speakable astonishment of the old keeper. So did Charley Forester miss the rabbit which got up under his feet when somebody's carriage drew near; So did Ferdinand Armine, otherwise a dead shot, when he had just fallen deeply in love with Henrietta Temple, miss everything that rose up before him. So true is it, as Lord Beaconsfield observes, that there is no end to the influence of women on our lives.

Two other gentlemen of fiction we have yet to mention whose nerves were upset by a somewhat different cause, though not unconnected with womankind.

The scene in 'The Small House at Allington' is very true to nature. Crosbie, en gaged to the old squire's niece, goes out shooting with the squire's son, whom he endeavours to pump with the object of ascertaining whether the old gentleman is likely to give the young lady a marriage portion. Bernard Dale resents this cross-examination, and returns an unfavourable answer.

"Then you think he will give me nothing?'

"Nothing that will be of any moment to you.'

"It's confounded hard.'

"Then they went in among the turnips, and each man swore at his luck as he missed his birds. There

are certain frames of mind in which a man can neither ride nor shoot, nor play a stroke at billiards, or remember a card at whist, and to such a frame of mind these two men had

arrived."

I am not ashamed to say that I have experienced the truth

of these remarks myself—and this more than once. I remember that in my youth I had a slight altercation with my host before starting, and it upset us both for the day. He shot badly, but I could not shoot at all. I missed every bird that came near me, and finally gave up my gun in despair to the head keeper. There were four of us out, and the bag which was thirty-seven brace ought, with decent shooting, to have been nearer sixty.

There is a popular prejudice according to which field-sports tend to harden and brutalise the character, a prejudice which sporting fiction of the best kind is well calculated to rebuke. I will begin with Sir Walter Scott, a keen sportsman in his youth, but showing clearly how the sportsman's instincts do not refuse to mingle with the instincts of humanity. His intercession on behalf of the gallant badger, who had maintained such a stout fight against the whole Mustard and Pepper family, and which provoked such an extremity of wonder in Dandie Dinmont, is one instance. In another that inimitable picture of the death of the fox in Rob Roy,' which we wonder that Landseer never painted-Scott has a word of pity for "poor Reynard" and again in The Betrothed,' in his capital description of the hawking party, he represents the cry of the heron as protesting against "the wanton cruelty" of his persecutor. Yet Scott loved to be in at the death. We see it again in the "burning the water" in 'Guy

I remember some two years ago I took part in an otter hunt. I ran with the dogs. I was as keen as any one present to witness a kill, yet when after a long hunt, lasting for several hours, the otter was at last beaten by the hounds, I would have given something to know that he had escaped. I have often, when watching a covey of partridges or seeing rabbits feeding and frisking outside a plantation, without a gun in my hand, almost wished that I had never grown so fond of shooting them.

Sympathy with the fox has often animated good sportsmen, as it is said that sympathy with the criminal has often animated many good Christians, however deeply they execrated his crime. Let us speak of the fox, at the moment, in the language of our forefathers, as "the villain," "the nightly robber," and the parallel is complete. Bromley Davenport tells us that when he has seen a beaten fox lying down in a hedgerow, he has often tried to get the hounds away from him. Yet, had he been killed, Davenport would have been very sorry not to be "up." Trollope, too, in a capital

This mixture of softness and harshness, which we see in so many sportsmen,-sportsmen, that is, of the best type, and equally conspicuous in sailors and soldiers, between whom and the sportsman there is a strong affinity,-is surely very suggestive. I have sometimes fancied that these two rival passions might have been implanted in us for wise purposes the one to soften the heart towards sympathy with pain and misery ; the other to harden it against those trials which, besetting our state of probation, are said to be necessary to the perfecting of the human character, and at the same time to form that sterner moral fibre which, while nations remain as they are, is needful for their defence against aggression. The value of field-sports as a nursery for soldiers has, of course, been too often insisted on to make it necessary to dwell upon it here.

I have quoted these passages in support of my contention that English gentlemen are by no means insensible to the harsher aspects of field-sports, and that in their pursuit of them, apart from the personal gratification which they afford, they are actuated by a belief that their wholesome influence largely predominates over any objectionable elements which are no doubt to be found in them.

