flexible hide playfully about her wrists.

"And if I'd let that dry that way I'd be handcuffed hard and fast," she said.

"It would cut you down to the bone," supplemented Brent Palmer.

She untwisted the strip and stood looking at it, her eyes wide.

"I-I don't know why," she faltered. "The thought makes me a little sick. Why, isn't it queer! Ugh! it's like a snake!" She flung it from her energetically, and turned toward the ranch-house.

The honeymoon developed and the necessary adjustments took place. The latter Señor Johnson had not foreseen, and yet when the necessity for them arose he acknowledged them right and proper.

""Course she don't want to ride over to Circle I. with us,' he informed his confidant, Jed Parker. "It's a long ride, and she ain't used to riding yet. Trouble is I been thinking of doing things with her just as if she was a man. Women are different. They likes different things."

This second ideal gradually overlaid the first in Señor Johnson's mind. Estrella showed little aptitude or interest in the rougher side of life. Her husband's statement as to her being still unused to riding was distinctly a euphemism. trella never arrived at the point of feeling safe on a horse. In

VOL. CLXXVI.-NO. MLXX.

Es

time she gave up trying, and the sorrel drifted back to cowpunching. The range work she never understood. As a spectacle it imposed itself on her interest for a week; but since she could discover no real and vital concern in the welfare of "cows, soon the mere outward show became an old story. Estrella's sleek nature avoided instinctively all that interfered with bodily wellbeing. When she was cool and well fed, and not thirsty and surrounded by a proper degree of feminine daintiness, then she was ready to amuse herself. But she could not understand the desirability of those pleasures for which a certain price in discomfort must be paid. As for firearms, she confessed herself frankly afraid of them. That was the point at which her intimacy with them stopped.

The natural level to which 3 G

these waters fell is easily seen. Quite simply the señor found that a wife does not enter fully into her husband's workaday life. The dreams he had dreamed did not come true.

This was at first a disappointment to him, of course, but the disappointment did not last. Señor Johnson was man of sense, and he easily modified his first scheme of married life.

"She'd get sick of it, and I'd get sick of it," he formulated his new philosophy. "Now I got something to come back to, somebody to look forward to. And it's a woman; it ain't one of these gangle-leg cowgirls. The great thing is to feel you belong to some one, and that some one nice and cool and fresh and purty is waitin' for you when you come in tired. It beats that other little old idea of mine slick as a gun-barrel."

So during this, the busy season of the range-riding, immediately before the great fall round-ups, Señor Johnson rode abroad all day, and returned to his own hearth as many evenings of the week as he could. Estrella always saw him coming, and stood in the doorway to greet him. He kicked off his spurs, washed and dusted himself, and spent the evening with his wife. He liked the sound of exactly that phrase, and was fond of repeating it to himself in a variety of connections. "When I get in I'll spend the evening with my wife." "If I don't have to ride over to Circle I., I'll spend the evening with my

wife," " and so on. He had a good deal to tell her of the day's discoveries, the state of the range, and the condition of the cattle. To all of this she listened with at least patience. Señor Johnson, like most men who have long delayed marriage, was selfcentred without knowing it. His interest in his mate had to do with her personality rather than with her doings.

"What you do with yourself all day to-day?" he occasionally inquired.

"Oh, there's lots to do," she would answer a trifle listlessly; and this reply always seemed quite to satisfy his interest in the subject.

Señor Johnson, with the curiously instant transformation often to be observed among the adventurous, settled luxuriously into the state of being a married man. Its smallest details gave him distinct and separate sensations of pleasure.

"I plumb likes it all," he said. "I likes havin' interests in some fool geranium - plant, and I likes worryin' about th screen-doors and all the rest of the plumb foolishness. It does me good. It feels like stretchin' your legs in front of a good warm fire.'

The centre, the compelling influence of this new state of affairs, was undoubtedly Estrella, and yet it is equally to be doubted whether she stood for more than the suggestion. Señor Johnson conducted his entire life with reference to his wife. His waking hours were concerned only with the thought of her, his every act revolved

in its orbit controlled by her influence. Nevertheless she, as an individual human being, had little to do with it. Señor Johnson referred his life to a state of affairs he had himself invented and which he called the married state, and to a woman whose attitude he had himself determined upon, and whom he designated as his wife. The actual state of affairs-whatever it might be -he did not see; and the actual woman supplied merely the material medium necessary to the reality of his idea. Whether Estrella's eyes were interested or bored, bright or dull, alert or abstracted, contented or afraid, Señor Johnson could not have told you. He might have replied, promptly enough, that they were happy and loving. That is the way Señor Johnson conceived a wife's eyes.

