sides too far from Smyrna for of an appreciative gallery it was hard to maintain the enthusiasm of the players, and the club at no time looked like becoming a permanent institution. it to be an easy matter to attend any social functions which might be going on in the town. Besides, driving backwards and forwards at night when the trains did not run had always a spice of danger, and a short time after I left the place a party of English people thus returning from the theatre were waylaid on the road by brigands, and two of them carried off and held to ransom. The ransoms were paid and the captives released, but one of them died as the result of the hardships he had undergone. After a day spent in the town one was quite content to enjoy the simple pleasures of the country. Bridge never failed, nor the more active amusements of tennis, football, shooting, and for a time, cricket. It is strange that cricket never really went down in Smyrna. I managed after considerable exertions to start a club, but it never had much life in it, and collapsed after a couple of seasons. The Smyrna-born English, with the exception of a few who had been to school at home, took the most languid interest in the game, and I suppose that if the truth were told our national pastime does lack attraction for those who have not been brought up to it. While the club lasted we played occasional matches against ships of war, beating single ships and suffering defeat at the hands of the united squadron; but in the absence On the other hand, football, the Rugby variety, was very popular. An annual match against Constantinople lent an abiding interest to the game, while the more spectacular nature of the encounter and its shorter duration always attracted a gratifying number of spectators. These were not only English, but natives of all sorts as well. None of the lastnamed understood the game, and the popular conception of the proceedings was well expressed by a Cavass whom I sent to fetch a carriage to take me to the ground on the occasion of a match, when he reported that not a vehicle was to be had, as "they have all gone to the fight." The immediate vicinity of Bournabat provided little shooting beyond an occasional woodcock in the pomegranate groves round the village, but if one chose to go some little distance along the Aidin railway fairly good sport could be had in winter with cock and snipe. This entailed very early rising, for the train left the main line station about 5.30, and one had to drive for nearly an hour to get there. Some years, in an exceptionally cold winter, there would be enormous passages of cock, and big bags could be made, fifty couple to a single gun-that of a former van. British Consul-being the rec- tion for brigandage, sharing ord. In my time there was nothing approaching this, and any one was considered to have had a satisfactory day who brought home five or six couple. I could rarely get away for a day's shooting during the week, so usually took my outing on a Sunday-unfortunately, the day also selected by crowds of sportsmen from Smyrna, mostly Greeks, who filled the train up with themselves, their dogs, and their bottles of liquor, until my companions and I were glad to take refuge in the guard's I have seen over a hundred of these gentry leave by the train, and fifty of them alight at a single station, there to spread over the country, doing little execution, but effectually disturbing what game there might be, up to eleven or twelve o'clock, when they settled down to eating and drinking, principally drinking, until the train returned late in the afternoon. To avoid this crowd I generally frequented two nice little marshes near the stations of Kayass and Trianda, where it was possible to shoot ten couple or so of snipe in peace. By going farther afield there was aod chance of pig and red-deer, but to go after them implied an expedition of several days, and led one into country which was far from safe. The fear of brigands made any distant expedition an enterprise not to be lightly undertaken. Smyrna had always enjoyed an unenviable reputa VOL. CCXII.—NO. MCCLXXXVI. the honours in this respect with Salonica. The Turkish Government did its best to suppress the evil in its usual unsystematic and spasmodic way, but with no conspicuous success. The gendarmerie whose duty it was to deal with such malefactors were worse armed than the brigands, and the sympathies of the rural population, whose poverty rendered themselves immune, were hardly on the side of the authorities. Furthermore, the paternal habit of the Turks of detaining witnesses in safe custody so long as proceedings were pending did not encourage people to come forward to offer evidence. At times the scandal became so crying that special measures had to be taken to cope with it. On one such crisis a Vali of Smyrna had the happy inspiration of enrolling a large band of uncatchable brigands in the ranks of the gendarmerie, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. For a short time the plan worked admirably: the new gendarmes were up to all the tricks of the trade, and gave chase to their former confrères with zeal and success. But before long the inevitable relapse from grace occurred, the converts reverted to robbery, blackmail, and other improprieties, and the Vali had to acknowledge his experiment to be a dismal failure. Instead, however, of proscribing the backsliders and so driving them into open defiance of the Government, the wily functionary 2 G induced them by fair messages him. Was he right? The decision was a difficult one: gratitude for a nose saved in the one scale and public duty in the other. to pay him a visit in Smyrna, where, he said, he had the Sultan's instructions to distribute rewards to them; and when the band, suspecting nothing, marched into the courtyard of the Konak (government house) they were at once shot down by a company of soldiers who awaited them. The photograph of their heads stuck on the spiked rails round the Konak was a souvenir much sought after by visitors to Smyrna when I was there. At the beginning of my stay in Smyrna a case occurred in connection with brigandage which raised a nice point of ethics. An Englishman had been carried off a couple of years before and held to ransom, and one day I was requested by the police to send him round to identify, if possible, a bad character who had fallen into their hands, and was believed to be a member of the band. He informed me afterwards that he recognised the fellow