around and let the Major introduce me to my own wife. I thought I knew what a fine little kid she is-but say, you ought to have heard the Major! Called me everything under the sun, Brannington. Not fit to blacken her last year's shoes, he said. Wanted to fight me -honest, he did!" Ronald forgot all embarrassment in a quick rush of boyish enthusiasm. "Say, the old boy's the real stuff after all, isn't he? Do you know, Brannington, I'll bet he'd have given me a great battle at that, if he is just up out of bed. It's the spirit that counts-and if anybody lacks spirit it isn't dad!" Somewhere in the back of my mind was a remembrance of an unmanageable horse that could be broken into harness only by drastic action. But I hastened to say "How about Letty? Have you told her? She's feeling pretty cut up over leaving, I think." "Was-not is." We started at the voice behind us. A slightly tear-stained but quite radiant Letty stood there. "I couldn't help overhearing," she apologised. "Oh, Ronald!" Even a confirmed bachelor has his moments of insight and good sense. I beat a hasty retreat downstairs, and out into the cold clear autumn night, for the drizzle of rain had ceased. For a moment I stopped to give place for thanksgiving, and looking up at the lights in Number 3 saw a scene silhouetted that indiscreetly mocked my bachelorhood. Then I went on to Gadwick's once again-to the famous dinnerparty and the Major. How many years ago? you ask. Ah, better find the elder Miss Corneroy, who has so supreme a disregard for the yearly records of Father Time. You will find her wherever Captain Bartholomew Corneroy spends his roving existence, caring for him with a rule of iron that seems to suit him, for he retains the perennial bloom and spirit of youth that stood him well through all his troubles. The other day I met a man, ruddy, inclined to corpulence, dressed in the habiliments of those whom the world treats generously. He nearly wrung my hand off. I will.'" 66 Some one," put in Slim, "some one ought to write this perishin' story. I've seen worse in the magazines." 66 lawyer Gadwick, since gone for me to up an' speak, speak through those portals where his legal mind will stand him less in stead than the kindly heart we had come to know and love; of the Corneroys and the Cornwalls-Ronald and "Miss Letty" and the Major. "Stringe, isn't it, sir," said Emmaline. "I always think of it still as 'Vanity Square,' and yet I think maybe I spoke 'asty 'asty about it that w'y. 66 That was a great speech you made, Emmaline," I laughed. "She mighta lost us h'all our jobs," said Slim, shaking his head gravely. "She's an orful woman that w'y with her tongue. Now you tike me, I'm tactful. Like the time I said to that perisher, Lord Lumley, Kind 'earts,' I says." 66 Stow your kind 'earts, Slim!" advised Marty. "The thing I want to know "-he winked at me-" is how much the Cap'n gave you, Emmaline, to spring that stuff." "Get aw'y with you, Mart Connolly," said Emmaline indignantly. "The Cap'n he comes to me and puts me h'up to it. 'Nothin' but a bloomin' h'earthquake will shake us all straight,' he says, and wants to p'y me to speak up. 'Get out,' I told 'im, 'I'm fighting mad about it now, and if you say it's right Good stuff!" acclaimed Marty. "It's up to you, Mr Brannington." "Yes," said Emmaline, with a new softness in her faded eyes, "an' don't forget, sir, 'ow I went h'out into the Court the very next night and found them there in the moonlight." "Ronald and his wife?" I asked. "I almost fell h'over them," said Emmaline. "Least I thought it was them. They jumped up from the shady side of the fountain-place, sir, an' I says, jokin' like, 'Excuse me, Mr Ronald, but you needn't mind me seein'. mind me seein'. A man may kiss 'is wife when he likes, I s'y.' And who was it but the Mijor hisself, and Miss Patience who give a little shriek, and they walked aw'y out the gate very dignified, and quite far h'apart as it were, sir; but I follered 'em a bit, and you mind where the trees is heavy up the street even after the leaves is almost gone? Well, 'e took 'er arm again there, sir. I sawr 'im, I did. Just think, sir-the Mijor! You'll put that in, sir? " "I will, Emmaline," I promised. THE IVORY BUDDHA. BY J. O. P. BLAND. more SOONER or later, to every man, there comes a time when his day dreams turn readily to the past than to the future, when the latest map upon the wall calls up remembrances of things past rather than new visions of long trails and quests that are never done. Sooner or later Odysseus wearies of the wine-dark sea and finds increasing comfort in the thought of his own hearthstone, where the song of the sirens, mingling with the soothing murmur of Penelope's distaff, shall come but as the memory of some distant music, bittersweet. Grudgingly or gracefully, the wanderlust, like love and the fine frenzy of the poet's soul, yields to the insidious hand of Time. Here and there some superman, like Goethe or Tolstoy, or Pliny the Elder, may succeed in preserving something of the divine fire unquenched by years, pursuing the spirit of Romance with stout heart in spite of rheumatic joints; but the general run of mankind, having weathered the roaring 'forties and the fattening 'fifties, are content to drift gently into leisurely fireside habits and to confine their wanderings to well - beaten tracks, wherein creature comforts may be found. True it is, that they keep their youth the longest and savour best the wine of life, in whom the wanderlust persists in spite of years; and their treasure-house of memories is the richer for every added year of traffics and discoveries. But to all, sooner or later, comes a day when the spirit no longer moves one to revisit the glimpses of adventurous moons, when, as the rain drives in fierce gusts against the curtained pane, we snuggle down into our easiest arm-chair and thank Heaven that tonight we go not down to the sea in ships. And fortunate he who, when that day comes, has gathered from his wanderings, to brighten the horizon of that easy-chair, some salvage and flotsam of memorable times and tides-pictures or bric-abrac, what you will, the