the passionless blue of skimmed milk, and his complexion was pale brown; his nose, in profile, was almost an equilateral triangle. It was impossible to guess his age; he might have been at any year between seventeen and seventy.

I forget how we first met. Jan's figure in his blue blouse, much-patched trousers, high black cap and wooden shoes, is as closely woven into the background of my Dutch experiences as are the windmills and canals in the scenery.

Jan's profession, or professions, perplexed me. He was never a week out of work, but he was rarely at the same work for a week. Sometimes he was a gardener and worked in the Vondel Park; at other times I saw him on the dam much occupied with the tram-lamps; now he would get a job on a barge, either unloading or punting; and then he would play ferryman on the Amstel; occasionally, during the vegetable season, he would repair to the home of his grandmother at Zaandam, and hawk new potatoes with a barrow drawn by his grandmother's dogs.

I had drifted to Amsterdam on a tour round some of the European picture-galleries. I meant to stay three days and see the Night Watch and the Ryks Museum. I stayed three months, and saw, under Jan's guidance, a good deal of the national life, the peasant life, that is to say, for in these days wealth eclipses racetraditions and has a nationality of its own, levelling its subjects to a cosmopolitan routine of hotels, where German waiters, French cooking, and English upholstery generate an atmosphere that defies latitude and longitude, and relegates the color and flavor of locality to the working classes. Jan showed me the picturesque side of Dutch life; if it were the under-side, it was not his fault

that civilization sweeps what is picturesque from the surface. He also imparted to me a fairly useful smattering of the somewhat intricate mother-tongue, and incidentally all the bad language thereof.

I was introduced to the household of Jan's grandmother, who lived in a little green wooden house in sight of a forest of windmills, and whose wrinkled face in its frame of a crisp white cap suggested a Rembrandt canvas. I was introduced to Jan's great chum, a villainously dirty diamond cutter in the Ghetto, and to the drunken skipper of a clumsy peat barge from the north, -but they do not belong to this story. I always meant to return to Holland; but I had to work hard, and money was scarce. The months melted into years and I remained in London.

About five years after my idle holiday in the byways of Amsterdam, my work took me daily to the Reading Room of the British Museum, and my income necessitated my making my home in a dingy room over a small baker's shop in the Tottenham Court Road. It was a very small shop. Two shelves round it held the loaves of bread, bags of flour, and tins of biscuits that were the whole stock-intrade. In the window were displayed trays of sticky buns and unappetizing slabs of cake. A red label on the door advertised the fact that afternoon tea was served at the round, marbletopped, rickety table at the back of the shop in front of the counter.

When I returned from my work at six every afternoon, I had tea at the rickety marble-topped table, and watched Mrs. Garford, the mistress of the establishment, presiding over the counter; Mr. Garford lived downstairs with the ovens. Her treatment of customers was peculiar, though dignified. She spent her time knitting severe gray under-garments, and when the

jerky door-bell announced the entrance of a patron, she raised her head with an expression of displeasure on her countenance marked enough to reduce the intruder to a state of abject apology. But at the hour when my observations were taken the customers were mostly tiny children, wizened wisps of humanity, with huge bags, making timid enquiries concerning the disposal of stale bread and broken biscuits. When times were good, or when editors paid up, I could put buns into the cold, dirty little fingers, though Mrs. Garford frowned, and complained that such proceedings encouraged a business she could very well dispense with.

One evening, as I sat over my heavy cup of tea, a little man shuffled up to the counter and demanded a halfpennyworth of stale bread. Despite the English clothes he wore I recognized his familiar gait and bearing.

"By Jove! Jan, by all that's wonderful! Have you forgotten me, Jan?" I exclaimed.

"Hé! Mynheer Peter!" returned Jan without the slightest astonishment; but he shook hands and I think his queer face brightened a little: we had been good friends.

A pause ensued. Jan was not communicative and sought neither confidences nor interest.

"How is your grandmother, Jan?" was what occurred to me as the politest question to begin with.

"Dead," said Jan.

"Dead?" My accents were meant to convey regret and sympathy. "Buried," added Jan firmly.

There was nothing for it but more questions.

"What made you come to London?" Jan grunted.

"What do you think of it now you're here?"

"Dirty," said Jan cheerfully, putting down his halfpenny and beginning to

envelope his bread in the folds of a red handkerchief. "Damned dirty."

Further examination elicited the information that he had found employment in the work-room of a neighboring furniture shop, and that he was living in an unsavory slum near Windmill Street. As he passed out of the door he turned round and asked: "How goes it with you, Mynheer Peter?"

"Pretty well, thanks."

