Luckily the war has made eggs too expensive for me to fear the public will pelt me off the stage with them.

Still after years of writing one naturally dreads the cold potato and the orange-peel.

I once in talking said to a celebrated dancer who was about to bid farewell to her admirers and retire to private life, “Perhaps you will take a benefit when you come back from finishing your last tour.” She answered, “Yes . . .”; and then added, “or perhaps two.”

That is not my way, for all my life I have loved bread, bread, and wine, wine, not caring for half-measures, like your true Scot, of whom it has been said, “If he believes in Christianity he has no doubts, and if he is a disbeliever he has none either.”Once in the Sierra Madre, either near the Santa Rosa Mountains or in the Bolson de MÁpimi, I disremember which, out after horses that had strayed, we came upon a little shelter made of withies, and covered with one of those striped blankets woven by the Navajos.

A Texan who was with the party pointed to it, and said, “That is a wickey-up, I guess.”

The little wigwam, shaped like a gipsy tent, stood close to a thicket of huisachÉ trees in flower. Their round and ball-like blossoms filled the air with a sweet scent. A stream ran gently tinkling over its pebbly bed, and the tall prairie grasses flowed up to the lost little hut as if they would engulf it like a sea.

On every side of the deep valley—for I forgot to say the hut stood in a valley—towered hills with great, flat, rocky sides. On some of them the Indian tribes had scratched rude pictures, records of their race.

In one of them—I remember it just as if now it was before my eyes—an Indian chief, surrounded by his friends, was setting free his favourite horse upon the prairies, either before his death or in reward of faithful services. The little group of men cut in the stone, most probably with an obsidian arrow-head, was life-like, though drawn without perspective, which gave those figures of a vanished race an air of standing in the clouds.

The chief stood with his bridle in his hand, his feather war-bonnet upon his head, naked except the breech-clout. His bow was slung across his shoulders and his quiver hung below his arm, and with the other hand he kept the sun off from his face as he gazed upon his horse. All kinds of hunting scenes were there displayed, and others, such as the burial of a chief, a dance, and other ceremonials, no doubt as dear to those who drew them as are the rites in a cathedral to other faithful. The flat rock bore one more inscription, stating that Eusebio Leal passed by bearing despatches, and the date, June the fifteenth, of the year 1687. But to return again to the lone wickey-up.

We all sat looking at it: Eustaquio Gomez, Polibio Medina, Exaltacion Garcia, the Texan, two Pueblo Indians, and I who write these lines.

Somehow it had an eerie look about it, standing so desolate, out in those flowery wilds.

Inside it lay the body of a man, with the skin dry as parchment, and his arms beside him, a Winchester, a bow and arrows, and a lance. Eustaquio, taking up an arrow, after looking at it, said that the dead man was an Apache of the Mescalero band, and then, looking upon the ground and pointing out some marks, said, “He had let loose his horse before he died, just as the chief did in the picture-writing.”

That was his epitaph, for how death overtook him none of us could conjecture; but I liked the manner of his going off the stage.

’Tis meet and fitting to set free the horse or pen before death overtakes you, or before the gentle public turns its thumbs down and yells, “Away with him.”

Charles Lamb, when some one asked him something of his works, answered that they were to be found in the South Sea House, and that they numbered forty volumes, for he had laboured many years there, making his bricks with the least possible modicum of straw,—just like the rest of us.

Mine, if you ask me, are to be found but in the trails I left in all the years I galloped both on the prairies and the pampas of America.

Hold it not up to me for egotism, O gentle reader, for I would have you know that hardly any of the horses that I rode had shoes on them, and thus the tracks are faint.

Vale.

R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.