elty of children, pulled himself free and ran away.

"He was such a nice little kiddie," they said, apologetically, as
though they felt they had been caught in some act of weakness.

"I haven't got a card with me; I haven't needed one for two years,"
said the lieutenant, genially. "But fancy your knowing Sparks! He
has the next station to mine; I'm at one end of the Shire River and
he's at the other; he patrols from Fort Johnson up to the top of the
lake. I suppose you've heard him play the banjo, haven't you? That's
where we hit it off--we're both terribly keen about the banjo. I
suppose if it wasn't for my banjo, I'd go quite off my head down
here. I know Sparks would. You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to
talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks
has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred
miles."

I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely
that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and
spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the
second meeting. But when he arrived he found that they had organized
a morphine club, and the only six white men on Lake Nyassa were
sitting around a table with their sleeves rolled up, giving
themselves injections. Sparks told them it was a "disgusting
practice," and put back to his gunboat. I recalled the story to the
lieutenant, and he laughed mournfully.

"Yes," he said; "and what's worse is that we're here for two years
more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China.
Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old,
and the steamer stops once every month."

[Illustration: Custom House, Zanzibar.]

Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side,
so we had time in which to give the exiles the news of the outside
world, and they told us of their present and past lives: of how one
as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy;
how another had sold "ready to wear" clothes in a New York
department store, and another had been attache at Madrid, and
another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship. We
exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would
meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many
bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect
the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.

But at last the ship's whistle blew with rauco