understands, and which, in spite of all its hardships, he has learned to love.
The great wheel of progress, like some vast snowball, rolls steadily along,
gathering to itself all manner of weird and unlikely places and people, filling up
the hollows, laying the high hills low. Rays of searching garish light reflected
from its surface are pitilessly flashed into the dark places of the earth, which
have been wrapped around by the old-time dim religious light, since first the
world began. The people in whose eyes these rays beat so mercilessly, reel and
stumble blindly on in their march through life, taking wrong turnings at every
step, and going woefully astray. Let us hope that succeeding generations will
become used to the new conditions, and will fight their way back to a truer path;
for there is no blinking the fact that the first, immediate, and obvious effects of
our spirit of progress upon the weaker races, tend towards degeneration.
Ten years ago the Peninsula was very different from what it has since become,
and many places where the steam-engine now shrieks to the church bells, and the
shirt-collar galls the perspiring neck, were but recently part and parcel of that
vast 'up country,' which is so little known but to the few who dwell in it, curse it,
—and love it.
I sent my soul through the invisible,
Some Letter of the After-Life to spell,
And Presently my Soul returned to me
And whispered 'Thou thyself art Heaven or Hell.So sings the old Persian poet, lying in his rose garden, by the wine-cup that
robbed him of his Robe of Honour, and his words are true; though not quite in
the sense in which he wrote them. For this wisdom the far-away jungles also
teach a man who has to rely solely upon himself, and upon his own resources,
for the manner of his life, and the form which it is to take. To all dwellers in the
desolate solitude, which every white man experiences, who is cast alone among
natives, there are two 'up countries'—his Heaven and Hell, and both are of his
own making. The latter is the one of which he speaks to his fellow race-mates—
if he speaks at all about his solitary life. The former lies at the back of his heart,
and is only known to himself, and then but dimly known till the time comes for a
return to the Tents of Shem. Englishmen, above all other men, revel in their
privilege of being allowed to grumble and 'grouse' over the lives which the Fates
have allotted to them. They speak briefly, roughly, and gruffly of the hardships
they endure, making but little of them perhaps, and talking as though their lives,