lounging-chairs, they had fun like boys. It was easy to see that life was glorious for them.

Toward nine o'clock they drifted away, some to the offices, some to the mill, some to telephone to field-men and lay out the next day's cutting. Long after midnight I awoke to hear men coming in; before five o'clock in the morning I heard. men riding away.

They were working like giants, for the grinding season on a big plantation is a giant's work. Every man was at his post night and day. There was a telephone instrument at every man's pillow. I learned during my stay that they awoke automatically if the steady roar of their battle-ship of mill was checked for even a moment in the night.

It was desperate work, but it was done under the right conditions. Every mail brought to the great house the latest books and periodicals from England and America. They had fine horses to ride. There was no luxury that the world could afford that was not theirs if it could be transported to them.

They had come into the land with knowledge, and with money behind them. They had fed the money to the tropics, and the tropics were returning it to them a hundred fold. It is no figure of speech. The modern sugar-mill and plantation are a gold-mine richer than any that the followers of Pizarro found in the mountains of Peru.

The land could not master them. They were masters of it, and only as a master can the white man survive in the tropics as they are.

A month later I was in a great Jamaican "pen," or cattle ranch. It was in one of the most exquisite parts of that exquisite island. My host could not quite say that he counted his cattle on a thousand hills, but he could count ten mountain peaks from his veranda, and the cattle on them all were his.

Here life was not so prodigal as on the Gargantuan sugar-plantation of the Spanish-American land, but there were men and women to do every service that savored of manual work.

Barefooted black maids in stiffly starched dresses and snow-white turbans ran to meet the guests and wait on them from morning till night. The choicest

delicacies of an island rich in delicacies were pressed on one. There were mounts and remounts in the stables at the service of guests.

One morning, as my horse threaded its way among the horde of black laborers, I saw one of a somewhat lighter complexion, the color betokening that slight percentage of white blood that is known as "Sambo" in Jamaica.

I stopped and spoke to him because he had a singular characteristic for one of black blood: his hair was not kinky and had a decided red tinge, and he had a reddish stubble of beard. More singular still, he had perfectly light-blue eyes. His speech, however, when he answered me, was no different from the dialect of the other mountain negroes-a dialect part English, part African, and part purely

Jamaican growth, making almost unintelligible language even to the Jamaican of the lowlands.

I asked my host about him. "Oh, he?" was the reply. "He's a German negro; that is, he 's a descendant from a colony of German peasants that somebody brought here sixty or seventy years ago and planted in the mountains yonder. It was after slavery was abolished, and it was thought that white farmers could work small holdings. Of course, they could n't pull through. They 've disappeared, been swallowed up in our black population. What else could happen? They were poor people, and the English owners of big estates were away above them. There were no white people of their own class, so they went black. Now and then one of 'em, like that chap, still shows his parentage."

East of Jamaica, in the Windward Islands, is a little island where the dialect has a strong Irish brogue. The population is black. There is another black island where the inhabitants use a Dutch dialect. Even to this day their costume is faintly suggestive of old Holland. The original colonists have merged. Every Central American state has its tale of lost white colonies.

"What else could happen?" as my Jamaican host asked. Barred from the society of his white kind, for no poor man

Buy

or one dependent on daily labor can afford to associate with the white men who live in the style in which the ruling white class must live in the tropics, he is forced against his will to associate more or less with blacks or mixed breeds.

Then the time comes when he learns to like them, or at least not to dislike them; for, speaking generally, the poor peasants or peons of the Caribbean tropics are a gentle and amiable people, not at all deserving the reputation of ready bloodshed that the Northern mind associates with the unquiet Spanish Americas. At first the poor Northern white man may loathe them with all the fierce prejudice of the North; but sooner or later tolerance is bound to come, if not to the original colonists, to their children.

