THE TRIBES ON MY FRONTIER, 



West. When this is on them, South Sea Bubbles, Bombay 

 share manias, diamond fevers, gold-mine crazes, are tem- 

 perate, judicious, and well-considered movements compared 

 with their behaviour. Science has never settled what it is 

 precisely that sets them a-going. It seems likely that 

 something does this. What is quite certain, however, is, 

 that when once set a-going, they keep going. I have stood 

 near one of the parade grounds at Poona and watched 

 them. With scarce a pause to rest their wings or sip a 

 flower, from eight or nine o'clock until the afternoon, as far 

 as eye could reach, the host kept streaming past, like the 

 fugitive Gauls after one of Caesar's great battles. And in 

 their fate, too, I fear they resembled those barbarian hordes, 

 when a deep river at last barred their weary way, and they 

 tumbled headlong, one upon another, into its reddening 

 waters ; for I stood again another year beside the Bombay 

 harbour, and watched the frenzied myriads hurrying from 

 the mainland over Elephanta, and across the sea and over 

 Bombay or Karinja for their direction was somewhat 

 southerly and then ? Then, I suppose, over the sea, and 

 on and on and on and on, until darkness settling down on 

 them, and their amazing strength at last ebbing away, they 

 must have dropped' into the waves, each one, as it fell, 



