these shop-keepers succeeded in conveying to me was that articles which Saigon did not sell were things which common sanity would refrain from demanding. It was I, not they, who was rightfully garbed in shame. From curiosity I asked to be furnished with other articles at other shops.-a rough waterproof overcoat, a decently strong umbrella, boots that would fit one, and the like. But none of these things, it appeared, sold themselves in Saigon. Instead, the shops seemed to be littered with all sorts of extraordinary trash which no hypothetical eccentric could be supposed to require. If this rubbish sold itself in Saigon, Saigon, I reflected, must be a mighty queer place. So it is. It is (among other things) the dumping-ground for the unsaleable surplus stocks of France.

And, lo! ere I knew it, there were the Discontented Englishman and I about to be close locked in a grapple over the eternal Fiscal Question. One does not go all the way to Indo-China to renew a discussion in which no man of "settled opinions" ever convinces his neighbor, or by his neighbor is convinced. I fled for my life.

LES FONCTIONNAIRES. "Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?"-The Lotos-Eat

ers.

There were roads, beautiful French roads, as good as any in the world, in and about Saigon. If their length equalled their quality they would form at any rate the beginning of a magnificent road system. As it is, most of them fade away into nothing at a discreet distance from the town. They enable one to take the air; they do not materially assist one to take a journey. They are quite pretty to look at.

There is, at any rate, the beginning of a railway system, but in a country which has been occupied for sixty years by a European nation, and where

the engineering difficulties are reduced to a minimum by the flatness of the wide areas to be traversed, the progress made is not impressive. L'Administration, it would appear, blossoms out chiefly in the direction of its personnel. In Kambodia, for instance, where there is a scattered population of one and a half million souls, no less than two hundred European fonctionnaires are considered necessary for its government. British India, with its three hundred millions, claims the services of less than five hundred officials of similar position.

But the Indian Civil Service, like all our services, is notoriously shorthanded. Our cadets nowadays are set to work upon active administrative duties long before their official education has been satisfactorily completed. This at any rate, it would seem, need not be the case in French Indo-China, where there can hardly be enough work to go round. The French Civil Servant should surely have that which our people to-day most notoriously lack-time, time to learn. Unfortunately, however, unless my informants -all themselves Frenchmen of experience-are at fault, the notion that there is aught to learn is one which does not readily present itself to the young official newly imported from France. Being posted to an appointment in the Colonial Civil Service of his country appears to be regarded by him as the end, rather than as the beginning, of his life's work. To secure employment as a Civil Servant in Indo-China no examination, competitive or otherwise, beyond the taking of an ordinary degree, is demanded of him. The rest is a question of influence-the winning of a nomination from the Minister of the day. Appointments in the Colonies are not things for which Frenchmen scramble with any eagerness: the family "waster" is the person on whose account, for the most

part, the necessary influence is exerted. He will be returned to France and mercifully retransported once every three years at the expense of Government. For the rest, he is provided for for life. His own immediate preoccupation is to create in the land of his exile as close an approximation as adverse circumstance will admit to the France from which he has been banished. The country in which he finds himself is hopelessly, incurably Oriental. To work in it any notable transformation would be a herculean task. He has no liking for tasks, even when their proportions are not magnificent. He contents himself with the creation of a Rue Catinat. It is not over difficult, it adds to his material comfort, the which is his chief care, and it helps ever so little to disguise the banishment to which he is condemned.

For, be it remembered, he is always in banishment, always a kind of official remittance-man, your French fonctionnaire in Indo-China,-always there because he cannot help it. never because he likes it.. The East sounds no call for him, but the alluring voice of France is for ever making mocking music in his ears. He is "putting in time," like any other deported criminal, and only in very rare instances does he learn to love his chains.

These are facts which seem to be recognized by the Administration. The attitude of Government toward its Civil Servants is largely one of compassion, of pity. It is hard enough for these poor devils to be here at all, it seems to say. It would be wicked to make things harder for them by expecting them to be useful. Accordingly, though the inability of the French Civil Servant to speak the vernaculars is universally admitted and almost as universally deplored, successive Governors-General have drawn back dismayed from the proposal to

make such studies compulsory and promotion dependent on proficiency. Such action, it is thought, would be a cruelty, a brutality, the adoption of methods of barbarism. One does not wantonly strike the man who is down; and if a man were not "down," how, in the name of common sense, would he ever be a Civil Servant of France in Indo-China?

