bringing him the Bible, but I could fairly scold the poor old stupid for putting half a normal load on a pony having only one-tenth its normal strength, and no grain at the end of the journey. When men look at you with the deep, patient eyes that light those Asiatic faces, and when one's wrath must filter through Achbar's brain and Achbar's tongue, the victim still lives when you have finished with him.
And the morning and the evening were the second day when I began to read the Bible to Anginieur. Ere a week had passed, even my orthodox Catholic friend felt that the early books of slaughter and the vitriolic prophets left much to be desired as an elevating preparation for probable death. Job, the patient and Ecclesiastes, struck a more sympathetic note. The ante-Abraham traditions were suggestive, even absorbing, to the intellect that would inquire critically into the history of religion. So, also, though of far less hold upon one's interest, the childish babbling of the dream-interpreters, down to Daniel. Much of all this turns around life, but the life of a nation rather than of an individual. It could enter little into the meditations of those whose chances of living were down to the Camp Purgatory measure. Ruth, Esther, and the Songs of Solomon were read, together with some torn pages of Childe Harold, which had been hidden in our kit ; all these spoke to us of the Heaven of woman's love, from which we seemed to be permanently exiled. To the life of Christ, he of Christian childhood, though long since forced beyond the fold, might fancy that he could more con-
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