nce and restraint under great
provocation. They must have been sorely tempted to give the Poet the
spanking he so richly deserves.

* * * * *

When the small army of newspaper correspondents who were despatched by
the great New York and London dailies to Khartoum to interview Colonel
Roosevelt upon his emergence from the jungle started up the White Nile
to meet the explorer, they were deterred, both by the shortage of boats
and the question of expense, from chartering individual steamers. But
the public at home was not permitted to know of these petty limitations
and annoyances. On the contrary, people all over the United States, at
their breakfast-tables, read the despatches from the far-off Sudan dated
from "On board the New York _Herald's_ dahabeah _Rameses_" or "The New
York _American's_ despatch-boat _Abbas Hilmi_," or "The Chicago
_Tribune's_ special steamer _General Gordon_," and never dreamed that
the young men in sun-helmets and white linen who were writing those
despatches were comfortably seated under the awnings of the same
decrepit stern-wheeler, which they had chartered jointly, but on which,
in order to lend importance and dignity to his despatches, each
correspondent had bestowed a particular name.

But the destroyer _Sirio_, which we found awaiting us at Fiume, we did
not have to share with any one. Thanks to the courtesy of the Italian
Ministry of Marine, she was all ours, while we were aboard her, from her
knife-like prow to the screws kicking the water under her stern.

"I am under orders to place myself entirely at your disposal," explained
her youthful and very stiffly starched skipper, Commander Poggi. "I am
to go where you desire and to stop as long as you please. Those are my
instructions."

Thus it came about that, shortly after noon on a scorching summer day,
we cast off our moorings and, leaving quarrel-torn Fiume abaft, turned
the nose of the _Sirio_ sou' by sou'-west, down the coast of Dalmatia.
The sun-kissed waters of the Bay of Quarnero looked for all the world
like a vast azure carpet strewn with a million sparkling diamonds; on
our starboard quarter stretched the green-clad slopes of Istria, with
the white villas of Abbazia peeping coyly out from amid the groves of
pine and laurel; to the eastward the bleak brown peaks of the Dinaric
Alps rose, savage, mysterious, forbidding, against the cloudless summer
sky. Perhaps no stretch of coast in all the wo