s a Face on the
steamer--a face above a pointed straw-coloured beard, a face with thin
lips and eloquent eyes. We conversed, and presently I got at the ideas
of the Face. It was, though it lived for nine months of the year in the
wilds of Alaska and British Columbia, an authority on the canon law of
the Church of England--a zealous and bitter upholder of the supremacy of
the aforesaid Church. Into my amazed ears, as the steamer plodded
through the reflections of the stars, it poured the battle-cry of the
Church Militant here on earth, and put forward as a foul injustice that
in the prisons of British Columbia the Protestant chaplain did not
always belong to the Church. The Face had no official connection with
the august body, and by force of his life very seldom attended service.

"But," said he, proudly, "I should think it direct disobedience to the
orders of my Church if I attended any other places of worship than those
prescribed. I was once for three months in a place where there was only
a Wesleyan Methodist chapel, and I never set foot in it once, Sir. Never
once. 'Twould have been heresy. Rank heresy."

And as I leaned over the rail methought that all the little stars in the
water were shaking with austere merriment! But it may have been only the
ripple of the steamer, after all.

No. XXVIII

TAKES ME FROM VANCOUVER TO THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK.

"But who shall chronicle the ways
Of common folk, the nights and days
Spent with rough goatherds on the snows,
And travellers come whence no man knows?"

This day I know how a deserter feels. Here in Victoria, a hundred and
forty miles out of America, the mail brings me news from our Home--the
land of regrets. I was enjoying myself by the side of a trout-stream,
and I feel inclined to apologise for every rejoicing breath I drew in
the diamond clear air. The sickness, they said, is heavy with you; from
Rewari to the south good men are dying. Two names come in by the mail of
two strong men dead--men that I dined and jested with only a little time
ago, and it seems unfair that I should be here, cut off from the
chain-gang and the shot-drill of our weary life. After all, there is no
life like it that we lead over yonder. Americans are Americans, and
there are millions of them; English are English; but we of India are Us
all the world over, knowing the mysteries of each other's lives and
sorrowing for the death of a brother. How can I sit do