, and
held his tongue for a month or two.

"But though Tommy was no good at his job, he was a tremendous swell at
other things. He was an uncommonly good linguist, and had always about
a dozen hobbies which he slaved at; and when he found himself at Deira
with a good deal of leisure, he became a bigger crank than ever. He
had a lot of books which used to follow him about the world in
zinc-lined boxes--your big paper-backed German books which mean
research,--and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and corresponded
with half a dozen foreign shows. India was his great subject, but he
had been in the Sudan and knew a good deal about African races. When I
went out to him, his pet hobby was the Bantu, and he had acquired an
amazing amount of miscellaneous learning. He knew all about their
immigration from the North, and the Arab and Phoenician trade-routes,
and the Portuguese occupation, and the rest of the history of that
unpromising seaboard. The way he behaved in his researches showed the
man. He worked hard at the Labonga language-which, I believe, is a
linguistic curiosity of the first water-from missionary books and the
conversation of tame Kaffirs. But he never thought of paying them a
visit in their native haunts. I was constantly begging him to do it,
but it was not Tommy's way. He did not care a straw about political
experience, and he liked to look at things through the medium of paper
and ink. Then there were the Phoenician remains in the foot-hills
where the copper was mined-old workings, and things which might have
been forts or temples. He knew all that was to be known about them,
but he had never seen them and never wanted to. Once only he went to
the hills, to open some new reservoirs and make the ordinary Governor's
speech; but he went in a special train and stayed two hours, most of
which was spent in lunching and being played to by brass bands.

"But, oddly enough, there was one thing which stirred him with an
interest that was not academic. I discovered it by accident one day
when I went into his study and found him struggling with a map of
Central Asia. Instead of the mild, benevolent smile with which he
usually greeted my interruptions, he looked positively furtive, and, I
could have sworn, tried to shuffle the map under some papers. Now it
happens that Central Asia is the part of the globe that I know better
than most men, and I could not help picking up the map and looking at
it.