about as much resemblance to the tusk-gilded aristocrats of Delhi as a charwoman bears to a duchess.

Her temper was uncertain, her gait was like an earthquake, and her belly and legs were shamelessly caked with oracked mud; caught in the keddah1 at an advanced age, she was only half broken; and finally, it must be alleged against her character that her favourite beverage was planters' gin.

She had been handed over to the two Shikaris-a young police officer and his friend, a cavalry subaltern-free gratis and for nothing for a few days' shooting, and aiready her temporary owners were beginning to realise the truth of the adage which points out that it is often far better to give than to receive. They had been perambulating the jungle since dawn that morning, and the combination of the sun on their spines and Maria's sea-sick heaving shuffle was beginning to tell most unpleasantly upon both of them.

"I say," at length exclaimed the Subaltern, with that dreadful candour which characterises Young Humanity in moments of acute distress, "if this switchback business goes on much longer, I shall cat my soul out."

"I have," came a resigned reply from the other side of the moving mountain. Here Maria surpassing herself with a figure of eight stern waggle -as she slid into a nullah

both voices died away again into ominous silence. The Assistant Superintendent of Police was, at more normal moments, a pleasant-featured, tired-looking youth. His weary smile and eternal assumption of excessive boredom not infrequently proved the undoing of those unwary Orientals who failed to penetrate beneath his fatigued exterior. He formed rather a complete contrast to the soldier who now shared the elephant with him. The latter was a restless enthusiast and an incorrigible optimist of the genus irrepressible among subalterns: a species off whose backs work or worry, success or failure, roll as easily as water off a duck's. This particular specimen of a wholly satisfactory type of modern British youth had but recently left Rugby in order to join the Indian Army, where, in his own regiment-Hastings' Horsehe was popularly known as the Hun - Child. This on account of a certain cultivated martial ferocity of parade manner, which was, however, much to his own annoyance, very heavily discounted by his preposterously juvenile appearance. He was at present on sick leave from Mesopotamia, and had just arrived from Caloutta in order to spend a generous week-end with his friend.

Suddenly the elephant stopped dead, and cocked her by no means coquettish ears.

"What's up now?" inquired the Subaltern, raising his head;

"wonder if she's spotted a tiger. Old Morrison warned us she generally bolted when she did."

"More likely she's spotted pink rats after all that liquor she swallowed last night," grumbled the Policeman, "But, by Jove, no!" he added a second later, pulling himself upon the top of the pad. "Listen to that!"

An angry bubble squelched from the depths of the jungle straight ahead, and Maria waved her trunk thoughtfully. "Rhino," whispered the Policeman; "what pity they're preserved just now."

"But," suggested the Subaltern guilefully, "you're allowed to shoot in self-defence, and we can't risk Maria's beauty bein' spoiled .. a bull rhino can knock an elephant over if he catches her sideways."

The rhinoceros settled this knotty point in morality by suddenly making an entirely unprovoked assault upon the now hysterical Maria, to whom he appeared to have taken an instinctive aversion at first sight. The two Shikaris just had time to fire wildly together, and then their gunshy elephant bolted.

When in a hurry elephants do not gallop, but on occasion they travel rather faster than if they did. When this happens their riders know exactly what a pea feels like when rattled inside an empty drum.

The rhinoceros, having missed his charge, stood staring with his pig-like eyes at

the vanishing party, but made no attempt to follow up his initial success.

Maria having deposited both her English riders-one after the other-in clumps of clinging bamboo, then endeavoured to pluck her native Mahout from her neck with her fumbling trunk. Foiled in this laudable endeavour by repeated blows from the Mahout's ankus, she galumphed into a reach of the river, and squealed wildly for gin, with which to calm her now lacerated nervous system. Her Mahout smote her violently over the skull with the vigour of a navvy picking open a drain.

66 Peace! my heart's treasure," he said suitably. "Fear nothing, little black pearl, for is not old Jamu with thee?" and he smote her again to show that he was. The little black pearl, thus reassured, waddled up out of the bed of the Brahmaputra, and plucked a young toddy-palm by way of light refreshment. Old Jamu inquired if she found it to her liking.

"Y' 'r'rumph!" Maria ourtly.

assented

"And now, little princess, we return to seek the SahibLog."

"N' 'r'rumph!" declined Maria firmly, and thereupon set off for camp at a sort of lollopping gambol, leaving her abandoned riders to find their way home-that is to say, to the police-officer's patrol-boat on the river as best they might.

The source of the Brahmaputra lies somewhere in Central Asia. Certain inquisitive souls have a perfect mania for looking for it. Somebody or other is finally supposed to have found it, and since nine people out of ten are not in a position to argue the point, we may as well accept the supposition as correct. The Brahmaputra is rather unique among rivers, and its perils are not dissimilar to those of the Dogger Bank with an Occasional cyclone thrown in. Its dense fogs, its shifting sandbanks, its iron reefs, its furious currents, its sudden floods, and its frequent storms, all tax the skill of the most experienced of navigators, many of whom have been known to declare openly that they feel far happier in a good honest Chinese typhoon than when on the bosom of India's greatest and most treacherous river.

At places-and this some two hundred miles from its mouth -it is not unfrequently six or seven miles broad during the monsoon, while on the other hand it sometimes squeezes itself through rooky defiles but a thousand yards in width, with all the swift rush of a rapid.

On its way to the sea it is fed by a thousand tributariesthe main stream of the manychannelled Ganges being one not unuseful contribution-and the confluence of such subsidiary streams are known locally as mukhs, or mouths.

