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claimed for it the wisdom of Solomon, or any wisdom whatever. With becoming modesty it confined its limited mental power to the solution of the only problem that presented itself-i.e., was that object against which it had leaned for several hours another elephant, or was it, the leaner, really another tree. I respected it for that retiring virtue, and, considering it physically, was lost in admiration of its strength and symmetry. Jumbo was as a corpulent Berkshire hog compared with that warrior of the Terai.

We just missed a share in one of the elephant hunts of Jhung's foresters, and perhaps it was as well we did, for the man who joins in an expedition of that kind can form no idea when or where the chase will terminate. Nor is there any attempt to give ease to him who rides. Howdahs, footboards, soft rugs, and umbrellas should be hated and avoided by the elephant-hunter, who has, indeed, to scorn delights and live laborious days if he would be in at the capture of the quarry. Clinging on to a small pad by his eyebrows, or elseways as he can, he has to belabour his elephant with a mace whenever the pace slackens; and the holding on, and the urging along, occupy his time and attention so fully that the meal he carries in his wallet becomes a movable feast in a double sense, and the pipe he would fain fill and light is forbidden by uncongenial circumstances, and the last condition of that man is worse than the first, in proportion to the square or cube of the distance travelled. And the hunt, when finished, may come to an end dozens of miles from everywhere. Then it may well be that the novice in elephant-hunting exclaims against the cruelty of fate,

and arrives at a drivelling condition in which he would give any number of kingdoms for a restaurant-ay, even for a beerhouse!

By arguments such as are here given, I have always sought to console myself for that disappointment in regard to our going after wild elephants.

This

But

I did not set any particular store by skins and horns as trophies of my Terai shooting, but one living trophy that I brought away with me I valued exceedingly. was a tiger cub, one of three that I came upon in a patch of grass cover, and the best tempered of the party, as far as I could judge by a few minutes' inspection and handling. The mother of these three got away unseen just as I entered the grass, but the elephants soon winded the cubs, and I approached the spot where they were marked down full of hope that there would one or two fair-sized tigers present themselves. there were only the three-monthold cubs deserted by a mother that proved to be utterly insensible to the most ordinary maternal obligations. For when I came upon those cubs, I counted upon the tigress mother as mine. It seemed as if I had only to exercise due patience and strategy to secure this result. I retired from the field leaving the cubs intact, leaving also scouts to watch the tigress's movements if it reappeared. I gave the tigress ample time to recover its nerve and maternal instincts, and, finally, I attempted by cautious approach and circumvallation to catch the whole family together; but in vain there, when I returned to the spot, were the three cubs only. I repeated this performance again and yet again, with the one unvarying consequence; and then, as the day

was closing in, I made my selection of the amiable cub, and carried it off in my arms, leaving the other two for their parent. Next day I returned betimes to the scene, and having carefully cut off the tigress's retreat, closed in upon its lair. Alas, only emptiness was there! The tigress had carried off its two remaining cubs into space, to be seen no more by me that year, at all events.

The cub that I carried off grew in strength and grace for some months as the pet of my household. Never but on one occasion did its amiability fail it, even for a moment, and then we had our first and last struggle for supremacy. My pet was about five months' old when this crisis occurred, and a sofa- cushion was the bone of contention. My pet, stretched at length upon a couch, was bored for want of a plaything; it took the cushion and worried it, and it worried until its own temper suffered as much from the rough treatment as my cushion, and then I intervened, and my pet and I had a short encounter, in which the victory was mine. Thereafter, that splendid tom-cat gave no trouble to anybody: always loose about the house, it was my constant companion and my first-born's plaything; and there was reason to hope that thus it would reach maturity-tractable and trustworthy even as a fullgrown tiger. But this was not to be: when it was about ten months' old it died of some mysterious ailment which proved incurable, in spite of all the healing art of vets and doctors.

I tried a panther as a pet, with less success on the side of amiability and more on the side of health. That beast grew to be tame enough by fits and starts, but suffered from occasional lapses in

to savagery; and when it fought with me or any visitor of mine, it had no gentlemanly instincts in favour of fair - play. It would stalk any of us, coming upon us by surprise from behind the chairs or from under the table, until it became a matter of surprise when it did not stalk us, and that pet stood generally regarded as an unmitigated nuisance. Then I gave it to a rajah for a small zoological collection, and saw no more of it.