We English, we too to-day, are suffering in Asia from the fact that less and less do our people who work for 'England in the East regard the scene of their labors as the one place that matters, as "Home" in all save the name alone. Aforetime this was the rule: now it is the exception. Facility of communication with Europe has loosened many a foundation-stone of our Oriental Empire. But that Empire had been upreared, vast, solid. and four-square, ere ever Progress, with its offspring Mechanical Contrivance, had begun to work the ruin which so many of us now watch with such despairing eyes. To Henry Lawrence, who "tried to do his duty"; to grim John, who wrought through sheer strength mightily, as his brother wrought with tenderness, sympathy, and love; to Nicholson, the Quixote of our race, who fought with no imaginary foe,-India, their India, was to them the whole world. What to them did Europe matter, or the criticisms or the plaudits of the folk who did not know? India claimed from them their sole allegiance. At her feet they laid their love, their labor, and their lives. We, who to-day maintain with little ease that which they wrested from ruin, know in our hearts that we are daily becoming more and more depolarized. Our lodestar now is Europe, not the East.

But our race produced that breed of giants whose work we have inherited, -produced the men whose names will live in story long after the Raj for

which they toiled has tottered to its fall. France has been less fortunate. Our foundation-stones, may be working loose: those of her Empire in Indo-China seem never to have been laid.

LES CIVILISES.

"Give a dog a bad name and-hang him!"-Ancient Proverb.

The Discontented Englishman had served in many of our Eastern stations. He had always found the road, and had followed it satisfactorily, to the cricket-field. In Saigon he had diligently sought a similar track, and it led him at the long last to le Cercle Sportif. Here it was that his indignation culminated.

Healthy Exercise-it is the fetich of the Englishman in Asia, for with him, too, the instinct to reproduce home surroundings makes itself felt; nor is it a bad idol before which to bow down and worship. If you cannot, owing to your limitations, be of the East when in it, I prefer the Englishman's totem to the nocturnal cafés of the Rue Catinat.

"Rummy beggars," grunted the Discontented Englishman. "Stop a game of tennis to shake hands with every new arrival at the Club-not strangers, mind you, but ordinary playing members! Dripping wet their hands are too. Ugh! I offered a prize for a lawn tennis tournament,-thought it would buck 'em up a bit. Devil a bit! No entries. Afraid of being beaten. What can you do with men like that?"

His indignation found expression in abrupt, grunting outbursts of very colloquial English.

"Football, too. Soccer. Thirty men who play out of a population of Heaven knows how many, and every Jack one of them plays for his own d-d hand. No notion of playing for the side-not a notion of it. And the morals of the place!"

Words failed him.

It is an axiom among Englishmen that those who have no love for healthy and regular exercise have no use for the Decalogue, except to use it as pie-crust.

"Read Les Civilisés'!"

I followed his advice. I cannot recommend any reader of 'Maga' to make a like experiment. I believe the picture there drawn of life in and about Saigon to be vilely and maliciously exaggerated; yet at the back of it, as men on the spot reluctantly admit, there lurks some modicum of odious truth. The book could never have been written of Englishmen in any colony or dominion. So much at least is certain. There is a proverb about smoke and fire; but here, I am convinced, the wreaths of stifling, filthy vapor that smudge all the sky rise from far worse bonfires than have ever been lighted, even in Saigon.

"If Paris had contracted a mésalliance with Port Said, and the devil had played the part of sage-femme for them, the result might have been Saigon,” said a Discontented Frenchman.

BOOKING.

"He is insensibly subdued

To settled quiet: he is one by whom All effort seems forgotten; one to whom Long patience hath such mild composure given,

That patience now doth seem a thing of which He hath no need."

-Wordsworth.

The imperative instinct which earliest awakes in one on arrival at Saigon is a desire to quit it as soon as may be. I experienced some difficulty before I was able to act upon this impulse.

To begin with, one had to hit upon a propitious moment when the office of the shipping company chanced to be open, and thereafter to contend with the nebulous conversational discursiveness of the functionary who was by way

of furnishing the inquirer with information. The next step was to take a ticket for Phnom Penh, but this was by no means to be accomplished at the office of the company. I was shown a small wooden booth on the quay-an erection like an antiquated bathingmachine from which the wheels had been removed. It was there that one took tickets, I was informed. When? Whenever one chose, was the cheerful reply. I remarked that the bathingmachine appeared to be hermetically closed. The fact was at once admitted without comment or emotion. Perhaps these were not his office hours, I suggested. "Ma si! Only— well-he was not there, ce Monsieur. Perhaps he would come back presently. Would I wait? No? Well, some other time!"

ascertained it. He named twice the proper sum. I expostulated. He fell to making calculations with the scratchiest of pens upon the thinnest and dingiest paper. Watching him, I observed that he multiplied by the simple process of putting the sum down over and over again and then adding it up. His addition was imperfect. I ventured to draw his fatigued attention to the fact. Once more he smiled at me, sweetly out of those tired eyes of his.

