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rivers as it is with different kinds of land fortune to miss your train, and be left

each produces in the greatest abundance the crops for which it is best adapted. It would be folly to place trout in still and sluggish waters with muddy bottoms-as foolish, indeed, as it would be to transfer from its turbid element to a clear, cold, and swift-running mountain-stream, coursing over its sandy or rocky bed, the uncomely and repelling catfish. It is to the nice discrimination exercised by the fish-culturist in such important points that the present encouraging state of the art is due.

Although our State Legislatures have been somewhat slow in aiding and encouraging the Fish Commissioners, yet much has been done by judicious and well-directed legislation for the promotion of the work in which they are engaged. Laws have been passed for the punishment by fine or imprisonment of persons convicted of selling fish out of the season within which they are allowed to be captured. But our law-makers should go still further: they should not only prohibit the catching of fish by illegitimate methods-by the liming or poisoning of water, by the use of giant-powder, and other equally atrocious and criminal appliancesbut they should impose heavy penalties for the capture of the young of trout, salmon, salmon-trout, and other fish, under a certain weight. As it is, the indiscriminate warfare waged by thoughtless or unscrupulous anglers upon troutlets so small that it would take twenty or thirty to weigh a pound, should no longer be tolerated. To such an extent has this style of fishing been carried that hundreds of our streams and brooks have been literally depopulated, while others have been so overfished that the capture of a trout weighing a pound, or even half a pound, is an event of rare occurrence. Another serious obstacle to the increase in the size and number of trout in our waters is to be found in the damming up of our streams for the running of mills and factories. All access to the spawning beds in the upper waters is thus completely cut off, and in course of time the inevitable consequence follows-the trout die out! A simple remedy for this is the construction of a fish-way which, while it would not materially reduce the quantity of water in the dam, would yet afford an unobstructed and sufficiently wide passage to permit of the ascent of the fish during the spawning season.

With such protection from our law-makers, and liberal appropriations to meet the reasonable demands of the commissioners and superintendents for the means essential to the successful prosecution of their labors, the most sanguine expectations of our fishculturists will be realized; our exhausted waters will be replenished, a valuable addition will be made to our food-supply, a great branch of our productive industry will not only be restored, but rendered more productive and profitable than ever, and a substantial and lasting benefit will be conferred on the whole population.

J. M.

T is not always to be accounted as a misover for a few hours at some place on your way, instead of being sped on, as you had expected, to that other place where you meant to be. Certainly not a misfortune, if you should chance to be stranded, as we were, in the ancient town of Salem.

Once there, there were but two things to be thought of the haunts of Hawthorne and the Salem witches. It would be hard to say with which the place seemed most associated. But Hawthorne, the house in which he was born, the one which was afterward from time to time his home, the Custom-House, "The Scarlet Letter," "The Old Town-Pump,' "The House of the Seven Gables"-all these came thronging into one's mind, and took precedence of the diablerie, and clearly the firstnamed was the legitimate starting-point. Accordingly we took our way, as so many have done, to that house in Union Street where the great romancer first saw the light.

The Hawthorne house, where the worthy Captain Nathaniel left his little family when he went to sea, is on a narrow street leading down toward the water-a prosaic kind of street, cheerless by reason of its commonplaceness, and one that would have a depressing influence on such a temperament as Hawthorne's. It was probably inhabited in his childhood by the class of people who make the average in a community; it is very quiet, too quiet, and must have always been very much as now, except that it has settled more and more into a state of grayness and passivity. One standing on that door-stone, and looking across and up and down, sees nothing in any way attractive, unless it be the large gabled house which faces the head of the street, and the masts of vessels above the roofs at the lower end; and it is easy enough to understand why the precocious, largebrained, melancholy - eyed child, with the quaint name, who used to come out and sit on the threshold, should have grown up a student of men and women rather than of Nature, analyzing human moods and motives rather than taking delight in outward aspects of wood, and sea, and sky. There was nothing fair and gracious in his immediate surroundings, and of necessity he became introspective. The houses open directly on the street, having no yard in front, no space for vines or flower-borders, no trees worth naming, and no room for gardens unless within a scant place hidden by the high fences. His own is no exception; there is just a bit of ground at one side, and a tiny court at the back, the only greenery of which is a solitary peach-tree.

The house itself is superior to most of those on the street. It is two stories high, with a high roof, and great, square chimney in the centre. The present occupants are three or four families of decent Irish, who take pleasure in showing the rooms, which are low-posted, with beams crossing the ceiling overhead, after the old style. Two small parlors at the front are separated by a little entry-way, which leads to similar rooms above

a narrow staircase, so narrow and with steps of such a shape, diminishing fan-like at one side, that in descending one is liable to slip off and come thumping down from one landing to another.

