do the last couple of miles. I could see that
Cashmere gate and the Delhi walls ahead of me; 'pon my soul I felt as if
they were defying me and despising me, just standing waiting there under
the blazing sky, and they never seemed to get any nearer. It was like
the first night of a fever, the whizzing of the wheels, the ding-dong of
the pony's hoofs, the silence all round, the feeling of stress and
insane hurrying on, the throbbing of my head, and the scorching heat.
I'll swear no fever I've ever had was worse than that last two miles.

As I reached the Delhi walls I took one look at the clock. There was
barely a minute left.

"By Jove!" I gasped, "I'm done!"

I shouted and yelled to the pony like a madman, to keep up what heart
was left in the wretched little brute, holding on to him for bare life,
with my arms and legs straight out in front of me. The gray wall and the
blinding road rushed by me like a river--I scarcely knew what
happened--I couldn't think of anything but the ticking of the clock that
I was somehow trying to count, till there came the bang of a pistol over
my head.

It was the Cashmere gate, and I had thirteen seconds in hand.

* * * * *

There was never anything more heard of the bagman. He can, if he likes,
soothe his conscience with the reflection that he was worth a thousand
pounds to me.

But Mrs. Le Bretton never quite forgave me.

AN IRISH PROBLEM

Conversation raged on the long flanks of the mail-car.

An elderly priest, with a warm complexion and a controversial under-lip,
was expounding his native country to a fellow-traveller, with slight but
irrepressible pulpit gestures of the hand. The fellow traveller, albeit
lavender-hued from an autumn east wind, was obediently observing the
anaemic patches of oats and barley, pale and thin, like the hair of a
starving baby, and the huge slants of brown heather and turf bog, and
was interjecting "Just so!" at decent intervals. Now and then, as the
two tall brown mares slackened for a bout of collar-work at a hill, or
squeezed slowly past a cart stacked high with sods of turf, we, sitting
in silence, Irish wolves in the clothing of English tourists, could hear
across the intervening pile of luggage and bicycles such a storm of
conversation as bursts forth at a dinner-party after the champagne has
twice gone round.

The brunt of the talk was borne by the old lady in the centre. Her broad
back, chequer