not; but all the Pir's enemies must be killed according to our religion, so when the news came that Imamali had set forth on a journey to Fatteh Mahomed and would pass through Yakubkhan's village, it became our duty to slay him for the sake of the Pir, whose men we are. While Yakub entertained him in his house and sent Allahbux for a fisherman's boat, we three swam across the dhand on skins, with axes in our turbans, and lay in wait among the tamarisk bushes on the island along the path he must take. When the old man came we fell upon him and slew him. The Muhanas saw us do it, but we threatened them into silence. We carried the body as far as the stream that flows between the islands, and then in that stream we floated it down to the dhand and round the corner of the greater island till we reached the shore of the river Indus itself. Here a large tree had fallen, the trunk of which we used like a butcher's block. On it we laid the corpse, and with our axes hacked and sliced it into four pieces, which we cast separately into the fastflowing flood; and that was the end of Imamali. Afterwards the rising waters covered the smaller island and the tree-trunk, so no trace of our deed was left." He might have added, "Thus die all enemies of the Pir!" for no doubt so he thought.

VOL. CCXX.-NO. MCCCXXXIV.

Well, it might have been expected that the law which had made all these efforts to get the murderers into its clutches would not let them go, but such was not the case. When the Sessions trial came on, the witnesses Chand and Jam said their say, and Alahando duly repeated his confession, but to no purpose. There was no corpse forthcoming, and the judge felt that some of the evidence was false, though he could not say exactly what-perhaps judges are lacking in imagination. Anyhow, the accused were acquitted, much to the disgust of the police. Of course, the fisherman and his boy were contradicted by their first statements to the Fouzdar and the Inspector, in which they professed to know nothing of the death of Imamali; and confessions and the evidence of accomplices when elicited with much effort by the police have not the same weight in India as in England. That finishing touch of cutting up the corpse into four pieces, so that the prophecy might be fulfilled"The Hurs will cut me in pieces," seemed almost too artistic, and the murderers were given the benefit of the doubt. Here ends the story of the Pir's Vazir, which is true. Whether the anticipated deaths of Alibux the contractor of Sukkur and of Chand and Jam will furnish an equal interest depends on the Hurs.

2 G

H.M.S. Dart was a schooner yacht of 400 tons, which had been bought from a private owner for the Naval Service, and had afterwards been lengthened and fitted with auxiliary steam power. She was a good little ship, and in spite of the alterations to her shape and draught caused by the addition of engines, boiler, and screwshaft, was still a first-rate sailer. She was intended to be the Admiral's yacht " for the Australian station; but, by some dark official process, she became instead a Surveying Vessel, and thereafter fulfilled a long and honourable career in those waters in the service of the Chart-makers. She was entirely unfitted for hydrographic work; but we are accustomed, in the Surveying Service, to be dealt out with old castaway ships, or "misfits," and to make the best of them. The Dart was by no means the worst we have had in recent years; in fact, she was rather above the average. We were quite pleased with her. The crew forward on the mess deck numbered sixty; there were six of us in the Ward-room-three lieutenants of the Hydrographic Branch, and three "Idlers," as the Old Navy, with bludgeon

like humour, designated the Engineer, Surgeon, and Paymaster.

Besides, and over all of us, there was the Captain-the "Skipper," the "Old Man,"a lieutenant like ourselves, but a few years older, having "21 stripes"; such, in fact, as nowadays is styled "Lieutenant-Commander." He was separated from our profane society in the Ward-room by a passage-way of at least three feet in length, at the end of which was the door of "The Cabin." Here, in splendid isolation, in accordance with the Law of the Navy, he resided; and if occasionally he heard from the end of the passage a few home-truths, they were probably welcomed by him as a corrective to the chorus of approval, and even of affection, which more often assailed his blushing ears; for he was the best of fellows, and we didn't mind if he knew it (as well as our opinion of his mistakes).

We commissioned in Auckland, New Zealand, and then set forth on what proved to be a devastating voyage to Sydney, New South Wales. In ordinary weather the trip would have taken us a week, but this time it took four, each

a fresh and furious gale. It was mid-winter- the merry month of June. We rounded the North Cape of New Zealand one anxious night in the teeth of a howling north-wester; only just able, with the sheets hauled flat aft, and with the faithful engines going at full speed, to claw the struggling, sagging ship off from the immense black cliffs close under her lee. The full realisation of the seriousness of things was veiled for me, and for most of our new ship's company, both officers and men, by the anodyne of sea-sickness, which laid us flat in a state almost of coma, all unaccustomed, as we were, to the cantrips of so small a ship in so great a seaway. Our watches had to be kept through it all-wet, drooping, unheeding, as we might be, of all save personal misery. When, during my next turn on deck, the slow morning broke through the rain, we were past the headland, with the sheets eased. The danger of the lee shore was past, though not that of the grey waves, roaring hungrily at us. But the little ship was staunch, dancing over them, dipping and curtseying to them with a fine disdain. One monster, however, took her unawares on the starboard side, and as she lifted to it, hurled its foaming crest on the deck, carrying all away to leeward, sweeping, in a wash of icy water, coils of rope and the men standing by them, against the berth

were brought up. Then, heeling the ship heavily to port as it passed under her, the great hill of water seized the lifeboat, where it hung on the lee side swung out ready for an emergency, but tightly secured to its davits, and tore the boat bodily away. With dim uninterested eyes of sickness, I watched it floating away, uninjured, swept along on the crests of the great combers.