"It is always sufficiently difficult, le calcul," he remarked blandly, as though stating an axiom.

Finally, with a sort of inert despair, though the emotion working in him appeared to be too feeble to deserve that name, he accepted my figures, and opening a book of forms in counterfoil

I stalked "ce Monsieur" as one stalks shy game, and I ran him to earth in his bathing-machine at last. 'At the moment it seemed to me to be a somewhat notable achievement.

He proved to be a cadaverous-looking individual in the last stages of consumption or ataxia, feebly courteous, humbly yet cynically inefficient, incredibly exhausted of mind and body.

I told him what I wanted in as few words as might be. The shipping clerks of my acquaintance are hardworked folk, with little time to waste and short tempers for muddled customers. He smiled at me with faraway eyes, and asked me if I did not want everything except that for which I had asked. I seemed in some miraculous fashion to have changed places with the shipping clerk. He was wasting my time, not I his. At length he consented with dreary reluctance to recognize that I required the ticket for which I had applied-a return to Phnom Penh. I asked the price-a mere matter of form, for I had already

to fill in my name, the name of the ship, my destination, the number of the voyage, the amount paid, and one or two similar details. His method of writing reminded me of his arithmetic. He did not write so much as draw-draw each letter with extraor dinary painstaking slowness, and by their aid build up very gradually each individual word. I watched my name creep into being in this strange fashion; then he looked up at me once more with that tired plaintive smile.

"This will take time," he said. "It is not an affair of a moment. On this side," indicating the direction in which the shadow of the bathing-machine was casting a dwarfed patch of blackness upon the white-hot stones of the quay, "On this side you will find a chair. Seat yourself, I pray you. To hold oneself on end is so fatiguing." I sat on that chair for a good ten minutes, and at the end found him regarding his still unfinished masterpiece with his eternal weary smile. The ink in his pen was dry.

I got my ticket in the end, but. like

Thomas à Kempis of old, I began to perceive that "patience is highly necessary to me."

I do not for one moment suppose that my friend in the bathing-machine was in any sort typical of the French clerk of Saigon, but I know of no other country in Asia where a white man would be entrusted with such purely mechanical duties, nor have I met in all the East any white man so feebly and amiably inefficient. What Blackwood's Magazine.

I have written reads, I am aware, like gross exaggeration, yet I am relating only facts. How this man ever obtained employment, and how, having been employed, he escaped immediate dismissal, are problems which baffle solution, unless, indeed, men speak truly when they declare that the French colonies are the last resort of the proved inefficient, the incompetent, the wastrel, and the "dead-head."

Of all the pleasanter vices, the idealistic interpretation of the Middle Ages is perhaps the least noxious and the most alluring. One turns but too gladly from the controversies that rage around our own dehumanized Poor Law to the graces and humanities of medieval charity. Here are no economics, here is no organization. Manchester was still a sleepy village which boasted no School. Men gave from impulse, and liked to think of those who received only as the blessed occasions of good-will. The sick poor were "the sore members of Christ." Ever the leper begged with the halo of the Gospel around him, and the Dukes of those days took warning from the Dives of the Miracle Play. We are all familiar with the rôle of the monasteries in medieval charity, but the immense development of the hospitals has only now been investigated by a competent student. Miss Clay has succeeded in compiling a list of no less than 750 of these 'spitals.' The total impression one derives from her analysis is of an active and very genial benevolence. The mere number of these houses in a population much less

1 "The Medieval Hospitals of England." By Rotha Mary Clay. The Antiquary's Books. Methuen.

than that of modern London is enormous. They cared for the leper and the sick poor, for the aged and the orphan, for the broken soldier and the shipwrecked or homeless sailor. Some specialized in attending to wayfarers and pilgrims, and planted themselves by the gates of the town. Others, until leprosy died out, were lazar-houses; some were primarily for the poor clergy. A few specialized quaintly, as a supplement to direct persecution, in caring for the converted Jews. Others were primarily alms-houses set apart for the permanent residence of the aged and destitute. Most of them, however, were promiscuous to a degree which would fill Mrs. Webb with horror. Tramps and pilgrims, the aged and the sick, soldiers, sailors, and idiots, poor married mothers and "yong wymmen that have mysse done" dwelt somehow together under the same roof, and the large tolerance that spoke so few moral judgments made their association endurable.

One might go on from this broad survey to a closer investigation in the same mood of envious wonder. A pity which did not seek to degrade its victim was everywhere the presiding spirit. One foundation specifies mi