My Indian menagerie included two or three bears; but these animals, however sweet-tempered they may be, are not adapted to the home-life of the ordinary pet. I am aware that children have warrant for believing that bears can be accustomed to the use of chairs and beds and tables, and so forth. Thus are they and we instructed by the tale of the three bears; but, though it be rank heresy to question this teaching, I must say that I regard the presence of one bear (let alone three) in a domestic interior as incompatible with the survival of any furniture whatever, unless it be of cast-iron and the strongest of metal work. This much I say, speaking from experience.

As for deer and antelope, &c., I suppose I did no more than follow the Anglo-Indian fashion made and provided in regard to the keeping of these animals. The average Anglo-Indian domicile is, as often as not, a partially-equipped Noah's ark. In the compound are to be found, as a matter of course, goats and sheep, and the sahib's dogs, and the mangy foundlings of the bazaar, and cows from whose milk the memsahib fondly hopes to draw supplies of cream and butter, and horses and poultry of sorts, and teal and quail and pigeons. And to the ordinary collection there are frequently

added pea-fowl and monkeys, and deer and cranes of sorts, and other of the commoner creatures of the wilds, and, more rarely, a wolf (chained up to an empty cask) or panther, or any other beast of the forest or fowl of the air that the collector can get hold of. One enthusiast I remember rejoiced in the possession of an Ornithorhynchus paradoxus (or duckbilled platypus), which was very precious to him as such, although it was really quite a different creature. And to all the livestock, domestic or otherwise, collected in the Anglo-Indian compound, have to be added the inevitable crows and kites and mynas, and other birds of Indian station life.

suppose the Anglo-Indian who becomes an amateur Jamrack does so very much for the sake of occupation, or to extend the narrowly restricted horizon of his home-life from May to October. Monotony hangs pall-like over his environment during that term, and the dead level of the plains that surround him is exactly typical of the flatness of his daily life outside the work of his kutcherry. Nor can it be truthfully said that the average official life, the preparation of the sacred meqsha, the report on the Gangetic dolphin, or the annual statistics of the how-not-to-doit department, is always deliriously varied. Children who call him father may not continuously glad

den the heart and make endless variety in the life of this unfortunate the climate forbidding that they should share his exile. So do Anglo-Indians take an interest in animals that are not exactly what they see everywhere and every day, and every hour of the day: I have known them wildly excited by the first appearance of the bullfrogs that come in with the burst

of the monsoon, and absolutely intoxicated by the début of the water-wagtail-the herald of the cold weather. And for much the same reason one does curious things in the way of time-killing: thus, for two years, I acted as secretary of the Lucknow Race Club, and for a much longer time as manager of an amateur theatrical company, and I cannot understand that any sane man, being free to live his own life, would have accepted either of those honorary situations while any other employment stone-breaking or otherwise-was open to him.

My experiences as secretary of the Lucknow Race Club were in some sort of a sporting nature, as were my experiences as an owner or part owner of race-horses, but I do not desire to recall the latter, and for the former-well, they are another story.

Only in one district of Oudh (in the Transgogra country) did I see machans used for tiger-shooting, and there the idea seemed to prevail that any branch of a tree that would carry a man was good enough for a machan, however close to the ground. I only saw one tiger killed in that district by machan shooting, and on that occasion, a lady being of the party, the machans were ten feet or less from the ground. There were four guns out (Mrs A., who shared her husband's machan, being a spectator only); and a tiger, if so inclined and not prevented by a bullet, could have reached any one of the occupants of the four machans erected for us. The only sense of using those raised positions was in the fact that so there was less chance of the tiger seeing and being frightened off by one of us to the detriment of another. It was with rather the guilt-laden consciousness of the assassin that

I, as one of four, lay in wait for that tiger.

But mine was not to be the assassin's hand. At first, when the line of coolies had shouted and drummed and horned their way into earshot of our ambuscade, it seemed as if the tiger would head my way; but the procession of wild things flying before the beaters included not the forest king. First, with wary step and safety-seeking eye, the jackal emerged, crossed the glade in front of me, and was gone into the jungle behind. Then patter, patter, patter upon the fallen leaves, what is it that approaches so noisily—an elephant? No; a peacock! Clumsy of foot, as harsh of note, this worthy attendant upon the Olympian shrew followed the jackal. Then a heavily antlered stag stepped forth, and sniffing danger in the air, sped

on.

