UGANDA JOURNAL.


 The stories, later collected as Sanders of the River, were published in the
 Weekly Tale-Teller and were an immediate success. They were quickly followed
 by a second series, The People of the River, which proved equally popular. Wal-
 lace soon realized not only that this work was better than anything he had done
 to date but also that the theme was almost inexhaustible. Accordingly he became
 a serious student of African Ethnology and Folklore, but, while he embodied in
 the tales much of the results of his researches, he did not hesitate to invent also
 material of his own; do that while many of the customs, beliefs, superstitions,
 and proverbs of the river tribes are genuine Bantu, others are pure Wallace, and
 most likely to be so when they are supported by footnotes, apparently in the
 authentic manner of the learned investigator. Wallace particularly enjoyed this
 form of leg-pulling.

 And so it went on through the whole of the eleven volumes of the series.
 I am of opinion that, though all are good, the later books are not the equals
of the earlier. In 1909 Wallace still considered that he had some claims to be
thought a literary artist. The earlier Sanders books were written slowly and with
considerable care. In his later years, with the encouragement of his publishers,
by his own inclination and as a result of his journalistic training, the author
came to attribute more importance to quantity than to quality. He was the mass
producer par excellence. His vanity was flattered by the legend of the "weekly
Wallace"-which eventually became the "mid-day Wallace"-and the later San-
ders books were written under this handicap and with but little conscious attent-
ion paid to conscientious craftsmanship. It is also apparent that the atmo-
sphere of the theatre and the cinema had grown upon him, and this accounts
for the sensationalism that appears in such a book as Sandi the King-maker,
the last of the series.
 In spite of all this he remained to the end, so far as the Sanders books are
concerned, an artist malgrd lui, and a master of his own technique of weaving the
various strands of the several plots and underplots, that characterize so many
of the stories, into a neat conclusion.
 After the completion of the first three series of tales, he found it necess-
ary to introduce one improvement. Sanders was the strong and silent man of
action, and strong and silent men in large doses are definitely a bore. It was
impossible for him to go on for ever, or for Wallace to sell him for ever, dashing
up and down the river with monotonous regularity, collecting hut-tax, hanging
murderers and witch-doctors without trial, settling innumerable palavers, and
preventing the outbreak of tribal warfare. Hence in the fourth book, Bones,
Sanders was got rid of by being sent on leave for the space of one volume-though
incidentally he had to return before the end of it as the deus ex machina-and
his No. 2, Capt. Hamilton of the Houssas, was appointed Acting Commissioner
in charge of the River Terrotories. But Hamilton himself, Wallace thought, was
of the same type as Sanders, and to substitute the one for the other was not
enough. What was wanted was more comic relief. The bare-faced dishonesties
of Bosambo, and his quaint reminiscences of his early missionary training, could
continue, but they were not enough. Hence the invention of Lieut. Augustus