orted the picture, which speedily got restive, to sit still. So much
for the mere mechanical.

Finally, I should explain the book's character. "Tell about things as
they actually are"; so said the Two with emphasis. I tried, but the
Actual eluded me. It was as if one painted smoke, and then, pointing to
the feeble blur, said, "Look at the battle! 'the smoking hell of
battle!' There is the smoke!" The Poet's thought was not this, I know,
when she coined that suggestive phrase, "The Dust of the Actual," but it
has been the predominating thought in my mind, for it holds that which
defines the scope and expresses the purpose of the book, and I use it as
the title of one of the chapters. It does not show the Actual.
Principalities, Powers, Rulers of the Darkness, Potentialities unknown
and unimagined, gathered up into one stupendous Force--we have never
seen it. How can we describe it? What we have seen and tried to describe
is only an indication of Something undescribed, and is as nothing in
comparison with it--as Dust in comparison with the Actual. The book's
scope, then, is bounded by this: it only touches the Dust; but its
purpose goes deeper, stretches wider, has to do with the Actual and our
relation to it.

But in touching the Dust we touch the outworkings of an Energy so awful
in operation that descriptive chapters are awful too. And such chapters
are best read alone in some quiet place with God. For the book is a
battle-book, written from a battle-field where the fighting is not
pretty play but stern reality; and almost every page looks straight from
the place where Charles Kingsley stood when he wrote--

"God! fight we not within a cursed world,
Whose very air teems thick with leagued fiends--
Each word we speak has infinite effects--
Each soul we pass must go to heaven or hell--
And this our one chance through eternity
To drop and die, like dead leaves in the brake!

. . . . . . .

Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad if thou wilt:
Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven,
And that thy last deed ere the judgment day."

[Illustration: This is our bullock-bandy. The water was up to the top of
the bank when we crossed last. The palms are cocoanuts.]

CHAPTER II

Three Afternoons off the Track

"They are led captive by Satan at his will in the
most