There is a singular cupboard or closet in one apartment, having steps in it, the floor of which is breast-high, so that one could sit there as in a capacious seat; and there is a remarkable arrangement of freplaces all across the corners of their respective rooms, so that if the partition-walls were to be taken down they would be found to fit round the chimney as triangular pieces do round the central square in a patchwork-quilt. In the back-chamber at the left, the two windows of which look down into the cheerless backyard, Hawthorne first opened his eyes to the light on the 4th of July, seventy-one years ago.

That he had no joyous remembrances of this house his own records in his "NoteBook" abundantly show. One brief item in 1836 reads thus: "In this dismal chamber Fame was won (Salem, Union Street);" and in 1840, still brooding over the long delays that had attended his recognition as an author, he writes: "Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. . . . If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed, and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all, or at least till I were in my grave."

The house of his mother's family, to which they removed after his father was lost at sea, known as the Manning Place, is on the next street, running parallel with it, and the gardens join. He lived there many years, there spent his college vacations, and to it returned, even after his marriage, making it his frequent abode for longer or shorter intervals, and there a good deal of his earlier writing was done. His special study was up in the third story, in the most secluded part, as suited his habits, in a back-chamber, the window of which on the one side looked down into the little room where he was born and the dismal court below, on the other off over the distant tree-tops to the promontory of Marblehead.

The street is broader than the other, and the mansion was once a fine one, with two fronts, so to speak; one opening into a garden roomy enough for flower-borders and shrubbery, and where one family of the many that now tenant it have scarlet-runners and morning-glories, adding an element of glowing color to a place which, but for that, would be altogether dreary with the asben grayness of age and neglect. The gabled end is on the street, and this house, like the other, is close upon the sidewalk. The lower front-rooms have the appearance of having been at some time used for a store, and the wide, formidable double doors show immense staples for bar and padlock and strong iron cleats. There are the remains of a ponderous knock

er, such a one as Hawthorne speaks of as "the iron hammer," summoning those within; he further describes such a building as this, "the timber frame of solid oak and chimney, with flues large enough for the witches to fly out, round which the community of gables centred." It has been intimated that this was the very "House of the Seven Gables," counting in the gabled doors to make up the magic number, but there is no certainty that the author had any one special house in view, so many quaint and ancient ones being familiar to him that be needed only to draw slightly on his imagination for the materials of his famous Pynchon Mansion. He evidently clung to this quarter of his native town, with which he must always be more especially associated. His name, cut with a diamond on the glass, is to be seen in one of the windows; and the name could be read, with the date of the building of the house, on a stone at the door, until the accumulation of dust or wear of time made it illegible.

The building, however, with which he is most intimately identified, far more even than with the houses which he lived in, is the Custom-House, which is close by, not far from the foot of these streets. On the way thither one comes upon an old pump, which looks aged enough to be the veritable original of his charming essay. As it is one of the only two remaining of the pumps anciently established in every ward, the presumption is that a description of this particular one answers for Hawthorne's pump, seeing that they were all alike. It is large enough for a mausoleum, and looks not unlike one, made of slabs of dingy stone, like stained, gray gravestones, set up on one end, in a square at the foundation, but all inclining inward at the top, where they are kept in position by a band of iron. A decaying segment of log appears, in which the pump-handle works

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tipped on their hind-legs against the wall," the venerable officials used to sit and doze in the summer-time, have been substituted elegant, modern arm-chairs. The room at the left, where he, the "Locofoco surveyor," as he calls himself, sat, an unwilling habitant of the fifteen square feet of space which he used to pace back and forth with something of the restlessness of a caged animal, is no longer "cobwebbed and dingy with old paint," but refurnished and refitted; instead of the gray sand over the floor, a carpet; the rickety chairs and three-legged stool have been banished to the limbo of dilapidated wares; but the pine desk, over which the romancer spent so many unwilling hours, has been given by the Custom-House authorities to the Institute of his town, and it may be seen in the edifice where are preserved the very treasures that Hawthorne described forty years ago, such as the portraits and some of the garments of such worthies as Governor Leverett and Sir William Pepperell, Bradstreet, the Olivers, Endicotts, and Pynchons; and in the rear of which building, those conservatives of old-time things, the honored members of the society, have caused to be set up an exact model, as to size, architecture, and all, even to the little diamondpaned windows, of the church in which Roger Williams preached.

