a-muck, and he came suddenly upon an English sailor, who took it uncommonly coolly: he just stepped a little on one side, caught the Malay with a heavy left-handed lunge just under the ear, and killed him on the spot.

"I once saw an elephant kill another with a blow of its trunk," said Captain Hardcastle, a veteran officer, who had spent nearly the whole of his life in India.

"Ahem!" said the Major.

99

"That's right, Hardcastle," said Tom Madcap, "come it strong "It is a fact," persisted the Captain. "It was when we were entering the Deccan, a long time ago now. We were marching through one of those deep narrow roads they have, a thing you might call a ravine, ten miles long, so narrow that there was only room for one elephant at a time. This was a young female, and next behind her was an old male, and whether he had been teasing her, or how he provoked her I do not know but all of a sudden she wheeled right round, up with her trunk, and gave him just one blow on the head; down he went, and we thought he was stunned, and were rather astonished at that; but when we came to examine the matter, by Jove, the poor brute was as dead as a stone."

What a vixen!" said Mr. MacGallaher, who now began to eye everybody with a species of drunken cunning, and seemed to be getting an idea into his head that Captain Hardcastle was inclined to practise on his credulity.

"There is a particular spot in an elephant's head," continued the narrator, "where the skull does not effectually protect the brain; this is the place you always aim at when you are shooting them, and whether her instinct made her aware of this spot or that she merely hit it by accident I do not know; but she did hit it, and the brute, as I said, died instantly, and the worst was, that we had no means of moving him; he stopped up the road completely, for not an elephant would go near him; and the column was delayed under a blazing sun for seven hours; for the only way we could get rid of him was by having up the pioneers with their tools, and cutting the body into pieces."

Here Mr. MacGallaher cast a grim and ominous glance at the unconscious speaker; he seemed very much inclined to be quarrelsome, without exactly knowing how to set about it.

"You see mighty sthrange things in India, Sir," said he.

Very strange indeed," said the Captain.

"Did ever you see an elephant caught in a thrap, Sir?" continued Mr. MacGallaher, waxing more wroth.

"Never," said the Captain, cracking a walnut.

"Did ever you hear tell of catching a weasel asleep?" thundered Mr. MacGallaher, and Captain Hardcastle raised his eyes from his plate to answer this unexpected question, when the surgeon of the regiment, who had also a store of Indian anecdotes, unwittingly interfered, and transferred the Milesian's wrath to himself.

Talking of catching elephants in a trap," said he; "I have seen something much better worth seeing than that, for I once saw a tiger caught with birdlime."

"A tiger caught with birdlime!" roared out Mr. MacGallaher, completely confounded by what seemed to be the intolerable insolence of this last assertion. "Do you mane to tell ME that, Sir?"

"Indeed I do," returned the doctor, "and a very curious sight it was. I would not have missed it for anything. I was on a botanical tour in the north of India, not very far from the territories of his Majesty of Oude, (May his sauce live for ever!) when the man in whose house I was lodging told me that a tiger had been tracked to his haunt, and that he was to be killed in the course of the day, after the manner of their forefathers, if I pleased to see it. Of course I did please to see it, and, accordingly, towards evening found myself, with half a dozen of the natives, perched up in a tree, which commanded a capital view of a dark out-of-the-way sort of place, where they assured me he was sure to come. I could see no preparations for taking him, but they explained to me that the ground all about was covered with leaves, the upper sides of which were smeared with birdlime, and that if he once trod on one of these leaves he was done; nothing could save him. Well, Sir, by and by down came a thumping royal tiger, swaggering along as if the whole place belonged to him; which, indeed, might have been the case, as far as nobody being inclined to dispute it with him; and sure enough he had not gone five steps before he did pick up a leaf on his fore paw. He stopped dead short, lifted up his paw and took a squint at it, as if he did not much like the look of it, and he then gave it a bit of a shake, a sort of gentle pat that would have knocked over a bullock like a nine-pin. The leaf remained, and the next thing he did was to rub it against his jaw, where it stuck. He got into a passion, but as all this time he had been picking up more leaves, the more he tried to remove them from his face the more of them stuck there. They got into his nostrils and drove him half mad; they began to get into and over his eyes, and almost blinded him, and all this time the natives about me were in a state of the highest delight, grinning and chattering like so many monkeys. All of a sudden he gave a frightful yell, and took a roll on the ground that of course covered him half over with them. He howled most hideously, and by this time he had got his eyes quite stopped with them, and after a few minutes of this sort of tarring and feathering process, he was considered to be so completely deprived of all power of self-defence that one of the natives just walked up to him and let an ounce ball into his heart as coolly as you'd shoot a jacksnipe."

