“I see you have not brought your knapsack back, sir,” said Mr. Baker.
“No,” said I, “and very thankful was I when I had handed it over to those for whom it was intended.”
“I have no doubt you were, sir, for I could see it was a desperate heavy load for you.”
“Indeed it was.” But at this point I brought the discussion to a close.
Two days later I sailed, and reached home early in February 1892. I was married three weeks later, and when the honeymoon was over, set about making the necessary, and some, I fear, unnecessary additions to this book—by far the greater part of which had been written, as I have already said, many months earlier. I now leave it, at any rate for the present, April 22, 1892.
Postscript.—On the last day of November 1900, I received a letter addressed in Mr. Alfred Cathie’s familiar handwriting, and on opening it found that it contained another, addressed to me in my own, and unstamped. For the moment I was puzzled, but immediately knew that it must be from George. I tore it open, and found eight closely written pages, which I devoured as I have seldom indeed devoured so long a letter. It was dated XXIX vii 1, and, as nearly as I can translate it was as follows:—
“Twice, my dearest brother, have I written to you, and twice in successive days in successive years, have I been up to the statues on the chance that you could meet me, as I proposed in my letters. Do not think I went all the way back to Sunch’ston—there is a ranger’s shelter now only an hour and a half below the statues, and here I passed the night. I knew you had got neither of my letters, for if you had got them and could not come yourself, you would have sent someone whom you could trust with a letter. I know you would, though I do not know how you would have contrived to do it.
“I sent both letters through Bishop Kahabuka (or, as his inferior clergy call him, ‘Chowbok’), head of the Christian Mission to Erewhemos, which, as your father has doubtless told you, is the country adjoining Erewhon, but inhabited by a coloured race having no affinity with our own. Bishop Kahabuka has penetrated at times into Erewhon, and the King, wishing to be on good terms with his neighbours, has permitted him to establish two or three mission stations in the western parts of Erewhon. Among the missionaries are some few of your own countrymen. None of us like them, but one of them is teaching me English, which I find quite easy.
“As I wrote in the letters that have never reached you, I am no longer Ranger. The King, after some few years (in the course of which I told him of your visit, and what you had brought me), declared that I was the only one of his servants whom he could trust, and found high office for me, which kept me in close confidential communication with himself.
“About three years ago, on the death of his Prime Minister, he appointed me to fill his place; and it was on this, that so many possibilities occurred to me concerning which I dearly longed for your opinion, that I wrote and asked you, if you could, to meet me personally or by proxy at the statues, which I could reach on the occasion of my annual visit to my mother—yes—and father—at Sunch’ston.
“I sent both letters by way of Erewhemos, confiding them to Bishop Kahabuka, who is just such another as St. Hanky. He tells me that our father was a very old and dear friend of his—but of course I did not say anything about his being my own father. I only inquired about a Mr. Higgs, who was now worshipped in Erewhon as a supernatural being. The Bishop said it was, ‘Oh, so very dreadful,’ and he felt it all the more keenly, for the reason that he had himself been the means of my father’s going to Erewhon, by giving him the information that enabled him to find the pass over the range that bounded the country.
“I did not like the man, but I thought I could trust him with a letter, which it now seems I could not do. This third letter I have given him with a promise of a hundred pounds in silver for his new Cathedral, to be paid as soon as I get an answer from you.
“We are all well at Sunch’ston; so are my wife and eight children—five sons and three daughters—but the country is at sixes and sevens. St. Panky is dead, but his son Pocus is worse.