We heard later that it was washed up at Tom Bowling's Bay, in the North Island, where, still uninjured, some Maoris found it on the beach. This first gale had hardly cleared off before, two days later, another began in an orgy of electric display. St Elmo's Fires appeared at each mast-head and yard-arm-the Dart was square-rigged on the fore,-and on both peaks of the gaffs. It was in the gale which followed, coming from the eastward, that we were pooped -partly through the nerveless steering of an unfortunate sea-sick helmsman-as we ran before the wind. A tremendous sea rolled in on us over the starboard quarter, deep and green, and poured down the companionway, which, with its boobyhatch covering, faced aft towards the oncoming flood. In doing so, it carried with it the first group it encounterednamely, the helmsman, the Quartermaster conning the ship, and the Officer of the Watch. The first of them shot down the ladderway to the bottom

in a bruised and battered heap, the other two managed somehow to cling to the upper deck. In the Ward-room, which was at the foot of the companion, the swirling sea discovered, and tore away from its securings, a can of lamp oil, which it broached, carrying its contents away with it, and floating them broadcast. The wave spread itself, and the oil with it, into each cabin and passage-way below the deck, so that every surface reached by it became like a sheet of ice, and the difficulty and even danger of getting about the ship, already great in the tumbling seaway, was horribly increased. Boots and bare feet carried the oil from the lower deck to every tread of the stairway, and unless the most extreme precaution was observed, you shot down it, like the traditional "greased lightning "-greased, indeed, and went up it clinging desperately to the handrail, hand over hand, for foothold there was none.

During that terrible passage we encountered two more gales, each with its own list of losses (a second boat went away from us in one of them); but we arrived at length off Port Jackson, battered and storm-worn, with every sail but two blown out of the bolt-ropes. steamed slowly through the Heads, and up to Sydney, on almost our last few ounces of coal. It was a lovely day (at last), and the harbour was full of pleasure boats. As we proceeded to our moorings in

We

Farm Cove, we were greeted with cheers and flag-wavings, not only from the boats, but from crowds of people gathered on the ends of the pleasant wooded points that diversify the shores of that which the proud inhabitants invariably speak of as "Our beautiful 'arbour." One boat came alongside of us, and we hailed her to inquire what was "on.” "Why," said the people in her, "you have been reported in all the papers for the last fortnight as 'lost,' and here you are! Hooray!" We were frankly amazed. That we had had a thoroughly horrid, and even dangerous time, we were aware, but this result of our long unpleasant voyage we had never expected. It was quite an embarrassing resurrection. Our arrival off the Australian coast had been reported, we heard, from a lighthouse to the northward, where we had made the land the day before; and hence this popular reception. The news was telegraphed to the Admiralty at once, and reached London shortly before eight o'clock on Sunday morning, June 30. In spite of the day of the week, in spite of the hour of the morning, the message was sent out at once by special command to sixty-seven homes in the United Kingdom, where, after a fortnight, during which the hoped-for news came not, anxiety was settling down into despair, and even into the wearing of "mourning." arrived soon after eight o'clock at my home in Ireland. The

It

officer, and the greatly admired adviser and friend of my naval cadet days, did not wait to write out the happy news on the pink form, but rushed to the house by the shortest route, which was over the kitchengarden wall. "Ma'am, ma'am," he called out breathlessly to my mother at her window, "the Dart is safely in Sydney! Glory be to God!" Such omission of post-office formality, not only in the matter of the unwritten message, but in the pious extension of its wording, could, I feel sure, only have occurred in Ireland; and if the costume in which my sisters at the top of the back-stairs met the Postmaster was, as I have heard, distinctly informal, this also was Irish, and did not, at that supreme moment, excite attention.

A month and more went by before we were comfortably re-established in the Dart as a going concern, with sails replaced, and new ropes rove; with the empty davits, whence the boats had been torn away by the seas, re-supplied; with leaks stopped; with sea-sodden furniture and beds, oil-soaked carpets, and ruined kits renewed. Then, at last, we steamed northward into that wonderful region, the "Inner Route," off the coast of Queensland, where, in latitude 15° S., our work was laid.

The Great Barrier Reef of Australia is a coral breakwater that reaches southward for a

protecting the Queensland coast and baffling the Pacific swell at a distance of thirty miles from the land. The space between the Barrier and the shore is a festering intricacy of reefs, shoals, and islets; it has taken the coral-disease very badly. As you leave the Barrier and approach the land, the scattered patches lessen both in size and number, until you come at last to a belt of fairly clear water between the last of the reefs and the coast, which is in most places three or four miles wide, though sometimes much less. This belt of navigable water, which lies roughly parallel with the trend of the coast, is known as

"The Inner Route."

Through it ships provided with charts may travel in comparative safety and in smooth water from Capricorn Channel, where, in the latitude of the Southern Tropic, the Reef begins, all the way northward to Thursday Island (known, for the best of reasons, as "Thirsty Island"), which lies on the tenth parallel, off Cape York, the burning tip of Australia.

The chart we were ordered to make was to replace one made in the year 1841, which had itself replaced the original chart of the explorations of Captain Cook; and it chanced that the twenty-mile stretch of water and reefs between the coast and the Barrier on which we were to start was filled with special memories of that great man. Sailing northward in