410

The Lady's Realm.

as pleased to see the travellers as if they
were Royalty come in person to make Terra-
cina a fashionable resort. But Bianca, who
had a dread of old men, except when they
were obviously clean, shrank from him. The
outside of the albergo frightened her, for it
was built on vast open corridors that once
sheltered the diligences, when the travel tide
flowed that way before the railroad was
made.

"We shall be murdered in our beds," she
cried to Mark.

The proprietor bowed like a suddenly
jerked marionnette, "*Subito*, miladi, *subito*."

For though he professed to speak French,
he knew that he did not do it well.

They were led, reluctant, up mighty flights
of stone stairs, worn into hollows by the tired
feet of generations of wanderers, and were
taken at last into a room as large as a

now, Mark," she cried. "Of course, I mean
a long-remaining, lingering old man. They
are all the same in Italy. It is not always
easy to get them in, but it is most dreadful
to get them out. They wander round saying
'Si signora' and other things till I am tired."

But she had ejected him without demanding
the bath.

"Can I have one, do you think?" she
asked. "Oh, would they dare call it a Grand
Hotel if they hadn't a bath?"

"Would they dare?" repeated Mark
scornfully. But he opened the door, and
found the "very, very long old man" was
still lingering in the passage, like a dilapidated
and downcast Peri.

Mark explained the matter to him in all
his languages, and at last something that
looked like comprehension dawned in the
proprietor's eyes. He smiled and said "Sì"

MR. MORLEY ROBERTS

NOVELS AND BOOKS OF
ADVENTURE

Mr. Morley Roberts died at Manor Mansions, Belsize Park Gardens, N.W., yesterday. He was a versatile and exuberant writer, and the author of more than 60 novels and books of adventure by land and sea.

Born in London on December 29, 1857, the eldest son of the late W. H. Roberts, superintending inspector of income-tax, he was educated at Bedford School and at Owens College, Manchester. At the age of 19 he went to Australia and worked on railways in Victoria and on sheep and cattle runs in New South Wales. Between 1884 and 1886 he found employment on railways and in saw mills and on sheep and cattle farms in six States of North America. He also took part in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Forty years later he revisited British Columbia, and in a pleasant though somewhat melancholy book, "On the Old Trail," described the changes which had taken place since the days when he shovelled earth. He served before the mast in sailing ships, thereby acquiring material for his sea stories. For a time he was a writer in the War Office and in the India Office.

His first book was "The Western Avernus," published in 1887, but the first which attracted general attention was "Rachel Marr," published in 1903 (and republished in 1925), which the late W. H. Hudson said was "a great book." Roberts wrote a biography of Hudson in 1924. In "A Tramp's Notebook" (1904) Roberts revealed an extremely unconventional temperament. Among

his later books were "Time and Thomas Waring" (1914), a story of the transformation of a man's character as the result of a surgical operation, "Hearts of Women" (1919), "On the Earthquake Line" (1924), dealing with politics and natural history in Central America, and "Tales of Changing Seas" (1927), a re-issue of a number of sea-stories. So much were these appreciated that he was invited to lecture on "The Sea in Fiction" at the Royal Institution in 1928. The next year he exhibited 52 water-colours of Jamaica and Central America at the Abbey Gallery. His latest publications were "Bio-Politics" in 1938 and "The Behaviour of Nations" in 1941. He married Alice, daughter of the late Angiolo R. Selous.