“Yes,” he said; “and what’s worse is that we’re here for two years more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China.  Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old, and the steamer stops once every month.”

 [Illustration:  Custom House, Zanzibar.]

Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side, so we had time in which to give the exiles the news of the outside world, and they told us of their present and past lives:  of how one as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy; how another had sold “ready to wear” clothes in a New York department store, and another had been attache at Madrid, and another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship.  We exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.

But at last the ship’s whistle blew with raucous persistence.  It was final and heartless.  It rang down the curtain on the mirage which once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages, of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and flashing hansoms.  With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the Kanzlar became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon line.

I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with never a pang.  But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty group.  We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was more of a salute than a cheer.  I had never seen them before, I shall never meet them again—­we had just burned signals as our ships passed in the night—­and yet, I must always consider among the friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi, “the only respectable members of Chinde Society."[A]

[Footnote A:  NOTE—­I did not lose the white-clad youths.  The lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also, should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society.  He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the Kanzlar, alone prevented his social position being publicly recognized.  That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though tardily, created a member of Chinde’s respectable society.  R.H.D.]