"The hair on Trooper Peter Halket's head slowly stiffened itself. He had no thought of escaping; he was paralysed with dread. He took up his gun. A deadly coldness crept from his feet to his head. He had worked a Maxim gun in a fight when some hundred natives fell, and only one white man had been wounded, and he had never known fear; but to-night his fingers were stiff on the lock of his gun. He knelt low, tending a little to one side of the fire, with his gun ready."

He is relieved, however, by the sight of a man with bare feet, wearing a linen tunic, and without arms, who answers the trooper's challenge in English. And then there ensues a long conversation, held over the fire. The story of Peter has taken up forty pages (very small ones); the talk over the fire occupies a hundred and fortysix. It goes over a great many subjects the question between the Armenians and the Turks; the question What is a Christian? to which naturally the trooper is unprepared with an answer; the question of Cecil Rhodes, and the right of England to give or take in Africa. Then the stranger gives Peter a very long report of the sermon of a little (his size is very specially noted) clergyman which offended his churchwardens, of the remonstrances of his wife afterwards, of a second sermon, and of how he walked up the street in a drizzling rain and all his people crossed to the other side. After this the stranger claims to be one of a large company known by a sign, which is the New Testament precept to love one another; and he tells how this great company began, apparently in these

same savage wilds, "when these hills were young, and these lichens had hardly shown their stains upon the rocks," &c., by the action of a woman who suddenly bethought herself, "as she picked the flesh from a human skull," that she did not like the taste of

in

man-flesh: "Men are too like me; I cannot eat them," she cried and she immediately let loose a captive who was intended for the next meal, and got killed herself consequence. This was the origin, the traveller tells Peter, of the great company to which he belongs. He has old wounds in his hands and feet. He is indeed no less a personage than-Jesus Christ.

It is wonderful to imagine how it is that so many writers in the present day have taken upon them to introduce into their not very sublime histories this extraordinary Interlocutor. To put their own diffuse and wandering words into such a mouth is bad enough; to express their own hot and hasty opinions through the supposed interposition of Him, whom this very introduction of Him proves some dim apprehension of, as at least the first and greatest of men if no more, is little less than blasphemy. Rash would be the man who would introduce Shakespeare into his scene, and make the great poet talk like any common man. How much greater is the offence not only to every feeling of reverence, but, from the merest human point of view, to every rule of art, and every sentiment of nature. Curiously enough it has been done chiefly by women, and it is one of the greatest evidences we know of that almost criminal recklessness, and disregard of consequences, of which women generally are accused. Great authority would we all get, no doubt, for our own

sentiments, could we convince even all the noble army of fools that we had the sanction of the Saviour of mankind. Therefore, quick! let us put His figure on our canvas, let us put our babble in His lips, and the thing is done! Mrs Lynn Linton gave us His fictitious human story. Miss Phelps (who ought to have known better) introduced Him as an actor in a novel. Miss Corelli (oh, bathos!) gave Him the honours of her facile pen. Are these ladies God that they can divine and express what would be the words of our Lord on any subject, or His opinion? The daring, the presumption, the folly, are too obvious for words. It is not given to mortals to express thoughts and feelings which are above the level of their own intellect and power of grasping. A poet may create a being purer and more noble than himself, but cannot go further in wisdom, in insight, or in love than is within his own possibilities at least; and what man can venture to think that he is himself on the mental or the moral level of Him who spoke upon the mount, who considered the lilies as they grew, and of whom even His enemies reported that never man spake like this

man.

Alas! many men of indifferent authority enough, preachers, platform orators, and others, have spoken quite as well as the stranger who talked with Peter Halket over the fire-who, indeed, speaks very much as Miss Schreiner speaks, only not half so well and forcibly as she does when she is on her own ground and knows what she is about.

