I do not recount this incident in order to magnify my own exploits. My deeds themselves are my best record, those deeds which a factious majority in successive Parliaments has, to its everlasting shame, refused to recognise, but which not even the voice of malice, always busy in the task of depreciating genuine achievement, can rob of one particle of their brilliant and immortal lustre. But the fight is indissolubly connected with the stirring story which I have here set out to relate, and for this reason alone have I mentioned it. During the brief struggle round the guns I became momentarily separated from the main body of my men. Seizing the opportunity, and noticing, too, that in the previous melée I had been unhorsed, two gigantic artillerymen made at me. My sword was broken, my revolver was empty! What was I to do? But little time for reflection was left to me. With savage shouts the two dusky Titans sprang upon me. I gave myself up for lost, shut my eyes, thought of my poor mother, saw in a flash my happy country home, the thatched roofs of the cottages, the grey old church, the babbling stream, the village school, the little shop where my infant mouth had first become acquainted with the succulent bull's-eye—in short, I went through all the symptoms that are understood to accompany the imminence of a violent death. Suddenly, however, the desire to live awoke once more. The smaller of my two foes had outstripped his companion. He was just about to seize me, when, lowering my head, which was encased in a spiked helmet, I bounded at him. Fair and full I caught him, and so terrific was the force engendered by my spring and the foeman's rush, that not the spike alone, but the helmet and the head too, pierced him through and through.
"Fair and full I caught him."
Down on his back he fell crashing, bearing me with him as he went over and fixing the spike firmly in the earth, pinned like some huge beetle by a human pin. As my legs flew up they encountered the second giant, and, winding round his chest, crushed every vestige of life out of him and flung his mangled body full twenty yards to the rear. I had escaped, but my position was still uncomfortably awkward. By this time, however, the rout was complete, and four of my men, by dint of tremendous exertions, succeeded in extricating me from my curious entanglement. My pinned foeman turned out to be the Ranee's brother, Hadju Thar Meebhoy. We bore him back with us to camp, where, marvellous to relate, after a prolonged illness, he eventually recovered.
Of course he has never been quite the same man since. He has to be careful about his diet, but with the childlike simplicity of an Oriental he finds a constant pleasure in opening and shutting the little aluminium doors which our dear old surgeon, Toby O'Grady, constructed to replace the Khan's stomach and the small of his back. I came to be great friends with him and it was through him that I gained the knowledge which prompted the adventure I am now about to relate.
(To be continued.)
A WORD ABOUT THE ST. HENRY JAMES'S THEATRE.
There is something in a name, especially when it happens to be the title of a play. At the St. James's, Mr. Alexander's latest venture has been Guy Domville, by the American novelist Henry James, who if he knew as much about play-writing as he does about novel-writing would probably be in the first flight of dramatists; and he would not have chosen so hopeless a name for his hero and for his play as Guy Domville. For the anti-James jokers would delight in finding that Guy could be "guy'd," and to say as to "Domville" that "a first night audience 'vill dom' the play." For all that, if Alexander be the sagacious commander in the dramatic field that he has hitherto shown himself, it is not likely that he should have been completely mistaken in accepting a play which a portion of the public has refused to accept. Of course, a manager cannot afford to keep a play going until the public come en masse to see it, and therefore, unless there is "a turn of the tide" (and such things have happened before now, and a condemned piece has had a long and prosperous career), Mr. Alexander will himself be obliged to do to the play what those who ridicule and chaff it have already done, i.e. "take it off."