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LES CIVILISÉS.

"Give a dog a bad name and—hang him !”—Ancient Proverb.

The Discontented English

a population of Heaven knows

man had served in many of how many, and every Jack one of them plays for his own d-d hand. No notion of

our Eastern stations. He had always found the road, and had followed it satisfactorily, to the cricket-field. In Saigon In Saigon he had diligently sought a similar track, and it led him at the long last to le Cercle Sportif. Here it was that his indignation culminated.

Healthy Exercise-it is the fetich of the Englishman in Asia, for with him, too, the instinct to reproduce home surroundings makes itself felt; nor is it a bad idol before which to bow down and worship. If you cannot, owing to your limitations, be of the East when in it, I prefer the Englishman's totem to the nocturnal cafés of the Rue Catinat. "Rummy beggars," grunted the Discontented Englishman. "Stop a game of tennis to shake hands with every new arrival at the Club-not strangers, mind you, but ordinary playing members! Dripping wet their hands are too. Ugh! I offered a prize for a lawn tennis tournament,thought it would buck 'em up a bit. Devil a bit! No entries. Afraid of being beaten. What can you do with men like that?"

His indignation found expression in abrupt, grunting outbursts of very colloquial English.

"Football, too. Soccer. Thirty men who play out of

playing for the side-not a notion of it. notion of it. And the morals of the place!"

Words failed him.

It is an axiom among Englishmen that those who have no love for healthy and regular exercise have no use for the Decalogue, except to use it as pie-crust.

"Read 'Les Civilisés'!"

I followed his advice. I cannot recommend any reader of 'Maga' to make a like experiment.

I believe the picture there drawn of life in and about Saigon to be vilely and maliciously exaggerated; yet at the back of it, as men on the spot reluctantly admit, there lurks some modicum of odious truth. The book could never have been written of Englishmen in any colony or dominion. So much at least is certain. There is a proverb about smoke and fire; but here, I am convinced, the wreaths of stifling, filthy vapour that smudge all the sky rise from far worse bonfires than have ever been lighted, even in Saigon.

"If Paris had contracted a mésalliance with Port Said, and the devil had played the part of sage-femme for them, the result might have been Saigon," said a Discontented Frenchman.

BOOKING.

"He is insensibly subdued

To settled quiet he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten; one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need."

The imperative instinct which earliest awakes in one on arrival at Saigon is a desire to quit it as soon as may be. I experienced some difficulty before I was able to act upon this impulse.

To begin with, one had to hit upon a propitious moment when the office of the shipping company chanced to be open, and thereafter to contend with the nebulous conversational discursiveness of the functionary who was by way of furnishing the inquirer with information. The next step was to take a ticket for Phnom Phnom Penh, but this was by no means to be accomplished at the office of the company. I was shown a small wooden booth on the quay-an erection like an antiquated bathing - machine from which the wheels had been removed. It was there that one took tickets, I was informed. When? Whenever one chose, was the cheerful reply. I remarked that the bathing - machine appeared to be hermetically closed. The fact was at once admitted without comment or emotion. Perhaps these were not his office hours, I suggested. "Ma si! Only-well-he was not there, ce Monsieur. Perhaps he would come back presently. Would

-WORDSWORTH.

I wait? No? Well, some other time!"

It is thus, seemingly, that business is conducted in Saigon.

I stalked "ce Monsieur" as one stalks shy game, and I ran him to earth in his bathingmachine machine at last. At the moment it seemed to me to be a somewhat notable achieve

ment.

He proved to be a cadaverous-looking individual in the last stages of consumption or ataxia, feebly courteous, humbly yet cynically inefficient, incredibly exhausted of mind and body.

I told him what I wanted in as few words as might be. The shipping clerks of my acquaintance are hard-worked folk, with little time to waste and short tempers for muddled customers. He smiled at me with far-away eyes, and asked me if I did not want everything except that for which I had asked. I seemed in some miraculous fashion to have changed places with the shipping clerk. He was wasting my time, not I his. At length he consented with dreary reluctance to recognise that I required the ticket for which I had applied-a return to Phnom Penh. I asked the

price-a mere matter of form, for I had already ascertained it. He named twice the proper sum. I expostulated. He fell to making calculations with the scratchiest of pens upon the thinnest and dingiest paper. Watching him, I observed that he multiplied by the simple process of putting the sum down over and over again and then adding it up. His addition was imperfect. I ventured to draw his fatigued attention to the fact. Once more he smiled at me sweetly out of those tired eyes of his.

"It is always sufficiently difficult, le calcul," he remarked blandly, as though stating an axiom.

Finally, with a sort of inert despair, though the emotion working in him appeared to be too feeble to deserve that name, he accepted my figures, and opening a book of forms in counterfoil began to preHe had to pare my ticket. fill in my name, the name of the ship, my destination, the number of the voyage, the amount paid, and one or two similar details. His method of writing reminded me of his arithmetic. He did not write so much as draw-draw each letter with extraordinary painstaking slowness, and by their aid build up very gradually each individual word. watched my name creep into being in this strange fashion; then he looked up at me once more with that tired plaintive smile.

I

"This will take time," he

said. "It is not an affair of a moment. On this side," indicating the direction in which the shadow of the bathingmachine was casting a dwarfed patch of blackness upon the white-hot stones of the quay,"On this side you will find a chair. Seat yourself, I pray you.

