as Saigon, though the distance as the crow flies cannot be as much as a dozen miles. No attempt has been made to abridge the journey by means of canals from point to point in places where the stream forms one of its innumerable figures of eight; hardly any attempt even has been made to mark the fairway, and we got well aground once, and touched bottom time and again. The country on every side and as far as the eye could carry, was flat as the palm of one's hand, and covered with mean scrub. It all had the air of the amphibian, and the squalid native villages which here and there rose inglorious from the mud looked though they were in the habit of spending as much of their time under as above water-level. Yet this failed to impart to them any semblance of cleanliness. Instead, they seemed to be coated dreadfully with the foul slime and ooze into which they had been dipped. The depressed, flat-feat, ured natives who squatted about them nicely matched their surroundings. The whole was strangely suggestive of some mean parasite life which had spawned uncleanly in uncleanly places. I was glad when the sun sank behind heavy black clouds and shut out from sight the melancholy scene. I Saigon greeted us with a thunderous downpour of rain,-rain such as falls only in these latitudes,-and with difficulty I stowed myself and my shirt case into a ricskhaw, and was dragged off to a hotel in the Rue Catinat. sat under the low hood with the apron drawn high to keep as much of the wet out as would consent to be excluded, and I could see nothing until, with blinded eyes, I staggered out into the glare of innumerable electric arclights. A big place lay before me. flanked on one side by the opera-house and on three by hotels and cafés. The blazing arc-lights fell fully upon the shining wet asphalt, upon the trees ranged in orderly rows along the sides of the streets, upon the verandas of the hotels and cafés, which were brilliantly illuminated, and which were crowded by men and women seated at small tables, talking, drinking, and listening to music. Bands, hidden somewhere at opposite sides of the place, in turn burst out into some light and tripping air, and once in a while when these were silent the voice of a singer-the voice of a man, florid and luscious and evil, you could hear the heavy, sensuous jowl above the vast and flowing necktie-defiled the purity of the night with words which were received with rounds of delighted laughter and approbation. I leaned out of the window of my hotel and watched this scene for near an hour, and again and again I had to rub my eyes and to force myself to remember that this in truth was Asia. The sallow rickshaw coolies and the drivers perched on the boxes of the little victorias drawn by two small rats of ponies,-these and the soft-footed Chinese servants who served the inmates of the cafés were the only Orien tals within sight: the rest were white men and white women of sorts, and the Rue Catinat was a little tawdry pandemonium of their creation. Le Français ne s'éschappe jamais de la France: so much is known to all of But somehow this artificially engineered imitation seemed to have strayed woefully far from its original, and in the process to have acquired an added garishness, a new squalor, a peculiar ugliness and degradation. Perhaps this notion was purely fanciful. Maybe it was derived wholly from the knowledge that this incongruous place was actually a part of this great Asia of ours.-that around it, ignoring it, throwing scorn upon it by the sheer force of a solemn, unmoved indifference and contempt, us. spread away and away the grave, immemorial East, Which of our Coming and Departure heeds As the Sea's self might heed a pebble cast! FRANCIS GARNIER "Yes, your 'Never-never country,'-and In the centre of that meretricious place there stands a statue of bronzea long, lean figure, dressed in the ample frock-coat of the French naval officer of the middle of last century, the face heavy-browed, whiskered after the fashion set by Crimean veterans, with deep-set eyes serene and thoughtful, firm mouth, resolute chin, and an abiding expresion of melancholy. He was a man, this one, and a man in whom were combined many unusual qualities,-man of action, man of letters, above all, man of dreams-for this is the effigy of Francis Garnier, the biggest Frenchman who ever dreamed and dared and wrought for France in Asia since Dupleix's visions were shattered by Clive's hard-won Garnier onto his personal staff. In this capacity he served during the short campaign in China; and when the Treaty of Peking was concluded, in October 1860, accompanied his chief to the relief of Saigon. There were no cafés or arc-lights, no braying bands or florid songsters, in those days; but instead a tiny band of Frenchmen, cut off hopelessly from their base, clung with stern and persistent courage to their poor defences, repelling two dangerous night attacks, eking out their rations, and hoping against hope for the relief that was so long a-coming, what time the Emperor of Cochin-China encircled them with his armed hosts, and yet failed to reduce the stubborn strangers to submission. "Behold they have departed," his Majesty had written in an imperial edict, published when the news of the evacuation of Turon by the French was brought to him-"Behold they have departed, these noxious and greedy beings who have no inspiration save evil, no aim save sordid gain! They have departed, these pirates who devour human flesh, and who fashion garments from the skins of those whom they have eaten! Put to flight by our valiant soldiers, they have shamefully taken to flight!" All