the other ankle-bone and causing as much pain as you know what to do with. Then, unless you are more than human, you swear aloud, and the forest repeats the ugly word in a shocked whisper. You put your hand up to the back of your neck, and find there a bloated leech, so blown up with its feast of blood that it is almost circular in shape, which comes away unresistingly when you pluck it from its hold. Every mile or so you stop and search diligently for other leeches, pulling them in clusters from the seams of your coarse Cannanore trousers, from the wrinkles of your flannel-shirt, from the tops of your socks where they are striving eagerly to get past the tight bands of boot-lace that are made fast about your ankles to prevent their entrance. A huge elephant-fly, with a bright green head, enormous beady eyes the size of boot-buttons, and a fine spread of delicate transparent wings, buzzes teasingly about you with a cat-like purr. Without breaking your stride, you make futile efforts to kill him with blows of your broad felt hat; but he has eyes that look all ways at once, and he avoids you neatly with contemptuous light-heartedness. Presently his song ceases, and you are glad that he is gone, until a sharp pain in your back apprises you of the fact that he is eating you alive with complete enjoyment. Eventually you succeed in slaying him, but not until the combat has attained to almost Homeric proportions, and for a mile or so you trudge on unmolested. Then from nowhere, there springs up a swarm of horse-flies, and these you kill in scores, slapping the spots where the pain tells you that some of their number are beginning to feed.

The day wanes slowly, and the birds and insects awake. The first of all to sound his note is the sanggit, the inch-long tree-cicada that acts as

Boots to the other inmates of the jungle, waking them relentlessly from their peaceful slumbers. From a neighbouring tree it screams shrilly, with a surprising volume of sound for so tiny a creature. Strangely metallic, strident, and far-carrying, its brazen shriek echoes again and again through the forest, and presently all the world joins in the chorus. The cool winds of evening make a gentle stir in the tree-tops, setting them a-rocking, while the branches saw and creak against each other, and a shower of dying leaves falls slowly and reluctantly towards the earth.

A stream running gaily through the woods comes into sight, and you cry to your Malay companions that here the camp shall be pitched for the night. Bundles and loads are thrown to the ground with guttural grunts of satisfaction, and soon the note of the native wood knife is heard ringing through the noisy forest. You divest yourself of your clothing, exchanging all for a bathing-cloth, count your leech-bites ruefully, and walk on sore, tired feet to the brink of the stream. Then comes a moment of luxury such as no mere words can fittingly describe, as the cool, pure water ripples over your hot and dusty body, and the little curious fishes sail up to look at you, and then dart swiftly away in tiny flashing arrow-points. By the time you have purged yourself of all the dust and discomfort of the march, your hut has been constructed, and your people are washing the rice. preparatory to cooking the eveningmeal. Your mat is spread upon a bed of boughs, fragrant, and springy as is no other couch, and upon it you fling yourself, with the red blood rippling warmly through your veins, with all your limbs tingling pleasantly from the exertions of the day, and a great content of body and mind filling you with a lazy delight.

The forest spreads around you, and about you, and above; the songs of the jungle are in your ears; the mystery of the vast solitude is over all; and again you drop back insensibly into the primitive man, alone with God and Nature, in a new-made world where no human hand has yet been suffered to set its disfiguring mark.

Over the rocks of a rapid, a hundred yards below your camp, the tumbled waters of the river are brawling with a sound like that of a heavy rain-squall. A flash of the dying sunlight catches a spray thrown up by the angry fight that is being waged about a vast block of granite standing boldly in mid-stream. Thus it stood, with the same angry little river quarelling with it, with the same vast green jungle surrounding it, with the same song of bird and insect making music for it morning and evening, with the same beasts of the forest coming and going in the woods about it, in the days when Abraham began the history of the Jewish race, when Moses led the people forth from the Land of Bondage, when Spartans fought and died at Thermopylæ, when Rome ruled the world, when Edward was the Hammer of the Scots, when the Grand Monarch flaunted at Versailles, and when England and Napoleon came to the deathgrip at Waterloo. All the noisy clatter of the great world has no power to make itself heard in the depths of the eternal forest. This is God's country, and like its Master it is everlasting, calm, serene, unchanging, wholly untroubled by the little ripples on the surface of time that we puny mortals regard as the great events of our world. It is as it was in the beginning, and ever shall be, till all our earth is in due time hurled back to the chaos whence it came.

The blue smoke of the fires curls No. 482.-VOL. LXXXI.

lazily upwards.

