t for no reason at all save that
hot youth cannot abide the necessary delay.

For life is short, and though to-day be to us, who can tell for the
morrow? During the full moon there is no night, only a change to silver
light from golden; and the forest is full of delight. There are
wood-cutters' huts in the ravines where the water falls, soft beds of
torn bracken and fragrant grasses where great trees make a shelter from
the heat; and for food, that is easily arranged. A basket of rice with
a little salt-fish and spices is easily hidden in a favourable place.
You only want a jar to cook it, and there is enough for two for a week;
or it is brought day by day by some trusted friend to a place previously
agreed upon.

All up and down the forest there are flowers for her hair, scarlet dak
blossoms and orchid sprays and jasmine stars; and for occupation through
the hours each has a new world to explore full of wonderful undreamt-of
discoveries, lit with new light and mysterious with roseate shadows, a
world of 'beautiful things made new' for those forest children. So that
when the confidante, an aunt maybe or a sister, meets them by the sacred
fig-tree on the hill, and tells them that all difficulties are removed,
and their friends called together for the marriage, can you wonder that
it is not without regret that they fare forth from that enchanted land
to ordinary life again?

It is, as I have said, not always the man who is the proposer of the
flight. Nay, I think indeed that it is usually the girl. 'Men have more
patience.'

I had a Burmese servant, a boy, who may have been twenty, and he had
been with me a year, and was beginning to be really useful. He had at
last grasped the idea that electro-plate should not be cleaned with
monkey-brand soap, and he could be trusted not to put up rifle
cartridges for use with a double-barrelled gun; and he chose this time
to fall in love with the daughter of the headman of a certain village
where I was in camp.

He had good excuse, for she was a delicious little maiden with great
coils of hair, and the voice of a wood-pigeon cooing in the forest, and
she was very fond of him, without a doubt.

So one evening he came to me and said that he must leave me--that he
wanted to get married, and could not possibly delay. Then I spoke to him
with all that depth of wisdom we are so ready to display for the benefit
of others. I pointed out to him that he was much too young, that she was