salute and answered in a brisk tone, “Your orders shall be attended to, chief!” Then he burst out laughing, slapped Kayerts on the back and shouted, “We shall let life run easily here!  Just sit still and gather in the ivory those savages will bring.  This country has its good points, after all!” They both laughed loudly while Carlier thought:  “That poor Kayerts; he is so fat and unhealthy.  It would be awful if I had to bury him here.  He is a man I respect.” . . .  Before they reached the verandah of their house they called one another “my dear fellow.”

The first day they were very active, pottering about with hammers and nails and red calico, to put up curtains, make their house habitable and pretty; resolved to settle down comfortably to their new life.  For them an impossible task.  To grapple effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine.  No two beings could have been more unfitted for such a struggle.  Society, not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs, had taken care of those two men, forbidding them all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; and forbidding it under pain of death.  They could only live on condition of being machines.  And now, released from the fostering care of men with pens behind the ears, or of men with gold lace on the sleeves, they were like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedom.  They did not know what use to make of their faculties, being both, through want of practice, incapable of independent thought.

At the end of two months Kayerts often would say, “If it was not for my Melie, you wouldn’t catch me here.”  Melie was his daughter.  He had thrown up his post in the Administration of the Telegraphs, though he had been for seventeen years perfectly happy there, to earn a dowry for his girl.  His wife was dead, and the child was being brought up by his sisters.  He regretted the streets, the pavements, the cafes, his friends of many years; all the things he used to see, day after day; all the thoughts suggested by familiar things—­the thoughts effortless, monotonous, and soothing of a Government clerk; he regretted all the gossip, the small enmities, the mild venom, and the little jokes of Government offices.  “If I had had a decent brother-in-law,” Carlier would remark, “a fellow with a heart, I would not be here.”  He had left the army and had made himself so obnoxious to his family by his laziness and impudence, that an exasperated brother-in-law had made superhuman efforts to procure him an appointment in the Company as a second-class agent.  Having not a penny in the world he was compelled to accept this means of livelihood as soon as it became quite clear to him that there was nothing more to squeeze out of his relations.  He, like Kayerts, regretted his old life.  He regretted the clink of sabre and spurs