Stories about Lord Kitchener are as thick as blackberries just now. A correspondent writing to Mr. T. P. O'Connor, M.P., relates the following interesting particulars about the great. soldier:
Talking to a friend who knows Lord Kitchener well, I asked him for particulars of his meetings with the groat soldier. "'T first met him," he said, tin the early eighties in the Red Sea. We were on board n steamship bound for Port Said and England. It was a piping hot and all of us lay panting in deck-chai supporting existence with iced drinks and fans. A tall figure arrested my attention, whose close study of the little volume in his hand not even a burning afternoon off Jeddah could perturb. Clothed in the undress uniform of an officer of engineers, the'man at one moment would pace the deck, at another fling himself into his chair, tiding, reading always. He had come on board at Aden, and at the moment: I did not know it was Herbert Kitchener. But when presently he went Uelow, I ven-tared to pick up the book he had left in 'NO.te deck-chair. It was " volume of Arabic fables in the original, and above its title Tread "H. H. Kitchener." A man who can read Arabic in the Red Sea is certain to succeed.
"Years after this meeting I had a curious adventure. It was the day of the Lord Mayor's banquet, and it was not $Etchener would reach London from Ca'ro, eoerally known that in the afternoon
It was, in fact, I who acquainted the Lord Mayor that such a guest was within his hospitable reach. A telegram was sent to Kitchener at yr. At the dinner I sat next to him. He bore then the bullet-hole in his cheek, a wound which he had shortly before received in the Soudan. It is a curious fact that this Arab bullet, after remaining for som" months in the flesh of the face, fell into the Sirdar's plate at a London restaurant. This City feast was a notable step in Kitchener's career, for the Lord Mayor took the opp"xtunity of allude ing to his splendid soldiership, and Lord Salisbory subsequent)y delivered one of the handsomest eulogies " Prime Minister ever paid a rising officer. All through these compliments the hero fidyeted like a shy schoolgirl, and I think he was half angry with me for my part in his public acclamations.
"He was silent to duluess, except on the subject of his profession. Then he was almost as voluble asa golf enthusiast on stimies' and bunkers.' The one salient feature of the man was his ambition. It was his burning passion to succeed: every syllable he uttered showed it. A well-Known war correspondent has since told me how, after Atbara, when the penultimate blow had been struck at the power of the Khalifa, he went to Kitchener's quarters to congratulate him. The general held out his hand: 'Thank you, thank you,' he said earnestly; and then, as if to himself, in the terror of the thoughts to which his visitor's words gave birth: My God! if T had failed!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.