The prospect from the windows of Hawthorne's office-room is not so very dreary as he would have us think-the discontent of his own feelings must have given sombreness to what, seen on a bright, sunshiny, August day, was pleasing enough to our eyes. One looked up one of the most aristocratic streets of Salem, as aristocracy had its quarters some two hundred years ago, and the "scent of the roses still hangs round the grand old gardens and terraced walks of some of those whilom princely residences; the other fronts on Derby Wharf-built long ago, and named for the Derby family-with its row of sail- lofts extending its whole

Besides this, he had the open harbor, with the shifting beauty of the water, and beyond, the high land of Marblehead.

in vain now, however, since, being long out of use, it has no connection with the water below; on the front side are two cir-length. cular holes, like a pair of great eyes, made in the stone for the insertion of the spouts; and, finally, a long-handled iron dish, like a saucepan or warming-pan on a smaller scale, is attached by an iron chain to the stone by way of drinking-vessel. Altogether, though it may not strike an old Salem resident in that way, it seems to the stranger a very unique, antiquated, and remarkable struct

ure.

Hawthorne minutely depicts the CustomHouse-a brick edifice, fronted by a portico, beneath which twelve steps of granite lead to the street; it faces the dilapidated wharf, where, in the days of Salem's commercial glory, the East-India merchants used to congregate, watching the incoming and unlading of argosies freighted with treasures from the other hemisphere. Above the entrance is the 66 enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings," which bird has been dazzlingly regilded, so that its burnishing makes what he calls its "truculent" attitude more apparent.

Changes have come to the interior since Hawthorne described it. For the shaky, oldfashioned chairs in the front-entry, in which,

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It was in the front-room on the right, on the floor above, where, "poking" among the documents which filled some barrels and were piled up on the floor, Hawthorne found, on one rainy day, the scarlet letter cut from the red cloth, all embroidered with gold needle-work, and the package which contained the records about Hester Prynne. It was then a lumber-room, unpainted and unplastered, dim, dusty, cobwebbed, and littered, but is now handsomely finished and fitted up for special meetings, and adorned with two pictures one a portrait of Joseph Hiller, first Collector of Salem under the new constitution, the other that of General Miller, of Lundy's Lane fame-the man who said "I'll try, sir"-who was given the collectorship in 1825, and was in position there when Hawthorne had his surveyorship. The great writer pays a tribute to the great hero, too feeble then to come up the steps without assistance, but as faithful in this peaceful service as he had been in the warlike-a sincere, upright, simple-souled, straightforward

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Hawthorne in the Custom-House grew morbid. My imagination," he says, was a tarnished mirror-it would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. . . . An entire class of susceptibilities and a gift connected with them-of no great richness or value, but the best I had-was gone from me."

Not so, however, as "The Scarlet Letter" and other works, and more genial moods, proved. Wherever he went he came back to Salem, "like the bad half-penny," he said— Fate took him back. But we cannot help believing that he had a fondness for the old town, though, in perverse humor, he does, with a kind of grim exaggeration, speak of its

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'flat, unvaried surface" and wooden houses, saying that its "irregularity was neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame "-a "long and lazy street, with Gallows Hill at one end, and the almshouse at the other."

Salem keeps his memory green, and is proud of the immortality he has given her; and visitors from our own and other lands make pilgrimages to his homes and haunts, and leave their little tributes to his genius, a laurel - leaf, perhaps, or a more sombre, a quainter, odder token, for him most aptrosemary

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"That's for remembrance."

A. B. HARRIS.

TIGER-HUNTING IN CENTRAL INDIA.

THE

II.

HE sportsman will not be long under the guidance of the village shikárí before he comes ou tracks of tigers. Where one or more have been living some time in the neighborhood, footprints of many dates will be found in the sandy bed of almost every nálá. The history and habits of the tigers will generally ooze out of the local hunter at the sight of these marks. When the fresh tracks of the previous night are found, his impassive features will be lighted into interest, and, as he follows the trail with the end of his gun, his speech will be low and hurried from suppressed excitement. There is little chance, however, of coming on the brute himself at that early hour. He is probably lying somewhere on an elevated place commanding the approaches to his favorite lair, sunning himself in the soft morning light, and watching against the approach of danger, until the growing heat about ten o'clock shall have extinguished all signs of movement in the neighborhood, when he will creep down into some shady nook by the water, and, after a roll in the wet sand, proceed to sleep off the effects of his midnight gorge. Sometimes, however, if the sportsman be out early enough, he will find, from the cries of animals, that the tiger is moving not far ahead of him, and he may then, by cutting him off, even obtain a shot.