Like all great arteries of traffic, whether they be rail

ways, tubes, important thoroughfares, or, in this case, rivers, the lower stretches of the maze-like waterways of Eastern Bengal and Lower Assam are infested by a whole host of more or less professional criminals, whose activities are varied and multitudinous. Owing to the confusing manner in which, amid this perfect network of rivers, the channels shift and alter almost yearly, and also by reason of the recurrent and devastating inundations which preclude the construction of any adequate road, railway, or telegraph system, the process of bringing such elusive criminals to justice is no easy task. In consequence the local police seldom make any important "haul" without an infinity of stratagem that usually oulminates in a battle royal.

In the actual case of the wild swampy belt of big-game haunted country in which the Young Policeman and his friend were shooting, the almost insurmountable difficulties of internal communication amid its trackless depths and tortuous backwaters rendered it a peculiarly favourite locale for the evil-doer in search of a safe refuge or a discreet rendezvous. Such local defiers of the Law are specialised in different forms of villainy, as three unbroken years in their midst had already taught the young Assistant Superintendent.

Firstly, there were the river pirates-frank dacoits-who swam on board anchored native

oraft at night, out the throats of the sleeping orew, and after throwing their bodies overboard proceeded to occupy the ship themselves. Then there were opium and cooaine smugglers, disguised as simple fisher-folk, with illicit cargoes stored between the seams of their boats; Bengali anarchists seeking opportunities of meeting gun-runners from the Philippines; and a whole host of other queer-and desperate-malefactors outside the ken of the Constabulary in England. Indeed, the Young Policeman's lot, if not always an entirely happy one, was never devoid of incident, and prior to obtaining a few days' shooting-leave in his own distriot in the company of his friend, he had not ceased from, or paused in, his teasing labours for nearly eighteen overworked months. Even now-in local parlance he was still at the end of the wire, which, translated into practical language, meant that his services still remained at the immediate disposal of his seniors in case of local emergency.

Dirty monsoon weather was blowing up from the direction of the distant Bay, when the two Shikaris arrived home late that evening after their spill off the elephant.

This launch-called the Vampire-was a crazy old sunblistered stern-wheeler that was presumably propelled through the agency of steam. This presumption may be said to rest firstly on the fact that her decks were always deep in soot, and secondly, because she possessed a vertical projection amidships which bore some remote resemblance to a smoke - stack. In no other

As already explained, their shooting headquarters were established on board a river launch, which was at the disposal of the police officer and his armed constables when their duties took them afloat.

respects, however, did she conform to the popularly conceived idea of a steamboat.

The two boys, tired out after their long, hot, and profitless day on shore, sorambled gratefully on board again, and lowering themselves cautiously into two rickety deck-chairs, called loudly for liquid refreshment.

"Strikes me the snaggy old ditoh is rising pretty fast tonight," remarked the weatherwise minion of the Law, putting down his empty tumbler with a sigh of content, and gazing dubiously across the raging brown flood of waters. shouldn't be at all surprised," he added fatalistically, "if half the countryside isn't under water by the morning."

"Well, then, we can do a Noah's Ark stunt in this bally old flat-iron of yours," replied the Hun-Child resignedly, as he too finished his peg; "only, personally speakin', I bar takin' that god-forsaken hathion board for a oruise. Look at the old bitoh now," and he nodded across the taffrail towards Maria's standings on the bank, -"she's as pleased as Punch

с

at havin' made both of us out voluntaries this mornin'. But what's the odds, so long as you're happy," he concluded philosophically. "Who's for a tub? Bag's I first!" and, darting swiftly into their common bathroom before protest was possible, he coolly annexed the premises, turned on both taps to their fullest extent, and, whistling with offensive triumph, proceeded to unlace le dernier cri in brown cavalry field-boots. A minute later, and a mighty splash testified to his gifts as a quick-change artist, as, lifting his voice in untuneful song, he began to make the evening hideous with sentimental noises.

"And when I tell them
How beautiful you are,
They never ber-lieve me,
They never ber-lieve me,"-

he chanted dolefully. And, picking his perilous way through five different verses in three distinct keys, he continued to lament the incredulity of the world at large in respect to the charms of a lady-identity not disclosedwho, as he stated in agonised falsetto, had one day promised to be his wife,

In the meantime, his less exuberant friend had received a cipher telegram, which he was even now decoding with his usual calm precision. Once decoded, it seemed to give him furiously to think, for he pulled a puzzling-looking survey map from the cabin wall and studied it carefully with wrinkled brow.

Tracing the complex courses of the maze-like waterways before him with his forefinger, he finally pricked two holes on the map with the points of his compasses, and then produced a protractor. Having taken certain measurements along the latter, and having compared them with the scale of the map, he then took out his watch, looked at the telegram again, and made some mental calculations in terms of time. These appeared to be more or less satisfactory, for, yawning to himself, he paused to kill a mosquito before returning on deck. Here he walked for'ard, and gently but firmly kicked the opium - sodden crew into some semblance of life, and further interrupted what appeared to be a game of skill or hazard among his policeconstables.

"Get those two anchors up," he said quietly in the vernacular. "Where's the head serang?1 On shore? Well, let him stop there. Tell the engineer to be ready with all the steam he can muster in less than no time. Yes, we're going up the river to-night on business. No, the current isn't too strong. the same" (he soliloquised to himself, scrutinising the flood), "I wonder if we have got enough steam to go up-stream in this current. Lucky we kept any going at all: we shouldn't have but for wanting some to run the dynamos for our fans and lights."

"What's the joke?" inquired the Hun-Child, who here re