Nowhere is the overpowering romance of the land brought more vividly before you than in the dining-cars or on the decks of the river steamers. The tall young Englishman in flannels who sits opposite you at table remarks casually that he is using a four months' leave of absence to go up Gondokoro-way after elephant, and a French marquis who is sitting near by, happening to overhear the conversation, leans across to inquire about the chances for sport on the Abyssinian frontier. “You can't go across there, you know,” interrupts a bimbashi, whose freckled Irish face looks strangely out of place beneath the tarboosh which denotes an officer in the Egyptian service. “The Hadendowas are on the rampage again and the Sirdar has issued orders that no one is to be permitted to cross into Menelik's territory until things have quieted down. There's no use your trying it, for the camel police are jolly well certain to turn you back.” The bearded man in the ill-fitting clothes, who would be taken almost anywhere for a commercial traveller, is, you are told, one of the most celebrated big-game shots in the world, and just now is on his way to the Lado Enclave in search of a certain rare species of antelope for the Berlin museum. The grizzled Egyptian officer sitting by himself—for the British no more mingle socially with the Egyptians than Americans do with negroes—once served under Gordon, as the bit of faded blue ribbon on the breast of his tunic denotes; the brown-faced Englishman in riding-clothes, with the wrinkles about his eyes which come from staring out across the sands under a tropic sun, is a pasha and the governor of a province as large as many a European kingdom, and farther up the line he will get off the train and disappear into the desert on one of his periodical tours of inspection, perhaps not seeing another white face for three months or more. It struck me that there was something particularly fine and manly and self-reliant about these young Englishmen who are acting as policemen and judges and administrators and agricultural experts rolled into one, out there at the Back of Beyond. “It's only the hard work that makes it bearable,” said one of them in answer to my question. “What with the heat and the flies and the never-ending vista of yellow sand and the lack of companionship, we should die from sheer loneliness if we didn't work from dawn until bedtime. Besides, every two years we get long enough leave to go home.” (And oh, the caress in that word home.) Then he asked me with pathetic eagerness about the latest song-hits at the London music-halls, and was this new Russian dancer at Covent Garden as wonderful as the illustrated weeklies made her out, and honestly, now, did I think the government was going to be such a bally ass as to give the Irish home rule? That young man—he was twenty-four on his last birthday, he told me—has charge of a province four times as large as New York State, and in it