the special councillors who are charged with the conduct of colonial affairs. Yet another and a far more important means of escape from the alleged tedium of family or rustic routine is the career of the probationer, who aspires eventually to be elected a member of the hierarchy. This ambition cannot, however, be gratified before the age of thirty, when the intending candidate is admitted to the school of the neophytes. Here for a year he receives a course of lectures on Meleagrian history and is taught the rudiments of Latin grammar, but no instruction in reading or writing is yet afforded him. At the end of a twelvemonth of such preliminary training, the neophyte is either rejected as unfit or unsuitable, or else he is admitted a probationer of the seminary attached to the Temple of the Sun. In that case he receives a five years' course of far more advanced tuition; he is taught to read, write and speak the Latin language; and presumably he is also instructed in astronomy, politics, theology and other subjects concerning which his existing notions must be strangely vague or wholly erroneous. This long period of instruction entails a severe strain on the pupil, who is henceforth cut off from all private and external ties and interests, for he is never allowed to quit the precincts of his seminary. Of his final election and reception into the council of the hierarchy I have spoken elsewhere. Whether or no any candidate has ever failed to obtain his election and has been consequently compelled to remain in the institution for years, perhaps for the term of his lifetime, I cannot say; yet I do know for a fact that for its inmates there is but one door leading out of the seminary of probationers and that is the door which admits to the council chamber.