passengers carried by the places have long been barred. L. & S.W.R., it is perhaps And if I, weary; I, the doors no wonder that it occasioned of whose dwelling are open temporary stupefaction, still upon this unhappy earth; mingled with a vague feeling if I turn for a moment to these that some one was being ir- little roads———” reverent, though no one quite knew who. There W88 a gasp, and then several began to speak at once; but the Director, still sitting staring at the porter with his chin in his hand, made a motion for silence. "How do you account for that gentleman then, Jonas?" he said, indicating Mr Julius P. Sicke. "I suppose you admit you sent him to Brookwood?" "I did," said the porter. "He would be better buried." Amid the ejaculations of astounded indignation which broke out at this remark, the voice of Mr Julius P. Sicke was not heard. His condition rendered him speechless, "Do you dare admit such a thing before the very faces of the Directors, sir!" oried a furious Managing Director. The porter lifted his head. "Directors!" he repeated, and his contemptuous voice rang down the Board-room. "Where are the Directors? Who directs on this railway the silly journeyings of little men? No man! Not one. Who directs upon the earth the restless thrust of this uprooted generation? No man! Not one! And behold its its misery whose children struggle where none of them belong. But in these years the gates are down and the barriers broken, and many may gain entrance now to whom the Junctions of your world with older There were shouts of "The man's mad. Stop his nonsense. Shut him up." But the Direotor leant forward in his chair and sent his question through the noise. "Come now! Who are you?" he said; and the porter turned his gaze on him and answered "I am the Porter. What else should I be upon these roads of travel! Mine are the gates and the doors, and mine the undertakings of men. I open and shut; I forward and check; I send, I begin. I am the Porter." He lifted his head again and stood a moment looking with thoughtful eyes across the crowd, head and shoulders taller than any there. Then, with curious, balanced, leisurely tread, as though he were panoplied, he went away down the room and out at the door, and was gone before any one could sufficiently recover from the universal petrifaction to stop him. The Director watched him go; and then-whether it was that he thought that he himself was where he didn't belong, or wherever it was that he thought he did belong, nobody ever quite knew-but he leant forward and beckoned to the Station-master. "Follow that man," he said. "Bring him to see me. Oh yes, I know he's mad. But I've a fancy to see him again. Get hold of him somehow." And the sought for the porter far and wide, and high and low, but he never did get hold of him, either somehow or otherwise, for he was gone. Station-master But whether it is the true one or not, nobody ever saw the porter again. He passes out of these pages as shadowy and unexplained a figure as he passed out of the Boardroom that day, and out of Clapham Junction for good and all. The general conclusion was, of course, that he was a lunatic some crank with a permanent obsession who had descended from a higher posi. tion in society in order to secure a place in which he could give effect to his queer ideas with regard to his felloworeatures. And that explanation would certainly account for very nearly everything. It is, indeed, the only really sensible explanation available. But for Mr Pecklebury the thing was done. Though Mrs Bath still dwells in unmitigated stateliness in Puddispor, majestically unmoved by the presence or absence of anybody, and sustaining to the full her permanent refusal to pander, her step-nephew is with her no longer. He had "changed for ever at Clapham Junction. L'ENVOI. Gods there were in the days of yore, Whose terrible path in grave-strewn lands, Of one thing sure, to the end of my song. If ever He came, He is here no more. Look where, faster than ever before, The world's fools orowd where they don't belong. THE "GOOD OLD DAYS" IN MOROCCO. BY WALTER B. HARRIS. he puts down to the merciful providence of God. In return he has to pay regular taxation, which he particularly dislikes, and that he puts down to the intervention of the French. He eases his conscience and takes advantage of the situation. I. of Morocco, they entered a closed house, tenanted by suspicion, fanaticism, and distrust. The country considered itself impregnable, and the people looked upon the a despised "Christians" as sea." What a change has come about since then, and it is only thirteen years ago that the bombardment of Casablanca took place! From Yet gradual as the change time to time I accompanied is, much has already been the expedition that invaded accomplished. Only those who the Chaouia and the highknew the country before and lands beyond it, when one by who know it now can realise one the tribes gave way and the extent of what has been acknowledged that those two done. When the French French columns, advancing bombarded Casablanca and and ever advancing, were thus opened the road to their stronger than all the Saints occupation of the greater part in their tombs and than