the journals. He did his work, and treasured his reward, without discovering his success to the politicians of Paris. In Abyssinia he was a veritable pioneer. He knew the court of Menelik, to whom he sold guns and the munitions of war, long before that King of kings became the object of European intrigue. M. Ilg, the sovereign's favourite minister, recognised the services, and deferred to the experience, of Arthur Rimbaud. The natives regarded with awe this tall, lank, largehanded, blue-eyed Frenchman, who spoke their tongues, espoused their just cause, and permitted no familiarity. Being a trader, and loving the dark man better than the white, Rimbaud was incensed against the policy of all nations. He did not foresee (how should he?) the ultimate success of Great Britain. But he was witness of our misguided failure twenty years since, and could not look forward to a desert tranquillised by railways and sound administration. "Gordon is an idiot," he wrote with his habitual frankness; "Wolseley is an years of African toil were rewarded not only with consideration, but with a sufficient measure of wealth. Meanwhile he won golden opinions, not only for his knowledge but his character. The scholar gipsy was as dead as the poet; there remained the just man of affairs, the patron of the oppressed. One trait only did he preserve from the wreck of his ancient qualitiescontempt. His wit was as caustic as ever; he was no less scornful of other men's follies. than when he murmured monosyllables in the Latin Quarter. Among his own countrymen he made enemies, and he made them righteously. He could tolerate neither stupidity nor unjust dealing. A traffic in bad coffee inspired him to a literary effort, and quite honourably he concealed the true kindness of his heart beneath a mask of malice and satire. But if he was hostile to the charlatan who trades upon the credulity of a subject race, he was full of charity for all who made appeal to him. Still, remembering his own years of wandering, he gave whatever was asked, his coat or his dinner. "His charity, discreet and large," said an ancient colleague, "was the only thing he dispensed without a sneer." And it is not difficult to understand the rare and aristocratic temperament, at once generous and insolent, which inflicts pain on the unworthy as easily as it succours those who demand legitimate aid. legitimate aid. Meanwhile his scientific research had been intelligent and profound. So well did he know the country wherein he followed his trade, that the traveller Borelli was justified of the compliment he paid him. "The end of our voyage, said he, 66 was very different; he journeyed for his commerce, I journeyed for science and curiosity. How far better would science have been served had we exchanged our rôles?" When, indeed, has science paid a more generous tribute to commerce! But all the while he was dissatisfied with his lot. The romance of the East failed to satisfy his imagination, as poetry itself had failed. Deep down in his nature was the common desire of a well-ordered life. "Is it not miserable," he wrote, "this existence without family, without intellectual occupation?" Again and again he formulates in his letters the simple ambition which had at last taken hold of him. "Of what use," he cries, "are these comings and goings, these adventures among strange people, these fatigues, these languages, wherewith my memory is packed, if I cannot, after many years, seek repose in some town that pleases me, and find a family, or at least a son whom I shall educate to my view, and see grow up a man powerful and rich through science?" To this end all his efforts were bent. The "lost climates," of which he had written so many years ago, had tanned him to some purpose; he was weary of solitude, of Africa, of money. If only he could save enough to follow the profession which he had chosen at seven years of age! Moi, je serai rentier, he had written in his childhood, and wealth was almost in his grasp, when disease and death overtook him. It was at Harrar-in 1891 that his weakness was first revealed. A swollen knee interrupted the activity of his life. Unable to walk, he rode on horseback, and when he could no longer put foot in stirrup he transacted his business from a window, whence he could watch the scales and the hand that held them. But the disease increasing, he was forced to return to Alexandria, and a journey through the rainy desert hastened the malady; and when he arrived at Marseilles, there was no hope for his life save amputation. How bitter and unexpected a return to his native land! Nearly twenty years before, he had looked forward with pride and courage to this return. "I shall come back," he had written in 'Une Saison en Enfer,'-"I shall come back with limbs of iron, a dark skin, a fierce eye; by my mask, they will think I am of a strange race. I shall have gold: I shall be lazy and brutal. Women take care of infirm savages returned from a hot country. I shall mix in politics. Saved!" And there he lay in a hospital in Marseilles, where amputation had put an end for ever to his tireless activity! But no sooner was he a cripple than he was devising means of transit. He would learn afresh to sit upon а horse; he would return instantly to Harrar, settle his affairs, come back to France, SO marry, and write the works civilisation; he had known the that still moved inchoate in his brain. Alas! the struggle was over, the fight was fought, or at least only one adversary was left disease, at whose hands he was to suffer defeat. For a while he sought refuge in his native Ardennes; then he would move, all disabled, to Paris, and his journey across the capital is the saddest episode in a sad career. He had scarce been there since the days of his early triumph, the triumph which he was resolved to forget, and yet hoped, it may be, to renew. But it rained, and the day was cold, and the streets affrighted him, and he thought that at Marseilles he might see the sun. So he drove but from one station to another, crawling desolately back to the hospital, where some weeks later he died. And his noblest epitaph is the Ras Makonnen's comment on his death: "God calls back to Himself those whom the earth is not worthy to bear." So ended a strange and strangely broken career, which may now be