it again I'll whistle, or talk to myself out loud and think of
something cheerful. And I don't mean to be one of those chaps who spends
his time in jail counting the stones in his cell, or training spiders,
or measuring how many of his steps make a mile, for madness lies that
way. I mean to sit tight and think of all the good times I've had, and
go over them in my mind very slowly, so as to make them last longer and
remember who was there and what we said, and the jokes and all that;
I'll go over house-parties I have been on, and the times I've had in the
Riviera, and scouting parties Dr. Jim led up country when we were taking
Matabele Land.

"They say that if you're good here they give you things to read after a
month or two, and then I can read up all those instructive books that a
fellow never does read until he's laid up in bed.

"But that's crowding ahead a bit; I must keep to what happened to-day.
We struck York Road at the back of the Great Western Terminus, and I
half hoped we might see some chap we knew coming or going away: I would
like to have waved my hand to him. It would have been fun to have seen
his surprise the next morning when he read in the paper that he had
been bowing to jail-birds, and then I would like to have cheated the
tipstaves out of just one more friendly good-by. I wanted to say good-by
to somebody, but I really couldn't feel sorry to see the last of any
one of those we passed in the streets--they were such a dirty,
unhappy-looking lot, and the railroad wall ran on forever apparently,
and we might have been in a foreign country for all we knew of it. There
were just sooty gray brick tenements and gas-works on one side, and
the railroad cutting on the other, and semaphores and telegraph wires
overhead, and smoke and grime everywhere, it looked exactly like the
sort of street that should lead to a prison, and it seemed a pity to
take a smart hansom and a good cob into it.

"It was just a bit different from our last ride together--when we rode
through the night from Krugers-Dorp with hundreds of horses' hoofs
pounding on the soft veldt behind us, and the carbines clanking against
the stirrups as they swung on the sling belts. We were being hunted
then, harassed on either side, scurrying for our lives like the Derby
Dog in a race-track when every one hoots him and no man steps out to
help--we were sick for sleep, sick for food, lashed by the rain, and we
knew that we were beaten; but we wer