‘Oh, yes, the Sheikh,’ he went on in a hopelessly bored tone; ‘we saw him--he was a vūrry civil cuss, said it was all a mistake, and we were his dearest friends, and the English were his fathers and his brothers and all his relations, and I guess--oh, yes, I guess he sent us down to Mogador with a troop of cavalry, and--that’s all.’ He turned and went back into the smoking car. The oyster was closing fast. ‘Just one question,’ I hazarded; ‘what became of the other two men afterwards?’ He drew out a pack of cards, and began shuffling them, and I had to repeat the question. ‘Oh! I guess Kinjan would be alive,--why certainly he would be; unless he might have been caught up in a flame of fire, there wouldn’t be any other kind of a death for him,’ he said with the ghost of a smile. ‘And Torin?’ ‘Gone out, I reckon,’ he said impassively. The curt grimness of this remark jarred upon me, though why it should have, I don’t know; why expect sentiment from Dick Denver, who lived from day’s end to day’s end with his life in his hands? ‘In heaven’s name, why indeed?’ I said aloud to myself, as I turned once again before going through the door to my berth--Dick Denver was dealing a set of poker hands, and humming softly to himself. It was broad daylight, and the train still droned along. I was dead tired; and as I shut the door softly, and turned into my bunk, instead of an intelligent moral deduction from the story and its teller, all I could think of was the children’s grace, ‘Thank God for a good dinner.’ ACCORDING TO HIS LIGHTS ‘Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone; Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in your own.’ --Adam Lindsay Gordon. ‘Prevention is better than cure,’ they say. Quite probably; anyway that must be the reason why our system of imprisonment is so popular, for whoever knew anyone cured by it? What the exact state of Eugene Rattray’s moral sentiments were upon the day that he was released from Rochester Gaol, it would be difficult to say. Judging from the following record, I very much doubt whether the term of his imprisonment had materially affected his view of things. What was his offence? The law called it by an awkward name having consequences; these consequences the law applied to a man who had come back of his own accord from Australia to ‘face the music,’ as he phrased it. I myself could never see that the offence was more than a chance effect of circumstances upon a formed character. It seemed to me futile to punish a chance effect, seeing that it was the formed character you wanted to get at; but anyway, ‘they done it,’ as Huck Finn has it.