At the Post Office in Main Street, I gave Mr. Dixon a few last messages for home—he one to me for some Egyptian friends; and, with a shake and a wave, we parted, to meet in London after between us completing the circuit of the globe.

This time again I was not alone: an Irish miner from Montana, with a bottle of whiskey, a revolver and pick, shared the back seat with the mail-bags. Before we had forded the Jordan, he had sung “The Wearing of the Green,” and told me the day and the hour at which the Republic was to be proclaimed at his native village in Galway. Like a true Irishman of the South or West, he was happy only when he could be generous; and so much joy did he show when I discovered that the cork had slipped from my flask, and left me dependent on him for my escape from the alkaline poison, that I half believed he had drawn it himself when we stopped to change horses for mules. Certain it is that he pressed his whiskey so fast upon me and the various drivers, that the day we most needed its aid there was none, and the bottle itself had ended its career by serving as a target for a trial of breech-loading pistols.