strange gods of the heathen or the skins of beasts-things that shall recall to mind the touch of kindly vanished hands, the sights and sounds of old familiar haunts. I am one of those fortunate ones, moi qui vous parle, for from my easy-chair, when in lazy mood or weary of the chimney-pots and back gardens of Kensington, my meditative eye can wander gratefully around and about a little walled world, wherein pictures and curios and books summon spirits at my bidding from all the Seven Seas, and conjure visions of the fading years. Narrow enough, in terms of space, this horizon of shelves and walls, yet, with the help of memory's magic carpet, a great gateway that that discovers all the whole wide world, and "charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas." A tale of many wanderings and sojournings in distant lands is told on these four walls, but its dominant and ever-recurring note is that of Far Cathay. It begins in the 'eighties, with Chinese Gordon's" large red visitingcard, bearing its laconic superscription of introduction to the favourable notice of the great Li Hung-changa scrap of paper (which was never presented, for reasons that have nothing to do with this story) which helped to beguile me straightway from Trinity, Dublin, to the Customs students' quarters in the old Kou-Lan hutung at Peking. Then comes the miscellaneous jetsam of thirteen years in the service of His Majesty Kuang Hsü, years of travail (which the locusts have eaten), spent between Hankow, Canton, and Peking, with occasional furloughs in Korea and Japan; several mementoes of the lotuseating days, before Russia came down through Manchuria with her grey-clad legions and railways, when the East still slumbered and the Old Buddha from the Dragon Throne gave peace in her time. Later on there are milestones of Shanghai days, when we saw the dogs of war were let loose, first by the Boxers, and then in the struggle which ended with the Rising Sun flying once more at Port Arthur and the Russians driven back to Harbin. Sketches by Willard Straight and M'Cormick recall the nipping eager air of Manchuria and the long Siberian trail. Also there are pictures of houseboats and up-river scenes and tree-girt temples nestling in the hills, very grateful to the retrospective eye; and good honest Chinese faces, that bring to mind, with the fragrance of the gardens of one's youth, all the simple kindliness and doglike fidelity of their race. Every curio, every picture, has its story, from the mille-fleurs jar (an excellent imitation) presented to me with much ceremony by an astute Minister of State, to the Ming scroll of the Four Wise Elders, given me by old Sung, the curio dealer of the Soochow hutung, to commemorate his emergence, safe and sound, from the terrors of Towns's opium cure, taken at my urgent advice. And then, most precious of all, because of its emanations of perfect serenity, is the Ivory Buddha on his dais of lacquer and gold, as ineffably unconscious of the fretful penalties of material existence here in London as he was in the little shrine of the Po Yün Kuan, where for three hundred years and more incense and the prayers of the faithful were offered up before him. It is over a quarter of a century since he left that little shrine to become an honoured member of my household, but age cannot wither nor custom stale the august restfulness, comes the thrill that one knew the mysterious time defying at first discovering the charm charm, which the art of a of existence in China's ancient great craftsman has wrought capital, that subtle charm which into the features of the ivory still lingers, like that of melodies god. The first time that I unheard, with a magic all its saw him, his face reminded me own. Once again I hear the of two others-La Gioconda choir invisible of Peking's and the Sphinx-which, be- pigeons whirling, with music cause they both express (while in their wings, and can feel seeming to have solved for the tingling glory of an autumn themselves) the riddle of ex- morning, as in the days when istence, appeal eternally and I used to ride out through the universally to the hearts of Hsi Pien Men with O'Hara, to men. But the virtue which our summer quarters and stables radiates from the mystic seren- in a temple hard by the raceity of Amida in partibus exceeds that of either Monna Lisa or the Dreamer in the desert, even as Karma is greater than life itself. "Perfectly extinct upon his throne," as the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law hath it, the Ivory Buddha contemplates me from his place of honour by my hearthstone with an air of gentle and benevolent detachment, carrying my mind back to those Buddha-fields of Northern China where long ago I gleaned something of the teachings of the Selfless One, something of the eternal mystery of the Circle of Illusion and the shoreless seas of Birth and Death. As I gaze at him, softly glistening in the firelight, memories of those days come crowding; golden days, when every excursion into the unknown world of the wise old East was a glorious adventure, where Romance lay ever in waiting at the next bend of the road, and mystery lurked behind every grey wall. Once again, like wine in the blood, course. Amidst the sunlit memories of those days, when first I made acquaintance with the Ivory Buddha, and resolved, if it were possible, to become his owner (or rather, I should say, his host), two faces stand out clearly-old Chang, the genial Abbot of the Po Yün Kuan, and Torginsky, the soft-footed silent Russian with the face of a holy apostle and the mind of a Metternich, commonly known to us, his colleagues of the Customs Inspectorate, as the "Living Buddha." Old Chang I had known, in a casual way, for some years before that summer when O'Hara and I got into the way of dropping in on him for a cup of tea and a chat on our way to the race-course. A sociable old fellow he was, full of wise saws and old wives' tales, and a good Buddhist as Chinese priests go, well learned in the sacred books, and devout in the performance of his duties; but, like many of his brethren of the contemplative creed, a hard |