and addressed himself direct to me. This is the gist of what he said: Three days ago a sick man had been left in his tents by a party of Hausa traders, who were proceeding to Ansongo on the Niger. The man had come from the country of the Blacks, and had a package which he was carrying to a white man whom he expected to meet at Gao. They had left him with their women and children at their camp near the Dori road. He doubted whether the man would be still alive; his right leg was diseased, and when they last saw him he had a high fever. To my questions, was he dark was he of the Bambara people? the answer was yes. As to his name they did not know. There was no question as to whom it was-Mamadu ! Mamadu,

a

whom I had left almost cripple at Coomassie, must have started off after me, and had tried to catch up by cutting straight across country to Gao, while I had been travelling round by river. The chief was on his way to Gao, but he offered to turn back and take me to his camp, so at daybreak we started off across the desert for the Dori road, and by travelling light and fast we were able to make his grazing grounds soon after mid-day, and well before sundown we were hailed by some of the outlying cattle guards. Arrived at the encampment, we went straight to the shelter where the sick man was lying, hidden from sight by a blanket.

A bowl of milk was at his side, but this was obviously untouched, and the figure gave no signs of life even when I drew back his covering. Yes, sure enough, it was Mamadu. Fever had left him, and his body was clammy cold. I called to my orderly for my flask, and after we had been able to get a small quantity of brandy down his throat a certain amount of vitality returned. His eyes opened, and after looking at me for a moment, he turned on his side, and without a word drew his arm from under the blanket and pushed a small cloth bundle towards me. This slight movement completely exhausted him; and though he seemed to make an effort, he was unable to speak. As the bundle appeared to be the thing that mattered to him, I tore it open. Inside was a motor spannerthe spanner that had been missing some months before from my car in Coomassie ! I looked at the spanner and then at Mamadu. Again he tried to speak, and, as I knelt down beside him, he gasped out, "Mon Commandant-moi -moi non voleur." With this he collapsed, and did not again come to. At dawn on the following day we laid Mamadu to rest among the sand-dunes in grave covered with branches of mimosa. The Taureg nobles made a semicircle round the grave, leaning on their lances with their shields at their sides. Their flowing black robes, the glint of the

rising sun on their lances, and the background of their tall white camels, held by their black retainers, formed a most impressive scene, and I felt most inadequate in my woollen waistcoat and old jodhpore breeches, standing in front of them, with their dark grave eyes regarding me. Could I only act the part, and say or do something suitable ! I looked at the chief. He was counting his beads with his eyes fixed on the ground. Then again I thought of Mamaduthe zest with which he had recounted cruel things, done when all the savagery of past generations had surged up in him and got the better of his veneer of our civilisation; then of the woman-like care with which he had looked after me on the least sign of sickness; and finally, his last long journey across the burning desert, with his wounded limb, to redeem a slur which he thought rested

on his character. I broke away from these thoughts-I was still in the centre of these tall veiled men. My hand searched the pocket of my waistcoat, and finding a note-book and pencil, I wrote, "Here lies Mamadu Bambara." Then some words in a poem by Mr Kipling came into my mind, and I hastily put them down. "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din." I tore the page out, and walking to the grave spiked it to the ground with a mimosa thorn. The Tauregs gathered round, and each carefully examined, but without understanding, what was written, for the written word always causes a certain amount of awe among these desert people. Before we should reach the camp again the winds would have taken the fragment to themselves, but for the moment my spontaneous feelings were recorded at Mamadu's last resting-place.

WHEN Genovéfa, the Maid of Kerlescan, had sixteen years, her father, Gelvest le Bonniec, Comte de Noailles, accompanied her for the first time to the Pardon of Kerimor.

That night, at the ancient Manor of Kerlescan, father and daughter sat late before the huge gaping fireplace in the book-walled tower library, Genovéfa attentive on her stool at one side, Gelvest le Bonniec, leaning forward a little from the old carved chair opposite, speaking gravely and quietly of the things they had seen that day. Genovéfa's white hands were folded demurely in her lap. She followed the remarks of her father with close attention, but with only a part of her mind, a mental trick which was often useful to her. She stared into the fire. She saw a flutter of gaycoloured ribbons all dancing there.

Never in all her life had Genovéfa previously previously visited even the meanest village. Her material world was bounded within three kilometres of Kerlescan. By virtue of the teaching of Gelvest le Bonniec, her mind roamed free, reaching out far as the void spaces beyond the stars. When she spoke, her voice suggested the placid flowing of a deep unhurried stream, no stranger to

laughter, though, in sunny shoreward shallows.

"Thank you, my father, for a very happy day."