All the writers we have

THE depressing horror of a great famine is a thing not to be lightly recalled or described; but at the time so readily does the human temperament adapt itself to abnormal surroundings-the gruesome details make very little impression on a mind inured. A man's capacity for pity is as limited as are his other faculties; and in the midst of scenes which he will never be able to recollect without a shudder, he soon becomes-I will not say callous or hard-hearted, but acquiescent and resigned to the workings of a Providence which must, after all, bear the responsibility for its own acts.

During the Indian Famine of '99 I was employed for some months on special relief work in a corner of the province of Rajputana, and I soon acquired that armour of stoicism without which no man of ordinary sensibility could have endured such surroundings. I had seen the countryside strewn with the corpses of wretched beings, who through fear or ignorance had refused to leave their homes to seek relief until too late; I had seen cholera sweep down with the dusk of night on a crowded famine camp, and slay its thousands before the morning; I had witnessed the last extremity of demoralisation to which wretched humanity can be driven by hunger-the mangled corpse by the road

side, and the furtive, hang-dog look of the unfortunate who has fed. I had thought myself impervious to horror; but I confess that my philosophy was not proof against the story of the Tigerman, which was told me one night, after dinner, by Cotterell of the Bombay Army, who was on famine duty in the district next to mine.

His district was a hilly tract of jungle - country, inhabited chiefly by tribes of Bhils, the aboriginals of India. These little fellows were very badly hit by the famine, for thrift is a thing unknown to them, and they never make provision against a bad season. Their ancient and simple remedy for a scarcity in their own homes was to plunder their neighbours, and this, in all simplicity of heart, they now proceeded to do; but it did not serve them, for this time their neighbours were nearly as badly off as themselves. Also the strong hand of the British Government intervened, and after a village or two had been raided and sacked a party of troops was sent to keep order. Their arrival was the signal for a stampede to the woods and hills; the Bhils, basing their expectations on their former experience at the hands of certain native potentates, looked for nothing less than a general massacre; the relief works which were opened by

the Government were looked as merely traps to lure them into the power of their would-be destroyers; and in spite of all that the relief officers could do, thousands of folk perished out of sheer inability to understand that any one could want to save them.

I met Cotterell by chance at a place called Fatehgarh, a little village on the borders of both our districts. There were very few white men in those parts; and when, on arriving, I saw his tents pitched near mine, I was delighted at the prospect of society. He was out when I arrived, but after I had had tiffin and got through some office-work, he strolled in and introduced himself. He was a tall, thin fellow, with hollow cheeks and eyes which told of jungle - fever; indeed he looked well on his way to the grave, and he was not long in getting there, poor fellow, for I saw his death in the papers a few months later.

We went for a stroll together in the evening, and, of course, he came over to dine with me. I have never seen a man enjoy his dinner so much. There was a little toy railway in one corner of my district, which meandered down by several junctions, growing larger and more important at each, until at last it joined one of the main lines of traffic; and by this I was able to procure, from Bombay, regular consignments of precious things like whisky, and bread, and food in tins, and-luxury of luxuries in that

arid famine-stricken land-real green vegetables, cabbages and peas, the sight of which completely unmanned my guest. He had been lodged in his inaccessible hills for nearly six months, and the sordid monotony of his staple diet of roast goat and onions had parched the very fountains of his appetite. After dinner we talked away over the cheroots and a bottle of Madeira, and a very agreeable companion I found him; but he seemed to have a strange aversion to describing his own experiences during the famine. We talked for some time about the Transvaal War, which was the chief topic of conversation in those days, and I gathered from him that our misfortunes in that unlucky country were no more than we deserved, for not allowing the Indian army to take part in the "show." From this gloomy topic we reverted naturally to the state of things around us. I spoke casually of a man-eating tiger I had heard of in his district, and asked if he had tried to get a shot; but a strange expression of disquiet came into his face as soon as I mentioned the subject, and he hastened to change it. Presently there was a rustle outside the doorway of the tent where we were sitting, and a thin, wild face looked in: some starving Bhil who had dragged himself here in search of food. My companion saw him as he was lifting a glass of wine to his lips. He threw himself back in his chair, and half the contents were spilled from his