The routine of life then soon settled. After breakfast the Señor insisted on his wife's accompanying him on a short tour of inspection. "A little pasear," he called it, "just to get set for the day." Then his horse was brought, and he rode away on whatever business called him. Like a true son of the alkali, he took no lunch with him, nor expected his horse to feed until his return. This was an hour before sunset. The evening passed as has been described. It was all very simple.

When the business hung close to the ranch-house-as in the bronco-busting, the rebranding of bought cattle, and the like he was able to share his wife's

day. Estrella conducted herself dreamily, with a slow smile for him when his actual presence insisted on her attention. She seemed much given to staring out over the desert. Señor Johnson, appreciatively, thought he could understand this. Again, she gave much leisure to rocking back and forth on the low wide verandah, her hands idle, her eyes vacant, her lips dumb. Susie O'Toole had early proved incompatible, and had gone.

"A nice, contented, homesort of a woman," said Señor Johnson.

One thing alone-besides the desert, on which she seemed never tired of looking-fascinated her. Whenever a beef

was killed for the uses of the ranch, she commandeered strips of the green skin. Then, like a child, she bound them and sewed them and nailed them to substances particularly susceptible to their constricting power. She choked the necks of green gourds, she indented the tender bark of cotton-wood shoots, she expended an apparently exhaustless ingenuity on the fabrication of mechanical devices whose principle answered to the pulling of the drying rawhide. And always along the adobe fence could be seen a long row of potatoes bound in skin, some of them fresh and smooth and round; some sweating in the agony of squeezing; some wrinkled and dry and little, the last drops of life tortured out of them. Señor Johnson laughed good - humouredly at these toys, puzzled to explain their fascination for his wife.

grinned; "you'd bust the game. But hold him up for the limit, anyway.

He chuckled aloud, pleased at the rare birdlike coquetry of the woman.

They drove to Williams. It took them two days to go and two days to return. Estrella went through the town in a cyclone burst of enthusiasm, saw everything, bought everything, exhausted everything in two hours. Williams was not a large place. On her return to the ranch she sat down at once in the rocking-chair in the verandah. Her hands fell in her lap. She stared out over the desert.

Señor Johnson stole up behind her, clumsy as a playful bear. His eyes followed the direction of hers to where a cloud - shadow lay across the slope, heavy, palpable, untransparent, like a blotch of ink.

"Pretty, isn't it, honey?" said he. "Glad to get back?" She smiled at him her vacant slow smile.

"Here's my cheque - book," she said; "put it away for me. I'm through with it."

"I'll put it in my desk," said he. "It's in the left-hand cubby hole," he called from inside.

Very well," she replied. He stood in the doorway looking fondly at the pose of her blonde head thrown back against the high rockingchair.

"That's the sort of a woman, after all," said Señor Johnson. "No fuss about her!"

So ancient, inveterate, and universal is the inclination of mankind to the pleasure and profit of the chase in its various aspects of hunting, hawking, shooting, and fishing, that not only do we assume that these sports were eagerly pursued in the earliest periods of man's history, but we actually have records dating from a remote antiquity to show that such was the case. The arts of poetry, painting, and sculpture, such rudimentary results of their earliest efforts as change has preserved to us and accident revealed, afford us this evidence. For in its infancy the attempts of art, when not merely ornamental, were usually exerted on representations of the chase. On the tusk of the mammoth, and the bones of other animals, have been seen the rudely but effectively scratched picture of that huge beast itself, slain after we know not how periculous a pursuit. Pieces of prehistoric pottery, of horn and bone, have been found bearing other scenes of the chase; while the walls of caves, to which the flint - weaponed hunters were wont to withdraw in stress of weather or of war, have been discovered decorated with drawings of such pursuits; of their perennial warfare with fellow-man and kindred beasts. In later ages, when stone weapons had given place to

1 As Ovid said—

bronze, and those in turn to iron, the same subjects occupied these primitive ́artist-hunters, rather than scenes of serenity or details of domesticity. As the ages advanced the passion for the chase increased rather than diminished, and skill and bravery in it were accounted second only to those qualities as exercised in war. And war itself was but "the sport of kings."

Every class of the community shared this inclination, and we see the claims of others beside the landed proprietors to enjoy it implicitly recognised by those strict ritualists of sport who drew up that " canon of hawking wherein every one has his— or her, for woman's rights were in this already allowed-particular and allotted hawk, from the eagle of the emperor to the kestrel of the knave. The clergy, in their grades, were also included; and it is well known that churchmen of all ranks were as addicted to hunting as the laity. So much so that synods and councils were fain to pronounce against a too open and lavish indulgence in it. But the fellow-feelings of the higher ecclesiastics were, no doubt, responsible for such pronouncements as, forbidding the clergy to hunt for pleasure, allowed them to join in the chase for their health. Boniface, Archbishop of Mayence,