of which sounded very satisfactory and confident; yet the valiant soldiers aforesaid, though they outnumbered the Frenchmen by fifty to one, had scant stomach for more fighting after they had twice tasted of their enemy's quality, and when Charnier arrived in February 1861, the siege of Saigon was raised in triumphant fashion. The capture of Mytho, on the shores of the Mekong, which now is joined by a little railway to Saigon, was the next move, and at this also Garnier was present; but the main work of conquest effected, Charnier returned to France dragging a very reluctant and disgusted aide-de-camp at his heels. He Poor lad! It seemed to him, as it has seemed to so many energetic and ambitious youngsters when a halt is momentarily called in the active march of life, that life itself was ended. spoke in characteristic, youthful fashion of the "setting of his star,"-a luminary which had hardly so much as emerged yet awhile,-and wrote of the dulness of his routine duties that they were tasks which "developed the intelligence very little and satisfied the heart even less!" A notable discovery, forsooth! But does not half the charm of youth abide for us who are no longer young in the naïve fashion in which it discovers ragged, thumbmarked old truths, and invests even them with a sort of pathetic novelty? He had not much of which to complain after all,-youth seldom has, for by 1863 he was back in Indo-China filling the post of Collector and Magistrate at Cho-lon the Chinese town which lies a few miles to the southwest of Saigon. This is one of the stock "show places" of Cochin-China. to which visitors are driven by the force of public opinion (if they are weak enough to submit to it), or by the dread of missing some specially interesting sight. For a matter of fact, it is an ordinary Chinese trading town of south-eastern Asia, neither so extensive nor so picturesque and original as the Chinese quarter of Singapore, and differing only in size from similar trading centres which have come into being in the Malay States during the past quarter of a century. A trifle more squalid, perhaps, a little less prosperous, showing less evidences of individual wealth, but that is all. Cho-lon is a poor place to-day, view it how you will: five-and-thirty years ago, when young Garnier ruled over it, it must have been a more wretched spot still. No wonder if he presently fell to dreaming of an escape from it into a wider, cleaner world. For he was always a man of dreams, this young Frenchman, from his school days, when the vision of an organized resistance to the power of Great Britain filled his mind and kindled his enthusiasm, to early manhood, when his dreams assumed a more practical and useful form, and so on and on, till he lay dead in Tongking with a bullet through his heart. "England, you will say, is a Colossus," he had written in a fine fit of youthful fury. "Granted, but her feet are rotten. Shake her and she will fall. England is universally execrated, and in our day public opinion makes and unmakes empires. When Tell and his two comrades swore in the darkness to give back her liberty to their country, was not the enterprise a folly? We, we desire to restore liberty to the world, and the world will be on our side, for it groans and laments under the painful restraint, the constant encroachments, which this nest of pirates and robbers, having become powerful, imposes upon it and makes on every occasion." Yet England was not so much as shaken, the poor Colossus of whose feet of clay those who love her best are nowadays, it is to be feared, only too sadly conscious; and this was the man who later was to write of the work done by the British in India with a fine and generous enthusiasm, and who exclaimed during his saddened middle age, "What a misfortune it is that I was not born an Englishman! With them I should have been a man at once powerful and honored! As bad luck will have it, however. I cannot make up my mind to be no longer a Frenchman!" But at Cho-lon Garnier dreamed to more practical effect, and succeeded by sheer persistence in gradually infecting his superiors with his own enthusiasms. Cochin-China had been annexed; Kambodia had been declared a Protectorate; similar work was going forward in Annam and Tongking. Garnier, almost alone among his fellows, grasped the fact that France stood here upon the threshold of what might be an immense Asiatic empire. Let no time be lost, he insisted, in ascertaining what possibilities lay at the back of this narrow fringe of coastcountry, in penetrating into the unknown wilderness whence ran in mysterious splendor the mighty waters of the Me-kong,-the river which Linschoten of old declared to be "The Captain of all the Rivers," and in surprising for France secrets hidden from the West since the beginning of things. The inspiration belonged to this lad of four-and-twenty, with whom the project speedily became an idée fixe; but three long years came and went before the authorities in Paris and on the spot could be brought to the point of giving practical effect to his designs. Then came the great journey-the first organized exploration of the Hinterland of Indo-China from the shores of the China Sea ever undertaken by white men. Doudart de Lagarée, a post-captain in the French navy, who then was holding the post of Political Agent at the Court of Kambodia at Phnom Penh, was given the supreme command, but Garnier was his chief lieutenant, his right-hand man, and throughout the inspiring genius of the expedition. The valley of the Mekong was explored from the delta to Chieng Hong, the point at which the river had been struck