On one occasion, I followed a tiger in the early morning for several miles up the bed of a stream, entirely by the demonstrations

of the large Hanúmán monkey, of which there approached close up from that direction. were numbers on the banks feeding on wild He never stirred. Then I made the elephant fruits. As the tiger passed below them the kick him, and he fell over. He was stone monkeys fled to the nearest trees, and, climb- dead-converted, without the movement of a ing to the highest branches, shook them vio-hair, into a statue of himself by the bursting lently and poured forth a torrent of abuse,* that could be heard a mile away. Each group of them continued to swear at him till he passed out of sight, and they saw their friends farther on take up the chorus in the tops of their trees, when they calmly came down again and began to stuff their cheeks full of berries, as if nothing had happened.

I think it is the pranks of juvenile tigers, rather than the serious enmity of old ones, that cause such a terror of them to exist among the monkey community. The natives say that the tigress teaches her cubs to stalk and hunt by practising on monkeys and peafowl.

The gorgeous plumage of the latter, scattered about in a thousand radiant fragments, often marks the spot where a peacock has thus fallen victim to these ready learners, but the remains of a monkey are seldom or never seen. Indeed, these sagacious Simians rarely venture to come down to the ground when young tigers are about, though this sign is not always to be relied on as denoting the absence of tigers. I thought so for a long time, till one day in the Bétúl country, in 1865, after hunting long in the heat of a May day for a couple of tigers whose marks were plentiful all about, we came up to a small pool of water at the head of a ravine, and saw the last chance of finding them vanish, as I thought, when a troop of monkeys were found quietly sitting on the rocks and drinking at the water. I was carelessly descending to look for prints, with my rifle reversed over my shoulder, and another step or two would have brought me to the bottom of the ravine, when the monkeys scurried with a shriek up the bank, and the head and shoulders of a large tiger appeared from behind a bowlder, and stared at me across the short interval. I was meditating whether to fire or retreat, when, almost from below my feet, the other tiger bounded out with a terrific roar, and they both made off down the ravine. I was too much astonished to obtain a steady shot, and I was by that time too well acquainted with tiger-shooting to risk an uncertain one, so they escaped for the time. I quickly regained my elephant, which was standing above, and followed them up. It was exceedingly hot, and we had not gone more than a couple of hundred yards when I saw one of the tigers crouched under a bush on the bank of the ravine. I got a steady shot from the howdah, and fired a three-ounce shell at his broad forehead at about thirty yards. No result. It was most curious, and I paused to look; but never a motion of the tiger acknowledged the shot. I then went round a quarter of a circle, but still the tiger remained motionless, looking intently in the same direction. I marched up, rifle on full cock, growing more and more amazed-but the tiger never moved. Could he be dead? I went round to his rear and

The voice of the monkeys on such occasions is quite different from their ordinary cry. It is a hoarse, barking roar, something like that of the tiger. Is it the first beginning of imitative language?

of the large shell in his brain. It had struck him full in the centre of the forehead. We then went on with the track of the other. It led down into the Móran River, on the steep bank of which there was a thick cover of jáman-bushes, in which the tiger was sure to stop. I had just before come through it, and found the place as full of tracks as a rabit-warren. Having a spare pad elephant out that day, I sent her round to keep down the bottom of the bank and mark, while I pushed my own elephant Futteh Rání (Queen of Victory) through the cover. About the centre I came on the tiger, crouched like the other, with his massive head rested on his forepaws, the drawn-up hindquarters and slightly-switching tail showing that he meant mischief. At the first shot, which struck him on the point of the shoulder, he bounded out at me; but the left barrel caught him in the back before he had come many yards and broke it, when he rolled down right to the bottom of the bank, and fell, roaring horribly, right between the forelegs of the elephant.

On another occasion I was much struck with the caution of the monkeys under very trying circumstances. In May, 1864, I had tracked a man-eating tigress into a deep ravine near the village of Pálí in the Seoní district. She was not quite a confirmed maneater, but had killed nine or ten persons in the preceding few months. She had a cub of about six months old with her, and it was when this cub was very young and unable to move about that want of other game had driven her to kill her first human prey. I knew when I entered the ravine that this was her regular haunt; for, though every bush outside had been stripped of its berries by a colony of monkeys, I saw them perched on the rocks above the ravine wistfully looking down on the bushes at the bottom, which had strewed the ground with their ripened fruit. They accompanied me along the ravine on the top of the rocks, as if perfectly knowing the value of their assistance in getting the tigress-and better markers I never had. I should probably have passed out at the top without seeing her, as she was lying close under a shelving bank, but for the profane language of an ancient, gray-bearded Hanúmán, who posted himself right above her, and swore away until he fairly turned her out of her comfortable berth. The excitement of the monkeys soon told me she was on the move; and presently I saw her round face looking at me from behind a tree with a forked trunk, through the cleft of which I caught sight of about a square foot of her striped hide. It seemed about the right place, so covering it carefully I put in a shell at about forty yards, and she collapsed there and then, forming a beautiful spread-eagle in the bottom of the nálá.. The youngster now started out, roaring as if he were the biggest tiger in the country; and, though I fired a couple of snap-shots at him as he galloped through some thick bushes, I could not stop

