OF

DR. J. B. QUIÈS.

CHAPTER I.

"FOLLOW YOUR CATTLE!"

No doubt you have more than once in your life closely observed the minute hand of a clock. It does not appear to move. The monotonous swing of the pendulum is the sole indication of the march

of time. You reckon it off -tic, tac, tic, tac; you go on reckoning; still the slender pointing dart is motionless, but at the end of a period which appears to you endless, it has travelled over one of the little spaces marked upon the dial.

"Ah!" you say, you say, "how long a whole minute is!"

Then you turn to your work again, and when you are no longer looking at it the minute hand goes at a gallop. You have hardly begun before it has passed Over five of the little

spaces.

"Ah! how long a whole minute is!"

"Dear me," you say, "how short ten whole minutes are!"

Now, you were wrong in the first instance, and you are wrong in the second. One minute is very short, ten minutes mean much. Ten minutes suffice to endanger the fate of empires, and to change the face of the world. Ruin or success, happiness or misery, may depend on ten minutes. Nay, that brief space may shape the whole of a lifetime.

Experience has often proved this truth, which is indeed a truism; nevertheless, we are about to demonstrate it once more by an example.

On the 28th of September, 1874, the train from Paris, which was due at Marseilles at a quarter-past nine in the evening, arrived ten minutes late. The train next in order was timed to enter the station at thirty-two minutes past nine, so that there was an interval of seven minutes only in which the passengers had to get out of the compartments, luggage out of the vans, and the defaulting train out of the way. Of course the trunks and boxes were mercilessly knocked about, and any travellers who had glass or china among their impedimenta, arrived at home with their property in fragments.

How could it be helped! Ten minutes after time!

The travellers, knocked about like their belongings by the guard and the station-master, had hurriedly got out of the train, and were making for the exit, but two receptacles were still full. Their occupants had been unable to open the doors.

Why? Because these travellers were not men, but beasts; magnificent specimens of the Hungarian variety of the bovine species, sent by Karl Brünner, an agriculturist in the neighbourhood of Pesth, to M. Lemoine, an agriculturist at Médéah, who purposed to acclimatize that particular breed in Algeria.

"Deuce take the cattle!" Thus spoke the stationmaster. They will have us late. Get them out! Get them out!"

The bolts were shot back, the sliding sides of the cattle vans were removed, and the four-footed travellers were