Cornelius was subjected to a persistent and relentless perseoution. It began with a kind of social boycott. Nobody spoke to him on his way to or from Mass. Nobody would have any dealings with him at local fairs. He was warned, anonymously, to keep away from the pony races. Then the men employed on the Fagans' farm left without notice at the busiest time of the harvest. The cattle kept breaking out mysteriously and straying into bogs and glens. A valuable young horse was found entangled in barbed wire on an adjacent farm.

in

"Cornelius had great spirit him always,' said Mr Fagan, "and he knew it was because he had been fighting agin the Germans in place of for them that the Sinn Fein had him persecuted. But it vexed him when his wife was in dread to go outside the house, and when his young son would be playing at shooting policemen and shouting, 'Up the rebels!'"

"Where did you learn that at all?' says Cornelius. At school, sir,' says the little fellow, and Up Dublin! Down England! Up the Huns!' says he, proud-like of his learning. Cornelius was lepping mad, and he wouldn't let him go to school any more. And didn't they come after that and throw stones on the roof in the middle of the night

same as they'd shoot a policeman. He thought to best them in the latther end, though his wife was crying all the time to go back to England. But it was the picture settled him. He was smoking his pipe one evening after giving the young horse a gallop. Two men came to the door on bioyoles. 'Ye have a picture within in the house,' they says. "That's true maybe,' says Cornelius. 'Tis a picture of ould George the Englishman,' says they, and bedad! ye've got to take it down.'

"Get out of that, quick,' says Cornelius.

"Well, they made off on their bicycles, for he put the fear of God on them with the look he gave them. But didn't ten of them come with black masks and guns at one o'clock in the night, and they bet the backdoor in. Cornelius got a stick and went to the head of the stairs. 'We'll not allow a picture of the English King in the Irish Republic,' says they. 'Let ye take it down at once or we'll shoot it down,' and they up the stairs to the sittingroom. But Cornelius was in front of them in it, and had the picture whisked off the nail and into a cupboard in the wall.

""'Tis down,' says he, quiet enough; 'I'd not give ye the satisfaction of firing at his Majesty, ye dirty cowardly tinkers,' says he. They left him then, but he was terrible angry, and did no more, but away with him and his wife and child to England.

"I fought for the freedom of

the world,' says he, and it's not the freedom of a dog I'd get in Ireland.''

There was little one could say in comment on this tale. Mere words seemed inadequate, and it is a shameful fact that similar cases occur continually all over the country.

Fagan poked the fire vigorously. "The Government will be driving the decent people to go Sinn Fein to save themselves," he said bitterly. "Wirra! what ails them at all that they can't govern? Is it the way they're afraid of Sinn Fein ?"

"Well, they seem to be going to give us Home Rule now, and perhaps that will settle the country," I suggested.

He laughed hoarsely.

"Is it Home Rule to settle the country when divil a man in Ireland can keep a law, let alone make one?" he asked; "and it's not a republie that would settle the country either, no, nor twenty republics! Though for the matther of that, it's not twenty republies there'd be in Ireland within six months, but forty, and the whole lot of them persecuting each other and wanting England to help. 'Faith, it's the English would have their fill of hardship in the latther end!" he concluded with gloomy satis

faction.

The sound of a motor-horn in the street told me the soldier and his car had arrived.

"Look," said Mr Fagan as I rose to go, "what's wanted is for the English Government to govern. Not to be fooling

Late that afternoon I passed through Clashagoppul on my way home, and stepped to say good-bye to the Fagans.

The sun had set, and with the long hours of darkness before them their nerves were again in the ascendant. Mrs Fagan suggested I was ineurring needless danger in being driven by a soldier.

Mr Fagan, with an uneasy laugh, referred to the political views he had expressed that morning as "all talk and thrash-same as you'd see on the newspapers."

Both implored me to say nothing about Cornelius.

"Herself does be very frightful by night," said Mr Fagan, "and indeed there's no saying quare things mightn't happen to us these quare times."

His parting words, gravely uttered, seemed to sum up the situation for many in Ireland at present

Wirra! what good is your life to you at all when you'd never know the minute that you'd lose it?"

A CERTAIN afternoon of March this year found me at the City Station in Karachi on my way up-country after an absence from India that had extended throughout the War.

Now, if there is one thing that can make Indian railway travelling almost bearable, that thing of course is privacy. But on this particular day the train was crowded, and I looked in vain for an empty compartment. Finally, I had to content myself with an upper berth in a coupé, the lower berth of which was already taken up by a green canvas Wolseley valise. An upper berth for the two days' desert journey to Lahore! it was a black business. I sat thoroughly soured and soured and glared at that roll of bedding, wondering resentfully what manner of owner would eventually materialise.

But, after a little, mere vulgar euriosity got the better of me, and I furtively turned the valise over to take a peep at any name there might be underneath. There was nothing to be seen but four large white initials. Still, these told me all I wanted: for any one with such queer initials has surely no need to name his property in full. I felt that "J.U.D.E." could stand for no one the world over but for "Judy" Elkington. Now Judy and I

had started life at the "Shop" together; and we had met again, in Simla-days before the War, when he had been in the Intelligence Branch at Army Headquarters. So we were old friends.

