the plains. He did not leave without a pang our little station by the river. He was deeply attached to it, as indeed he generally became to places wherein it was his fate to live for any considerable time. He had a strong sense of indebtedness to external things. 'All that I experience is I,' he once wrote to me, and I am that. I am the food I eat, the books I read. I am the July rain, and the sunlight of this November morning.' And again, ‘I never leave a place where I have lived long without leaving also at least a third of myself behind. The greater part of this remnant ultimately disentangles itself, I suppose, and straggles after me, but some of it remains, and is reabsorbed into the inanimate world from which it was derived. This "truncated" feeling always bewilders me when I migrate. I often wonder why what is left behind is not equally troublesome to my successors there.' He had added between the lines as an afterthought, 'Perhaps it is, only they don't understand the reason of their trouble.'

a

He consoled himself very effectually, however, for his departure from the scene of his last years in service. He bought a house in the Indragiri Hills, a lodge originally built, I believe, by a tea planter, and by him styled, for local reasons, Halfway House name which Postlethwaite, but with symbolical intent, retained. There I visited him several times during the last ten years of his life. Halfway House was about four miles distant from a well-known hill station. It lay just below the brim of a lovely basin of the hills, and looked westward across the valley into a splendid waterfall. From its immediate terraces arose a solemn troop of pines of different species, such as flourish so vigorously in the hospitable climate of the Indragiris; and Postlethwaite had laid out part of

the garden before them in the Chinese fashion, with a mimic stream and a little bridge, stone lanterns, mounds of rock, and a marsh for irises little. regions which he whimsically dignified, according to classical Far Eastern example, with a geography of imposing Chinese names, of which I remember only that a certain hillock of clean sand was nominally dedicated to the Contemplation of the Honorable Moon. At the back of this quaint pleasance, and somewhat apart from the main house, he had built a delightful Chinese apartment, or rather a set of apartments, for it was divisible at will by means of paper panels, upon the spotless planks of whose little lowrailed balcony he could sit like an Ashikaga and see the far-off waterfall in a frame of pine boughs, a picture visited by the breath of heaven, an aerial, and magic fresco, charged with alteration and tremulously musical. He had spent much of his time in the Far East, and during his last years his delighted fancy followed more piously than before the tortuous paths of the Far Eastern mind. The curve was characteristic of Postlethwaite's sensitive response to environment. In the plains the trend of his thought had latterly become from year to year more notably Indian, abstract and subjective; but in the temperate air and amid the romantic mountain grandeur of the Indragiris he was reminded again of the great landscape painters of China and Japan, and his native interest, his temperamental bias toward absorption in the visible beauty of the world, was confirmed and rejuvenated.

I found him, therefore, a more delightful companion than ever; but his habits had become crystallized with time and living much alone, and his devotion to nature had taken upon itself a certain ritual solemnity, which he treated only half seriously himself, but

which was rendered almost formidable by the air of half-comprehending reverence with which his sister, who kept house for him, and the household of long-service familiars, had grown accustomed to surround it. Postlethwaite, I should have stated, had at his retirement taken for a time to color photography, had become in fact something of a pioneer in that study; and the brilliant glass transparencies which he produced were known throughout the province. He would conduct me, then, through the secrets of his chemicals, in which, to tell the truth, I was by temperament little interested; and he was content to find me a more intelligent collaborator in his gardening - a pursuit upon which he spent much time, not only in his metaphysical Chinese parterre, but amid the more sensuous profusion of the outer garden, whose floral paragons, chiefly roses, were famous throughout those years even among the gorgeous exhibits of the Indragiri Flower Show. He allowed me also to lend a hand in the care of his cattle, enormous milk-white creatures of both sexes, the result of a cross which he had initiated between certain Australian breeds and the stately zebus of Nellore.

I found, however, that he preferred to be left entirely to himself for certain considerable and well-marked portions of the day. He had always professed a periodical, I may say a daily, need of solitude as pressing as that which others feel for company. This appetite of his, I found, had grown with exercise, was more deliberately indulged, less tolerant of dispensation, than of old. The first hours of the day he had always reserved for himself, and now, though he was often seen about the farm in the early morning, he was always uncommunicative at such times, breakfasted alone, and did not appear in public until ten. An hour after

lunch (and here lay the innovation) he was off again, generally for a long ramble, and he took tea alone, and rather late, on the balcony of the Chinese lodge. There he would sit smoking in his dressing gown until long after the colors had faded from the sky above the waterfall. The household were particularly careful not to disturb him at this time, which they seemed to regard as the most sacred hour of the master's day. At dinner he appeared, genial and almost worldly, but still clad in his quaint Chinese dressing gown, unless there were unfamiliar visitors. From dinner onward he was entirely at his guest's disposal, and we would sit until the small hours talking of life and art and science and history, of men and beasts and plants, of the kingdoms of this world, and of the kingdom of God.