Some old enough to have listened to their parents' impassioned talk about God's country may try by hook or crook to reach the States. The others, in whom the call of blood is not so strong, will remain. When they cease to struggle for the white man's share, and are content to take the native's, life becomes easy for them. The tropics that killed their fathers will always give them food. There is no wolf of winter to prepare for. They take the easiest way. It is the law of the survival of the fittest, acting not in slow ages, but in swift generations. It is the law of the imperishable jungle.

of staff, and all that he knows about war he learned from Skobeleff."

Fifteen months later, in the streets of Moscow, I saw a strange procession;many thousands of the poor following a decrepit old white charger while a military band with reversed instruments played Tschaikovsky's dirge. It was the anniversary of Skobeleff's death, and they were performing the rites customary for that day. Millions of ignorant Russians refuse to believe that Skobeleff is dead. It is whispered among them that at the propitious moment he will appear to lead them to victory; that he disapproved of the Japanese war, and therefore did not appear then.

A few days before he sailed for Europe on the trip which ended with his death on the Titanic, Frank D. Millet said to a friend in his studio:

"Skobeleff! How well I remember him! We used to call him 'The Madcap.' That was when he swam the Danube against orders, dashed into Plevna without reinforcements, and committed other little indiscretions of that sort which only a madman or a genius would attempt. Later I came to recognize him as almost a reincarnation of Napoleon. His ambition was literally about the same as Napoleon's. He wanted Russia to conquer the world. I stood with him once on the heights above Constantinople-it was in March, 1878, just before the Treaty of San Stefano-when he outlined to me his schemes, which began with the absorption of the Ottoman Empire, then extended to a conquest of India, and conIcluded with piratical designs on England in Europe. It was unbelievably naïve, and I should have dismissed the talk as the veriest moonshine had I not been a witness during the preceding months to the man's rise from an inferior position, where he was under a cloud, to a lieutenant-generalship, with which he had become the hero of the war. He was then the practical hand which Russia held on Turkey's throat. He died only a few years later, miserable, wasted, futile. A strange man, a great man; I think the most remarkable man I have ever known.”

For years I have been collecting this material, published and unpublished, about Skobeleff from those who knew him and from those who wrote about him. I

LXXXVII-48

remember one sultry summer night in Denver when I was timidly halted by the head porter as I was leaving my hotel. He had seen a Russian mark on my luggage and had learned my occupation. He told me a strange tale of his connection with the Russian police and of his exile. Finally I mentioned the name of Skobeleff. Tears came to his eyes, and he told me what I shall later relate the story current in the underworld of Europe as to the true cause of Skobeleff's death.

Skobeleff himself rises before my imagination as the last of the great beaux sabreurs, those romantic chieftains whose careers have illumined all ages of warfare except the present. His avatars were Alcibiades, Mark Antony, Chevalier Bayard, Sir Philip Sidney, Marshal Saxe, and Marshal Ney. Marshal Ney. Skobeleff ended the line, for modes of warfare and civilization have so changed since his time that there is slight chance of followers.

II

MIKHAIL DMITRIVITCH SKOBEleff was born on his father's estate near Moscow in 1843. Thirty-nine years later, in 1882, he expired miserably in a hovel in the slums of Moscow. If forty marks the beginning of middle age, Skobeleff died still a youth. In fact, the flame of youth inspired his whole life, which was one long boyish escapade, passionately eager, unafraid, illogical, inspired, fatalistic, sublime.

He did not come of noble blood, though his mother was a beautiful woman of cultivated distinction, with forebears among the lesser nobility. His father was a man of the people, son of a self-made merchant whose grandfather had been a Scotch immigrant named Scobie.

The elder Skobeleff served forty years in the Russian army, and was on the active list as a major-general when Mikhail was born. He had his son educated on his estate by a French tutor, from whom the boy learned English, German, French, and Italian. He became an expert linguist, and later mastered, in addition to the five major languages, seventeen dialects of Turkish, Russian, and Caucasian. His boyhood was spent largely on horseback, and he early became a master of the sword and pistol.