Jan grunted again, and disappeared in the human stream on the pavement, leaving me to enjoy a lecture from Mrs. Garford on the probably deplorable consequences of my association with what she, with the disarming snobbishness of a motherly woman, denounced as low acquaintances.

I saw Jan two or three times a week after that night. Our meetings were cordial, if brief; and our mutual esteem was not diminished by our mutual reserve. He always came into the shop at the same hour, and always made the same purchase, a halfpennyworth of bread; but one day I was surprised to hear him asking the price of every cake on view. Mrs. Garford showing herself supremely bored at this catechism, as he betrayed not the slightest intention of buying more than his one loaf, he turned to me and enquired if I were going out. From past experience of Jan's methods I interpreted the hint as an invitation and took up my hat. "I will walk a little way with you, Jan," I said. His silent acquiescence told me that I had taken my cue rightly, and we went out together.

After a little hesitation Jan crossed the road and made for the comparative seclusion of Bedford Square. We walked round it while Jan seemed to be making up his mind about something. Presently he began, in Dutch, as though he found it easier: "You will not take it amiss, Mynheer Peter, that I confide in you?"

"Rather not! What's up?" said I cheerily.

When we reached the third side of the square he blurted out: "I am married."

I was surprised to an uncomplimentary degree; but my amazement seemed to please him. He nodded with great satisfaction, and repeated, “Ja, Ja, I am a married man."

"Many congratulations, Jan! How long ago was the wedding?"

After some deliberation Jan replied that he had been married for three years, adding with immense pride that his wife's name was Wilhelmina.

"Then she is Dutch?"

"No, Mynheer, she is English. She has your English brown hair. She is tall, but tall! And her eyes are large -enormous!"

Jan's gesticulations seemed to imply that his wife was as tall as the lamppost we had just passed, and that her eyes were the size of the square round which we were still wandering.

"You must introduce me to her, Jan," I suggested.

Murmuring something about being much honored, he seemed to shuffle back to his usual reticence, and we parted.

The next time we met I politely enquired after Wilhelmina's health. I was informed that she was very well, and delicately led to understand that Jan expected another addition to his little family.

"Another one, Jan? Have you a child, then?"

"Two, Mynheer; a boy and a little maid, splendid children. They take after their mother; they are handsome, -damned handsome." I believe Jan was under the impression that the expletive with which he usually qualified his adjectives was the correct superlative; it was the only one I ever heard him use.

The new arrival was a girl. Jan ex

plained that he preferred girls, and seemed to be pleased that his tastes had been consulted; though he added immediately that he was glad his eldest was a son. I asked Jan to let me see his offspring, and occasionally I sent them a few sweets or oranges; but each time that I was to be taken to Jan's home something intervened. Once I was hurriedly sent off to review a new play produced down at Brighton; once the children developed measles. Another time I was told that Wilhelmina was ill. Jan's queer little face was screwed into an anxious frown; he looked quite ill himself, and I did not see him for a fortnight. Then I met him in Charing Cross Road, looking pinched and wan, but he cheered up when I spoke to him. From the depths of a spacious pocket he produced a screw of paper, and unfurled about a yard of cheap yellow ribbon.

"I have been buying ribbon for Wilhelmina," he said. "Wilhelmina is better and is having a new bonnet. It is to be a fine bonnet."

While he carefully folded up his treasure again I was wondering whether Wilhelmina was not a little extravagant. She had been ill: illness meant expense, and Jan looked decidedly shabby and in low water. It seemed an odd moment to buy fine new bonnets. But he seemed pleased, and it was certainly not my business, so I enquired after the babies and went on my way.

That winter was a very severe one. Each time I met Jan he looked thinner and more shrivelled. I began to suspect that he was hard up, and once I offered to lend him a little money. The sum I offered was not a large one because I happened to be exceedingly hard up myself; but Jan haughtily refused it. He had plenty of money, he said; and he added that he had a great many friends who could afford to lend him money better than I could.

He

Two days afterwards he crossed the street to show me a toy he had purchased for his baby. It was a gaudy little ball on a piece of elastic. had probably given a penny for it, and he showed it to me with child-like glee. My mind was a little easier about him; he looked cold, and ill, and half-starved, but I reasoned that if he could afford to buy toys for his children he could not be so poor as he appeared to be.

For some weeks after that I did not see him. Then one evening the post brought me an almost illegible scrawl on a post-card. "To Mynheer Peter-I am ill, Mynheer, very ill. Jan."

It was a raw foggy evening as I groped my way to the address at the top of the card; the street-lights shone as faintly luminous round clouds, and the staircase up which I stumbled at the end of my journey was as dark as the street outside was dirty. Eventually I found my way into a small room at the top of the house. A woman, the parish nurse, was attending to the spark of fire in the tiny grate, and Jan lay motionless on a narrow bed.