Sometimes Postlethwaite would go out alone for the day, and the household were not perturbed if he even failed to return by bedtime, for he would sometimes sleep in the house of some friend at the far end of a favorite ramble. Sometimes, too, he and I and the camera or sketchbooks, for he dropped his photography before the end - would spend a day upon the hills together, but for the most part the order of the days was as I have described. It suited my own humor well enough, as I was fond of sketching from nature and, like the majority of AngloIndians outside novels, used to being long alone; and I never spent happier days than those which are associated with the memory of that curious hermitage, with its choice, full-blooded roses and oxen, white and red, its great, symbolic pine trees, and gracious dreams, on the lovely hillside over against the waterfall.

After living ten years in this retreat, the master was moved to leave it for the last ramble, of which we had so

often spoken together; and became, as he had loved to think, 'a portion of that loveliness,' which his life, for those at least who knew him well, had made more lovely. This event, so sorrowful to his friends, does not, however, mark the end of my story; nor perhaps of his, but I will proceed with mine. His excellent sister remained at Halfway House, though it was several years before I had the heart to visit her there. One day, however, she wrote that she wished to consult me on some matter connected with the disposal of his photographic patents, and I took advantage of a brief Easter vacation to go to her.

I found the house and grounds very much as he had left them. His books, his portfolios, his laboratory, the Chinese lodge and its quaint garden, had been preserved with an exact and pious care. The beeves and the roses, or their descendants, were as large and beautiful as ever, for of the beeves, at least, his sister had always known as much as, or more than, he. But in the neighborhood, beyond the pale of the sanctuary, heart-rending change had been at work. The rude mountain track below the house had become a metaled road, where periodic motor cars ran dustily. Above the trees that fringed the northern rim of the valley basin could be seen some of the roofs of the military settlement of Marlborough, which had grown up around the new cordite factory beyond. Worst of all, they had dammed the stream above the fall, and taken the water away to drive the factory engines.

Its naked cataract - I would rather say, its empty throne - still shone across the valley, a very metaphor of desolation, but beautiful still in its dumb suggestiveness the tall embrasure of yellow rock whorled and rounded by the corrosion of its vanished waters, the tumultuous fringe of trees

and creepers as thick, and almost as green, as when they trembled in the breeze and thunder of the fall. Few mere sights could be more poignant than the aspect of this void rock as I saw it between the pines from the balcony of the Chinese apartment on the morning after my arrival. The waterfall had always seemed to dominate the valley, to be the high altar, as it were, of an open-air cathedral; rather it had seemed a living presence, which had governed the orientation of that populous chapel of the cathedral which was Halfway House. The hills, the house itself, seemed strangely silent now, for although the sound of the great fall had come to us muffled from afar, and sweetened, as it were, with atmosphere, its pervasive murmur was the only silence that we knew. This hard and utter numbness, like the naked gash in the green heart of the hillside opposite, into which the morning sunlight now shone so pitilessly, was like the palpable and hopeless absence of my friend an absence now raised to the power of a tragedy in nature.

But that evening at sundown, as I sat in the same place, the place and hour wherein the master of the house was wont to keep his ritual contemplation, sat and dreamed of him and of the days that were gone with him, almost suddenly the valley was filled with the familiar murmur, and lifting my eyes I saw the streams come down over the rock as of old. For more than an hour I watched and heard them, for it was as if my friend himself had appeared and spoke with me. I saw the long, throbbing veils of silver fade into the twilight. I could even see, with a strength beyond my usual vision, with a sharpness which reminded me of that eagle eyesight upon which my friend himself was wont, even to the last, to pride himself, the white plumes of the water overlap and follow one another

into the gulf, like the breast of a great swan, the bird of creative Brahma, sinking forever through the void; and when at last I rose and went into the house the chant of the cataract still rang clear out of the darkness. My spirit was deeply moved, and my emotion, perhaps, made me refrain from speaking of the matter to my hostess that night. Afterward I wondered more prosaically that the people at the factory should allow so much water to run to waste. But when I was told by the old butler, after my hostess had retired, that no great quantity of water ever came over the old way now, and when I went out later and found the night all black and silent, a different kind of awe came upon me, and a conviction drew to light which was confirmed next day by the information given me at the factory-a conviction which I had perhaps subconsciously entertained from the first, but in the hour of deep feeling had regarded as based upon a distinction of no moment; the conviction, namely, that those were no material waters that I had seen and heard.