from the Burmese side by M'Leod, the Scotsman, in 1837; the Chinese province of Yun-nan, then rent by the great upheaval of the Muhammadan Rebellion, was traversed; Ta-li-fu, the capital of the rebels, was visited by Garnier in circumstances of the greatest difficulty; and the valley of the Yang-tse was descended till at last the French flag was sighted floating over the Consulate at Han-kau. The explorers returned to Saigon after an absence in the wilderness of over two years; but, alas! they bore with them only the bones of Doudart de Lagarée, the wise, tactful, kindly chief, whose prudence had often curbed the fiery impulsiveness of his lieutenant, and whose lovable character had won the enthusiastic affection of every one of his comrades. "It seemed to us," said Garnier. on his return, to the Empress Eugénie, who throughout had taken an intense interest in this journey of exploration -"It seemed to us, while we were toiling and travailing in the wilderness, that the eyes of all France were fixed upon us. I find now that the eyes of your Majesty alone marked our progThat for us is a more than sufficient recompense for hardships endured." ress. Which was well and prettily said, for what fairer, kinder eyes would any man desire to watch his struggles and his victories? But there abode in the words, I suspect, more than a trace of bitterness. The great achievement left Paris and France cold. Far greater interest was excited by it in England, for instance, and Garnier himself was made the victim of the most heartless calumnies and misrepresentations. Nobody cared for the fame of Doudart de Lagarée for its own sake; but it was gall and wormwood to the mean and the envious that a living man should earn fame or credit. Garnier was represented as a ghoul who had waxed rich by the plundering of the honored dead, and though he never stooped to defend himself, though he insisted upon sharing every honor showered upon him by the learned societies of other lands with the widow of his dead chief, he presently turned his back upon મી France which had for him neither gratitude nor honor, and passed back to the Indo-China which was still for him the land of dreams. He was killed a few years later in an ill-managed little business in Tongking, and to-day his statue stands in the most incongruous spot in all Asia, looking down upon the meretricious frivolity of les civilisés of Saigon! Was it my fancy only that seemed to mark an expression of awful melancholy in that still face of bronze? THE DISCONTENTED ENGLISHMAN. "How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to seem Falling asleep in a half-dream." -The Lotos-Eaters. There is a saying on the Outskirts anent the first public works which are wont to engage the attention of the various European nations when, in the struggle for empire, they start, each after its own characteristic fashion, the task of administration in a newly acquired country. The English, it is said, build first a road, which leadsto a cricket-field. The earliest care of the Belgian is to construct a guillotine, and to put it into first-rate working order. The Dutchman erects a custo:n-house; the German, a block of barracks, or failing that, a sentry-box; the Italian makes nothing; while the Frenchman builds a café chantant and flanks it by a Roman Catholic church. I had seen the cafés chantants overnight: the church in close proximity it filled the whole of the upper end of the Rue Catinat-was not to be overlooked when next day I stepped out of the still slumbering hotel into the cool, fresh fragrance of the early morning. I had found it impossible to get my café au lait before a liberal six heures et demi. An outraged Chinese servant, blear-eyed from the night before, had exclaimed with horror at my desire to have it even at that late hour-for in the Tropics half-past six is late; but at seven o'clock the European part of the town seemed still to be lapped in slumber. This struck me as curious at the time, in view of the fact that in the East the cool hours of the early morning are the most precious in the twenty-four-precious alike for work and exercise. pealed to me as something still more remarkable later, when I learned that the business hours of the place are from 7 A.M. to 11 A.M., and from 2 P.M. to 4 P.M. It ap This fact, and some others, were explained to me by the Discontented Englishman. He added that by making seven, seven-thirty, by reckoning ten-thirty as eleven, and by treating the afternoon hours in a like generous spirit, the time devoted to the silly trivialities of toil was by the majority of Frenchmen sensibly and satisfactorily reduced. Later, when I had a little business of my own to transact, I discovered the truth of this assertion. The puzzle is to hit upon the moment which may legitimately be regarded as a real business hour. It can be done, however, with thought, experience, and practice; but even so, the achievement owes not a little, I think, to some occult, natural instinct. I had been that morning into a chemist's shop in search of tabloids of bisulphate of quinine-a drug of some repute in tropical Asia, and had watched the small French chemist shrug contemptuous shoulders at the sheer extravagance of such a demand. I had tried other chemists with a like result, and had been blandly assured that such a thing did not sell itself in Saigon. This information was imparted with an air of the most complete satisfaction with the scheme of appointed things. There was no senseless fiction anent a stock which had unexpectedly run out, about a consignment due by the next mail. On the contrary, the impression which |