For a time their trade prospered. The roads were fairly quiet in those days and the profits of trade were large, so that before long they were able to invest their spare savings in some land and palm trees in the village which they made their base. They built a house here and about three years before the war their little girl was born. After that the woman did not accompany her husband very frequently on his trips to the mountains. She remained at home and looked after her little daughter and the land and trees. Her husband made usually two trips a year and spent a month between each trip at home.

Then the war broke out. Everyone remembers what happened then; how after we occupied Mandalay the weak remains of the Burmese Government were swept away in a tide of furious insurrection. Law and order disappeared, and there was a chaos. The roads were infested with brigands and no one was safe. The woman's husband was shot by them one misty morning as his caravan was going through the passes. Fortunately there remained to her the land and the house and the daughter. She did not think of returning to India. Her friends were in the village where she lived. After her husband's death she put on Burmese dress and made her daughter do the same. They lived as Burmans do, they offered gifts to the monks and to the pagoda, they joined in the festivals with the villagers and were accepted as of them.

It was four years after the war that I came to the village.

I had been hard-worked on the frontier, and was sent there for a rest. It was a pleasant little place; not very much to do, a certain amount of officework, some cases to try, and now and then a chase after the last gang of Dacoits who were left.

There were no troops within twenty

miles of us, but we had a hundred military police in a small fort near the court-house.

These were men enlisted in Upper India, and formed into battalions, one for each district. They relieved the troops of all outpost duty, treasure and prison guard, and the work of hunting robbers. Each battalion had ten European officers, but these lived at the district headquarters, and the outposts were commanded by a native officer, a subadar or a jemadar who had been in some native regiment. They were usually quiet and well-behaved, having but little to do with the Burmese among whom they lived.

Two or three months after my arrival at the village I began to miss the woman from the well in the evening. I had liked to see her, and I was afraid that she might be ill, and so I inquired of some of the girls there. They laughed when I asked.

"She is married," they said.
"Married!" I asked, "to whom?"

To a sepoy of the Indian police, they told me. And he was jealous of her as Indians are, and did not like her to go abroad much or come to the well in the evening. So she stopped at home. Sometimes the little girl came with a neighbor, carrying on her head a tiny pot for water, but the mother never. It was very natural, I thought, that the woman should marry again, and not seeing her I soon forgot all about her.

heard nothing, suspected nothing at all. Life went on as usual until the end.

It was the hot weather then. The earth was baked and dry and very dusty. The hills were hid in haze that quivered under the fierce sun that beat and beat all day with never a rest.

The air was dry and everything was hot, to touch one's stirrup-irons after a ride was to scorch one's finger.

And the nights were worse, far worse than the days. In the days you have work to do, you can forget, but in the night you cannot do so. Through the sultry hours of the early night you lie awake upon your bed and suffer. You cannot sleep. The air is as the air of a furnace, the sheets are hot like iron sheets, the pillows suffocate you as they press your cheek. It is not till long past midnight that the air cools a little and you can doze with a restless, wearying sleep for an hour or two till the hot dawn comes.

I heard in my sleep a shot and then another. They hardly woke me, arousing just enough consciousness to make me feel a petulant anger against the disturber of my rest. I turned to try again, and there came another shot and another, and behind them sounded a murmur of voices, a shouting dimly heard afar off as in a dream.

It annoyed me, and I opened my eyes drowsily to see the first red finger of the dawn pointing across my room. I thought it was someone shooting green pigeons in the fig-tree near the court, and I cursed him for getting up so early.

But the shouting became clearer, it was a turmoil, a yell from many men growing louder, and I sat up to wonder what it was.

In a moment my door was thrown open and my syce, a Sikh, came running in. "Sahib, it is a sepoy running amuck. He is coming past here. not go out."

Do

In a moment I was on my feet. Our

revolvers were never far away from our hands. "Let me get out," I said. But the Sikh pushed me back, and a shot came through the roof of my house. It was but a thatched roof, and the walls, but of matting. I ran to the window and looked out.

Just beside my house was a road leading into the village. A man was running down it. He was a sepoy in uniform, with rifle and cartridge-belt. He was alone. At the corner of the lane he suddenly stopped and turned. His rifle sprang to his shoulder and he fired straight up the lane past my window, not at me. I wondered whom he fired at and looked up to see, but no one could be seen. Then he turned and ran on, disappearing round the corner, pushing in a new cartridge as he went. A moment later the jemadar and some sepoys appeared.

The danger for the moment was over, and my Sikh was holding the door open. "Only be careful, sahib," he said, "for the man is mad."

Outside I met Forest, the police-officer, running with his rifle towards the village, and he called to me.

"Abdul Khan has shot the Havildar dead," he cried, "Come on!" So we ran on side by side into the village.

It is not pleasant to be waked from one's sleep by murder and outrage. It is not pleasant to have to pursue the murderer with your eyes still blinking with slumber, your head still too stupid to take in the bearings of what has happened, your system yearning for a cup of tea.