This terrible mistake comes to a climax at the end of the address, when the stranger wishes to intrust Peter Halket-whose capacities in every way that honest trooper has very naïvely exhibited, so that even

without special insight no man in his senses could have thought him a suitable messenger-with a message to England, in which Government, Queen, women, working men, &c., are all specially addressed; then with a message to the Dutch in Africa; and then, which is the point of the whole, to Mr Rhodes. Peter has a great deal more sense than his mysterious visitor. He declines all these high missions, and is finally left with a commission to "Love his enemies," which precept he is made to carry out tragically shortly after, in a manner which, if supported by evidence, would do more to enlighten the reader on South African methods than any amount of impassioned sermonising; for the second part of the story introduces us to a camp in the wilderness, where a number of troopers are assembled, Peter Halket in the background marching up and down as sentinel, for punishment, in the heat of the day. The other men are grumbling over their cooking. "Here are we," they say, "with our halfteaspoonful of Dop [bad brandy] given us at night, while he [the captain] has ten empty champagne bottles lying behind his tent. We have to live on the mealies we're convoying for the horses, while he has pati and beef, and lives like a lord!" It appears from their talk that this captain is one of those "who are sent out from England to boss it over us," yet not a real English officer," though likely to "be a colonel or general before we're done with him."

Now we should like explanations about this-still more about the incident which brings the story to a close. A poor negro has been found in a hole in the bank of the river, wounded, with two bullet wounds in the thigh,

"It's

who evidently had lain in his cave painfully mending of his wounds till he could walk a little. evident he was just waiting till we are gone to clear off after his people," says one of the troopers; "he'd got that beastly scurvy look a nigger gets when he hasn't had anything to eat for a long time." This poor wretch is fastened up to a tree with leather thongs, by the legs, waist, and neck, waiting the possibility of a superior officer and party joining the camp to decide what is to be done with him. If this does not happen, the man is to be shot next morning. Needless to say Peter Halket cuts his bonds during the night: he is thereafter shot dead by the captain under the tree.

Now, of course, any horrible single accident may happen in war -but this is not given as an isolated instance. The writer of a book like this, who has already a large audience secured and may do infinite mischief, ought not to be let off with the remarks of a critic. Is this the kind of thing which the troopers in South Africa do? Do they torture wounded and helpless prisoners? Do they consider every wandering negro trying "to clear off to his own people" as an active belligerent? Is their whole aim and object nothing but murder and robbery? Are our young men who go there, in troops, from English houses full of the love of God and pity for suffering men, so callous to such proceedings as to look on, thinking it fun? Every family Every family which has a son in South Africa has an interest in knowing whether this is a horrible truth, or a still more horrible and vicious invention. The captain, with his ten bottles of champagne and his handy revolver, is like an apparition out of the fifteenth century—

though neither his wine nor his weapon existed then. Is all this true? We decline to believe it, except on evidence. Stray utterances, even isolated facts worked up in the white-heat of a woman's passion, we might painfully understand; but this, as the rule of the campaign, quite an ordinary and everyday matter, we refuse to give credit to, unless supported by undeniable proof, which the author should be compelled to produce. We have already seen what vague pretence at evidence sometimes satisfies а literary operator. What has Mrs Schreiner to produce in support of her horrible assertion? Without evidence we refuse to believe.

He

Mr Rhodes, however, is the chief subject of the attack. He no doubt might bring half-a-dozen actions if he chose against his daring assailant- who probably, however, is very well aware that he is not at all likely to do so. Mr Rhodes is not our affair. is abundantly well able to take care of himself. But if our sons are trained in South Africa to be like that, we are bound to know it-and by proof that cannot be disputed. A writer of fiction has great licence-but not such licence as this. The ravings against an individual, which she has the extraordinary rashness and folly to put into the lips of Christ, are bad enough. They are, besides, so violent and unmeasured as to defeat any possible object she could have had in uttering them, and give us good hope that the rest, too, is but venomous spume and foam. But it ought not to stop here.

We feel as Coleridge must have done, when out of his ghastly ship and all its weird crew he passed

of poetry

"A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune ".

when we suddenly pass out of all
the horrors of Mrs Schreiner's
political pamphlet into the lovely
poetic region of the book now be-
fore us.
It seems indeed almost
profane to discuss among other
books, unless without drawing a
ring round it to keep off their
common touch, the wonderful and
unique little volume which Mr
Barrie has consecrated to his
mother.1 Some captious critics
have caught at the only thing
that could possibly be said in
its disfavour, that the subject
was too sacred and the details
too intimate to be given to the
public; but we should have been
sorry indeed if any such scruple
had withheld Mr Barrie from set-
ting before us the most beauti-
ful description of a little Scots
village household ever drawn, a
picture in which every line is ideal
yet every touch absolutely true,
such a description as is, according
to Professor Wilson's criticism of
Galt, a Fact; but full of many
tender refinements which Galt
knew not, and which were beyond
his sphere. The homely woman
in no way above her sphere, yet
above all spheres, who is the ideal
of her children, their most favour-
ite and admired companion, whose
little foibles they adore almost
more than the generous perfection
of all her gifts and graces, the
fountain of thought, the source of
mirth, the Rosalind and the Nao-
mi of her family, is not a common
figure nowadays in literature. Our

