Not a Gilt-edged Security.—The investment of Wei-hai-wei.
"ANIMAL SPIRITS."—No. 3. THE BARN DANCE.
TALL TALES OF SPORT AND ADVENTURE.
I.—THE PINK HIPPOPOTAMUS. (continued.)
It did not take me long to make my preparations and devise my plans. In such matters as these I have always found it best to prepare for every possible contingency, and then, with a trustful heart, to leave the rest to chance. I therefore calculated to a nicety the number of miles we should have to traverse, took into account the physical configuration of the country through which we should have to pass, the height of its various mountains, the depth of its valleys, the breadth and current of its rivers, its capacity for food supply, and the nature of its inhabitants. Having done all this, I spare the reader unnecessary details. It would profit him but little if I were to set down exactly the equipment, the clothing, the arms, and all the other preparations which my matchless experience prompted me to make. Such an expedition as that which I was about to engage in can never be undertaken again, for the simple reasons that there are now no pink hippopotami in the world, and that improved methods of communication, ridiculous railways, absurd telegraphs, preposterous telephones, and ludicrously well-metalled roads have robbed life, even in Seringapatam, of all the romance which, in my younger days, cast a halo of adventure round the smallest undertaking. How gloriously we revelled, how grandly we fought, how magnificently contemptuous we were of danger! But now we clothe ourselves in patent wool, we tremble at the shadow of a policeman, we judge everything by the mean standard of its money value. Some day we shall awake from our dreams of false security, when the crash of invasion sounds in our ears, and we see our homesteads ruthlessly trampled down by the hoof of some despised and foreign foe. Then, when it is too late, the public will remember that England still possesses one great leader inured to hardship and danger from his earliest youth, one whom, though a perverse Parliament has slighted him, the greatest warriors and the gallantest sportsmen have been proud to salute as their unquestioned superior. I shall answer to the call with what strength I may still possess, and my prematurely grizzled hair shall be seen waving in the van of my country's defenders; but even an Orlando Wilbraham (have I mentioned that that was my name?) must fail if he has only shop-reared dummies to support his efforts. Enough, however, of these mournful prognostications.