She arose, slim and graceful, raised the hand of her father to warm soft lips. He in turn kissed Genovéfa lightly on the forehead.

"Good night," he said. "May your sleep, dear child, be untroubled."

She smiled, a sudden radiance, looking back over her shoulder as she crossed the room.

"I never dream, as you know, except in the daytime."

When she had passed down the stairway let into the thick stone walls, the Comte de Noailles turned to a doorway opposite, a barrier of heavy oak, iron-barred. He opened the ancient lock with a great hand-forged key; shot the bolts behind him. At the top of another worn stone stairway he parted faded curtains, and was alone in his own tower retreat. There he lit two thick candles and set them on a littered table of age-blackened hewn oak. He began writing midway down a corrected page.

the four elements-earth, air, fire, and water. Aristotle added a fifth element, æther, considering that the imponderable æther was the mother of elements from which all forms and all forces proceed. It remained for Galen to write in natura nihil plane sincerum' - that every appearance of nature is deceptive and but the manifestation of one primal nonapparent element, containing within itself all discoverable elements in unceasing growth and decay. Such ancient sublimations, in seeking the ultimate identification of that which acts and that which is acted upon, have a startling resemblance to the most modern theories regarding the constitution of matter and the operation of natural forces. philosophy it would seem that the mind of man is incapable of groping further than

In

Gelvest le Bonniec finished the page, carefully blotted the paper, and placed it beneath a huge pile of manuscript held under an iron weight. The first page of the manuscript bore the title, 'Metamorphosis: A Study of Religious, Philosophic, and Scientific Origins.' Now, after twelve years of solitary labour, he was engaged with Section 2, Chapter XIV., dealing with "Researches in Alchemy."

The history of the Comte de Noailles can be told very briefly. The family, living in Paris, were rich and of the old nobility. Young Gelvest, the only son,

child, who spent much of his time with his books. Very early he felt the call of the Church; later, doubt entered his mind, and his misgivings were strengthened by study of the classic philosophers. Just at this time both parents were lost to him. The young man accepted the worldly responsibilities of his position. He made a brilliant marriage in society, which could not fail to result unfortunately. After only two years, when scandal could scarcely be avoided, he took his infant child, Genovéfa, and retired to the ruined tower which was the old seat of the family in Morbihan. The name of the mother was never mentioned to the child, although, five years later, the husband learned of the death of his wife.

In the topmost chamber of the Tower of Kerlescan, Gelvest le Bonniec installed complete laboratory equipment. There, in three years, he expended four hundred thousand francs in experiments little more scientific than the researches of the medieval alchemists. The only result of such futile study was a firm belief among the peasants that a wizard dwelt among them at Kerlescan. He realised his folly in time. Thereafter he confined expenditure to the purchase of rare books, a passion which grew with the increase of his learning. He returned to Paris but once after his exodus, spent an additional hundred and eighty

the Wind she was named by Mône Réviol, the old Breton nurse, who, with her husband, remained as the only servants in the château. She did, in She did, in truth, belong more to nature than to humanity. No place in all Brittany was so lonely and desolate as the gorsegrown moor, wind-raised dunes, and scattered scrub-pine spinneys all about Kerlescan. Very wide and high was the sky over Kerlescan, a vast, inverted, turquoise sea, where gigantic cloud ships spread fleecy sails to the pursuing winds. There the sun-god drove his leaping flame horses across the world, and the dust from his chariot wheels drifted down to colour the golden gorse of the moor. The pale dead moon, exiled from earth, was the gracious woman divinity of a thousand fading dreams. Each star was

a world nearer than Kerimor. When soft grey veils of mist floated in from the sea, the moor became a twilight land, where the shades of skin-clad herdsmen moved among the stones they had raised. Grey gulls drifted overhead soundlessly, uneasy spirits of that misty land of ancient shadows. In summer there was a little world of life beneath each moss-grown stone. Each coarse grass tuft was a forest where the little people hastened to and fro in the narrow glades between shadowed trunks of great trees. Very wide was this world, reaching but an easy step from the Manor of Kerlescan: wide as space itself, the world beneath the eaves, where each brown-backed book was a door opening the way to strange and marvellous places. A lonely and desolate land, but Genovéfa could not be lonesome there. She felt herself part of that beauty, unconscious that her own gracious movements were sweet to the sight as the swaying of willow withes; her deep eyes mirrored the reflected light of the brown bog-pools; in her wind-kissed cheeks fused tints of gold and ivory blended with wild-rose petals, to delight the eye of a lover of whom she had not yet dreamed.

From the first, Gelvest le Bonniec shared all his thoughts with Genovéfa. The child had no other companion. She gave a wealth of love to her father, who, she was sure, possessed all the knowledge in the world.