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eaten up with conceit, are shrewd enough to know this; upon all points of self-interest they are preternaturally clever. Lih-Kiu demanded an audience at once, and told what she knew. The name of the White Lily had chilling effect. The officers deputed for this service were men in whose nerve the Kunsi put especial trust, but they had not reckoned upon fighting with unseen powers, the unnameable resources of the Wu-Wei-Keäou. They hesitated, and talked of referring for instructions.

At this moment a stir arose outside so considerable that the chiefs went out. A Tuan Inggris had reached the landing-place, with two footmen and two police. He chanced to be halting at Blidah Fort, which is no longer a military station, when the Kunsi messenger arrived. This gentleman immediately assumed command of the expedition; his name does not signify-we may call him Smith. After learning how matters stood, he ordered an advance. In single file the party threaded the subterranean passage, waded up the stream, and sought traces of the landing-place. So well hidden was it that the Dyak trackers missed it, wandering upwards until they reached a deep black pool between perpendicular rocks, which brought them to a pause. Lih-Kiu, who accompanied them, knew the road but by hearsay. The trackers turned, working their way back, and missed the spot again. At this moment a Dyak showed himself upon the bank. He trembled with excitement; his yellow face had the green undertones of horror. Yan-poa's men recognised him as the guide who had set forth with their missing leader, and questioned him eagerly. He reported that Yan-poa was dead, caught in a trap. This news caused a panic. Had not Smith been there, with his disciplined men, the expedition would have returned. He made a spirited harangue, calling on each nationality to vie with the others, and with a half-heart they all followed him.

The Dyak put them on the trail, and Smith followed, urging the pace as fast as he dared. So rapidly he pushed forward that the heavy Chinamen could not keep up if they would; nearly all of them vanished. After half an hour's march the guide slackened, then stopped, pointing ahead, with terror in his face. A few steps beyond, the batang path was blocked by Yan-poa's body, hanging upon a spear. The instrument of death had been firmly lashed on the crown of a vigorous sapling, bent double by main force, and caught by a rope which the passing foot disengaged. Calling a halt, Smith cut away the lashings, and tossed the corpse, spear and all, into the swampy bush alongside. After this dreadful warning he >roceeded with extremest caution. To go first would have been death

inevitable, but he kept close behind the Dyak leading. That scapegoat was relieved continually, for human nerves would scarcely bear such tension. Several traps were discovered, and after each escape the march grew slower, until, sweat pouring down his face, the poor fellow begged to be let go. When they had passed the swamp Smith quitted the batang to cut a path alongside, through the untrodden jungle. Before they had taken many steps, the Dyak fell backwards with a cry of terror, and Smith caught him by the hair as he slipped into a pit.

sun.

Mutiny was breaking out when they reached the old, clear forest, through which they could proceed with less alarm. But daylight fades rapidly beneath a world of leaves that blocks out the midday Resolute though he was, Smith felt oppressed by the desperate and mysterious perils of this service. His own flesh crept a little as the shadows darkened in that silent wood, haunted by malignant spirits, the more terrible because unseen. "Halt!" was on his very tongue, when a rifle shot broke the murmuring stillness. A bullet sung past his ear and struck one of those behind. It was the signal for a volley, delivered at close quarters. Several men dropped; the others broke into headlong flight. The footmen, however, the police, and half-a-dozen more stood their ground, slipping each behind a tree and opening fire. Smith shouted loudly, and one by one a number of the fugitives paused, looked back, and rejoined the faithful few, dodging amongst the trees. The foe apparently were weak in numbers, and when Smith with a trusty handful assailed their flank, resistance ceased at once; the surprise had failed. Skirmishing from tree to tree, keeping up an uninterrupted fire, the Malays crept quickly in, and carried the position with a rush-a long breastwork it was, needing several hundred men to hold it. Advancing cautiously, they saw their goal ahead.

Superstitious terrors vanished before the familiar peal of musketry. Waiting no order, the Malays ran crouched across the clearing, and took shelter behind the outhouses. All the darkening scene glowed for an instant as a jet of fire and smoke burst from every window of the building. Again the volley was repeated; then silence. Rapidly the assailants stole from point to point, until they found shelter beneath the flooring; for the house was raised on posts, as usual. But the defenders no longer replied. Filled with a sudden dread, Smith called his men back. Some obeyed; a few stood battering and wrenching at a window. Then, with the roar and shock of an earthquake, the house rose solidly upwards, and fell in hurtling atoms. Great branches whirled and dropped, trees were uprooted, VOL. CCLII. NO. 1817.

M M

earth and sky seemed to meet in the clang and din of hell. When that uproar subsided, there was silence for a moment. Men uninjured had been lifted from their feet and tossed headlong to a distance, stunned and bleeding. The first sound was a whimper of half-conscious pain, which rose and swelled on every hand till the very forest seemed to shriek. Smith, badly bruised, exerted himself to collect the few who kept their senses. It was not yet quite dark. Slowly and toilfully he gathered men who were howling for fear, not pain. They lit half-a-dozen fires, which made the clearing glow luridly; trembling sentries were posted, and the wounded men sought

out.