He had always been a good all-round man, had Judy. Within a very few pounds of the best professional jockeys on the flat, they used to say; and you might find his name, too, more than once in Rowland Ward. But that was only one side of him. For he had a quaint love for roaming the byways of Indian history and religion, and was shining light of more than one learned Asiatic Society. Still, he never rede this hobby of his to excess, and was always the best of company. I was in luck after all; the Sind desert began to lose many of its prospective horrors.

I

Just before the train started caught sight of a wellremembered figure strolling over from the bookstall, and we were soon shaking each other by the hand and making the usual remarks and inquiries that go with such a meeting.

The first hour or two of our journey were fully occupied in comparing notes. Then came Kotri Junetion, with its adjournment for dinner. And afterwards, as the desert sand began imperceptibly to creep

through every orack and oranny, our first flow of reminiscences was exhausted and we had time to turn our attention to the daily papers that we each had brought.

Mine W88 the Pioneer.' But there happened to be remarkably little news that day, and I began to feel distinctly bored with it. However, just as I had finished the telegrams and leading articles, my eye was caught by a headline referring to the recent discovery of oil in Baluchistan. Now oil is such a vital commodity these days that none can help feeling vaguely interested in it; so I read the paragraph carefully. It was highly technical and left me little the wiser; but I gathered that the district where the oil had been found lay on the Makran Coast in Southern Baluchistan, about midway between Karachi and the Persian border.

"I don't know much about the oil," said Elkington in answer to a question of mine, but they tell me that it is no good. The whole formation is volcanic, you see, and the strata is so broken up that the oil has leaked away. But I was out in those parts this winter, so let's hear what the 'Pioneer' has got to say."

"Here you are then," I said, "just see what you can make of this." And I read him the following extract:

"The oil-fields in question lie in the Malan Hills, not far from the Arabian Sea coast. Gaseous hydrocar

bons would appear to have gathered in a state of pressure along buried anticlines underlying the impermeable clays. For, at different points, these gases have forced their way through fissures in the clays -to form remarkable mudvolcanoes. It is claimed that liquid hydrocarbons (petroleum) must also exist in large quantities, for the gases are continually discharged from the volcano craters, accompanied by an unoeasing flow of liquid mud and brine. Indeed, during paroxysmal eruptions, these gases have been known spontaneously to ignite. . . ."

"By Jove, they have," Judy interrupted somewhat foroibly. "I've had more than enough of mud-volcanoes."

"But why this heat?" said I. "I was under the impression that a mud-volcano was the sort of creature a child might play with. You don't mean to say that you were rash enough to fall into one ?"

"No, I wasn't ass enough to fall in, but I was precious near being pushed. The yarn has nothing to do with oil; but perhaps I had better inflict it on you, just in case you should still think I was in any way to blame."

"A little something with a spice of Canterbury Tale about it, to beguile the weary hours? That sounds delightful. Commencez dono, monsieur, s'il vous plait."

"Last autumn, then," Judy began, "when I came back

from Palestine, I had a couple of months' war-leave due. But England didn't seem to be much of a country to spend them in at the time, So I made up my mind to do another shooting trip. Now I had never shot a Persian ibex -the smooth-horned fellow, you know, and the Makran coast was said to be full of them.

"Makran, too, was a place that I had always wanted to go to. You see, since the beginning of time it has been the great link between India and Western Asia. And there are a lot of things in the country well worth seeing, from an antiquarian point of view; those Shamil tombs, for instance, of which no one seems to know the origin. much of the hinterland is still practically unknown.

And

"On the other hand, of course, I knew Makran to be one of the most poisonous places in the world. For it is nothing but a barren maze of broken hills-as hot as hell, where it rains with luck once a year, and the little water you get is guaranteed to corrode any but indigenous innards. But, after all, my leave was in winter, when the climate anyhow would be bearable, So finally I decided to go to Makran,

bunderboat isn't built for deep-sea voyaging; it is an open affair for carrying goods inside Karachi harbour. The winds were contrary, and for five days I lived cheek-byjowl with my Muhammadan orew in no more privacy than that enjoyed by a galleyslave. It was rough, too; you try a bunderboat in an Arabian Sea swell if you want to appreciate what Horace meant by 'inverso mare.'

"We were out of sight of land most of the time. But on the third day we sighted a low range of hills far away on the starboard horizon, the coastal range of Southern Baluohistan. And like enough, that was the very landfall that Nearkos made on his northward voyage, after he and his fleet parted from Alexander by the Indus mouth. As the hills grew olearer and clearer, I allowed my thoughts to wander to the succession of men of many races - Assyrian and Greek, Sassanian and Seljuk, Arab and Mongol, and many more, who have thirsted and oursed and died in Makran

before the British came.

88

"The beginning of December found me setting sail from Karachi in a bunderboat, and shaping my course up the Arabian Sea. I don't want to dwell on that voyage.