him. It is important to extinguish a brute, however young, who has once tasted human flesh; and I followed him till it grew nearly dark, when I returned to the ravine to take home the tigress, and there I found my monkey friends tucking into the berries in all directions, and hopping about close to the body of the dead tigress. The cub was met, much exhausted with its run, by a gang of wood-cutters, and killed with their axes.

The barking of deer, and the alarm-cry of peafowl, frequently indicate the movements of a tiger. The sámbar, the spotted deer, the barking deer, and the little fourhorned antelope, all "bark" violently at a tiger suddenly appearing in the daytime. In April, 1865, having marched nearly a thousand miles exploring in the forests, almost without firing a shot, I halted to hunt a very large cattle-eating tiger near Chándvél in the Nimár district. This animal was believed by the cowherds to have killed more than a thousand head of cattle; and one of the best grazing-grounds in all that country had been quite abandoned by them in consequence. His haunts lay in a net-work of ravines that lead down to the Narbadá River-now included in the Ponásá Reserved Forest, which I was then exploring. The herds of cattle having been withdrawn from the grassy glades on the banks of the Narbadá, where he usually preyed on them, he had lately been coming out into the open country, and had been heard for several nights roaming round about the village of Chándvél on the edge of the forest. I found his tracks within a hundred yards of the buffalo-pens of the village the morning I arrived; and a few nights before he had broken into a Banjárá encampment a little way off, and killed and dragged away a heifer, which he ate within hearing-distance of the encampment, charging through the darkness, and driving back the Banjárás and their dogs when they tried to interrupt him. I picketed a juicy young buffalo for him the night I arrived, about half a mile from the village where his tracks showed he regularly passed at night. Next morning it was found to have been killed and dragged away about a hundred yards to a small, dry water-course; and, after having been cleaned as scientifically as any butcher could have done it, all eaten up but the head, skin, feet, and one fore-quarter. If his footprints had not already shown him to be an unusually large tiger, this feat of gormandizing would have sufficiently done so. We started about ten o'clock on his trail. It was the 12th of April, and a hotter day I never remember. Long before mid-day the little band of cowherds and shikárís who accompanied me had most of their wardrobes bound round their heads to keep off the sun; and I looked for a tussle with such a heavy old tiger, long accustomed to drive off the people he met, if we found him well gorged on such a grilling day as this. We took the track down fully five miles till it entered a long, narrow ravine with pools of water at the bottom, and shaded over with a thick cover of trees and bushes. We could not go into so narrow a place to beat him out with an elephant; and after much deliberation, we decided to have a pad elephant at the head of

the ravine, and post the people we had with us on the trees round about to mark, while I went down to the other end and quietly stalked along the top of the bank on the chance of finding him asleep below. There never was such a beautiful retreat for a tiger, I think. In many places I could not see through the dense shade at the bottom, and several times had to fling down stones to assure myself whether some indistinct flickering object were the tiger or not. I was proceeding quietly along, probing the ravine in this fashion, when the pad elephant we had left at the farther end gave one of those tremendous screams that an untrained elephant sometimes emits when suddenly put in pain. She had stumbled over a stone when swinging about in their impatient fashion. There was little chance of finding the tiger undisturbed after this, and I had only to stand and watch for a chance of his coming down the ravine on being seen by the scouts on the trees. The first intimation I had of his presence was from a couple of peafowl that scuttled out of a little ravine on the opposite side; and then I saw the tiger picking his way stealthily up the face of a precipitous bank, where I could hardly think a goat would have found footing. He was about a hundred and fifty yards from my rifle; and the first bullet only knocked some earth from the bank below him. When I fired the other he was just topping the bank, and clung for a second as if he would have come over backward, but by an effort recovered himself and disappeared over the top. Running to a higher piece of ground, I saw him trotting sullenly across the burnt plain, and looming as large to the eye as a bull-buffalo. He certainly looked a very mighty beast; but he was a craven at heart, or he would never have left such a stronghold to face the fearful, waterless, burnt-up country he did. I lost no time in getting round the head of the ravine and giv ing chase on the elephant. His tracks in the ashes of the burnt grass were clear enough, and we followed him for about two miles, sighting him on ahead every now and then, till he disappeared in a little ravine, and we lost the track in its bare rocky bottom. I was going along the bank, with the other elephant in the bottom of the ravine, when I heard the bark of a sámbar to my left on some high ground, and, urging Futteh Rání at her best pace in that direction, shortly came on the tiger slouching across the open plain evidently suffering from a wound, with his tongue hanging out, and wearing altogether a most woe-begone look. He made an effort when he saw me, and galloped a hundred yards or so into a patch of bamboojungle. I knew from the local shikárí that he was making for a water-hole about half a mile ahead, and cut across with the elephant to intercept him. I had the pace of him now, and got clean between him and his water. I never saw such an air of disgust worn by any animal as that tiger had when he came down the hill and saw the elephant standing right in front of him. He said, as plainly as possible, "Come what will, I don't mean to run another yard; and it won't be the better for anybody that tries to make me." So he lay down behind a large anjan