who is jealous of her daughters, and continually struggling to keep the rights which are slipping from her hands; or the Mrs Nickleby, who is perhaps still more typical of the modern methods, though Dickens has gone out of fashion. We are bound to admit that we thought Mr Barrie's wonderful portrait would be caviare to the general-i.e., to most people out of Scotland, to whom the idea of discussing everything in heaven and earth with an old woman in a mutch, and finding inspiration in her talk, and suggestion, and absolute sympathy with the highest dreams and wishes, might appear an absurd one. But I am happy to find that this is not the case, and that the fact of having a man of genius for her son explains to the stranger the possibility of such a mother. There are such mothers, however, who are not so fortunate as Margaret Ogilvy, and whose clear and sparkling stream of imagination and intellectual life seems spilt upon the ground, and leaves no health-giving influence behind. Yet one can never regret, even should this be the case, the existence of these wonderful little unknown celestial lights glimmering in chimney-corners, or looking out upon the whole breathing world of poetry and meaning from the narrow panes of a window in Thrums.

It is almost impossible to quote from such a book, which imperiously demands to be quoted entire, that the proportions of it may not be broken, and which no worthy reader will do less than read again and again and get by heart, especially if he himself has had such a mother. It is at length the full

answer to one of the fantastic questions that used to be current some years ago, why the mother in fiction was generally so unsatisfactory an image? which we opine was, because the man had not yet arisen who could do her full justice. This is not fiction, but it is as good, since it is the introduction of a new and most living human creature of the noblest mould, and as true as the Bible or Shakespeare, to nature and life --and all the better that it is fact as well, and already dwells in many a heart. We must quote one little touch, however, not of motherhood, but of the strange ideal atmosphere which may be breathed in a Scotch village, or at least still could be breathed when Mr Barrie was a boy. He describes an old tailor, homeliest of figures, "one of the fullest men I have known, and quite the best talker"

"This man had heard of my set of photographs of the poets, and asked for a sight of them, which led to our first meeting. I remember how he spread them out on his board, and after looking long at them, turned his gaze on me and said solemnly-

'What can I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own?' "These lines of Cowley's were new to me, but the sentiment was not new, and I marvelled how the old tailor could see me so well. So it was strange to me to discover presently that he had not been thinking of me at all, but of his own young days, when that couplet rang in his head,

and he too had thirsted to set out for Grub Street, but was afraid, and while he hesitated old age came, and then Death, and found him grasping a box-iron.

"I hurried home with the mouthful, but neighbours had dropped in, and this was for her ears only, so I drew her to the stair and said imperiously

'What can I do to be for ever known,
And make the age to come my own?'

It was an odd request for which to draw her from a tea-table, and she must have been surprised, but I think she did not laugh, and in after years she would repeat the lines fondly, with a flush on her soft face. That is the kind you would like to be yourself,' we would say in jest to her, and she would reply almost passionately, 'No; but I would be windy of being his mother.""

That was in Thrums, and not imaginary but Fact as well as true. We well remember another youngster further back than Mr Barrie, and in circumstances much less poetical, who was wont to walk about, between the ages of eight and ten, saying over with glowing eyes a scrap which never has been found in any poem, but which we should much like to discover the source of. It began abruptly

"From which the child of fancy oft resolves

To frame he knows not what excelling thing,

And wins he knows not what sublime reward

Of praise and honour."

Well! the child of fancy does not win any sublime reward, not even Mr Barrie, who is at present on the top of his wave, but "has long given up" (he says) "the dream of being for ever known"; but he would have been none the worse for having dreamed it, even if he had died a tailor, and Margaret Ogilvy, no doubt, in heavenly triumph of being "his mother," never doubted of the end obtained.

The one thing in which we disagree with Mr Barrie is in his optimistic thought that Thrums will remain as original as ever under the influence of "the roar of 'power'" which has replaced the "click of the shuttle," and though "the nest of weavers" has become to-day "a town of girls." The old