scent speech than that
earlier one, it compared with it as the nuptial champagne with
Miller's bottled beer.

'The old Pioneer is now dead,' he told us, 'as dead as the Dodo
or the Great Auk. No longer need we take Quinine to be "our grim
chamberlain to usher us and draw" . . .' (here his memory of Hood
failed him). 'No more need we shiver in our Kaffir blankets at
Kaffir Stores 'fifty miles from the dead-ends of rail-less
post-towns. "Le roi est mort." Malaria is dead or dying so far
as Alexandra is concerned. We Alexandrians are now becoming
wholesome Englishmen in a wholesome White Man's country. Long
live the railway, and may it perforate the Alexandra District!'
'Amen,' said the best-man fervently. But I said nothing.

I admired Marvell. It was just like him to press a guinea on me for
my Mission, though I told him there was no fee of any kind, and
that I was ever so glad to be there. The remembrance of my dream
stung me. I said something for conscience sake. 'Civilization has
its perils,' I said dully, 'immature civilization. The period
between no-drains and the up-to-date drainage system wants some
living through.' 'That's all right,' Marvell declared. 'I'll watch
it. I didn't go through Bloemfontein in the War for nothing.'

'Le roi est mort: vive le roi! 'Alack! If Malaria slackened hold,
enteric tightened its clutch. People were found to say that the
latter state of Alexandra was worse than the former. Marvell and
Rose Marvell both got enteric. But, thank God, the uneasy
misgivings engendered by that eight-devil dream of mine about
Alexandra were not justified! They both won through. They are
going back to England for a change next month (the hay-making
month at home), they tell me.

'God made the country, and man made the town, and the devil made
the little railway-swollen, transitional, Alexandra-sort-of-town.'
So Marvell wrote to me by last mail. He is not so keen now on
the transition stage of civilization for his wife's residence.
He is thinking of a pioneer place in Northern Rhodesia, either
that or London. If the perils of the old regime in Alexandra are
diminished, the perils of the new regime appear to have a knack
of growing.

THE RIDING OF THE RED HORSE

I

Isaka rubbed his eyes, but he did not unroll himself yet out of
his blankets. He was lying in the darkness with a round of white
walls dimly seen about him. Through a hole in the grass roof, a
star met his fixed gaze. The cock