tree, showing nothing but one eye and an ear round the side of it. I marched up within fifty yards, and now saw the switching end of a tail added to the eye and ear. I could not fire at him thus, and therefore sidled round till I saw his shoulder. He saw the opening thus left, and eyed it wistfully, as if he would rather escape that way, if he could, than fight it out. But I planted a ball in his shoulder before he had time to make up his mind; on which he rose with a languid roar, and lumbered slowly down the hill at the elephant. So slowly! He actually hadn't steam left in him to get up a proper charge when he tried. A right-and-left stopped him at once, and another ball in the ear settled him; and then Futteh went up and kicked him, and it was all over. He was a very large tiger, measuring ten feet one inch in length as he lay, and was a perfect mountain of fat-the fat of a thousand kine, as the cowherds lugubriously remarked when they came up. He had a perfect skin, clear red and white, with the fine double stripes and W. mark on the head, and long whiskers, which add so greatly to the beauty of a tiger-trophy. The whole of the pads of his feet were blistered off on the hot rocks he had been traversing, and his tongue was swollen and blue. We were nearly dead ourselves, and went down to the water he had been making for," while a messenger went to the village for more men-the dozen lusty cattle-herds and my own men together being totally unable to put him on the pad-elephant to carry home. An ordinary tiger will weigh about four hundred and fifty or five hundred pounds, but this beef-fed monster must have touched seven hundred pounds at least; and a tiger, from his length and suppleness, is a very awkward object to lift off the ground.

I have said that ten feet one inch is the length of an unusually large tiger. The average length from nose to tip of tail is only nine feet six inches for a full-grown male, and for a tigress about eight feet four inches. The experience of all sportsmen I have met with, whose accuracy I can rely on, is the same; and it will certainly be found, when much greater measurements than this are recorded, that they have either been taken from stretched skins or else in a very careless fashion. The skin of a ten-feet tiger will easily stretch to thirteen or fourteen feet, if required; and if natives are allowed to use the tape, they are certain to throw in a foot or two "to please master." Master also, no doubt, pleases himself in a similar manner. A well-known sportsman and writer, whose recorded measurements have done more to extend the size of the tiger than any thing else, informed me himself that all his measurements were taken from flat skins. But the British public demands twelve-feet tigers, just as it refuses to accept an Indian landscape without palm-trees. So a suppressio veri went forth; and not only that, but his picture of a dead tiger being carried into camp was improved by a few feet being added to the length of the beast, while, to make room for it, the most of the bearers were wiped out, leaving about four men only to carry a tiger at least fifteen feet long! Populus vult decipi, etc.

Sporting stories are apt to breed each other, incident leading on to incident, so that I find I have already killed some five or six tigers, while yet only on the threshold of my subject-discoursing of the preliminary exploration of the tiger's haunts. I have little more to say on that matter, however, the sum of it all being that every information regarding the tiger's country, the route he usually takes from one haunt to another, the points where he may be most easily intercepted or come upon unawares, good points for scouts, etc., must be obtained. Places must also be fixed on for tying out baits for him at night. He must be induced, if possible, to kill a buffalo or an ox so tied out; and it must be in such a position that he can be easily tracked from there to one of his usual haunts.

