honeymoon, at once a necessity and a delight.

Those were the royal days of coffee-planting in Ceylon, before a single
season and a rotten fungus drove a whole community through years of
despair to one of the greatest commercial victories which pluck and
ingenuity ever won. Not often is it that men have the heart when their
one great industry is withered to rear up in a few years another as rich
to take its place, and the tea-fields of Ceylon are as true a monument
to courage as is the lion at Waterloo. But in '72 there was no cloud
yet above the skyline, and the hopes of the planters were as high and
as bright as the hillsides on which they reared their crops. Vansittart
came down to London with his young and beautiful wife. I was introduced,
dined with them, and it was finally arranged that I, since business
called me also to Ceylon, should be a fellow-passenger with them on the
_Eastern Star_, which was timed to sail on the following Monday.

It was on the Sunday evening that I saw him again. He was shown up
into my rooms about nine o'clock at night, with the air of a man who is
bothered and out of sorts. His hand, as I shook it, was hot and dry.

"I wish, Atkinson," said he, "that you could give me a little lime juice
and water. I have a beastly thirst upon me, and the more I take the more
I seem to want."

I rang and ordered a carafe and glasses. "You are flushed," said I. "You
don't look the thing."

"No, I'm clean off colour. Got a touch of rheumatism in my back, and
don't seem to taste my food. It is this vile London that is choking me.
I'm not used to breathing air which has been used up by four million
lungs all sucking away on every side of you." He flapped his crooked
hands before his face, like a man who really struggles for his breath.

"A touch of the sea will soon set you right."

"Yes, I'm of one mind with you there. That's the thing for me. I want
no other doctor. If I don't get to sea to-morrow I'll have an illness.
There are no two ways about it." He drank off a tumbler of lime juice,
and clapped his two hands with his knuckles doubled up into the small of
his back.

"That seems to ease me," said he, looking at me with a filmy eye. "Now I
want your help, Atkinson, for I am rather awkwardly placed."

"As how?"

"This way. My wife's mother got ill and wired for her. I couldn't
go--you know best yourself how tied I have been--so she had to go alone.
Now I've had another wire to say that she