all the Holy Men with their been avoided that could wound promises of victory. The the religious susceptibilities of Moor had to realise a fact. It was very difficult at first. It changed his whole aspect of life, his whole mentality. A few thousand Christians were conquering his country! And the two columns were as irresistible as the fact itself. He took refuge in the supreme solace of his religion, oried, "It is the will of God," laid his rifle aside, and either went back to the fields or enlisted in the French army. Behind the show of force there was another and still more important factor at work. As distriot after distriot was oooupied and the troops passed on, there sprang up a new organisation, a new administration that safeguarded the interests of the people, their lives, and their properties. They experienced, for the first time for centuries, security. The ever-present fear of death, confiscation, and imprisonment, under the shadow of which they had passed their whole lives, as had their parents and their ancestors before them, disappeared. The extortion of the "Kaids" ceased, or was greatly curtailed, and justice was obtainable. the people. They have had the experience of Algeria and Tunis. They have studied our action in Egypt. They have known what to adopt and what to avoid. They have maintained upon the throne a descendant of the ancient line of Sultans, and, governing in his name, they have been able to obtain an elasticity of administration which the codified laws of France could never have given, had a system of direct government been adopted. They have met with far less opposition than might have been expected. In fact the introduction of civilisation into Morocco, in times of great difficulty during the war, has been a fine example of the true spirit of pacification and progress. I, who have known Morocco for over thirty years, can bear witness that in the parts of the country occupied by France the improvement in the welfare of its people is immense. There is yet much to be done. Decades must pass before the work is complete, but I am convinced that the great policy inaugurated by General Lyautey in Morocco will be accepted in the future as the basis of governmentto the mutual benefit of the "Proteoting" and the "Proteoted." Yet there are those who still talk of the "good old days" of Morocco before the French came to the country. That any one can regret that time is incredible. Only those who failed to see beneath the surface and how little surface there was to hide the factscan possibly compare the two periods. The most that can be said against the French régime is that the native finds the introduction of regulations annoying. He has a regular tax to pay instead of suffering the extortion of his own authorities, as he did in the past. He dislikes regularity, and some Moors would probably prefer the uncertainty and gambling chances of the past to the uneventful prosperity of the present. It is true there was the risk of death, of confiscation, of imprisonment, but there was also the chance of loot and robbery, of acquiring a position by force or by bribery, and of being able in tolerable security to confiscate the property of others and put others in prison: and if in the end one died in prison oneself well, it was God's will. The Moor is a gambler. He staked under that old régime not only his fortune but his life. Often he lost both; but sometimes he won, and it was the lives of others that were sacrificed and their properties that accrued till a great estate was built up, till palaces were built in all the capitals, till his slaves were legion and his women buzzed like a swarm of bees-and then one day the end came. If fate was kind, he died in possession of his estates-and they were confiscated on the day of his death; but more often he died in prison while his family starved. Meanwhile, nothing could be imagined more pitiable than was the lot of the country people, victims of robbery of every kind, for, from the Sultan to the village Sheikh, the whole Makhzen pillaged and lived on the poor. No man could call his soul his own. Thank God, the "good old days" are gone and done with, I sometimes wonder whether, in spite of all that has been written on the subject, the state of affairs existing in Morocco, up to the date of the introduction of the French Protectorate in 1912, is fully realised. While Mulai Hafid W88 Sultan, from 1908 to 1912, in which year he abdicated, the palace was the constant scene of barbarity and torture. The Sultan himself, neurasthenic, and addicted, it is said, to drugs, had his good and his bad days. There was no doubt that at first he meant to reform his country—or perhaps, more correctly, to save it from the encroaching intervention of France. He was possessed of a certain sunning intelligence and with an idea of government; but disappointment met him. Things had gone too far. Morocco was doomed. Finding all his attempts to preserve his country's independence futile, he gave way to temptations, and became cruel and avaricious. Rebels taken in war-many no doubt were harmless tribesmen-had their hands and feet cut off. Twenty-six were thus tortured at Fez in one day. Twenty-five succumbed, mostly |