A Special Correspondent's lot--Hypothecated wits--The Daughters of Zion--Their modest demeanour--Under the banner of Woman's Rights--The discoverer discovered--Turning the tables--"By Jove, sir, you shall have mustard with your beefsteak!" IT has been my good fortune to see many countries, and my ill-luck to have had to maintain, during all my travels, an appearance of intelligence. Though I have been over much of Europe, over all of India and its adjoining countries, Afghanistan, Beloochistan, Burmah, and Ceylon, in the north and west and south of Africa, and in various out-of-the-way islands in miscellaneous oceans, I have never visited one of them purely "for pleasure." I have always been "representing" other people. My eyes and ears have been hypothecated, so to speak--my intelligence been in pledge. When I was sent out to watch wars, there was a tacit agreement that I should be shot at, so that I might let other people know what it felt like. When run away with by a camel in a desert that had no "other end" to it, I accepted my position simply as material for a letter for which my employers had duly paid. They tried to drown me in a mill-stream; that was a good half-column. Two Afridis sat down by me when I had sprained my knee by my horse falling, and waited for me to faint that they might cut my throat. But they overdid it, for they looked so like vultures that I couldn't faint. But it made several very harrowing paragraphs. I have been sent to sea to get into cyclones in the Bay of Biscay, and hurricanes in the Mozambique Channel, that I might describe lucidly the sea-going properties of the vessels under test. I have been sent to a King to ask him for information that it was known beforehand he would not give, and commissioned to follow Irish agitators all over Ireland, in the hope that I might be able to say more about them than they knew themselves. It has been my duty to walk about inquisitively after Zulus, and to run away judiciously with Zulus after me. Sometimes I have taken long shots at Afghans, and sometimes they have taken short ones at me. In short, I have been deputed at one time and another to do many things which I should never have done "for pleasure," and many which, for pleasure, I should like to do again. But wherever I have been sent I have had to go about, seeing as much as I could and asking about all I couldn't see, and have become, professionally, accustomed to collecting evidence, sifting it on the spot, and forming my own conclusions. In a way, therefore, a Special Correspondent becomes of necessity an expert at getting at facts. He finds that everything he is commissioned to investigate has at least two sides to it, and that many things have two right sides. There are plenty of people always willing to mislead him, and he has to pick and choose. He arrives unprejudiced, and speaks according to the knowledge he acquires. Sometimes he is brought up to