can outdo his. The king is a licentious drunkard; when he gives the order for the disastrous assault on Wallenstein's entrenched camp outside Nuremberg he is under the influence of liquor; he never takes a town without murder and ravishment, insulting of nuns and mutilation of priests. He appears at Würzburg as a blood-boltered butcher with his sleeves turned up lest they should hinder him in his murderous work; and at "Rodenburg on the Dover" (which he never besieged at all) he is repulsed with the loss of thousands by a garrison of fifteen hundred. Geographical inaccuracies may be pardonedTilly, when he defeated the Danes at Lutter, did not know what country he was fighting in, but there is not a word in Poyntz's account of the Swede's campaign which can be relied upon as true.

His Saxon captainey stood him in little stead. He was captured in "Foytland" by "Count Butler" (afterwards the treacherous organiser of Wallenstein's murder), and having in vain besought John George of Saxony to ransom him, followed the example of his betters, and turned his coat, becoming henceforward a furious Imperialist. His doglike attachment to Butler, a poor creature and a most unsuccessful soldier, is curious for Poyntz was worth a score of Butlers. But it was most likely from Butler that he got his really graphic account of the murder of Wallenstein's lieutenants in the Castle of

VOL CXC.-NO. MCLI.

Eger, which may fairly rank as history.

Under Wallenstein Sydenham fought at Lützen, and except that he jumbles up his account of the battle with his recollections of Breitenfeld, his narrative may be trusted, at least so far as it concerns himself. "I lost three horses that day being shot under me and I hurt under my right side and in my thigh but I had horses without maisters enough to choose and horse myself; all had pistols at their saddle bow, but shot off, and all that I could do was with my sword without a scabbard and a daring pistol but no powder nor shot: my last horse that was shot had almost killed me, for being shot in the guts as I think he mounted on a suddaine such a height, yea I think on my conscience two yards, and suddaine fell to the ground upon his rump and with his suddaine fall thrust my breech a foot into the ground, and fell upon me and there lay grovelling upon me, that he put me out of my senses. I know not how I was, but at length coming to myself with much adoe got up, and found two or three brave horses stand fighting together. I took the best, but when I came to mount him I was so bruised and with the weight of my heavy armour that I could not get my leg into the saddle that my horse run away with me in that posture half in my saddle and half out, and so run with me till he met with Picolominie coming running with a troop of horse

It is unpleasant after this soldierly bit of narrative to discover that Poyntz is mainly concerned not with the loss of the battle for his side. No; even as the battle of Poitiers centred, in the opinion of Samkin Aylward of the White Company, round his precious feather-bed, so the interest of Lützen is in our hero's opinion chiefly to be found in the running away of the "WagonJades" with the train and all his money. "Canally! bagagy!" said Wallenstein in his queer jargon as he saw them go; and indeed their flight finished his chances of victory; but for Sydenham Poyntz the main trouble was that they took with them thousand pounds of his.

One more piece of graphic description he gives us. It is after the terrible defeat of the Swedes at Nördlingen-a defeat caused chiefly, if we may trust Poyntz, by his personal valour and alertness. As an appendix he gives us a vivid account of an assault on the town. Here he says he scrambled for first place in the escalade with a younger soldier. "A proper young man he was and up he went and I followed him at heels. So soon as he came to the top of the walls it seems one thrust at him with a halberd and thrust off his beaver; his beaver was

one struck off his head and it fell to the ground. The head being off the body falls upon me, and then it lies very heavy upon me and blooded me wonderfully that I was almost smothered with blood. I not knowing the cause oried what the Devil ailed you that you do not mount higher, but what with the weight and with the blood I could hold no longer and down we fell together and what with my fall upon the stones and he in his armour upon me that I knew not whether I was alive or dead," and so on.

All which is very dramatic. But unfortunately for Poyntz's fame as a true historian Nördlingen was never assaulted at all, but surrendered peaceably the day after the battle.

