a military
hospital,--Thomas gets change of air thus,--and a few hundred thousand
sampans manned by women with babies tied on to their backs. Then we
swept down the sea face of the city and saw that it was great, till we
came to an unfinished fort high up on the side of a green hill, and I
watched the new General as men watch an oracle. Have I told you that he
is an Engineer General, specially sent out to attend to the
fortifications? He looked at the raw earth and the granite masonry, and
there was keen professional interest in his eye. Perhaps he would say
something. I edged nearer in that hope. He did:--

"Sherry and sandwiches? Thanks, I will. 'Stonishing how hungry the
sea-air makes a man feel," quoth the General; and we went along under
the grey-green coast, looking at stately country houses made of granite,
where Jesuit fathers and opulent merchants dwell. It was the Mashobra of
this Simla. It was also the Highlands, it was also Devonshire, and it
was specially grey and chilly.

Never did _Pioneer_ circulate in stranger waters. On the one side was a
bewildering multiplicity of islets; on the other, the deeply indented
shores of the main island, sometimes running down to the sea in little
sandy coves, at others falling sheer in cliff and sea-worn cave full of
the boom of the breakers. Behind, rose the hills into the mist, the
everlasting mist.

"We are going to Aberdeen," said the hostess; "then to Stanley, and then
across the island on foot by way of the Ti-tam reservoir. That will show
you a lot of the country."

We shot into a fiord and discovered a brown fishing village which kept
sentry over two docks, and a Sikh policeman. All the inhabitants were
rosy-cheeked women, each owning one-third of a boat, and a whole baby,
wrapped up in red cloth and tied to the back. The mother was dressed in
blue for a reason,--if her husband whacked her over the shoulders, he
would run a fair chance of crushing the baby's head unless the infant
were of a distinct colour.

Then we left China altogether, and steamed into far Lochaber, with a
climate to correspond. Good people under the punkah, think for a moment
of cloud-veiled headlands running out into a steel-grey sea, crisped
with a cheek-rasping breeze that makes you sit down under the bulwarks
and gasp for breath. Think of the merry pitch and roll of a small craft
as it buzzes from island to island, or venturously cuts across the mouth
of a mile-wide bay, while you ma