ship, but now spliced to a country wife
and gone utterly to the bad. I had only heard of him in the vaguest way,
as living concealed in the thick of two hundred thousand natives, and
only emerging into the light of day for the purpose of hunting up some
brandy. I had a notion that if I could lay my hands on him I would sober
him on board my ship and use him for a pilot. Better than nothing. Once
a sailor always a sailor--and he had known the river for years. But in
our Consulate (where I arrived dripping after a sharp walk) they could
tell me nothing. The excellent young men on the staff, though willing to
help me, belonged to a sphere of the white colony for which that sort of
Johnson does not exist. Their suggestion was that I should hunt the
man up myself with the help of the Consulate's constable--an
ex-sergeant-major of a regiment of Hussars.

This man, whose usual duty apparently consisted in sitting behind a
little table in an outer room of Consular offices, when ordered to
assist me in my search for Johnson displayed lots of energy and a
marvellous amount of local knowledge of a sort. But he did not conceal
an immense and sceptical contempt for the whole business. We explored
together on that afternoon an infinity of infamous grog shops, gambling
dens, opium dens. We walked up narrow lanes where our gharry--a tiny
box of a thing on wheels, attached to a jibbing Burmah pony--could by
no means have passed. The constable seemed to be on terms of scornful
intimacy with Maltese, with Eurasians, with Chinamen, with Klings, and
with the sweepers attached to a temple, with whom he talked at the gate.
We interviewed also through a grating in a mud wall closing a blind
alley an immensely corpulent Italian, who, the ex-sergeant-major
remarked to me perfunctorily, had "killed another man last year."
Thereupon he addressed him as "Antonio" and "Old Buck," though that
bloated carcase, apparently more than half filling the sort of cell
wherein it sat, recalled rather a fat pig in a stye. Familiar and never
unbending, the sergeant chucked--absolutely chucked--under the chin
a horribly wrinkled and shrivelled old hag propped on a stick, who had
volunteered some sort of information: and with the same stolid face he
kept up an animated conversation with the groups of swathed brown women,
who sat smoking cheroots on the door-steps of a long range of clay
hovels. We got out of the gharry and clambered into dwellings airy like
packi