He held the bowl in the hollow of his hand almost tenderly. He seemed unconscious of the scowling looks around him.

At last he sat down on the ledge of the rude fountain, with his face towards the Gippies and the Arabs squatted on the ground, some playing mankalah, others sucking the dry lime leaves, some smoking apathetically, and others still gasping and staring.

One man with the flicker of insanity in his eyes suddenly ran forward and threw himself on the ground before Wyndham Bimbashi.

he

"In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful-water!" cried. "Water-I am dying, effendi,

whom God preserve!"

"Nile water is sweet; you shall drink it before morning, Mahommed," answered Wyndham quietly. "God will preserve your life till the Nile water cool your throat."

"Before dawn, O effendi?" gasped the Arab.

"Before dawn, by the mercy of God," answered Wyndham; and for the first time in his life he had a burst of imagination. The Orient had touched him at last.

"Is not the song of the sakkia in thine ear, Mahommed:

a man of Fayoum who chanted the Fatihah from the Koran.

Wyndham looked at them all and pondered. "If the devils out there would only attack us!" he said between his teeth, "" or if we could only attack them!" he added, and he nervously hastened his footsteps; for to him this inaction was terrible. "They'd forget their thirst if they were fighting," he muttered, and then he frowned; for the groans of the horses behind the house came to his ear. In desperation he went inside and climbed to the roof, where he could see the circle of the enemy.

It was no use. They were three to one, and his Gippies were demoralized. It would be a fine bit of pluck to try and cut his way through the Hadendowas to the Nile, but how many would reach it?

No, he had made his full measure of mistakes, he would not add to the list. If Hassan got through to Berber his Gippies here would be relieved; and there would be no more blood on his head. Relieved-and when they were relieved, what of himself, Wyndham Bimbashi? He knew what men would say in Cairo, what men would say at the War Office in London town, at "the Rag," everywhere! He could not look his future in the face. He felt that every man in Egypt, save himself, had known all along that he was a complete failure. It did not matter while he himself was not conscious of it, but now that the armour-plate of conceit

The man rose from his knees. A vision of his home in the Mirkaz of Minieh passed before him. He stretched out his hands and sang in the vibrating monotone of his people :

"Turn, O Sakkia, to the right, and turn to the left;

Who will take care of me if my father dies!
Who will give me water to drink, and the
cucumber vine at my door:
Turn, O Sakkia!"

Then he crept back again to the wall of the house where he huddled between a Berberine playing a darabukkeh and

torn away on the reefs of foolish deeds, it mattered everything. For when his conceit was peeled away, there was left a crimson cuticle of the Wyndham pride of the Wyndham Bimbashi pride! Certainly he could not attack. the Hadendowas; he had had his eternal fill of sorties !

And he could not wait for the relief party, for his Gippies and the friendlies were famishing, dying of thirst. He prayed for night. How slowly the minutes, the hours, passed; and how bright was the moon when it rose; brighter even than it was when Hassan

crept out to steal through the Arab lines !

At midnight Wyndham Bimbashi stole softly out of a gate in the garden wall, and, like Hassan, dropping to the ground, crept towards a patch of maize lying between the house and the river. He was dressed like a fellah, with the long blue yelek, a poor wool fez, and round the fez was a white cloth, as it were to protect his mouth from the night air, after the manner of the peas

ant.

The fires of the enemy were dying down, and only here and there Arabs gossiped or drank coffee by the embers. At last Wyndham was able to drop into the narrow channel, now dry, through which, when the sluice was open and the sakkia turned, the water flowed to the house. All went well till he was within a hundred yards of the wheel, though now and again he could hear sentries snoring or talking just above him. Suddenly he heard breathing an arm's length before him, then a figure raised itself and a head turned towards him. The Arab had been asleep, but his hand ran to his knife by instincttoo late, for Wyndham's fingers were at his throat, and he had neither time nor chance to cry "Allah" before the breath left him!

Wyndham crept on. The sound of the sakkia was in his ears, the long, creaking, crying song filling the night. And now there rose the Song of the Sakkia from the man at the wheel:

"Turn, O Sakkia, to the right, and turn to the left:

The heron feeds by the water side-shall I starve in my onion field!

Shall the Lord of the World withhold his tears that water the land; Turn, O Sakkia !"

The cold white stars, the deep cold blue the far-off Libyan hills in a gold and opal glow, the smell of the desert, the deep swish of the Nile, the Song of the Sakkia! .

