sage filled
me with startled amazement. I read it over and over again, getting more
bewildered each time. "The Deputies of Alsace and Lorraine have refused
to vote in the German Reichstag!" "But--good heavens!" I almost screamed
to myself, "_what_ were the Alsace and Lorraine Deputies doing in the
German Parliament at all?" I turned the matter over and over in my mind,
and at last, finding that I was getting worked up into a state of
dangerous excitement, I threw the paper from me and walked away. I
thought over the matter again, and so utterly incomprehensible did it
appear to me that I thought I must be mistaken--that my eyes must have
deceived me. Accordingly I ran back and picked the paper up a second
time, and there, sure enough, was the same passage. In vain did I seek
for any sane explanation, and at last I somehow got it into my head that
the appearance of the printed characters must be due to a kind of mental
obliquity, and that I must be rapidly going mad! Even Yamba could not
sympathise with me, because the matter was one which I never could have
made her understand. I tried to put this strange puzzle out of my head,
but again and again the accursed and torturing passage would ring in my
ears until I nearly went crazy. But I presently put the thing firmly
from me, and resolved to think no more about it.

It is not an exaggeration to describe my mountain home in the centre of
the continent as a perfect paradise. The grasses and ferns there grew to
a prodigious height, and there were magnificent forests of white gum and
eucalyptus. Down in the valley I built a spacious house--the largest the
natives had ever seen. It was perhaps twenty feet long, sixteen feet to
eighteen feet wide, and about ten feet high. The interior was decorated
with ferns, war implements, the skins of various animals, and last--but
by no means least--the "sword" of the great sawfish I had killed in the
haunted lagoon. This house contained no fireplace, because all the
cooking was done in the open air. The walls were built of rough logs,
the crevices being filled in with earth taken from ant-hills. I have
just said that _I_ built the house. This is, perhaps, not strictly
correct. It was Yamba and the other women-folk who actually carried out
the work, under my supervision. Here it is necessary to explain that I
did not dare to do much manual labour, because it would have been
considered undignified on my part. I really d