contemplated without scandal or sentimentality. Reckless admirers have done their best to complicate the life of Arthur Rimbaud, but the man was as free from pose as the poet; above all, he was one of the rare few who know the excitement both of action and of words. As a man of action he was more nearly complete than as a poet. His verses remain a fragment; his admirable work in Africa was wellnigh finished. He had been the pioneer of a new distant countries whereof his But it is in his prose-poetry that he is most genuinely himself. Here no comparison is possible save with Walt Whitman; yet if Rimbaud be described as the Walt Whitman of France, the description must be made with the utmost reserve. Indeed he had a more delicate fancy, a finer feeling for tradition, an infinitely better knowledge of literature, than the American, with whom he shares certain tricks of style and a vague, brusque method of presentation. It is unlikely that he ever saw 'Leaves of Grass,' though he had a perfect know ledge of English, and was in London during 1872, when perhaps Walt Whitman's name was known to a few. But Whitman had hardly by that time penetrated Soho, within whose purlieus Rimbaud must have found refuge. However, it is by his marvellous essays in poetic prose that Rimbaud will be remembered, and their relation to 'Leaves of Grass' is but a matter of curiosity. The 'Illuminations' (an English title, borrowed from the gold and red scrolls of our childhood) are rather experiments in folk-lore than a record of life. 'Une Saison en Enfer,' on the other hand, is a medley of experience and prophecy. It was Rimbaud's literary ambition to be less a poet than a voyant, a seer, and in this strange pamphlet, which alone he committed to type, we have a vision of what he might have accomplished had not activity killed inspiration. In some such form as this, we may imagine, he would have translated the converted him into a vicious monster, when he was only a youth of astounding industry and undisciplined talent. His character, which might seem a tangle of contradictions, was in reality a marvel of simplicity. Its note was sincerity-sincerity to his own nature. He was determined to reach his goal, at whatever cost, and in despite of scruples. of scruples. He wrote poetry, because the impulse was imperative. He refrained from publication, because in the writing the impulse was satisfied. He travelled on foot, because the lack of money was no hindrance to his wandering spirit. He visited Africa, a slave to the Orient, and he stayed to make a fortune, because, after all his voyages, the desire to live a well-ordered life in his own land survived all the passions of his turbulent spirit. When he was sixteen he wrote two lines which may serve as a key to unlock the secret of his career: "Fileur eternel des immobilités bleues, pets. knowledge which he had gained Je regrette l'Europe aux anciens paraunder the African sun, and therefore we may the more bitterly regret his untimely death. And side by side with the instinct of creation there grew always the faculty of acquisition. As he said himself, his head was full of strange languages; at Harrar he mastered the elements of many sciences. Once, in his childhood, when a piano was denied him, he learned that instrument by practising upon a painted board; and the strange irony, which made him a myth long before he died, Yes, he explored the "blue immobilities," and he regretted Europe, as he might once again have sighed for Africa, had he returned well and wealthy to the Ardennes. His biographer describes him, with some justice, as a kind of Peer Gynt. WILDFOWL-SHOOTING IN THE OUTER HEBRIDES. FAR out in the Western Atlantic, separated from the mainland-as some of us have too good reason to know-by very stormy seas, lie a number of islands which differ greatly in their natural characteristics, and especially in their fauna, from the rest of Scotland. You look in vain here for the ordinary features of a Highland landscape. There are no great pine-woods covering the hills with their sombre green; no fringe of graceful birches along the burn-sides and round the lochs; no narrow welldefined straths and glens. On some of these islands-great stretches of country, thirty or forty miles long-you will not see a tree at all, large or small. On a particular shooting of some 30,000 acres a ten weeks' residence has so far only revealed to the writer one stunted willow struggling for its existence by a small lochan far out on the moor. Picture -instead of these great mainland woods, and high mountains, and rich pastures, and arable a country for the most part flat, nowhere for many miles rising above 500 or 600 feet. Dot over it countless freshwater lochs, from tiny tarns a gunshot across to big threeor four- or five-mile stretches, and then throw the sea all over it, so that every hollow which is not filled with fresh water is, at high tide, filled with salt. Nothing strikes a stranger more than the almost universal pres ence of the sea. You have it all round you, lying placidly glistening under the bright winter sun, or rolling in great waves tearing and striving with the rocks, always stormy or quiet, dull or bright-of a beautiful pale green. But then you have it inland as well— miles inland you come across it -finding its way by thousands of narrow crooked channels far into the country, carrying its shells and seaweed into the middle of the moors. It takes a stranger a long time to get into his head and understand the ways of this far - wandering salt water: though it helps him in his sport, it sometimes causes him a good deal of trouble and extra labour. You stand in the middle of a seemingly flat plain, miles away from the sea proper, which you can hear sullenly roaring outside. For miles around you lies a level expanse of brown-yellow land. This land is dotted over, it is true, with innumerable sheets of water, large and small; but a man who knew only Caithness Flows or the Moor of Rannoch would think he would have little difficulty in threading his way between them, and getting safely to the lodge. He knows in which direction that harbour of refuge lies. But let him try it for the first time-by himself. When he reaches it, it will be at cost of walking which will cause him no little astonishment and vexation. If |