eats into the very
marrow of the bones of the man who has once tasted this particular fruit
of the great Tree of Knowledge. Just as the old smugglers, in the Isle
of Man, were wont to hear the sea calling to them; go where he may, do
what he will, the voice of the jungle, and of the people who dwell in
those untrodden places, sounds in the ears of one who has lived the
life. Ever and anon it cries to him to come back, come back to the
scenes, the people, the life which he knows and understands, and which,
in spite of all its hardships, he has learned to love.

The great wheel of progress, like some vast snowball, rolls steadily
along, gathering to itself all manner of weird and unlikely places and
people, filling up the hollows, laying the high hills low. Rays of
searching garish light reflected from its surface are pitilessly flashed
into the dark places of the earth, which have been wrapped around by the
old-time dim religious light, since first the world began. The people in
whose eyes these rays beat so mercilessly, reel and stumble blindly on
in their march through life, taking wrong turnings at every step, and
going woefully astray. Let us hope that succeeding generations will
become used to the new conditions, and will fight their way back to a
truer path; for there is no blinking the fact that the first, immediate,
and obvious effects of our spirit of progress upon the weaker races,
tend towards degeneration.

Ten years ago the Peninsula was very different from what it has since
become, and many places where the steam-engine now shrieks to the church
bells, and the shirt-collar galls the perspiring neck, were but recently
part and parcel of that vast 'up country,' which is so little known but
to the few who dwell in it, curse it,--and love it.

I sent my soul through the invisible,
Some Letter of the After-Life to spell,
And Presently my Soul returned to me
And whispered 'Thou thyself art Heaven or Hell.

So sings the old Persian poet, lying in his rose garden, by the wine-cup
that robbed him of his Robe of Honour, and his words are true; though
not quite in the sense in which he wrote them. For this wisdom the
far-away jungles also teach a man who has to rely solely upon himself,
and upon his own resources, for the manner of his life, and the form
which it is to take. To all dwellers in the desolate solitude, which
every white man experiences, who is cast alone among natives, there are
two