of self.  If he had not inherited Riversdale and its many occupations and duties, he would be to-day an instinctive human being instead of a scrapbook of culture.  For a rich man there is no escape from amusements which do not amuse; Riversdale had robbed him of himself, of manhood; what he understood by manhood was not brawn, but instincts, the calm of instincts in contradiction to the agitation of nerves.  It would have been better to have known only the simple life, the life of these Arabs!  Now they were singing about the camp fires.  Queer were the intervals, impossible of notation, but the rhythms might be gathered... a symphony, a defined scheme....  The monotony of the chant hushed his thoughts, and the sleep into which he fell must have been a deep one.

A long time seemed to have passed between sleeping and waking....

Throwing his blanket aside, he seized his revolvers.  The night was filled with cries as if the camp had been attacked.  But the disturbances was caused by the stampeding of the horses; three had broken their tethers and had gone away, after first tumbling into the reeds, over the hills, neighing frantically.  As his horse was not one of the three it did not matter; the Arabs would catch their horses or would fail to catch them, and indifferent he stood watching the moon hanging low over the landscape, a badly drawn circle, but admirably soft to look upon, casting a gentle, mysterious light down the lake.  The silence was filled with the lake’s warble, and the ducks kept awake by the moon chattered as they dozed, a soft cooing chatter like women gossiping; an Arab came from the wood with dry branches; the flames leaped up, showing through the grey woof of the tent; and, listening to the crackling, Owen muttered “Resinous wood... tamarisk and mastic.”  He fell asleep soon after, and this time his sleep was longer, though not so deep...  He was watching hawks flying in pursuit of a heron when a measured tramp of hooves awoke him, and hard, guttural voices.

“The Arabs have arrived,” he said, and drawing aside the curtain of his tent, he saw at least twenty coming through the blue dusk, white bournous, scimitars, and long-barrelled guns!  “Saharians from the desert, the true bedouin.”

“The bedouin but not the true Saharian,” his dragoman informed him.  And Owen retreated into his tent, thinking of the hawks which the Arabs carried on their wrists, and how hawking had been declining in Europe since the sixteenth century.  But it still flourished in Africa, where to-day is the same as yesterday.

And while thinking of the hawks he heard the voices of the Arabs growing angrier.  Some four or five spurred their horses and were about to ride away; but the dragoman called after them, and Owen cried out, “As if it matters to me which hawk is flown first.”  The quarrel waxed louder, and then suddenly ceased, and when Owen came out of his tent he saw an Arab take the latchet of a bird’s hood in his teeth and pull the other end with his right hand.  “A noble and melancholy bird,” he said, and he stood a long while admiring the narrow, flattened head, the curved beak, so well designed to rend a prey, and the round, clear eye, which appeared to see through him and beyond him, and which in a few minutes would search the blue air mile after mile.