unable to direct their own movements. Preposterous!" And then, making an
observation which I will not print, he suggested mildly that we might
fix up all matters ourselves.

Within an hour an English-speaking "one piece cook" had secured the
berth, which carried a salary of twenty-five dollars per month, we were
well on the way with the engaging of our boat for the Gorges trip, and
one by one our troubles vanished.

Laying in stores, however, was not the lightest of sundry perplexities.
Curry and rice had been suggested as the staple diet for the river
journey; and we ordered, with no thought to the contrary, a picul of
best rice, various brands of curries, which were raked from behind the
shelves of a dingy little store in a back street, and presented to us
at alarming prices--enough to last a regiment of soldiers for pretty
well the number of days we two were to travel; and, for luxuries, we
laid in a few tinned meats. All was practically settled, when The Other
Man, settling his eyes dead upon me, yelled--

"Dingle, you've forgotten the milk!" And then, after a moment, "Oh,
well, we can surely do without milk; it's no use coming on a journey
like this unless one can rough it a bit." And he ended up with a rude
reference to the disgusting sticky condensed milk tins, and we wandered
on.

Suddenly he stopped, did The Other Man. He looked at a small stone on
the pavement for a long time, eventually cruelly blurting out, directly
at me, as if it were all my misdoing: "The sugar, the sugar! We _must_
have sugar, man." I said nothing, with the exception of a slight remark
that we might do without sugar, as we were to do without milk. There was