himself and his
orders for the command of a brigade in the next English affair. He would
be afraid of being too long away from home lest he should drop out of
the running and ... Well, we are just the same in India, and there is
not the least hope of raising a Legion of the Lost for colonial
service--of men who would do their work in one place for ever and look
for nothing beyond it. But remember that Hong-Kong--with five million
tons of coal, five miles of shipping, docks, wharves, huge civil
station, forty million pounds of trade, and the nicest picnic parties
that you ever did see--wants three thousand men and--she won't get them.
She has two batteries of garrison artillery, a regiment, and a lot of
gun lascars--about enough to prevent the guns from rusting on their
carriages. There are three forts on an island--Stonecutter's
Island--between Hong-Kong and the mainland, three on Hong-Kong itself,
and three or four scattered about elsewhere. Naturally the full
complement of guns has not arrived. Even in India you cannot man forts
without trained gunners. But tiffin under the lee of a rock was more
interesting than colonial defence. A man cannot talk politics if he be
empty.

Our one fine day shut in upon the empty plates in wind and rain, and the
march across the island began.

As the launch was blotted out in the haze we squelched past sugar-cane
crops and fat pigs, past the bleak cemetery of dead soldiers on the
hill, across a section of moor, till we struck a hill-road above the
sea. The views shifted and changed like a kaleidoscope. First a shaggy
shoulder of land tufted with dripping rushes and naught above, beneath,
or around but mist and the straight spikes of the rain; then red road
swept by water that fell into the unknown; then a combe, straight walled
almost as a house, at the bottom of which crawled the jade-green sea;
then a vista of a bay, a bank of white sand, and a red-sailed junk
beating out before the squall; then only wet rock and fern, and the
voice of thunder calling from peak to peak.

A landward turn in the road brought us to the pine woods of Theog and
the rhododendrons--but they called them azaleas--of Simla, and ever the
rain fell as though it had been July in the hills instead of April at
Hong-Kong. An invading army marching upon Victoria would have a sad time
of it even if the rain did not fall. There are but one or two gaps in
the hills through which it could travel, and there is a schem