Against the red flames, leaping scarlet through the gathering gloom, the brown figures of the Malays are dimly outlined, as they stoop over the rice-pots, stirring listlessly. The pleasant smell of cooking food, very grateful to the nostrils of one who has gone fasting since the dawn, rises around you. The great, dim shadows steal up, like hungry monsters waiting to be bidden to the feast; the waters of the river, dimly seen in the gathering gloom, sing merrily, and the fuel of the fires crackles and snaps.

The long-expected meal is eaten ravenously; and then your tired limbs are stretched to rest, and the night falls upon the forest-world, melancholy and mysterious. The great tree-frogs cough out their musical bell-like note at frequent intervals, the sound, only heard in the depths of the jungle and during the quiet night-time, that seems to me to express, as nothing else can do, the aloofness, the cool, vast stillness, the magic and the mystery of this wild world of woodland. On another tree hard by the tiny frog we name George the Third cries "What? What? What? What? What?" every few minutes with high-pitched interrogative. The full-throated hoot of the argus-pheasant rings out through the woods, and is answered by similar calls from the bare and trodden drumming-grounds of other cocks on half a dozen hill-tops. The melancholy love-song of an owl is borne to you faintly on a little breath of lazy breeze; very far away some huge tree comes crashing down, the noise softened by distance into a kind of prolonged splash; near at hand a dead bough breaks off from the trunk to which it has clung so long, and falls rustling to the earth; the movement of some unseen animal overhead causes a shower of dry twigs and

H

fragments of bark to patter upon the palm-leaf roofing of your hut; many branches creak slowly; and the little, quiet noises of beast and tree, that together make up the splendid silence of the tropic-night in the jungle, tell of the throbbing life on every side whose pulse-beat they are.

Sleep comes to you easily, and you pass from indolent consciousness to dreamful rest without any gradation or interval. But the jungle does not sleep at night, and as you wake from time to time, you hear the sounds that tell unmistakably of the free, wild life about you.

Thus dreamily and uneventfully pass away the days and nights spent in a Malayan forest. Perhaps for weeks, or even for months at a time, the jungle swallows you up, and save that now and again you emerge into some sunny clearing where stands a little cluster of native huts, you are as completely cut off from your fellow creatures as the veriest hermit could desire. But the jungle-life is round about you, and, if you are blessed with the gifts of the seeing eye and the loving heart, you will find in it a plenitude of sympathy and content. The beasts live in a polity of their own, and for a space you are merely a trespasser on their domain, until you have learned the forest-lore that makes you free of the only land of freedom. Gradually every mark on ground or tree tells to you its tale, every cry and lilt and sound has for you its meaning. The tracks of many beasts lie plain upon the damp soil, and from them you will presently

learn to conjure up all manner of pictures of the numberless incidents of the jungle, with such distinctness of detail that they are as clear to your mind's eye as though you had been an actual witness of all the scenes that have left such sure traces behind them. Occasionally you will see, in a sort of meteoric flash, some huge beast, startled at your approach, tear through the thick underwood, with a mighty crashing of rent boughs and a protest of angry snortings. Occasionally, through a tiny glade of the forest, you will see a stately stag, standing with hoof lightly poised and graceful head turned enquiringly in your direction, uncertain whether your coming forebodes danger; then, with a leap, he is off and away, and the protecting cover swallows him up. Now and again, as you cross a stream, the lapping of a huge tongue can be heard a few yards away from you, the drinker itself unseen, and presently a loud crashing through the jungle shows that your presence has been discovered. For the most part, however, the forest tells you little save only that which the keen eye can gather from the picture-writings of Nature round about you.

And how comes it that these things hold a fascination for you that, like a madness, eats into your brain, depriving you of your sanity? In truth I know not; but sure it is that, once heard, the voice of the jungle rings in your ears for ever, calling, calling, calling, and giving you no peace till you rise and obey.

HUGH CLIFFORD.

IN the heart of the West African Bush some sixty miles up country from Freetown, the seaboard capital and seat of government of Sierra Leone, a rectangular blockhouse and two or three round native huts mark the site of an old African war-town named Robari, which enjoyed some local notoriety thirteen years ago as the chief stronghold of the Yonnies.

