And that his was not by any means mere "literary" courage one more extract will prove. One of his boys, Paatalise by name, had suddenly gone mad:-- "I was busy copying David Balfour, with my left hand--a most laborious task--Fanny was down at the native house superintending the floor, Lloyd down in Apia, and Bella in her own house cleaning, when I heard the latter calling on my name. I ran out on the verandah; and there on the lawn beheld my crazy boy with an axe in his hand and dressed out in green ferns, dancing. I ran downstairs and found all my house boys on the back verandah, watching him through the dining-room. I asked what it meant?--'Dance belong his place,' they said.--'I think this is no time to dance,' said I. 'Has he done his work?'--'No,' they told me, 'away bush all morning.' But there they all stayed in the back verandah. I went on alone through the dining-room and bade him stop. He did so, shouldered the axe, and began to walk away; but I called him back, walked up to him, and took the axe out of his unresisting hands. The boy is in all things so good, that I can scarce say I was afraid; only I felt it had to be stopped ere he could work himself up by dancing to some craziness. Our house boys protested they were not afraid; all I know is they were all watching him round the back door, and did not follow me till I had the axe. As for the out-boys, who were working with Fanny in the native house, they thought it a bad business, and made no secret of their fears." But indeed all the book is manly, with the manliness of Scott's _Journal_ or of Fielding's _Voyage to Lisbon_. "To the English-speaking world," concludes Mr. Colvin, "he has left behind a treasure which it would be vain as yet to attempt to estimate; to the profession of letters one of the most ennobling and inspiriting of examples; and to his friends an image of memory more vivid and more dear than are the presences of almost any of the living." Very few men of our time have been followed out of this world with the same regret. None have repined less at their own fate-- "This be the verse you grave for me:-- 'Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.'" M. ZOLA Sept. 23, 1892. La Débâcle.