He turned from me to Irene, the supper train again," and

who was watching him admiringly. "I saw you come along by the cottage," he said, "but I didn't want to greet you afore I had the flute. I've cut it for you proper."

He extracted the flute from his pocket and handed it to her. It was an elder stalk newly stripped of its bark, white as baby flesh. "And where be Master Val?"

Staff and Val shook hands. Irene spluttered gratitude. Staff told them that his mother would be expecting them over at the cottage when they had seen Mr Bliss' curiosities. I thought I detected a suspicion of contempt in the way he said "curiosities."

"There'll be more varmin for you to carry away. Maybe Mister Val would like to choose something."

"But I dare say it'll be supper-time afore you've seen all he "-Sancho Panza nodded familiarly at Don Quixote "has got to show you."

took himself off without a
formal good-bye. Presently we
heard his
his diminishing flute
under the window.

We very nearly did miss the supper train. By the time we had finished tea, stewed pineapple, a tin of mixed biscuits, and Mrs Staff's harvest cake, there was no time left to see the birds and the marine shells. The last half-hour was spent in looking for the spider and the trochil, the bird that picks crocodiles' teeth, which Val had read about in some book of travel. Its impudent daring teased his imagination.

Both were found, Val's trochil and Irene's poisonous, eight-legged, bird-eating spider, which disturbed her sleep. But the beauty of it was that it hadn't any legs left ; Irene had to take them on trust.

Uncle Bliss was moving his And as for eating birds, it feet impatiently. looked as if a bird had eaten it. No wonder Uncle Bliss had been a long time finding it. He held the bottle up to the light, and revolved it slowly, so that we could count the disjected parts of the spider as they chased each other round the glass. Val reckoned that there were eighteen of them. Possibly legs. The fearsomeness of the insect had not survived dismemberment.

Squire and knight seemed to be on terms of equality. There was no class consciousness about either; as regards rivalry I was not so sure. Staff was a bit too free a distributor for Uncle Bliss' taste. And that flute of his had captivated Irene.

Solomon presented the bottle to the Queen of Sheba, or his Obviously it was not Sancho little Arachnophobe, as he called Panza's day. His rustic shrewd- her. "Take it home with ness seemed to tumble to the he said; "then you fact, for he said, "It won't won't dream about spiders any do for the young lady to miss more."

you,'

The gift was hardly in the category of apes, ivory, and peacocks. Still, as an antidote to nightmare, especially in the form of arachnophobia, I have no doubt it proved "a sovran remedie."

"Oh, thank you, Uncle Bliss." nered. The problem now was one of even-handedness. He carefully detached from the shelf a bottle which contained an insect even more dismantled than the spider. It was a scorpion. A scorpion for Val, and a spider for Irene. That made things square. There was nothing to choose between their part in the impoverishment of the treasure-house.

And now it was Val's turn. I can imagine that his heart leapt. If there were any balance in the distributions of Providence, Uncle Bliss was going to give him the trochil.

"And what would Val like?" The encrimsoned Val was, of course, inarticulate. For a golden second, I believe, he thought that he had been given the freedom of the treasure-house. I wanted to pull his sleeve and whisper in his ear, "Val, old man, don't forget the fish ponds."

What was Uncle Bliss going to do? I felt for him in his difficulty. The last time he exercised his avuncular bounty he had settled the problem by the simple expedient of division. Irene's shilling had split up easily into two sixpences. Was he going to apply the same principle of bisection to Irene's spider? If not, what Solomonian shift would he contrive to make things even?

I might have known that Uncle Bliss was not easily cor

"You like scorpions, eh?"

Val appeared to be delighted with the gift. You would think he had emptied the whole cornucopia.

The

We had to run to catch the supper train. Luckily it was a few minutes late. Uncle Bliss saw us to the drive gate. Altogether it was a day to mark with a white stone. spoils, perhaps, were hardly worthy of the raid, but if the children were disappointed they were too loyal to show it. They held their bottles tight and upright so as not to let the stoppers fall out, spilling the seeds of scorpions and birdeating spiders in quiet Homersfield.

In the train and most of the way home from the station Irene chattered about Sancho Panza, who had promised to "larn her "" the flute.

Poor futile Don Quixote !

(To be continued.)

FROM THE OUTPOSTS.

THE FALKLAND ISLANDS.

