t, such as it is. People of diverse conditions of life
have found in it something to interest and to stimulate. One of the most
volcanic of the Labour members in the House of Commons told me that the
violence of his opposition to me in debate on a certain bill was greatly
moderated by the fact that I had written 'The Translation of a Savage';
while a certain rather grave duke remarked to me concerning the
character of Lali that "She would have been all right anywhere." I am
bound to say that he was a duke who, while a young man, knew the wilds
of Canada and the United States almost as well as I know Westminster.

THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE

CHAPTER I. HIS GREAT MISTAKE

It appeared that Armour had made the great mistake of his life. When
people came to know, they said that to have done it when sober had shown
him possessed of a kind of maliciousness and cynicism almost pardonable,
but to do it when tipsy proved him merely weak and foolish. But the fact
is, he was less tipsy at the time than was imagined; and he could have
answered to more malice and cynicism than was credited to him. To those
who know the world it is not singular that, of the two, Armour was
thought to have made the mistake and had the misfortune, or that people
wasted their pity and their scorn upon him alone. Apparently they did
not see that the woman was to be pitied. He had married her; and she was
only an Indian girl from Fort Charles of the Hudson's Bay Company,
with a little honest white blood in her veins. Nobody, not even her
own people, felt that she had anything at stake, or was in danger of
unhappiness, or was other than a person who had ludicrously come to bear
the name of Mrs. Francis Armour. If any one had said in justification
that she loved the man, the answer would have been that plenty of
Indian women had loved white men, but had not married them, and yet the
population of half-breeds went on increasing.

Frank Armour had been a popular man in London. His club might be found
in the vicinity of Pall Mall, his father's name was high and honoured in
the Army List, one of his brothers had served with Wolseley in Africa,
and Frank himself, having no profession, but with a taste for business
and investment, had gone to Canada with some such intention as Lord
Selkirk's in the early part of the century. He owned large shares in
the Hudson's Bay Company, and when he travelled through the North-West
country, prospecting, he was