Here Mr. MacGallaher's wrath exploded. He was fully convinced that both stories (both of which were strictly true) were mere inventions for the express purpose of hoaxing him.

"Do you think, Sir, that I came here to be insulted?" said he; "that I come by invitation of my friend, the Major, to dine at the mess that the officers may make game of me, and a laughing-stock of me, and an effigy of me, with these stories of boxing elephants, and tarring and feathering tigers, as if they were Christians, shooting wild bastes like cocksparrows. I'd have you to know, Sir-"

But, my dear Sir," interrupted Harry, "nothing can be further

from the thoughts of anybody here than insulting you. These stories are nothing surprising for India."

"Then you'll allow me to tell you, Sir, that they're very amazing for Ireland."

"If the circumstance of the elephant killing the other was not remarkable," good-humouredly observed Captain Hardcastle, "what would have been the use of my telling it at all?”

"And I can assure you, Mr. MacGallaher," said the doctor, "the manner of taking a tiger that I describe is very well known to exist, though few have had the opportunity of being eye-witnesses of it as I had, simply because it is confined to a part of India where few Europeans penetrate; and, as Hardcastle justly observes, if the story was one of everyday life, what would be the use of telling it?"

"Well, that's true," said Mr. MacGallaher, as suddenly appeased as he was irritated. "I beg your pardon, Sir; but sometimes I'm rather hard of believing. Shake hands, doctor; shake hands, captain; tip us your fin, major, ould boy. I'd go bail you'd shoot a tiger as soon as look at him; did you ever (hiccup) ate one, doctor? That was an elegant story of yours; I'll tell you a story myself, how Mick Rooney took a mad bull by the horns, that'll make you die of laughing."

It takes a tolerably clear head to tell a story well out of hand, and Mr. MacGallaher's head being what he would have called mighty conflubstrificated at the moment, and the course of the narration being seriously impeded by hiccups, repetitions, glasses of claret, and expressions of amity towards the gentlemen whose throats he had proposed cutting, and all the other elephants and tigers in the tropics, occupied about forty minutes, in the course of which Harry Mowbray contrived to effect his escape. Having reached his own room, and locked the door-a necessary precaution in barracks-Henry for some time paced slowly backwards and forwards. The pistols that had done him such good service in the morning, lay on the table, still loaded, and from time to time he cast a moody glance at them, as if he almost felt inclined to turn them against himself.

"It is a hard necessity," muttered he, "to live to suffer. Is it a necessity to live at all? If I had a father or a mother, a brother or a sister, a wife-ah! there it is-any one depending upon me; but my life is my own. What is life?-I have killed men with my own hand in action, whose very face I hardly saw whilst I struck at them-I have directed fire that I knew must kill men; and the sun shone, and the wind blew, and the rain fell, all the same. Why, bishops and parsons cannot think it very wrong, after all; for the first thing they teach a boy is, to admire Cato, Hannibal, Lycurgus, Brutus, Themistocles; and a score more illustrious names are held up for our admiration by Christian churchmen. Cicero dared not, nor Seneca, till he could not help himself; and nobody thinks better of them for it. But why I, who have neither fear of death nor love of life, should hesitate-" He took up the pistol.

It has been said that, when the weariness of life creeps over the soul, there are only two feelings strong enough to resist and reattach

the sickened affections to the earth, and those two are Love and Religion. Alas! it was Henry's imperfect notions of Religion that were the immediate causes of his disappointed love; but another feeling was at work in his breast. It was the weakness of pride that guided the hand of Cato: the strength of pride arrested that of Henry. "All this for a silly girl, who is frightened at independence of mind. I shall pay her no such compliment," said he, as he drew the charges.

PUE.