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CHAPTER II A HINT OP THE EAST IN the August of 1887 I happened to be staying in Devonshire, with a friend and neighbour who had returned recently from the East. He was a man of as many wanderings and as many exploits as Ulysses ; and his house from top to bottom was a museum of barbaric treasures. Enormous heads with horns, from the most secret places of Africa, peered down on the glass and flowers of the dinner-table ; the distended jaws of a crocodile yawned over the grand piano ; one went upstairs to bed past rows of poi-soned arrows and the blazing ruby discs of enamelled Eastern shields. Indeed, hardly an object caught the eye anywhere which did not literally, to quote a sentence of Macaulay's, carry the mind 'over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars.' One morning, as I was sitting with my host in the smoking-room, he produced from the cupboards

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