morning, and for three or four hours I tried to get within range of them; but they were never still for a moment, and at last I decided to leave them and go home. The only weapon I had with me was a Mauser 275, a new rifle which I had not yet had an opportunity of using on game. In trying it at a target, the pull-off was rather too stiff for my liking. We-that is to say, the Masai boy who was with me and myself-were making our way through long grass some five feet high, when suddenly there was the sound of something moving in the grass ahead of us. I turned to the boy and asked him what he thought it was. I thought he said "Chui (a leopard); I discovered afterwards he had said “Si’jui" (I don't know). We walked on a dozen paces or so, and just as we came round a large anthill he pointed ahead. Beyond the ant-heap, in the surrounding sea of grass, there was an open patch of ground where, owing to an outcrop of rock, no grass grew, and on the far side of this, some twenty paces distant, I came face to face with the overlord of the desmesne, a magnificent black-maned lion crouching, his head alone visible, the remainder of his body being concealed in the long grass. "Piga, bwana " (shoot, master), said the Masai boy in the same tone of voice he might have used if he had been inviting me to shoot at a guinea-fowl. On such an occasion one has to sum up things pretty quickly.

I realised at once that at that distance with a magazine rifle I should have one shot, and one only, and that one must be through the brain. If he were not killed outright on the spot, in two springs he would be on me. On the other hand, if I refrained from molesting him, the probability was that he would not molest me. We stared at each other for some appreciable time-it seemed a long time to me,-and then he slunk off into the grass. From the peculiar behaviour of the congoni, the lion must, I think, have been trying to stalk them. A lion does not, as a rule, hunt in the middle of the day unless he is very hungry. It is therefore to be supposed he was in no better temper than I was at our mutual failure to get a dinner. The Masai boy asked me why I hadn't fired. The only reply I could think of was that I had come out with a small-bore rifle to shoot meat, and one doesn't eat lion! fear I sank very low in his estimation. Thus unexpectedly does one meet with the local magnates. My friend had been living two or three years in this locality, and although constantly hearing lion at night had never seen one. In any district which is more or less settled the larger carnivora are very careful not to expose themselves unduly. On two other occasions only did I see lion rampant on this shamba. Once, at about 11 A.M. on a wet morning at the beginning of the heavy rains, I saw a

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lioness in the distance going at full gallop from one thicklywooded donga to another, and again one evening after 6 P.M. when there was very little daylight left, I saw another lioness out of range making her way stealthily along a game-path by the river.

I had almost forgotten to record a case of lion couchant. Returning to the house one day at noon, I saw lying in front of the entrance a lioness. She appeared to be dozing in much the same way as one has seen felines of her kind at the Zoo enjoying a siesta on a hot summer's afternoon. By this time, after some months' residence at the Crossways, I had arrived at the nil admirari state of mind advocated by the poet Horace as being the true philosophic attitude towards life in general, but this at first sight was, to say the least of it, startling. Then something in her attitude gave the show away. She was dead, and had been propped up by forked sticks on her far side out of sight. This was a little joke of the bullock boys, and I must admit they had posed her most artistically. Returning from the railway station with the bullock-cart, they had found her lying dead close to the cart-track on an outlying part of the estate, and had picked her up and brought her to the house. She was a young animal, not quite full grown, and bore traces of having been considerably in

the wars. The boys suggested that she had been killed by a lion, but I am inclined to think it was a case of cherchez la femme. It is probable that some older lioness, whose charms may have been on the wane, had become jealous of this younger and more attractive feline, who may have been getting more than her fair share of their mutual lord's attention, whereupon a battle royal had ensued, probably during his temporary absence, in which the lady, let us say, of riper experience had come off best.

My residence at the Crossways came to an abrupt termination one day in August. We had just finished work for the day and I was preparing to go out with Jack to look for a partridge, when a Kikuyu boy from my neighbour's farm handed me a chit. It ran as follows: Rumour has it that the Germans are over the frontier, and are marching to cut the railway. Will you come down and breakfast with I me to-morrow, and then we can go into Nairobi and see what is going to be done about it?" As I rode past at dawn the following morning the congoni on the flats sped me, the parting guest, on my way with a salvo of jubilant coughs and sneezes. For the next few years shambas generally had to a great extent to look after themselves, their owners being mostly engaged in Hunhunting over the border.