The great defeat left Swabia at the mercy of the Imperialists, and in that pleasant land Poyntz determined to settle down. He had already had a wife or two, procured for him by the good offices of "Count Butler." The first being of an humble condition and "very house-wifely" greatly pleased the Elder. The second was an aristocratic dame who had great store of kindred that lay upon him. He had lost most of the first wife's fortune when the waggon-jades bolted at that fatal battle of Lützen; but he had recouped himself afterwards while living at free quarters among the rich boors of Austria-Protestants, and therefore fair mark for plunder. Out of their spoils he had feathered his nest well, and now he seems to have

taken a third wife he was, if we may trust his portraits, a singularly handsome man — named, according to Aubrey, "Anne Eleanora de Court Stephanus de Cary, in Wurtemberg." What German title may lurk under this strange cryptogram it is impossible to say. But the projected halcyon times in Swabia did not last long. For now was the engineer hoist with his own petard. The hard captain of dragoons who had for years lived by plunder and rapine, returning to what had been his home, after some expedition, found that French stragglers from the Valtelline had been there before him, and discovered "the true tryal of Fortune's mutability, which was that my wife was killed and my child, my house burned and my goods all pillaged: my Tenants and Neighbours all served in the same sauce, the whole village being burned: neither horse cow sheep nor corn left to feed a mouse. This when I came home I found too true: some poor people got into the ruins living with roots: this went nere me.' It might well do so: but it was one case out of hundreds in that awful war in which Poyntz himself had played a part. He went off for consolation to Count Butler; found him dying; and ends his German reminiscences with an account of his efforts to recover a thousand pounds which he says his friend had left him, but which Countess Butler refused to pay. But Poyntz was nothing if not disinterested: "his views in entering upon this war were purely

no exercise for his talents as yet, and so took leave of his hosts and his country, and hey! for the German wars again. "I doe give a Longum Vale to my country and a Longum Vive to my Soveraigne Lord and King, King Charles, and will try my fortune again where I first raised it."

How the unctuous hypocrite served his sovereign lord King Charles is writ large. It was he who after Naseby followed up the broken Royalist forces and dispersed them at Rounton Heath in Cheshire: it was he who, when Charles took refuge in the Scots camp before Newark, sent the first news of the event to Speaker Lenthall. He was for a time commander of the whole forces of the Northern Association. But he was unpopular with the troops. When the "New Model" of the Independents was proposed, it was looked that Poyntz, Elder of the Dutch Church as he was, should oppose it and stand by the Presbyterians. So he did; but his soldiers mutinied, seized him and sent him under guard

IF there is any one who thinks that the stream of progress in the United States has been so rushing and fullflooded that it has overspread the whole continent, and found its way into every last corner of the land, he can correct that mistake by hunting up certain localities, and that without travelling to the remote wildernesses of the West. One of these unruffled, behind-theworld backwaters, that immigration and advancement have always swept by, is to be found in the Appalachian Range, in some of whose nooks conditions exist to-day that are a revelation. The land - seeking tidal wave has always naturally rolled to the flatter-lying lands of the middle and western States, leaving much of the Appalachians all undisturbed, and among the inhabitants of these mountains there are many of whom it can undoubtedly be said that they are direct and undiluted in their descent from some batch of the colonists planted by Sir Walter Raleigh on American soil. A certain amount of outside blood may have been introduced into some families, in course of their inland migration, by reason of their having possibly run across, and mixed with, one or other of the small early-day colonies of German and Swiss origin; but any such adulteration, if it took place, must have been of the slightest. Equally with many Virginians, they might lay

claim, though this may be not so readily traceable, to "first family" distinctions. They are, however, a people who have about as little interest in a genealogical tree as an average untutored, unhistoried savage, and they are unlikely ever to cause the blue-blooded Virginian any concern by furnishing proof of title to share honours with him.

Back in the old stirring days of Virginia and the Carolinas, when the English Monarchs and the Lords Proprietors were juggling with the real estate, these people's sturdy ancestors were growing cotton and tobacco on the coast. After a while the bolder spirits, fretting under the tithes and imposts laid upon them, began to strike out for themselves. Gradually, away from the coastal plain, through the great swamps, back and farther back into the country they moved, pushing aside the red-skinned Cherokee and Chickahominy as occasion required, and forcibly at times persuading these high-spirited aborigines that wigwams were made for packing up, and that the face of the earth was as fitted for the double-shovel plough of the white man as for the whoop and doubleshuffle of the war-dance. Byand-by they reached the Blue Ridge, and up and over that they climbed into the forested highlands beyond. There, all the while clearing and cropping, they laid olaims on the