I need not pursue the tale further. Some thirty Malays and half-breeds had perished; as many more were grievously hurt. Fragments of one strange body they found, believed to be A-chang's. Not a sign of the White Lily brotherhood. Every member had escaped, by a subterranean passage doubtless. Within the next few weeks a considerable number of the sectaries were taken, mainly upon denunciation of the Kunsi, whose secret and terrible methods of obtaining evidence a humane government cannot rival. Neither Inchi Ch'en nor Ku-Juh-Sang were amongst these. The two were found hanging on one tree close by the landing-stage the day after these events: the police returned their case as one of suicide. LihKiu received protection from the Government, dwelling at Blidah Fort until she wearied of the monotony. Upon her earnest petition, the Rajah gave her a passage to Singapore: what happened to her there is another story, scarcely less tragic.

It remains only to tell that A-chang's hut was burnt to the ground a few hours after the lodge blew up, and no more has been ever heard of his diamond.

F. BOYLE.

531

I

MY RARE BOOK.

WISH I could say it was my diligence that discovered it, and that I hunted it out of some fifth-rate bookstall of Goswell Street or of the New Road-"all this lot at 6d. apiece." But no, it has no romantic story as far as I am concerned. Given perhaps, eighty years ago, by friend to friend, or by lover to sweetheart, in days when our great-grandmothers were beautiful and our greatgrandfathers devoted, it got to be neglected, it got to be soldsomebody ceased to care for it, or somebody wanted the few shillings it then would bring-somehow it tossed about the world, till a keen bookseller or keen book-buyer rescued it, and took it to a binder of note, and then it was arrayed in seemly dress, and safer for the future. Afterwards, but not for very long, I think, it was a rich man's possession: one thing, and quite a little thing, in a great library of English classics, from Defoe and Sterne to Dickens and Tennyson. Then it came to be sold, along with most or all of its important companions, and so I got it, in most prosaic fashion. I bought it under the hammer at Sotheby's—or rather, Mr. Ellis bought it there on my behalf-on the 3rd of March, in this present year of grace. And now it takes up its position on insignificant shelves, by the side of the Rogers with the Turner illustrations; by the side of a few things-but the collector knows them not.

This is how it figures in the auctioneer's catalogue: "Wordsworth (W), Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems (including Rime of the Ancyent Marinere by Coleridge), FIRST EDITION, green morocco extra, g, e, by Riviere, 1798." The "g, e," means nothing more mysterious than "gilt edges." The morocco is of a rich and sunny green-the "good" green of modern artistic speech, which rightly enough, I suppose, endows colour and line with moral qualities. I am thankful. to the rich man for having saved me both money and trouble in binding, completely to my taste, it happens, my rare book.

And few things, perhaps, deserve a more careful guardianship. The "Lyrical Ballads" were a starting-point in the new English literature, which addressed itself to study in the field of Nature more than in academies, and which taught us the beauty and interest of

common life and of every-day incident; and it is a delight to me to see the pages of these simple lyrics and pastorals as Wordsworth's own eye was content with them when Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, passed them through the press, and printed them as well as might be, on pleasantly toned paper, bearing here and there on its water-mark the date of its making, "1795." On the whole, it is a well-printed book; two hundred and ten pages, tastefully arranged, and of errata there are but five. Those were days when centralisation had not brought the best work all to London, and even concentrated it in certain quarters of London; and of what is sometimes called provincial, but of what there is better reason to define as suburban, clumsiness-for nothing is done so ill in the world as what is done. in London suburbs-there is only a trace in the gross inequality of the size of the figures in the table of contents: they are taken, it appears, from different founts. But generally the book is printed with smoothness and precision, and, even apart from the high literature which it enshrines, is worthy of its good green coat, joyful of hue, pleasant of smell, and grateful of touch to the fingers that pass over it. And nothing that comes now, even from the Chiswick Press, or from Jouaust or whoever may be the fashionable printing man today in Paris, can be much neater than its title-page; the mention of which brings me to a point of interest to the bibliographer.

The book has two title-pages; or, rather, like many of the books of its day, there belong two title-pages to the same edition of it, the custom having been for a second bookseller, who bought what the first bookseller was minded to get rid of, to print his own title-page. This is the course that the thing followed in the matter of the "Lyrical Ballads." The book was printed, as we shall see in detail presently, by Cottle, in Bristol, in the year 1798. Five hundred copies were printed, but they did not sell. "As a curious literary fact," says Cottle, in his "Recollections," "I might mention that the sale of the First Edition of the 'Lyrical Ballads' was so slow, and the severity of most of the reviews so great, that its progress to oblivion seemed ordained to be as rapid as it was certain." "I had given," he further adds, "thirty guineas for the copyright; but the heavy sale induced me to part with the largest proportion of the impression of 500, at a loss, to Mr. Arch, a London bookseller." Mr. Arch printed his own title-page. My copy has his title-page, "London, printed for F. & A. Arch, Gracechurch Street," and so I think had the copy sold at Mr. Dew Smith's sale about four years ago. The date, of course, remains the same, 1798, and all else remains the

same,

The British Museum copy-it was Southey's copy-has the

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