"Thanks," Alice instantly retorted; "I shall remember that when you tell yours." They laughed over the retort. All three began to feel quite at ease. "So you kept up your sketching out there, and drew bush scenes for our illustrated papers?" said the Colonel. "Two or three times; more often for the Colonial papers." "We saw them all," said Alice, graciously—"I mean the English ones. We cut them out and kept them." (She should have said that she did.) "Did you, though?" said Dick, delighted. "Yes," said Alice, "and I have a crow to pick with you about them. That 'Week in the Sandwich Islands'—it was yours, wasn't it?" Dick admitted that it was. "Oh, and pray when were you in the Sandwich Islands?" He confessed that he had never seen them. "So you not only cheated a popular journal—a nice thing to do!—but deceived the British public, which is a far more serious matter. What explanation have [Pg 44] you to offer? What apology to 'One who was Deceived'—as I shall sign my 'Times' letter, when I write it?" [Pg 44] "Alice, you are an inquisitor," said Colonel Bristo. But Alice replied with such a mischievous, interested smile that Dick immediately ceased to feel ashamed of himself. "The fact is," he owned, "your popular journal doesn't care a fig whether one has been to a place so long as one's sketches of it are attractive. I did them a thing once of a bullock-dray stuck up in the mud; and how did it appear? 'The War at the Cape: Difficulties in Reaching the Front.' And they had altered the horns of my bullocks, if you please, to make 'em into South African cattle! You see, just then Africa was of more interest to your British public than Australia. Surely you won't be so hard on me now? You see you have made me divulge professional secrets by your calumnies." Alice said she forgave him, if all that was true; but she added, slyly: "One must take travellers' tales with a pinch of salt, you know!"
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