Scotland, and this is my first visit to my native country, as my
friend Mr Amos was telling you.'

The consumptive looked at me suspiciously. 'We've got two-
three of the comrades here that the cawpitalist Government expelled
from the Transvaal. If ye're our way of thinking, ye will maybe
ken them.'

I said I would be overjoyed to meet them, but that at the time of
the outrage in question I had been working on a mine a thousand
miles further north.

Then ensued an hour of extraordinary talk. Tombs in his sing-
song namby-pamby University voice was concerned to get information.
He asked endless questions, chiefly of Gilkison, who was the
only one who really understood his language. I thought I had never
seen anyone quite so fluent and so futile, and yet there was a kind
of feeble violence in him like a demented sheep. He was engaged in
venting some private academic spite against society, and I thought
that in a revolution he would be the class of lad I would personally
conduct to the nearest lamp-post. And all the while Amos and
Macnab and Niven carried on their own conversation about the
affairs of their society, wholly impervious to the tornado raging
around them.

It was Mr Norie, the editor, who brought me into the discussion.

'Our South African friend is very blate,' he said in his boisterous
way. 'Andra, if this place of yours wasn't so damned teetotal and
we had a dram apiece, we might get his tongue loosened. I want to