Wyndham Bimbashi's heart beat faster, his blood flowed quicker, he strangled a sigh in his breast. Here, with death on every hand, with immediate danger and a fearful peril before him, out of the smell of the desert

and the ghostly glow of the Libyan hills there came a memory—a memory of a mistake he had made years before with a woman. She had never forgiven him for the mistake-he knew that now. He knew that no woman

could ever forgive the blunder he had made-not a blunder of love but a blunder of self-will and an unmanly, unmannerly conceit. It had nearly wrecked her life; and he only realized it now, in the moment of clear-seeing which comes to everyone once in this life. Well, it was something to have seen the mistake at last!

He was near the sluice-gate now. It was impossible to open it without the fellah on the water-wheel seeing him. He crept

There was another way.

close and closer to the wheel. The breath of the blindfolded buffalo was in his face, he drew himself up lightly and quickly beside the buffalo-he was making no blunder now! The fellah still sang:

"Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left:

For the chargers that ride the bersim waits.."

The great jars on the wheel emptied their splashes of water into the trough for the channel.

Suddenly Wyndham Bimbashi leapt from behind the buffalo upon the fellah and smothered his head and mouth in the white cloth he had brought. There was a moment's struggle, then, as the wheel went slower and slower, and the patient buffalo stopped, Wyndham Bimbashi dropped the gagged but living fellah into a trench by the sakkia, and calling to the buffalo, slid over swiftly, opened the sluice-gate of the channel which fed the house, and closed that leading to the Arab encampment.

Then he sat down where the fellah had sat, and the sakkia droned its mystic music over the river, and the desert and the plain. But the buffalo moved slowly-the fellah's song had been a spur to its travel, as the cameldriver's song is to the caravan in the waste of sands. Wyndham Bimbashi hesitated an instant, then as the first trickle of water entered the garden of the house where his Gippies and the

"Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left:

Who will take care of me, if my father dies!
Who will give me water to drink, and the
cucumber vine at my door :
Turn, O Sakkia!"

If he had but one hour longer there would be enough water for men and horses for days-twenty jars of water pouring-pouring all the time!

Now and again a figure came towards the wheel, but not close enough to see that the one sluice-gate had been shut and the other opened. One hour passed, an hour and a half, and then the end came.

The gagged fellah had managed to free his mouth, and though his feet were bound also and he could not loose them at once, he gave a loud call for help. From dying fires here and there Arab sentries sprang to. their feet with rifles and lances.

Wyndham Bambashi's work was done. He leapt from the sakkia, and ran towards the house. Shot after shot was fired at him, lances were thrown, and once an Arab barred his way suddenly. He pistolled him and ran on. A lance caught him in the left arm. He tore it out and pushed forward. Stooping once, he caught up an Arab sword from the ground. When he was within fifty yards of the house, four Hadendowas intercepted him. He slashed through, then turned with his pistol and fired as he ran

He was within ten yards of it, and had fired his last shot, when a bullet crashed through his jaw.

A dozen Gippies ran out, dragged him in, and closed the gate.

The last thing Wyndham Bimbashi did before he died in the grey of dawn -and this is told of him by the Gippies themselves-was to cough up the bullet from his throat, and spit it out upon the ground. The Gippies thought it a miraculous feat and that he had done it in scorn of the Hadendowas.

Before another sunrise and sunset had come, Wyndham Bimbashi's men were relieved by the garrison of Berber, after a hard fight.

There are Englishmen in Egypt who still speak slightingly of Wyndham Bimbashi; but the British officer who buried him hushed a gossiping dinnerparty a few months ago in Cairo by saying:

"Lightly they'll speak of the spirit that's gone,
And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him;
But little he'll reck if they let him sleep on
In the grave where the Gippies have laid him."

And he did not apologize for paraphrasing the famous ballad. He has shamed Egypt at last into a sort of admiration of Wyndham Bimbashi, to the deep satisfaction of Hassan the Soudanese boy, who received his fifty pounds and to this day wears the belt that once kept him in the narrow path of duty.

THE policy of the open door is the

policy of the Imperial Government. It is not a party policy; it is an Imperial policy. Wherever the influence of the Imperial Government extends to the commercial life of nations directly under its control that system prevails and sound government is the result. It is an announcement to the nations of the world that the British are prepared to compete with them upon their own soil or under their own flag without fear or favour. In the self-governing branches of the British Empire, the attitude of the Imperial Government is one of neutrality; it virtually says: "You have to work out your career as nations; you have to gain your own experience. Canada, you are two centuries old; Africa, you have passed your first centennial; Australia, threequarters of a century has passed over your head. All we can do is to set you an example drawn from the experience of generations, and so far as you can bring yourselves to accommodate the necessities of your national lives to our policy, we can safely recommend you to follow it."

