o under the tri-colour
or under the standard bearing the open hand.

[Illustration: "During convalescence he read 'Under Two Flags' and
approved the idea."]

Some casual wanderer through the purlieus of science whom he met in
Brindisi, induced him to go to Sumatra where orchids and ornithoptera
are the game. But he acquired only a perfectly new species of fever,
which took six months to get over.

He convalesced at leisure all the way from Australia to Cape Town; and
would have been all right; but somebody shot at somebody else one
evening, and got Clive. So it was several months more before he
arrived in India, and the next year before he had enough of China.

But Clive had seen many things in those two years and had learned
fairly well the lesson of his own unimportance in a world which misses
no man, neither king nor clown, after the dark curtain falls and
satiated humanity shuffles home to bed.

He saw a massacre--or the remains of it--where fifteen thousand yellow
men and one white priest lay dead. He saw Republican China, 40,000
strong, move out after the banditti, shouldering its modern rifles,
while its regimental music played "Rosie O'Grady" in quick march time.
He saw the railway between Hankow and Pekin swarming with White Wolf's
bloody pack, limping westward from the Honan-Anhui border with
dripping fangs. He peered into the stinking wells of Honan where women
were cutting their own throats. He witnessed the levity of Lhasa
priests and saw their grimy out-thrust hands clutching for tips
beside their prayer-wheels.

In India he gazed upon the degradation of woman and the unspeakable
bestiality of man till that vile and dusty hell had sickened him to
the soul.

Back into Europe he drifted; and instantly and everywhere appeared the
awful Yankee--shooting wells in Hungary, shooting craps in Monaco,
digging antiques in Greece, digging tunnels in Servia,--everywhere the
Yankee, drilling, bridging, constructing, exploring, pushing, arguing,
quarrelling, insisting, telegraphing, gambling, touring, over-running
older and better civilisations than his own crude Empire where he has
nothing to learn from anybody but the Almighty--and then only when he
condescends to ask for advice on Sunday.

And Clive, nevertheless, longed with a longing that made him sick, for
"God's country" where all that is worst and best on earth still boils
in the vast and seething cauldron of a continent in the making. There
bubbles t