would be very much surprised
if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and
Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good
and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice.

On the day they boarded the _Kanzlar_ the pains of nostalgia were
sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves
of nausea, and tearing them. With a grim appreciation of their own
condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck,
as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even
boisterous and gay, but their gayety was that of children at recess,
who know that when the bell rings they are going back to the desk.

A little English boy ran through the smoking-room, and they fell
upon him, and quarrelled for the privilege of holding him on their
knees. He was a shy, coquettish little English boy, and the
boisterous, noisy men did not appeal to him. To them he meant home
and family and the old nursery, papered with colored pictures from
the Christmas _Graphic_. His stout, bare legs and tangled curls and
sailor's hat, with "H.M.S. Mars" across it, meant all that was clean
and sweet-smelling in their past lives.

"I'll arrest you for a deserter," said the lieutenant of the
gunboat. "I'll make the consul send you back to the _Mars_." He held
the boy on his knee fearfully, handling him as though he were some
delicate and precious treasure that might break if he dropped it.

The agent of the Oceanic Development Company, Limited, whose
business in life is to drive savage Angonis out of the jungle, where
he hopes in time to see the busy haunts of trade, begged for the boy
with eloquent pleading.

"You've had the kiddie long enough now," he urged. "Let me have him.
Come here, Mr. Mars, and sit beside me, and I'll give you fizzy
water--like lemon-squash, only nicer." He held out a wet bottle of
champagne alluringly.

"No, he is coming to his consul," that youth declared. "He's coming
to his consul for protection. You are not fit characters to
associate with an innocent child. Come to me, little boy, and do not
listen to those degraded persons." So the "innocent child" seated
himself between the consul and the chartered trader, and they patted
his fat calves and red curls and took his minute hands in their
tanned fists, eying him hungrily, like two cannibals. But the little
boy was quite unconscious and inconsiderate of their hunger, and,
with the cru