We went cautiously. When the wood was clear and straight we ran. When we came to a turn we went round slowly with much spying. The lanes were empty, for it was yet very early in the morning and the sun was just rising. Early workers were coming out in front of their houses, but the rest of the village was as yet asleep. To one or two of these early risers

we called to ask where the sepoy had gone, but they did not know. The lanes here in the centre of the village branched into several, and we could not tell which way he had passed. Near the big fig-tree we halted a moment to consider, and we heard a cry and a shot. "Sahib," cried the jemadar who was behind us, "that is his wife, he has killed her."

Then we set off running again, for we knew who his wife was-the woman I have spoken of-and we knew where she lived. It was a little house, surrounded by a yard fenced by a broken fence, near the centre of the village. In a moment we were round the corner, and it was in front of us. A bullet whistling past our ears drove us to cover at once.

There were several carts there near the house, and Burmese carts have solid wheels. They are three or four inches thick, of very solid timber, and afford a good protection.

Forest and I were behind a cartwheel, and we saw the sepoys who had followed us take shelter round about. One was behind a log, another under a house, a third sheltered by a tree. A second bullet from the house hastened the movements of those who were still exposed.

There was the little house before us. It was about twenty feet square, of bamboo, thatched and raised some two feet from the ground. Windows there seemed to be none, and the door was shut.

Forest and I sat behind the cartwheel to consider. We had got the man fast enough. He was in the house. What was to be done? It seemed easy enough at first thought. The house was not bullet-proof, we could fire volleys into it till the murderer was dead.

But then we became suddenly aware of a sound issuing from the house. It was a terrible sound, a woman groaning. It made one's blood run cold to

hear it. It was a moan rising into a shriek, and then choked. Now and then we could hear a word, "He has shot me," she said. We shivered to hear it. Forest almost leapt to his feet, but a bullet from the house just missed him, and I pulled him down again.

"Sahib," said the jemadar, "have a care. His bandolier is full of cartridges."

Think of us there! Before us in the house was the murderer. He was fully armed. He was quite desperate, knowing his life was forfeit. To break into the house would take some minutesenough for him to shoot us all dead at close range if he tried, and him we could not shoot. For we could not tell in that house where he stood and where the woman. If we fired blindly we were as likely to hit her as to hit him. We stared at each other in blank dismay.

A man often wonders what he will do if he is suddenly called on in an emergency. No one can tell till he is tried. But dilemmas such as we were in happen seldom. A fight is a fight. There could be no fight here. We could go up and be shot, but what would be the use of that?

So we sat there and looked at each other. More and more sepoys came and sought shelter all around us. The woman's cries from the house had ceased, and no more shots came from there. We supposed that the woman was dead, and that the man was reserving his ammunition for us. But still we were not sure she was dead, so we dared not fire.

The sun rose higher and it became very hot. Forest and I had come out as we had jumped from our beds. We had no hats and no shoes. Our dress was only our night pyjamas. The sun beating on our heads made us feel ill, and our mouths were very parched and dry.

But she was first; her little limbs were nerved with the swiftness of great fear, and ere we were half across the open space her hands were beating at the door. "Mamma!" she shrieked, glancing with terror over her shoulder. The door suddenly gave way and she was inside the house. A moment later men were jostling in the doorway, their rifles and revolvers cocked, there was a gleam of sunlight on drawn swords and bayonets, a murmur of oaths and commands, and the house was taken.

For there was no defence; the murderer was dead.

Such a sight that house was! None that saw it can forget it. In the inner chamber near the door lay the woman. Temple Bar.

She was naked from the waist up, newly aroused from sleep. And in the centre of her left breast was a dull red hole from whence the blood trickled slowly and dully. It had made a red stream down her fair bosom and side and dropped into a little pool beside her. She was not yet dead, and in her great eyes was an agony of appeal. Beside her crouched her little daughter, terrified beyond words, gazing in horrified question at her mother. great bearded sepoy lifted her in his arms and carried her out in silence.

A

In the inner room lay Abdul Khan, dead. He had shot himself with his own rifle. He was in full uniform and lay as peacefully as if he slept. The tumult and passion had left him for ever now, and his face was as calm as a child's. The wound with which he had killed himself was not visible.

His end, the end of the murderer and suicide, was peace, while, without, the moans of the woman wrung one's heart. But in an hour she too had come into her rest. So we went home.

There were many people anxious to adopt the child, and I gave her to Maung Laung. That is her story. Henry Fielding.

They are a relief from, literaturethese fresh draughts from the sources of feeling and sentiment; as we read in an age of polish and criticism the first lines of written verse of a nation. -Emerson.

For centuries a wealth of national epic and song has been accumulating and circulating orally amongst the Russian peasantry. With the development of railway communication, the

increased centralization of town life, and the spread of the reading and writing routine of school instruction, this national poetry will perhaps share the fate of that of other countries and cease to be. At present there is, fortunately, little sign of its decay. In the remote agricultural governments which compose the bulk of the spacious Russian Empire the truth of the national proverb, "Wherever there is a