given it me; I was his god

No

For

son. My mind was on fire. Sonnet after Sonnet was rather devoured than read before the August dawn broke over Kensington Gardens below the windows of my study. And oh, the joy of reassurance! fiend had tricked me. The flames of those sky-signs of dream were not of the pit. They were apocalyptic. now the revelation continued. From page after page there shone, before my opened eyes, the same solemn warning from that infinitely prescient mind to our poor purblind age, so soon to go unprepared to the slaughter because it had not understood. At one place it was simply the darkling menace of the name William Hohenzollern, given in full:

'How many lambs might the stern wolf betray,

If LIke a IAMb He could His looks translatE!

How maNy gaZers mightst thou

Lead away,

If thou wouLdest usE the stReNgth of all thy state !'

"At another place it seemed as if the saving message had been floating over the face of the poem, as clouds drift across a full moon, and the first two letters had not yet crossed the rim of the bright orb. And so it remains a clipped-lliam Hohenzollern' for ever in the lines:

'Clouds and eclipses stain both Moon and sun,

And loathsome canker lives in

sweetest bud.

All men Have faults, and evEN I in

this,

Authorizing thy trespass with compare,

Myself corrupting, saLving thy amiss,

Excusing thy sins more than thy siNs are.'

"And then, again, the poetprophet's warning call to his deluded countrymen would rise almost into a scream of ' 'Ware Hohenzollerns!' in the sombre passage:—

WeARY with toil, I haste me to my bEd,

For then my tHOughts, from far wHere I abide,

IntENd a Zealous pilgrimage to thee,

And keep my drooping eyeLids opEn wide,

Looking on daRkNesS.'

"Last scene of all, as our great author says, that ended this epic of discovery, this tragedy of a British Cassandra not understood or regarded in time, was the disappearance of the ultimate mystery of the famous dedication, To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets, Mr W. H.,' with its obviously ironical good wishes for such immortality as the William Hohenzollern of the 'insuing sonnets was likely to get when once their riddle was read. What grotesque guesses the fumbling moles of literary biography and criticism have made at the man indicated by that W. H.'-William Herbert, William Hall, Willie Hughes, William Himself! How vainly, as Plato has said, do men hunt far and wide for the truth that was tumbling about on the ground at their feet when they started! One

ray of understanding and no mystery remained. The 'Riddle of the Sonnets' was thenceforth an insubstantial pageant faded, leaving, as our poet puts it, not a wrack behind.''

Now don't go away with the notion that Colin's talent was just flimsy. A man who will take pains to ape in this elaborate way the pursy earnestness of the prosperous dealer in cheap culture cannot be a mere butterfly. Very taking smears of pathos, too, he knew how to dab on. Look at his "Foreword." There he wistfully tells how he had longed to push on with the book in 1914, when the vision was new; how the stern voice of duty had called him away from the chaste nunnery of study; how like a homing dove he had flown fondly back to his desk the moment the other dove, the peace one, arrived at the seat of war; how well he knew now the tender emotion of Claudio:

IN the far north-east of India-beyond the green and sodden gardens of Assam, beyond Tinsukia, beyond the Miris and the Abors-lies the little country of the Mishmis. A land of inhospitable mountains and dense forests, of impassable torrents, of avalanches of stone and mud, of fever and dysentery, of every biting bug and stinging fly known to man, no stranger who has once been there will willingly return.

To the south stretch the vast impenetrable forests where Assam merges indefinitely into Burma; to the east rise the unknown ranges of Hkamptilong. On the north the frontier marches with that debateable land which the Chinese call the Province of Zayul, and the Thibetans claim as Eastern Thibet. Then the frontier passes through untrodden hills till it meets the territory of the Abors, and descends again to the plains, touching the north-east corner of Assam at the little frontier post of Sadya. Three small tribes make up the Mishmi nation-the Mijus, the Digarus, and the Chulakattas-but their habits and their characteristics differ little. Small and hairless, inexpressibly dirty, smokers of opium, the heirs of every vice known to men or to monkeys, they are not a pleasant people.

I.

Nothing of value grows in Mishmi land: a few bananas, a few scanty acres of millet and opium poppy, no green vegetables, no cattle save a few half-wild Mithun, and the noisome swine of the East. And yet a few years ago the British Raj had occasion to occupy this deplorable country and assert its overlordship of the Mishmi tribes.

One of the dreams of British rule in India is the eventual linking up by rail of Burma and Hindustan, and this rail would most easily pass through the north-east of Assam. But the Government which builds the line must be certain of the Mishmi tracts.

At the time of this little expedition there was still an Emperor in Pekin, and that great yellow cauldron which is China, instead of erupting at its centre, was bubbling over on its farthest frontier. In the west of Szechuan there had arisen a very great general, one Chao-er-Feng, a man who, had he lived, would probably have carved out one of those central Asian kingdoms which have always sprung up in the days of China's weakness, and vanished again with her returning strength.

Chao-er-Feng had raised an army which adored him: he defeated the Thibetans ; he

defeated the mysterious Pomeds, that race which no European has ever seen, but which all the legends of the mongoloid nations declare to be white; and he held Zayul with a strong hand.

But not content with that, he had invaded Mishmiland, had given salt and parwanas to the headman, had asserted Chinese overlordship, and come down as far as the Del-li river, some sixty miles from Sadya. Then as the snow began to fall on the hills he withdrew again to his province of Zayul.

Now it is all but impossible to support a permanent garrison in the Mishmi country. There are no roads, the passes through which the Chinese came are impassable in winter, while access from India is closed all the summer by the flooding of the jungle tracts and the rising of the many torrents in the hills-torrents which are easily negotiated in the winter, but which from April to November present gorges, two hundred to four hundred feet wide and filled with a foaming flood, to the would-be builder of bridges.

And so it happened that even while Chao-er-Feng was withdrawing over the first snow on the passes, a little force of Indian troops was assembling at Sadya to undo his work.

Very little was known by us of the Mishmi country at that time. In the previous three or four years two British officers had scurried through the country and escaped with

their lives. From their reports it was known that there were no roads, and that the country was indescribably difficult and inhospitable. A map had even been prepared, which gave accurately enough the course of the Lohit Brahmapootra, the last great branch of that stately river, which traverses the Mishmi country from end to end, but is not navigable until it leaves the hills and enters Assam. Nowhere was it more than twenty miles wrong; but the map did not stop there. On each side we were shown an elaborate mountain system which did equal credit to the draughtsmanship and the imagination of the survey of India, while the country bristled with place - names, many of which were unrecognisable by the inhabitants, and not a few had no corporeal existence at all.

No one knew if the Chinese had garrisoned the country or not; no one knew if the Mishmi would greet us with open arms or with avalanches of stones and flights of poisoned arrows.

So the force was told to occupy the country, to penetrate some 190 miles to the last land held by Mishmis, to remove any Chinese they might encounter, and to return before the rivers rose in the spring, or they would starve, as no food could reach them after that.

At the best, the larger part of the journey would be over precipitous and dangerous hillsides. The baggage and sup