But Juggins only shuddered.

'"Bury it in Heaven's name!" he said. "I would not have it for all the
world. Besides it was alive. I saw and heard it."'

'Well, we put it back in the grave, and next day we left the Sakai
country. We had seen quite as much of it as we wanted for a bit, I tell
you.

'Juggins and I swore one another to secrecy, as neither of us fancied
being told we were drunk or lying. You, however, know something of the
uncanny things of the East, and to-night I have told the story to you.
Now I am going to turn in. Do not give me away.'

Young Middleton went off to bed, and last year he died of fever and
dysentery somewhere up country. His name was not Middleton, of course,
so I am not really 'giving him away,' as he called it, even now. As for
his companion, though he is still alive, I have called him Juggins, and,
since the family is a large one, he will not, perhaps, be identified.

UP COUNTRY

The days are hot and damp, and my legs are stiff with cramp,
And the office punkahs creak!
And I'd give my tired soul, for the life that makes man whole,
And a whiff of the jungle reek!
Ha' done with the tents of Shem, dear boys,
With office stool and pew,
For it's time to turn to the lone Trail, our own Trail, the
far Trail,
Dig out, dig out on the old trail--
The trail that is always new.

_A Parody._

It has been said that a white man, who has lived twelve consecutive
months in complete isolation, among the people of an alien Asiatic race,
is never wholly sane again for the remainder of his days. This, in a
measure, is true; for the life he then learns to live, and the
discoveries he makes in that unmapped land, the gates of which are
closed, locked, barred, and chained against all but a very few of his
countrymen, teach him to love many things which all right-minded people
very properly detest. The free, queer, utterly unconventional life has a
fascination which is all its own. Each day brings a little added
knowledge of the hopes and fears, longings and desires, joys and
sorrows, pains and agonies of the people among whom his lot is cast.
Each hour brings fresh insight into the mysterious workings of the
minds and hearts of that very human section of our race, which ignorant
Europeans calmly class as 'niggers.' All these things come to possess a
charm for him, the power of which grows apace, and