It may seem cruel thus to bait for a tiger with a live animal, but there is no doubt that the death of a tiger saves much more suffering than is caused to the single animal sacrificed to effect it. A natural kill will not do well for many reasons. It will probably not be discovered in time to hunt the next day, and the day after it would be useless. Further, it would seldom be conveniently situated with respect to some haunt of the tiger favorable for finding him in, and the whole day might be lost in trying to find him in wrong places. In fine, experience shows that no bag can ever be made worth speaking of without tying out baits. I usually purchased at the commencement of the season a dozen or fifteen half-grown buffaloes, these being the cheapest as well as the most readily killed by tigers. A thin old brute of an ox, or a tough, full-grown buffalo, a well-fed tiger will scorn to touch, and often in the morning his footprints will be found all round such a bait, which he has come and smelt, and (metaphorically) poked in the ribs, and left untouched. But a tender, juicy young buff., of about three and a half feet high, would tempt the most blasé of tigers to a meal. The cowherds, being good Hindoos, will not sell cattle avowedly to be tied up for tigers; nor will your Hindoo shikárís tie them up with their own hands, though few will object to superintend the operation. The flimsiest disguise is, however, sufficient to quiet the consciences of the cattle-men, who will sell a herd of young buffaloes in open market to your Mohammedan shikárí dressed up as a trader in kine, though they may ha known him for a bloody-minded baiter for tigers all their lives. I remember being very hard up for a bait once in the Nimár district, having come to a place where tigers were very destructive when I had none of my own. All I could say would not induce the gaolís (cowkeepers) of the place to sell me a single head during the daytime, the owner of the village being a Baghél Rájpút, a clan which claims descent from a royal tiger, and protects the species whenever it can. I was standing outside my tent in the evening when the village cattle were being driven in, having given up all idea of halting for the tigers another day, when a fine, tall young gaolí stepped up with a salaam and said: "Sahib, I have lost a very fine young buffalo in the jungle, and it will very probably be snapped up by the

recollect ever going out when he report-
ed the "find" a likely one without at least
seeing the game. He could shoot a little
say a pot-shot at a bird on a branch at twen-
ty paces-and kept guns, etc., in beautiful
order. But he soon came to utterly despise
and contemn every thing except tiger-hunt-

tigers; but, if you would send some one
along that road, perhaps he might find it, and
we will be pleased if your highness will keep
it, as you are going away from this to-mor-
row." He grinned a broad grin as he fin-
ished, and I spotted his game; so, sending
along the lállá about a quarter of a mile, we
found a very sufficient young wall-eyed buf-ing, for which he had, I believe, really an ab-
falo tied by a piece of straw-rope to a little
tree! We had barely time to get the little
brute put out in proper place before night-
fall; but he was duly taken, and we shot a
fine tigress, and wounded and lost a tiger, the
next day.

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sorbing passion. Even bison - hunting he
looked down on as sport not fit for a gentle-
man to pursue. For ten months in the year
he moped about, looking utterly wretched,
and taking no interest in any thing but the
elephant and rifles; and woke up again only
on the 1st of April, opposite which date
"Tiger-shooting commences" will be entered
in the Indian almanac of the future, when
the royal animal shall be preserved in the
reserved forests of Central India to furnish
sport for the nobility of the land!

Poor old lállá! He fell a victim in the
end to contempt of tigers, bred of undue fa-
miliarity. I was very ill with fever in the
June of 1866, and meditating a trip home,
and had sent out the lállá with a double gun
to shoot some birds for their feathers with
a view to salmon-flies. He came upon the
tracks of a tiger, and, contrary to all orders,
tied out a calf at night as a bait, and sat
over it in a tree with the gun. The tigress
came and received his bullet in the thigh,

The morning after the baits have been tied out a shikárí should go to see the result, untying and bringing in those that have not been taken, and following up the tracks from any that have, so far as to ascertain fully whereabouts the tiger is likely to be found later in the day. I have mentioned above the lállá, and that brings me to the subject of shikárís. A really first-class tiger-shikárí is extremely rare. The combination of qualities required to make him is seldom found in a native. I shall best explain what he should be by describing the lállá. And first as to his name. Lállá means in Upper India a clerk of the Káyat caste, to which our friend belonged; so that, though utterly ignorant of all letters save those imprinted on a sandy ravine-bed by a tiger's paw, he was nick-going off wounded into a very thick cover in named the lállá by the people, and thereupon his real name disappeared forever; and, when he was afterward killed by a tiger, no one had any idea what it was. He was a little, wee man, so insignificant and so dried and shriveled up that, as he used to say, "No tiger would ever think of eating me!" His early days had been passed in catching and training falcons for the nobles of Upper India, and in shooting birds for sale in the market.