But the tiger came not; and then, bang, bang, and a roar on my left, told me that another gun than mine had opened fire upon it. But we all shared in the finish when, on elephants, we pushed the tiger out of the patch of heavy undergrowth into which it had taken refuge and killed it.

And again I went after tigers in that district when the native shikari in charge of affairs, ignoring machans, sought to place the shooters upon the forks of saplings and upon low- hanging branches where security was not to be dreamed of, and shooting was an impossibility. Once, in our several beats, I permitted myself to be located in a sapling fork, but only to immediately quit that coign of disadvantage as soon as the shikari's back was turned. My

position would, indeed, have been unendurable for more than a few minutes. I could only stand on one foot at a time. I could only remain upon my perch at all by holding on with at least one hand; and if I had had occasion to fire my gun, it must have been fired pistol fashion, with the one hand not immediately employed in keeping myself aloft. And all this torture and crippling for an elevation of about half the height that a full-grown tiger can reach from the ground without jumping. I came down from that perch forthwith, and for the remainder of that day ascended no other. It has to be added that, as far as tigers were concerned, no machan or substitute therefor was required on that occasion, for from first to last no tiger made an appearance to any of us.

And now, reluctantly enough, I bring these reminiscences to a close. It required something of an effort to commence my narrative. It calls for a greater effort to write "Finis," to drop the curtain and put out the lights. Memories that had long slumbered have been awakened, and will not at once be lulled to rest again. Delights that had been put away as unattainable have returned to my imagination as temptations difficult of resistance. The good sport and the good-fellowship that went with my shikar of thirty years challenge me to renew that past and live the old life again. What a good time it was! What good fellows were they who helped to make it so! But to talk of living that life again—that way madness lies.

E. BRADDON.

THE DOUBLE-BEDDED ROOM.

SOME of us said that our friend Cecil Wake was the most nervous man they had ever known. And yet his health seemed always good, although the susceptibility of his temperament was such that it appeared as though the wear and tear of existence must soon prove too much for him. He was temperate-very temperate-and yet the amount of twitching that his facial muscles underwent when he was moved and excited, made one fear that the next thing he would do must be to weep. Circumstances

that did not affect other men produced an amount of moisture, especially in the corner of his right eye, which soon culminated in an actual tear-drop, always hastily brushed away before it fell. The Germans, in whose country he had been for some years of his youth, have a saying of such a man that "he is built near the water." Now emotion on certain occasions is always permissible, even to the male sex. When, for instance, a favourite daughter or niece is married, the "God bless you!" uttered by the master of the deserted home is apt to be gutturally, and even chokingly,-nay, often inarticulately, expressed. Perhaps it has been observed by those who do not go down themselves to the sea in ships, but who like to see a ship launched for the purposes of those who intend to inflict on themselves such discomfort, that when the said ship is launched, men among the crowd of witnesses of the operation blow their noses, and their eyes become watery. Cecil Wake's always became watery on such occasions. The cheering of the men on board of a ship of war, the march past of troops,

even the hurrying of firemen to a conflagration, made his vision very misty. Some said that this was to the credit of his heart-others said it was not to the credit of his nerves. Did he ride? Yes, sometimes, and well. The successful termination of a fox-hunt and the tragic death of the fox were events which were alleged by gossips to produce much the same effect upon him as the above-mentioned cases of marriage, launching, cheering, or fire extinguishing; but then fox-hunting takes place when the air is cold and eyes are apt to be moist from intense sympathy with an east wind. Nothing tangible on the nerve subject could be fairly deduced from such evidence. What are nerves? Nobody knows. Husbands swear that they are rubbish. Wives declare that their whole being consists of nothing else. What is certain is that they sometimes show themselves, or rather their influence shows itself, all of a sudden. A danger is laughed at and defied; but in a moment, although the danger may not be there, the mere imagination that it is present makes us feel uncomfortable. The boldest men are not always quite sure of themselves. One, a general, who had faced fire over and over again, laughed at the idea that he could feel anxious when taken down a steep ice toboggan slope. "Me? No, never felt nervous in my life;" and he took his place in front of the person who was to steer him down the ice. But he had hardly seated himself before he felt an irresistible impulse not to go forward, but to hang back. "Stop one moment,- -are you quite sure you can steer?" was the question

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