I could not help wondering if allowing an army to be openly recruited to defy the law in the North, or allowing strikers to destroy property in the South, would in the end make things in Ireland much “aisier." However, that was Mr Birrell's notion of popular government.

About Easter next year (1914) I was once more in Belfast. Things had then advanced considerably. The Home Rule Bill was up for its third reading. Ulster's opposition to it had only grown stronger. Her volunteers were no longer men with wooden guns: every day thousands of them marched through the streets in perfect formation in khaki uniforms, and with real rifles which they knew well how to use. But the English Government was still determined to force them to submit to their and England's enemies: Mr Churchill was telling how blood would flow, the fleet was being sent to Belfast Lough, and the regiments at the Curragh of Kildare were being ordered to march on Ulster. The Ulstermen were prepared for any fate; and still, while openly preparing to resist the King's soldiers, everywhere they were maintaining the King's peace. During this "insurrection" not a man, woman, or child, not a soldier, policeman, or civilian, received a hurt at their hands. Suddenly the collapse came. The regiments at the Curragh looked askance

When I went on to Dublin I imagined that I should find the people there the people there very much upset over this reverse to Home Rule. As a matter of fact, I found they were not bothering themselves over it a bit. What they were concerned about was the proceedings of the Transport Union. It was an openly Communist body, and it was gradually acquiring control of the left wing of the Nationalist Volunteer Army. The average moderate Nationalist regarded both Union and Army with aversion and fear; and the constant complaint I heard was, not that the Government had failed to suppress Ulster Volunteers, but that it had failed to suppress Sinn Fein and to smash Larkin and Connolly and their ragamuffin brigade. As for the English soldiers and officers, they were as popular-especially with the ladies-as ever they had been, which is saying much.

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What struck me as peculiar was that the most constant charge (and it was, I believe, a false one) which the Moderate Nationalists brought against

Larkin was that he was a son of James Carey, the witness whose evidence brought to the gallows that band of assassins, the Invincibles. Now the Moderate Nationalists always wanted the world to believe that they regarded the Invincibles with unspeakable horror. Yet in their mindsor at any rate on their tongues --it was an infamy to be connected with the man whose evidence convicted the murderers. The mentality (or honesty) of a Moderate Nationalist is remarkable.

The next time I visited both of the capitals of Ireland was in 1916. The war was then at its bitterest and most distressing stage. Belfast was at peace, but not at rest. The bulk of the Ulster Volunteers had joined the Ulster Brigade. Many of them had already served and fallen at Gallipoli; but their terrible trial had yet to come that famous advance at Thiepval, when they carried the German trenches, and left in them, or on their way to them, half their number, dead or wounded. Their friends at home had established in the grounds of the University of Belfast, at their own cost, the Ulster Volunteer Hospital, one of the greatest and best military hospitals in the Three Kingdoms. The tens of thousands of shipbuilders and engineers, whose services the Government preferred in their yards and shops rather than in the field, were working Sundays and Saturdays, day and

night, producing guns and ammunition, torpedo-boats, queer boats, and aeroplanes for the use of their comrades in France and Flanders and on the sea. The clatter of their hammers never ceased. Every purse was open, every muscle was exerted, to ensure that England should not succumb to the enemy's hosts. All party passions, all sectional feelings, were subdued to that one desire -the safety of the British Empire.

When I went to Dublin I found the city in a ferment. The threatened alliance between the Transport Union Communists and the left wing of the Nationalist Volunteers had taken place; and the one subject which the members of the alliance were discussing was armed rebellion. There were two parties among them-one for an immediate rising, the other for a postponed one,postponed, that is, until England was more exhausted by the Great War. The two parties were carrying on a public controversy on the point, with which Mr Birrell did not interfere, no doubt because, I suppose, he thought it made "things aisier." At every street corner little news-sheets were being hawked by raucous-voiced men advocating an immediate insurrection. Every night crowds gathered before Liberty Hall to hear loud-mouthed orators declaim against the tyranny of England, which permitted them to spout treason. Rebel officers in gorgeous green uniforms and