The Gothic Hall.

The models and plans of palaces that had been from time to time prepared by Captain Graham, had imparted to the royal mind a new architectural impulse; and after much deliberation with himself, he had finally come to the resolution of expending the timber requisite towards the erection of a chaste Gothic edifice. In the selection of the design. His Majesty displayed unlooked-for taste; for although as a penman his talents rank immeasurably in advance of the most accomplished of his scriveners, his skill as an artist had proved very circumscribed. It was nearly exhausted in the delineation of a nondescript bird, perched upon a tree-top, and did wuth difficulty extend to the one-legged fowler, gun in hand, who was conjectured to be planning its destruction. At the royal desire, I had frequently executed likenesses of the court favourites, and they were invariably acknowledged with much merriment; but, although repeatedly urged, no persuasion could induce the despot to sit for his own, from a firm belief in the old superstition, that whosoever should possess it, could afterwards deal with him as he listed.

“You are writing a book,” he remarked to me on one occasion, with a significant glance, as I was in the act of completing a full-length portrait of himself, which I had contrived to make unobserved from his blind side—“I know this to be the case, because I never inquire what you are doing that they do not tell me you are using a pen, or else painting pictures. This is a good thing, and it pleases me. You will speak favourably of myself; but you shall not insert my portrait, as you have done that of the Negoos of Zingero.” Such was the title with which His Christian Majesty was invariably pleased to dignify his heathen brother, Moselekatse, whose acquaintance he had made through the frontispiece to my “Wild Sports in Southern Africa.”

The Abyssinians have from time immemorial expended an entire tree in the reduction to suitable dimensions of every beam or plank employed in their primitive habitations; and it is not therefore surprising that Sáhela Selássie should have been equally delighted and astonished at the economy of time, labour, and material attending the use of the cross-cut saw. From age to age, and generation to generation, the Ethiopian plods on like his forefathers, without even a desire for improvement. Ignorance and indolence confine him to a narrow circle of observation from which he is afraid to move. Strong prejudices are arrayed against the introduction of novelties, and eternal reference is made to ancestral custom. But in a country where the absence of timber is so remarkable and inconvenient, the advantages extended by this novel implement of handicraft was altogether undeniable.

“You English are indeed a strange people,” quoth the monarch, after the first plank had been fashioned by the European escort. “I do not understand your stories of the road in your country that is dug below the waters of a river, nor of the carriages that gallop without horses; but you are a strong people, and employ wonderful inventions.”

Meanwhile the platform required for the new building advanced slowly to completion. The crowd of idle applicants for justice who daily convened before the tribunal of “the four chairs” were pressed into the service; and whenever His Majesty returned from an excursion in the meadow, the entire cortege might be seen carrying each a stone before his saddle in imitation of the royal example. Early one morning Graham received a message from the impatient despot to announce that the day being auspicious, he was desirous of seeing one post at least erected without delay. Greatly to his satisfaction the door-frames, which had previously been prepared by the carpenters of my escort, were simultaneously raised; and it being ascertained that the sub-conservator of forests had neglected to make the requisite supplies of timber, the delinquent was, with his wife and family, sentenced to vacate his habitation forthwith, and to bivouac sub divo during twenty days upon the Angollála meadow—a punishment not unfrequently inflicted for venial derelictions of duty, and attended during the more inclement seasons with no ordinary inconvenience.

But the endless suc............