At last his barracks were built, and the old huts destroyed; coffee, cocoa, maize, sweet potatoes, and bananas grew in well-ordered plantations, between parallel, palm-lined avenues, where formerly had been a wilderness of insanitary ruins. Then came the great feat of all—brick houses for the whites and for the Departmental offices. Bricks, bricks. He knew that bricks were made somehow from some sort of clay, and he had a hazy notion that straw was essential to their composition. So he started on a series of experiments. In the intervals of his work—with two sub-lieutenants to help him, he was responsible for training, feeding, and controlling from 1000 to 1500 soldiers, with their wives and families, for maintaining order in his district, and developing its commercial resources, and for ruling the natives in it; how well he had done this work I will show in a moment—but, in the intervals, he went on clay-hunting expeditions, and then sat up at night experimenting on what he had found, and at last he produced what he recognised as the real red brick—the philosopher’s stone of his research. And so the first brick house in Irebu was built in one year from when Jeuniaux first came. And he built other houses for his lieutenants and white non-coms., and a residency for himself, and a guest house large and comfortable, and post-office, state stores, guard-house, pharmacy, armoury, and houses for all the other whites. One by one they were built, and Jeuniaux, now Commandant Jeuniaux, and his ever-changing pupils built them all, until he had realised his ambition, and had constructed a model station, with its lovely avenues, its riverside promenade, its fine landing-stage, its parade ground, where 1200 men may, without crowding, manœuvre in companies at once, and its pretty public gardens. And when his first term of three years was over he left, with the sense of work accomplished, for his six months’ holiday. All the time in Europe he pictured the growth of his plantations and his palms, and told his friends he should be glad to get back “home” to Irebu, the town he built with his own hands. And the night before he reached it he could not sleep for excitement; and all day he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of it, and at last it came in sight. But not the Irebu he knew. The plantations had reverted into jungle, the avenues had disappeared, lost in the quick, rank growth; the pleasure gardens were a wilderness; the finest of the palms had been cut down; and he went through the coarse, wild vegetation that clogged the entrance to his house, and into the damp hall-way that was become the home of bats, and of rats, and of lizards, and he sat down there, and he wept. For so, in six short months, had an idle officer left in charge during his absence undone the labour of three years.