BY CONOR O'BRIEN.

I. THE ISLANDS.

As we sunk Diego Ramirez no repairs; we had not parted astern and rose the peak of Cape Horn on the weather bow, our little yacht Saoirse sailed swiftly into a new climate, a new ocean. The air was warmer, the breeze was gentler, and the sea was smoother; we basked in the sun as we drifted past the south shore of Staten Island, a very pleasant experience after the squalls of the Pacific.

snow

I reasoned thus: if I can pass from winter into spring in the two hundred miles to Cape St John, shall I not, by carrying on another two hundred in the same direction, find it summer in the Falkland Islands? This was against all the warnings printed in books of navigation and meteorology; but I had learned in the course of our voyage round the world to make a very large allowance for the pessimism of the Hydrographic Office, and had no reason to suppose that it was less libellous in its description of the Falkland Islands than in that of, say, Donegal. I also disregarded the warnings of those who, in the days when ships were ships and not 20-ton yachts, told stories of the terrible extortion they had suffered when they put into Stanley for repairs, for we needed

a rope-yarn since we crossed the fiftieth parallel ten days before. Having satisfied my mind as to these two points, I decided to satisfy my curiosity as to what a Crown Colony was like-indeed, more than my curiosity, for I had been too long in Australia and New Zealand, and required a corrective, something to reassure me of the possibility of good government.

I put aside my clearance for Monte Video and my Uruguayan bill of health, for that country is a republic, and the republican form of government does not suit the Spaniard any better than it does the Anglo-Saxon, and set a course for Beauchêne Island, which lies some forty miles off the coast of Lafonia. Only in place-names, and in the archives at Buenos Ayres and Downing Street, is the chequered history of the Falkland Islands displayed; they were successively colonised by the French, occupied by the Spanish, and exploited under a concession granted by the Argentine, the British claim being based presumably on their almost certain discovery by Davis in 1592, and their quite certain examination by Hawkins two years later. It

is, I know, the fashion to dis- I suspect that the traducers credit Hawkins; but any prac- of this excellent land never got tical navigator working out his nearer to it than the mail-boat courses on the chart cannot fail anchorage in Port William. to see the absurdity of rejecting For Stanley is certainly a bleak the obvious truth of his account and barren spot. There is no on the strength of a single soil, no warmth in the sun; clerical error. nothing but stones and wind. Some enthusiasts hopefully fence a few square yards of garden against the wind, but the wise raise their crops under glass. The glass, too, wants protection; the sea-gulls here are passionately fond of marrow bones, which they break by dropping them on to a smooth rock.

It was a fine breezy morning when we sighted the mainland. The hydrographer was, as usual, incorrect; if it is always breezy, it is generally fine. There were penguins rolling along beside us like little porpoises, and fur seals rolling along like big ones, and coming up astern, a thing we had not seen since we left New Zealand-a sail. She came up rapidly, for she was four times our size, and running a motor to boot; so we asked her to report us in Stanley, and followed in her wake.

She did more. She sent the pilot out in a providential launch which towed us up to our berth, and there we met the officials of the colony. The port doctor did not ask for my bill of health, but asked me to dinner; the Collector of Customs did not ask for my stores list, but asked me if I had seen Dougherty Island. (Heaven forbid ! This is one of the mythical rocks which disfigure the chart of the South Pacific, and is supposed to lie in latitude 60°.) The Colonial Secretary asked me to design a coat-of-arms for the colony, and the Governor asked me to go round the west coast in the seal protection cruiser and see something of the country, for they do not know the Falklands who only Stanley know.

Why they have not learned by now that a greenhouse is a poor substitute, and that if they break your glass they lose their bone, I cannot tell. The prudent person looks to his wire netting, or paints his roof green to imitate a lawn.

But leaving Stanley aside, the country has many virtues. Here there is no Parliament and no Press, no taxes, no trade unions, no strikes, no unemployed-or as near as no matter. Also there are no coal fires. What a joy it was to be met by the smell of turf smoke as soon as we entered the harbour! On the other hand, it must be admitted that there are no trees. This is attributed to the fact that an otherwise temperate climate is principally composed of wind.

Because the persistent wind makes the handling of a sailing boat very laborious, I was very glad that my means of conveyance to the west was not myown yacht, but His Majesty's