When I waited in the twilight the next evening, and when again, only a little later, the vision, the voice and the vision, were vouchsafed me, and again with that strange sensuous distinctness, my courage for a moment quailed, until the love and memory of my dead friend overshadowed every other feeling. That night I waited until the voice of the waterfall failed upon the darkness as softly as it came.

An illusion of the mind, you will say the work of memory and overwrought regret. But wait.

Afterward, when I was bidding my hostess good-night and good-bye, she held my hand and said to me, 'You have seen it, then?' I said yes, I had seen it.

'I too saw it once,' she said, with

tears in her eyes, but I thought there was gladness in the voice. "That was two years ago. But you have seen it twice within three days. You were a dear friend of his.' And thus, with shining eyes, and a certain sweetness in our hearts, we parted, and I never saw her again; for she too went forth finally from Halfway House not long after, but not until she had seen the phantom waterfall once more, for she wrote of it in one of her last letters.

That is all I have to tell. I am no mystic and a poor metaphysician, and I have searched in vain in my own mind and among current psychological and philosophical theories, aye, and ransacked the ancient wisdom of the East, for an explanation of that beloved and lovely mystery of the South Indian mountains. That it was in some way a manifestation, a unique and intimate manifestation, of the personality of our dear dead comrade, neither his sister nor myself had ever a doubt. She at least was content to leave the matter there; but Postlethwaite himself, in similar case, would not have been so, and I would willingly follow, if I could, the example of that fervent searcher of the spirit. My old friend neither greatly desired nor expected a personal survival other than objective, and I for one still see no clear reason to suppose that he now holds another opinion; but we cannot exclude the possibility that his disembodied spirit directly spoke to us in the garden house that he loved. Or had the repeated ardors of past contemplation established nomes and rhythms of the world-stuff thereabout that shook like an echo along the years, and played upon the sympathetic brain, as upon an instrument attuned, a symphony that spoke with all the subtle organ stops of sense? Or had our own poignant emotion induced in us a state, as it were, of backward clairvoyance, which for a time brought us into

touch once more, not only with the virgin waterfall, but with the mind of the sage for whom it had ever been a symbol of such heart-uplifting sanctities? I write only in vague suggestion, feeling as I do that these conjectures are at best but parts and aspects of the solution that I seek. I have long suspected, however, that the past and the future alike exist, in a sense, now, and are perhaps even accessible to the living sense and mind of us, had we but strength and skill to find our way to

them, or, if you wish, to summon them to us.

Marlborough has grown apace of late, I am told, and hill villas, with pretty posy names, have begun to grow up along the road by Halfway House, and to stare into the vacant cataract. I wonder whether any of their inmates ever see the phantom waterfall!

For myself, circumstances have borne me far, but I still hope to go back there again before I die, to see whether my old friend will remember me.

THE other day I attended a luncheon at the Civic Centre. It had been planned in the interest of law enforcement, which in this instance, as in most others, meant enforcement of the Volstead Act. This luncheon was not intended as a woman's affair, but was open to the general public; and men would have been even more welcome than women, since it is, on the whole, the men rather than the women who need to be convinced that the necessity for enforcing this particular act is imperative. But of an audience of between fifty and sixty only two were men. I scrutinized them carefully. They were not clergymen or newspaper men; from their expressions I hardly judged them to be Volstead enthusiasts, and so I concluded that they were just husbands.

Their faces showed complete uninterest tinged with hostility as we listened to the various speeches, most of which were more or less openly

triumphing. Almost every speaker recapitulated the history of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and described the Prohibition Amendment as woman's great political achievement - a statement which is at least partly true. It is certain that this is the first time in the history of any known civilization that the women of a nation, working together, have promulgated a far-reaching law to which the men as a whole are more or less opposed. The thrill felt by the women at the luncheon as they realized — some of them, perhaps, for the first time the enormous political power of women working as a group was obviously not shared by the men.

Perceiving this, it seemed to me that I perceived also the underlying reason why the relatively unimportant question of 'to drink or not to drink' has suddenly resolved itself into the paramount issue in America to-dayan issue all discussion of which is