us persistence. It was
final and heartless. It rang down the curtain on the mirage which
once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages,
of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and
flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the
mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the
_Kanzlar_ became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon
line.

I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them
until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to
borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with
never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean
land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty
group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was
more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall
never meet them again--we had just burned signals as our ships
passed in the night--and yet, I must always consider among the
friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways
straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi,
"the only respectable members of Chinde Society."[A]

[Footnote A: NOTE--I did not lose the white-clad youths. The
lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a
consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde
newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also,
should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society.
He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the
_Kanzlar_, alone prevented his social position being publicly
recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though
tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society. R.H.D.]

The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his
contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one
which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its
inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown
jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the
captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down
with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the
slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the
casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the
sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the
shore-wall of Moza