I do not think any one will deny that the rule of the Imperial Government has been for good. Its principles have been cast in a high mould, and its government of inferior races has been productive of the best results. That is the verdict of the world at large. That rival powers are disposed to view with jealousy the solid advance of the Imperial Government of Great Britain and Ireland as leader of the world is not to be wondered at.

Their fighting

powers have not been brought into play against it, but they have sought to make their commercial powers do duty to overcome the absolute indiffer

ence of the Imperial Government tc competition in trade or in finance. By

of protective duties, export bounties and artificial methods they have attempted to exclude British trade from not only their own bounds, but wherever their flag waves in distant portions of the earth. Increasing their armaments and testing the financial strength of Great Britain to keep pace does not produce a ripple on the surface of British finance, and the determination to keep the power of the navy equal to that of any other two nations is not beyond the annual resources of the revenue. The process of exhaustion has been heavier on the constitutions of foreign powers than it has been on that of the British Isles.

The national constitution should be just as much an object of care and solicitude as his own constitution is to an individual. Wisdom has guided those upon whom devolves the responsibility of preserving the constitution of the British Empire in a healthy state. What are its characteristics? Liberty of action, liberty of conscience and liberty of commerce to find its own level.

We have a place in the British Empire. Our political rule of life is moulded upon its constitution; but with that liberty of action which is its basic principle, we have to exercise wisdom to preserve our constitution in a healthy state, and upon us as Canadians devolves the whole responsibility. We have a place on this continent which is our own, alongside of a friendly neighbour with whom we are closely allied by natural ties. To work out our national life, not as a counter-irritant to theirs, but with collateral aims, seems to be the path of duty. We have attained a vigorous manhood, our national boun

daries are fairly well defined, and within their radius we have our own problems to solve in carving out the future of Canada.

A careless, or off some tongues a designed, expression is often used, that "Posterity has done nothing for me. Ergo, it is my privilege to drink to the dregs the present life which is mine." The sentiment is weak. The man or the woman who cares little what comes after them in private, municipal, provincial or national life does a wrong which dips far into the future, and a wrong which it is difficult to remedy. Wasting our national resources is just as bad as wasting our individual physical resources. The first duty of our national Government in order to maintain its national strength, which is proportioned to the respect it is able to maintain among the nations of the earth for good government, is to preserve its financial strength. The plea that the national Government is responsible for the prosperity of the individuals composing the nation does not hold good except in the wisdom of the laws which regulate their action one towards another.

What is the financial strength of our national Government or of any Government? It is its taxable power, the revenue from which should be a reflex of the prosperity of the people; to the extent that it divides that taxable power with class or corporate interests, to that extent is its financial strength weakened and its power for good in the national life of the people is also weakened. We have drifted into a policy that produces this result. The people are taxed upon their necessaries of life for protective purposes; a small portion of our industrial classes are protected by a tax against outsiders. To the extent which that taxation is imposed the revenue derived from that taxation is divided between the manufacturers and protected industries on one side, with the Government on the other, whereas the whole of the taxation the people are called upon to bear should be diverted solely into the treasury.

Take our iron industry for an ex

ample; a protective duty was imposed upon our pig iron of $4.00 per ton, now reduced to $2.50. At the end of fourteen years this has resulted, in 1898, in a production of 77,000 tons in the whole of Canada, while our neighbours to the south produce 15,000,000 tons, and Great Britain 12,000,000 tons. That duty on pig iron necessitated duties all along the line of iron industries ranging up to forty per cent., entailing last year a direct tax of $3,500,ooo on imports which went into the revenue, and a corresponding amount of taxation induced by the monopoly, the proceeds of which went into the pockets of protected classes. What for? To bring into life the production of raw material to the extent of 77,000 tons, valued at $770,000! Whereas by giving the iron workers free iron they would be in a better position to hold the home market, and also to compete in the foreign market, and a tax of $9,000,000 divided between the revenue and private parties would not be resting upon the people.

Another example: take spirits; the excise is $1.90 pergallon, the dutyis $2.40, the difference, fifty cents, should go to the treasury but it goes to build up private fortunes. In England the excise is $2.50, the duty is four cents less, consequently the Government get all there is in the taxation.

In

And so you can go through the whole range of customs taxation. England the whole of the taxation goes to revenue; in Canada it is divided with favoured classes. In the United States it is the same. A forcible feature has presented itself there from the fact that the excess of exports over imports is enormous. Twelve hundred and sixty millions was the value of the exports last year, and the imports are six hundred and fifty millions less; twice as much of their material resources has gone out of the country as has been returned to it. The why and the wherefore has yet to be ascertained; it is presumably the effect of high protective taxation which drains. the country and paralyzes the revenue.

In Great Britain the reverse condi