He had come down to Central India to make a bag of blue rollers and kingfishers, whose feathers are so much valued in the countries to the east for fancy-work, when he was caught, nobody knows how, by a gentleman with a taste for bird-stuffing, from whom he passed into the possession of a sportsman who put him on tigers, and eventually he came to me with a little experience of the business. His early training had made him exceedingly keen of eyesight and in reading the signs of the forest; while in his many wanderings he had accumulated a store of legends of demons and devilry, and a wild jumble of Hindoo mythology that never failed, when retailed over a fire at night to a circle of gaping cowherds and village shiká. rís, to unlock every secret of the neighborhood in the matter of tigers. Such an oily cozener of reticent gónds never existed. Then, miserable as he looked, he could walk about all day and every day for a week in a broiling sun, hunting up tracks, with nothing but the thinnest of muslin skull-caps on his hard nut of a head, and would fearlessly penetrate into the very lair of a tiger perfectly unarmed. He had a particular beaming look which he always wore on his ugly face when he had actually seen or, as he said, "salaamed to" a tiger comfortably disposed of for the day; and in late years, when I had to leave all the arrangements to him, I hardly

the bed of a river. The plucky but foolish
lállá followed her in there the next morning
by the blood; but soon found that tracking
up a wounded tiger with a gun is a very dif-
ferent thing from following about uninjured
tigers without intent to disturb them. Be-
fore he had gone a dozen paces the tigress
was upon him, his unfired gun dashed from
his hands and buried for half its length in
the sand, his turban cuffed from his head to
the top of a high tree by a stroke of her
paw that narrowly missed his head, and him-
self down below the furious beast, and being
slowly chewed from shoulder to ankle. He
was brought in a dozen miles to Khandwá,
where I was, by some men who had gone in
for him when the tigress left him. The fire
of delirium was then in his eye, and he raved
of the tiger's form passing before him, red
and bloody. But he recognized me when I
came to him, and conjured me to go out
forthwith and bring in her body next day if I
wished to see him alive. I knew that the na-
tives have a superstition to this effect; and,
though I was then in a high fever, I sent off
my elephant at midnight to a village near the
spot, following myself on horseback at day-
break. Much rain had fallen, and all old
tracks were obliterated. The jungle was
also very green and thick, and I spent the
whole day till the afternoon, hunting, as I
afterward found, in a wrong direction. At
last I came on a fresh trail, with one hind-
foot dragging in the sand, and then I knew I
was near the savage brute. We ran it up to
a dense jáman-cover in the river-bed, and I had
barely time to get the people on foot safely
up trees when the tigress came at me in the
most determined manner. She looked just
like a huge cat that had been hunted by
dogs her fur all bedraggled and standing on
end, eyes glaring with fury, and emitting the

hoarse coughing roar of a charging tiger that no one, to the very close of his tiger-shooting, hears without a certain quickening of the blood. The first two shots hit fair, but did not stop her; and she was not more than a few yards from the elephant's trunk when the third ball caught her clean in the mouth, knocking out one of her canine teeth and passing down the throat into the chest. She could do no more, but lay roaring and worrying her own paws till I put an end to her with another shot in the head. She was a lean greyhound-made brute, scarcely bigger than a panther. The lállá was avengedbut the poor fellow was beyond any help that the sight of his enemy might have afforded him and notwithstanding every care-for he was the favorite of everybody who knew him-he sank under the exhausting drain of so many fearful wounds.

"I

LOVE AND AMBITION.

LOVE you, I love you," the fond wave
sang,

As she crept to the garment's hem
Of the lordly hill, where her wistful tears
Were gemming it gem on gem.

"I love you, I love you, oh, lift me up
To your place in the sunlit air;
Or bend, if you will, your face to mine,
Till I touch your golden hair.
"Nay, nay, fair wave, yet ever be sure

Your song is as sweet as can be;

It toucheth me even as toucheth the wind,
Whose harp maketh music for me."

"The wind, the wind," said the murmur-
ing wave,

"The wind is not constant a day;

It blows where it listeth, while I, O Hill,
Am faithful for aye and aye."

"The wind and the sun and the rain," quoth he,

"Are friends, who my verdure renew; But you, little wave, with your softest caress,

What is there you can help me to do?

"Ah, nothing," she sighed, "but to love and to lave

Your feet with my kisses and tears; Only this have I done through the centuries

past,

Only this can I do through the years."

"O wave, keep your tenderness all for the

sea

I have work which you know not to do: You cannot mount up to the stars with me,

And I may not come down to you."

But Love has no choice; and the constant
wave,

A worshiper early and late,
Still kisses the hem of his ever-green robe,
And whispers in patience, "I wait."

MARY B. DODGE.

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