The Yonnie War of 1887 is one of numerous long-forgotten little expeditions that have taken place on the West Coast. The Yonnies were a restless, warlike tribe who subsisted on plunder and were the terror of all the country round. Their frequent marauding expeditions had spread such universal consternation that the neighbouring villages were all deserted and in ruins, while Robari itself was constantly being strengthened by the labour of the large number of slaves captured on these forays. Their last exploit was a raid upon a large town called Senahu, some twenty-five miles to the east of Robari, a place of considerable importance to the trading interests of the colony of Sierra Leone. They stormed the town, burnt it to the ground, killed all the men and made slaves of the women and children. At that time the territory of the Colony comprised only a narrow strip of land along the sea-coast, and the Protectorate since established over the back-districts of Sierra Leone had not yet come into existence. Consequently the warlike enterprises of the Yonnies

only concerned the British Government in so far as they blocked the country and hampered the free passage of the traffic to the coast. But their unbroken series of successes emboldened some of these marauders, in an evil hour for themselves, to march down country as far as Songo Town, a place only ten miles from the village of Waterloo on the borders of the Colony, and itself more or less under British protection, as there was a Frontier policeman stationed there. This official, fortunately perhaps for himself, was absent at the time. The Yonnies broke into his house and plundered his goods, but did no hurt to the man's wife who was at home alone.

The Colonial Governor of that period troubled himself very little about the Yonnies. A long and valuable service on the Coast had made serious inroads upon his originally magnificent physique, and at best the climate is not conducive to superfluous energy. He only summoned a few of the leading Yonnies down to Freetown for a palaver, told them they must be good boys and not break the peace any more, and sent them away with presents of money. They promptly took advantage of his generosity to purchase fresh supplies of guns and powder, and returned to Robari and their other war-towns to continue the practice of ravaging and murdering their neighbours. And still the Governor cared for none of these things. Colonial Secretaries in those

days had not begun to think the West African Colonies worth developing, and a policy of rigid non-intervention with the tribes beyond the frontier was strictly enjoined upon

their governors.

However this Governor went home on leave to recruit his health, and the Administrator who reigned at Sierra Leone in his stead, deeming the Yonnie entry into Songo Town and their looting of a police-station an insult not to be overlooked, especially when following close upon such an interruption to trade as the sack of Senahu, applied forthwith to the Home Authorities for permission to despatch a punitive expedition to crush these troublesome folk and restore peace and security to the frontier.

Meanwhile the Yonnies themselves clenched proceedings by sending down a message to Government House to the effect that it was their intention shortly to come down and sack Freetown itself. Probably this was a mere piece of impertinence, an idle threat never meant to be carried into execution; but it is quite possible that their long succession of easy triumphs over the most redoubted of their fellow countrymen had inspired them with a belief that they were irresistible. The message was received on September 8th, 1887. On the next day a meeting of the Executive Council was summoned, at which it was decided that immediate action must be taken. Accordingly on the 10th and 11th of September detachments of the West India Regiment then stationed at Tower Hill, Sierra Leone, were despatched to occupy Songo Town and Rotifonk, both of which places were threatened by the Yonnies. The detachments were each under command of a subaltern, with a medical officer attached to both. Rotifonk was distant only

six miles from Robari, and the small garrison there had rather an anxious time of it, being kept constantly on the alert by news of an intended attack, though no actual assault was ever attempted.

Two months passed before any further operations were begun. Sanction for an expedition had to be obtained from the Home Authorities, and there was no senior officer on the spot of sufficient experience to be entrusted with the command of it. Sir Francis de Winton was sent out from England to take charge, and arrived at Sierra Leone at the beginning of November with a couple of staff-officers to assist him. The force did not err on the side of excessive strength, but proved amply sufficient for the task required of it. It was composed of four hundred men of the 1st West India Regiment under command of their adjutant and three other subalterns, about one hundred of the Sierra Leone police, and a score of Bluejackets landed from the gunboat, H.M.S. Acorn, then lying in the harbour of Sierra Leone. The sailors, under command of their first lieutenant, were in charge of the artillery of the Expedition, which consisted of a single six-pounder field-gun, and they also brought a Maxim, at that time a new toy which had never yet been tested on active service. Another gunboat, H.M.S. Rifleman, furnished the same number of men, chiefly to manage the boats bringing up supplies to the base of operations.

No European had ever explored the Yonnie country, and only the haziest notions prevailed as to the precise position of their capital. But there was, or had been before the Yonnies laid it waste, a riverside village named Mafengbeh, which was believed to be no great distance from Robari, on the Ribbi river. The Ribbi joins the sea just south of the Sierra Leone penin