sure enough, but that he happened to be the one brigand who had behaved towards him with a certain degree of kindness, and had even intervened successfully on his behalf when the rest proposed to cut off his nose and send it into Smyrna as a hint that the ransom was being unduly delayed. Accordingly he refused to identify As an illustration of the kind of ruffian who takes to brigandage, this same gentleman told me that in the course of his wanderings as a captive with the band one of his captors wore out his shoes. Не асcordingly sat himself down by a roadside and watched the passers-by until a man came up who was well shod, whereupon he shot the poor fellow down, appropriated his footwear, and rejoined his comrades as if he had performed the most natural act in the world. Pleasant as was existence in Smyrna in the last decade of the nineteenth century, constant office work tended to become irksome after more than three years of it, and it was borne in on me that a change of scene and country would not be amiss. Accordingly, when the Vice-Consulate at Philippopolis in Bulgaria fell vacant in the spring of 1892, I applied for the post, and was gratified by the application being favourably entertained. After nine years' exercise of a profession one cannot well consider oneself any longer as a novice, and the title of the present article would hardly apply to any subsequent experiences. 66 66 LONDON RIVER. BY F. TENNYSON JESSE. means river below London Bridge is no longer, and that is a pleasure river. Gone are the joyous days when Cherry Gardens Pier lived up to its name, or when the Kings of England went merrymaking in their golden barges. Gone are the days when Mr Wilfer and Bella went to Greenwich for a fishdinner, or when Rogue Riderhood caught an honest living with each corpse he hooked. Nowadays the police boats pick up any stray corpses and call them simply "B.I.D.'s," which in hospital parlance means a Brought-in-Dead, and is still a good thing to get, as it means more money and less trouble than a live man. But the affair is so official now that the charm has gone from it. THAT is what sailors call it -London River. Thames is only for boat-race enthusiasts and the punt-borne haunters of the upper reaches. And London River " the Port of London-the greatest port in the world. Ships sailed from the Port of London in the days of the Romans, and ships sail from it still which is not by any means a thing that follows as a matter of course in these days when the draught of ships has so increased that many a harbour which flourished in old days is now left bare and desolate. Ships of twenty thousand tons can lie within three miles of London Bridge, and the waters that bore the leather-sailed boats of the Brittany fleets in the days of Cæsar, the upcurved prows of the Saxons and Scandinavians, the galleys of the Mediterranean peoples, the high-pooped caravels of the Middle Ages, the nimble merchantmen of Tudor times, the great three-deckers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the exquisite Colonial and China clippers, most beautiful of all the beautiful ships that ever graced the sea, bear also the broad steel bottoms of modern steamers, and part as sweetly to the cleavage of their towering stems. There is only one thing the the inspiration of our pilgrim Gone are the days when Gravesend was a yachting centre, and the clubhouse is no more. Hardly a white bow breaks the waters of London River any more; never a dock shelters the folded snowy pinions of racer or cruiser. The traffic of the world's goods, the masses of her spices, her ivory, her meats, her fruits, her silk, her wool, all the long list of necessities for the Apes and Peahens, these have gradually turned the pleasure of London River into scheduled utilities. Yet-and here was age-because of this there is more pleasure to be found now along the world's greatest waterway than ever before. For what Londoner really knows his river? To him it is not only" liquid history" but liquid mystery, and the pity of it is he should be content to let it remain so. Here is a whole Arabian Nights' Entertainment at his doors, and he never realises its presence. I speak of the magic of trade and of the imperishable beauty of ships. The Gudgeon, an eleven-ton yawl, travel-stained from fifteen hundred miles of cruising in five weeks, sailed up the mouth of the estuary on a grey rainy day, bound for Tilbury tidal basin. Though of the "exempt" class, by reason of her small tonnage, she was to have a pilot-rather for the purpose of obtaining a guide, philosopher, and friend than because she would have got into any difficulties. And here I may say that luck went with the Gudgeon, and she chanced on a pilot who fulfilled these functions, and whose forebears had all followed the sea, his father having been first officer of the famous Cutty Sark, that greatest of clippers, now so happily restored to the land that bred her. Gudgeon was armed also with a special permit allowing her to moor off any pier free of toll-rather an empty blessing, as the wash of the steamers and tugs made it impossible for a yacht to lie at any quay without being smashed-but it invested the Gudgeon and ourselves with an almost official air of importance, and, together with a card of introduction from a Port of London authority, made all things easy. If you draw a line from the Coastguard Station below Havengore Creek to the Isle of Sheppey, a line running north and south just east of the Nore Lightship, you sail over it into the jurisdiction of the Port of London. There the North Sea mingles with the Thames, and sends its waters pushing up-river and draws them down again twice daily, twisting the ships about as they lie at anchor, and causing a pattern of influences that set this way and that way and make of the navigation of the Thames the highly-skilled job that it is. Every fresh jetty thrown out into her course, every change in her huge system of docks and quays, is felt by the current of her blood. The new jetty at Tilbury, where the river is wide and strong, with seven hundred feet of navigable water, has set the tide right over on the southern shore, and made a new item to be learnt in the conning of her ways. The tide is cheated by man, of course, and instead of being an obstacle has become a thing to be used and cozened, to be allowed for in every calculation, and to be made to do half the work for the humans that ply upon the river. With the wind aft and her mainsail swung out, the Gud |