[Footnote 2: Interview with Mr. Edward Levis made for this Magazine.]
A TALE OF BRAVE DEEDS AND PERILOUS VENTURES.
BY ANTHONY HOPE, AUTHOR OF "THE PRISONER OF ZENDA," ETC.
_Quot homines, tot sententiæ_; so many men, so many fancies. My fancy was for an island. Perhaps boyhood's glamour hung still round sea-girt rocks, and "faery lands forlorn" still beckoned me; perhaps I felt that London was too full, the Highlands rather fuller, the Swiss mountains most insufferably crowded of them all. "Money can buy company," and it can buy retirement. The latter service I asked now of the moderate wealth with which my poor cousin Tom's death had endowed me. Everybody was good enough to suppose that I rejoiced at Tom's death, whereas I was particularly sorry for it, and was not consoled even by the prospects of the island. My friends understood this wish for an island as little as they appreciated my feelings about poor Tom. Beatrice was most emphatic in declaring that "a horrid little island" had no charms for her, and that she would never set foot in it. This declaration was rather annoying, because I had imagined myself spending my honeymoon with Beatrice on the island; but life is not all honeymoon, and I decided to have the island none the less. In the first place, I was not to be married for a year. Mrs. Kennett Hipgrave had insisted on this delay in order that we might be sure that we knew our own hearts. And as I may say without unfairness that Mrs. Hipgrave was to a considerable degree responsible for the engagement--she asserted the fact herself with much pride--I thought that she had a right to some voice in the date of the marriage. Moreover, the postponement gave me exactly time to go over and settle affairs in the island.
For I had bought it. It cost me seven thousand five hundred and fifty pounds--rather a fancy price, but I could not haggle with the old lord--half to be paid to the lord's bankers in London, and the second half to him in Neopalia, when he delivered possession to me. The Turkish government had sanctioned the sale, and I had agreed to pay a hundred pounds yearly as tribute. This sum, I was entitled, in my turn, to levy on the inhabitants.
"In fact, my dear lord," said old Mason to me when I called on him in Lincoln's Inn Fields, "the whole affair is settled. I congratulate you on having got just what was your whim. You are over a hundred miles from the nearest land--Rhodes, you see." (He laid a map before me.) "You are off the steamship tracks; the Austrian Lloyds to Alexandria leave you far to the northeast. You are equally remote from any submarine cable; here on the southwest, from Alexandria to Candia, is the nearest. You will have to fetch your letters--"