Archery in Scotland. By ROBERT MACGREGOR Ballad of Antique Dances. By W. E. HENLEY. Annual Cato Club, The Transactions of the. By DUTTON COOK. Annual Cawnpore, Ram Das of. Chant, A, for Winter. Annual By J. ARBUTHNOT WILSON PAGE 338 XI. Boston, New and Old 44 Dreadful Case, A. By WILLIAM JAMESON Dying Trees in Kensington Gardens, The. By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS. 361 Justice in the Punjab. By MAJOR A. HARCOURT Kensington Gardens, The Dying Trees in. By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS XLI. XLII. XLIII. XLIV. XLV. XLVI. Liszt, A Day with, in 1880. By Rev. H. R. HAWEIS, M.A. Madrigal, A. By AUSTIN DOBSON. 276176 By E. C. GRENVILLE-MURRAY. Annual Max Reineke's Great Book, By J. ARBUTHNOT WILSON Prince Saroni's Wife. By JULIAN HAWTHORNE. Annual Punjab, Justice in the. By MAJOR A. HARCOURT Ram Das of Cawnpore. By J. ARBUTHNOT WILSON Reduced Dinner Party, The. By JAMES PAYN. Annual Rigged with Curses Dark.' By Mrs. ALFRED W. HUNT Scotland, Archery in. By ROBERT MACGREGOR So like the Prince. By A. EGMONT HAKE. Annual Some Strangely Fulfilled Dreams. By RICHARD A. PROCTOR Three Wishes. By H. FRANCIS LESTER Transactions, The, of the Cato Club. By DUTTON COOK. Annual. Writing, Does it Pay ?-The Confessions of an Author Young Lady, The, in Grey. By F. W. ROBINSON. Annual. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. A. Hopkins. Frontispiece Market-place, Wycombe Lane in High Wycombe Beaconsfield Village Green BELGRAVIA. NOVEMBER 1880. A Confidential Agent. BY JAMES PAYN. IT CHAPTER XLV. THE LAWYER AND THE MAJOR. T was before the days of twin ships and of the Calais-Douvres that Mr. Frank Barlow took his departure to Paris by way of Folkestone; but even if those admirable scientific inventions had been in existence, it is doubtful whether they would have much availed him against the effects of a sea voyage. His nature was averse to range, and he had never tempted the waves before except in the floating bridge between Gosport and Portsmouth; and we all know what the ocean does with a new-comer. It receives him much as a midshipman's mess in old times was wont to receive one from his mother's apron-strings. When Mr. Barlow set foot on Boulogne shores he was in that pitiable state that he almost made up his mind to take out letters of naturalisation and become a Frenchman for evermore, rather than recross the Straits. Nor at the buffet of the railway station did he find anything better adapted to recover the tone of his stomach than, ratafia cakes, small sticks of chocolate, and very large cruet-bottles of vinegar and oil. Soup, indeed, he contrived to procure; but as it consisted -no, it had no consistence-as it was obviously composed of hot water with melted butter in it, it benefited him very little. Years afterwards, when speaking of this unique experience (for he never left his native land again), Mr. Barlow was wont to remark that though in foreign travels he often saw in the flesh what had apparently been boiled for soup, he never beheld those soups which those rags at some remote period must have made. On that long, uninteresting route to Paris it also struck him how very few English folks could ever be got to take it, and how they VOL. XLIII. NO. CLXIX. B would inveigh against its tedium, if it only happened to be in England. At one station he was so fortunate as to procure some oranges, the only food familiar to him, and therefore in which he had any confidence, at half a franc apiece. But the pangs of hunger compelled him subsequently to procure some little cakes, which turned out to be made of the same substance that is used at home for giving to dead rabbits the powerful aroma that fits them to be a 'drag' for a pack of hounds. Suffering, then, from a distressing combination of aniseed and mal de mer, and we may add mal du pays, Mr. Frank Barlow arrived in Paris and took up his quarters at the Louvre. He was not sorry to find that Major Lovell was for the present elsewhere, since an opportuuity for recruiting himself was thus afforded him; and having taken advantage of it and addressed a short note to the Major requesting an interview upon a subject of importance, he awaited events with his usual confidence and serenity of mind. The same evening he received a few lines from the Major expressing his willingness to see him, and was at once ushered to his apartment on the third floor. It was scarcely possible for two men of the same race, age, and position in life, to have fewer things in common with one another than Frederick Lovell and Frank Barlow. With the latter we are already acquainted: an uncompromisingly honest fellow, devoted to his profession and his mistress; strictly moral and genuinely though unenthusiastically religious; a very favourable specimen, on the whole, of the middle class to which he belonged. Socially the two men stood nearly on the same level, but the surroundings of the Major had from the first been of a more aristocratic kind; his parents had died early, and he had been placed by his uncle and guardian at a public school, and from it at once entered the army. He had had, therefore, very little education, while he had been left to himself altogether as to moral training. His father had been a man of fashion, and used to be known in circles of which Barlow père had known nothing as Caterpillar Lovell.' The sobriquet arose from his possession of an insect of that description which he was wont in the days of the Regency, when such eccentric bets were common, to back for a great deal of money to escape from a soup-plate, in the centre of which it had been placed, more quickly than any other caterpillar. The pretty creature was a fortune to him, until some one discovered that its celerity arose from the fact of the plate being a warmed one, when that source of revenue ceased, He left little behind him; but Frederick had great expectations from his uncle, a bachelor and a man of science, His weakness |