"If you want to see him, you're only just in time," said the woman. "He's sinking fast. He has been talkMacmillan's Magazine.

says."

I

"Poor old Jan!" I exclaimed. went across to the bed, and he opened his eyes.

"Hé, mynheer," he said very feebly. He panted for breath, and then he murmured, "About Wilhelmina."

"All right, old fellow," I said soothingly. "I'll look after Wilhelmina and the kiddies."

But he looked unsatisfied.

"Where's his wife?" I asked. "Couldn't she be here, and the children? He wants them."

"He is delirious," answered the nurse. "He hasn't got any wife or children." Before I could contradict the woman, Jan's hand touched my sleeve.

"I was so lonely, mynheer Peter," he said apologetically, "so damned lonely."

Those were his last words.

I found the piece of yellow ribbon and the little toy carefully wrapped up and stowed away in an old wooden box. I put them into Jan's hands, and his little romance, his make-believe happiness, was buried with him.

I suppose he found comfort in impressing me with tales of his invented wife and children. Perhaps he invented his game of happiness to impress himself, and found that a spectator made it more real.

Tient-sin, November.

The autumn sun was just sinking in a bank of haze through which it peered, a murky globule of tarnished rose, when the skipper of the George Washington changed his course to make the Chefoo headland. The fog which

hung heavily to the north-west had beaten the breeze. There was not a ripple on the oily surface of the Yellow Sea; and the countless fingers radiating from the Chefoo light heralded a real thick Pechili night. The skipper of the George Washington, a rough ill-hewn

Norwegian, came up from the charthouse, and, thrusting his great hairy hands deep into his coarse duck pockets, stepped the bridge pace for pace with his "hard case" mate, and talked gruffly of the sweets of the Karl Frederick's bar in Tsin-tau, their last port of call. The Malay quartermaster blinked stolidly at the wheel behind them. There is no worry about pilots in Chefoo's open roadstead; and once the skipper had made the headland, he just tucked the George Washington in behind a Butterfield & Swire's packet, and followed her stern light. His eye caught the great cloud of black smoke which, also beaten by the mist, trailed heavily behind the coaster. Then he glanced quickly up at his own smokestack. A similar dead-weight of burnt Japanese coal hung in motionless cloud behind him. The Norwegian stopped and said curtly to the mate, "Tell the engineer I want to see him."

In five minutes a little wizened figure stood at the skipper's elbow. A grimy finger touched the greasy pilot-cap which was pulled well down over a pair of ferret eyes.

"You wanted me, sir?"

"Yes, Higgin. Have you got that 'Welsh' trimmed?"

The little ferrety eyes gave a knowing signal as the dilapidated machinist made answer, "Rather: the Japanese on top will just take us in." The gnarled mate, returned from his errand, had walked over to the rail, and as he stared at the lights now beginning to twinkle on Chefoo Bluff, was making a mental calculation as to how much two thousand Mexican dollars a-month would work out per diem. Then it struck him that the sun had sunk low enough for their purpose, and he sent a deck hand to take in the sun-bleached ensign from astern. They were now up amongst the war-ships. The skipper took them astern of the Hai-shen, then inside the Austrians.

As they passed the Vicksburg and the American tender, the Chinese bos'un and winchmen clambered on to the forecastle, where the mate joined them. They were right under the Bluff now, with its countless lights dancing across the harbor-swell. The whirr of a winch told them that the Butterfield & Swire boat had let go her anchor. The skipper brought the George Washington in between her and a China Merchant, and dropped his hook.

In ten minutes the Chinese Maritime Customs' boat was alongside, and the little white-haired "runner" satisfied that the George Washington was carrying a cargo of Moji coal to Tsin-wantau, and had put into Chefoo to take water and the 100 tons of Chinese cargo consigned to the treaty port of Newchwang. Having settled his business with the port authorities, the skipper changed his duck suiting for a presentable suit of serge. Handing the ship over to the mate, he selected a sanpan from the cluster of hopeful boatmen swarming round the ladder, and went shorewards with his mind full of thoughts of a Beach Hotel din

ner.

The sanpan brought up at the seawall, and the skipper, throwing a twenty-cent piece into the bottom of the boat, climbed up the steps. A throng of lazy Chinamen was crowding the bund. They made way for the burly European as he shaped his course for the town. Just as he reached the cable office an exceptionally dirty coolie ran up to him and saluted with a half-naval, half-civilian tug at his ancient cloth-cap.

"Alright, master, Mr. Balleyhew Beach Hotel have got!"

The skipper shook his head, and answered, "All right, Wong"; while the Chinaman slunk away much as a ricksha-coolie would on his solicitations being rebuffed. The skipper walked directly to the hotel and turned into the