the loathsome and strange diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence, and despair.  It made them great!  By heavens! it made them heroic; and it made them pathetic too in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and old.  It seems impossible to believe that mere greed could hold men to such a steadfastness of purpose, to such a blind persistence in endeavour and sacrifice.  And indeed those who adventured their persons and lives risked all they had for a slender reward.  They left their bones to lie bleaching on distant shores, so that wealth might flow to the living at home.  To us, their less tried successors, they appear magnified, not as agents of trade but as instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out into the unknown in obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a dream of the future.  They were wonderful; and it must be owned they were ready for the wonderful.  They recorded it complacently in their sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the customs of strange nations, in the glory of splendid rulers.

’In Patusan they had found lots of pepper, and had been impressed by the magnificence and the wisdom of the Sultan; but somehow, after a century of chequered intercourse, the country seems to drop gradually out of the trade.  Perhaps the pepper had given out.  Be it as it may, nobody cares for it now; the glory has departed, the Sultan is an imbecile youth with two thumbs on his left hand and an uncertain and beggarly revenue extorted from a miserable population and stolen from him by his many uncles.

’This of course I have from Stein.  He gave me their names and a short sketch of the life and character of each.  He was as full of information about native states as an official report, but infinitely more amusing.  He had to know.  He traded in so many, and in some districts—­as in Patusan, for instance—­his firm was the only one to have an agency by special permit from the Dutch authorities.  The Government trusted his discretion, and it was understood that he took all the risks.  The men he employed understood that too, but he made it worth their while apparently.  He was perfectly frank with me over the breakfast-table in the morning.  As far as he was aware (the last news was thirteen months old, he stated precisely), utter insecurity for life and property was the normal condition.  There were in Patusan antagonistic forces, and one of them was Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan’s uncles, the governor of the river, who did the extorting and the stealing, and ground down to the point of extinction the country-born Malays, who, utterly defenceless, had not even the resource of emigrating—­“For indeed,” as Stein remarked, “where could they go, and how could they get away?” No doubt they did not even desire to get away.  The world (which is circumscribed by lofty impassable mountains) has been given into the hand of the high-born, and this