To hold oneself on end

is so fatiguing."

I sat on that chair for a good ten minutes, and at the end found him regarding his still unfinished masterpiece with his eternal weary smile. The ink in his pen was dry.

I got my ticket in the end, but, like Thomas à Kempis of old, I began to perceive that "patience is highly necessary to me."

I do not for one moment suppose that my friend in the bathing-machine was in any sort typical of the French clerk of Saigon, but I know of no other country in Asia where a white man would be entrusted with such purely mechanical duties, nor have I met in all the East any white man 80 feebly and amiably inefficient. What I have written reads, I am aware, like gross exaggeration, yet I am relating only facts. How this man ever obtained employment, and how, having been employed, he escaped immediate dismissal, are problems which baffle solution, unless, indeed, men speak truly when they declare that the French colonies are the last resort of the proved inefficient, the incompetent, the wastrel, and the "dead-head."

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF MY OFFICIAL LIFE.

BY SIR ROBERT ANDERSON, K.C. B.

II.

WORK AND PLAY AT THE HOME OFFICE.

As already intimated, the Secret Service Department, which was organised in London after the Clerkenwell explosion, was intended to be temporary, and in fact it lasted only for three months. Though my sojourn in London had proved an interesting and enjoyable episode in my life, I was eagerly looking forward to returning to the Irish Bar, when I learned that the Government wished still to retain my services at Whitehall. Mr Gathorne Hardy invited me to take charge of Irish business at the Home Office, and Lord Mayo put pressure on me to comply.

I had an intelligent aversion to the Civil Service-an aversion which my experience of it has not quenched. And when asked to come to London I laid the matter before the Irish Attorney-General, and received his assurance that, so far from injuring my professional prospects, my mission would give me further claims upon him for preferment. And shortly afterwards he proved the sincerity of his words by appointing me to a Crown Prosecutorship on my circuit. I referred to him again, therefore, at this juncture; and again he urged me to under

take the duties required of me, telling me in confidence that he expected shortly to have in his gift a principal Prosecutorship on the circuit, and that I should be remembered in connection with it. This decided my course, and in April 1868 I moved from the Irish Office to Whitehall.

But though Mr Warren was one of the most honourable of men, his promise was not fulfilled. When the appointment in question became vacant, he wrote to me that he could not ignore pressure put upon him against recalling me to Ireland. A typical Treasury letter had just been received, remonstrating against the cost of retaining me in London; and on this letter Mr Hardy had placed the laconic minute, "Mr Anderson's services are indispensable." I therefore resigned myself to the situation, and decided to remain until Í could get called to the English Bar.

Most people will be surprised to hear that, according to the Act of Union and the theory of the Constitution, Ireland is under the Home Office, and that the Home Secretary is the Minister responsible to Parliament for

Irish affairs.

What, then, it not choose as companions for
a wet day in a villa house.
And I have known men even
in high positions to whom a
like remark would apply. But
with such chiefs as Mr Hardy,
Mr Liddell, and Sir James
Ferguson at the Home Office,
and Lord
Lord Mayo and Sir
Thomas Larcom at Dublin
Castle, my position was an
enviable one. And with the
Home Office staff my relations
were friendly and pleasant.

will be asked, is the position
of the Chief Secretary for
Ireland? The answer is that,
strictly speaking, there is no
such office. The Minister who
is thus popularly designated is
"Chief Secretary to the Lord-
Lieutenant"; and all official
communications are supposed
to pass between the Lord-
Lieutenant and the Secretary
of State. In theory the "Irish
Office" is merely a branch of
the Chief Secretary's Office in
Dublin Castle-a pied-à-terre
for the Irish officials while
in London. All this is now
practically changed; but the
theory remains, and the change
has taken place within recent
years. Forty years ago all
important papers relating to
Ireland were transmitted to
the Home Office - the pre-
scribed form of letter being,
"I am directed by the Lord-
Lieutenant to transmit to you,"
&c., &c. The proposed scheme
was that, instead of this cum-
bersome system, official papers
should be "minuted" to me,
and that I should, as it were,
represent the Irish Office at
Whitehall, and Whitehall at the
Irish Office. Mr Hardy sug-
gested that I should be called
"Assistant Secretary for Irish
business," but to this Lord
Mayo objected as trenching
on his preserves.

Unless a man be so degraded as to like office work for its own sake, the charm of life in a Government department largely depends on the personnel. Practice at the Bar brings one into contact with many people whom one would

The Chief Clerk, indeed, resented my presence; but his influence was a negligible quantity. private fortune, who used the Home Office as a pastime. With exemplary regularity he took his two months' annual leave every autumn, and he did comparatively little during the other ten. This indeed was quite characteristic of the Home Office in those days. One of the senior clerks, with whom I struck up a friendship, remonstrated with me for my activity and zeal. On his first joining the department, as he told me, the then Chief Clerk impressed on him that the way to get on in the Civil Service was to do as little as possible, and to do it as quietly as possible. And he himself prospered by acting on that excellent advice, for in due course he rose to the top; and I may add that his tenure of the Chief Clerkship made it clear that the office was unnecessary, and it was abolished when he retired on a pension.

He was a man of

Forty years ago work in

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