see them and pay them their attention. But from the time of Colonel Kirkmount's first arrival and initiation into the command, he commenced his train of insinuating artifices and constant assiduities to Mrs. Danvers. Sometimes it was a new picture which he had placed in one of his suite of rooms and asked her to look at, sometimes it was an excursion which he had undertaken to see some native building, or scene in the neighbourhood. He first began by inviting her husband and herself, and though of course including many others, he managed to show her that he thought that she alone was the object worth devoting attention to or speaking to in any way. In every sort of accomplishment in vogue he was perfect. He figured either as an amateur, a dancer, a first-rate driver of a four-in-hand drag, or as an attendant on out-door excursions with a lady; and in singling out Mrs. Danvers, he first managed not to give her any peculiar or prominent place of preference, but found means to whisper to her that he could not endure the bore of having to perform the part of an attendant, or cavalier servente to any other person (naming any of the other ladies in the room), and begged her to afford him the means of passing some little part of the time in her society; to which she would laughingly reply that there was no constraint upon him, and that she had no means of driving him away should he wish to stay near her

seat.

Although she was not a proficient in dancing, she still sometimes took her part amongst the rest, and made the quadrille, as many do, a useful means of whiling away the time in conversation with an agreeable companion. This dance frequently gave an opportunity for Colonel Kirkmount to pay her attention, and as waltzing was one of his fortes, he generally managed to find some young lady who was delighted to whirl round in such a dance with him, and to whom it did not oblige him to talk much. But there was no beauty so favoured as Alicia Danvers! She joined in the rides with him, amongst which none were so exciting as the hunting parties. I shall endeavour to give my recollections of one which was joined in by several of the officers, and in which no riders were better mounted, and created more sensation from their appearance, than Colonel Kirkmount and Mrs. Danvers.

The time of the morning when we set out for the sport was about halfpast three, then it was necessary to have another horse sent on to the place where the hounds met; but for each particular rider who wanted to see sport, it required that he should leave his home at that early hour. On the morning that I speak of we had as good a chase of an antelope, and as fine sport as any that a rider in any country would wish to partake of. The line of country which we took was in Oude. The hounds were fox-hounds. When puppies, they had been drafted from different breeds, which had been known to the huntsman. He had been in the habit of corresponding with his friends at home, and when these different hounds had come to an age fit for travelling and going through the sport, they had been selected by them for him. These all were carried in a large conveyance, similar to a basket-omnibus, and the riders followed, listening to the yelping of the hounds, and anticipating the sport which was before them, and which promised well, owing to the coolness of the morning. After passing the bridge, the carriage bearing the hounds left us. No

lady but Alicia Danvers ventured to come out this dark morning, and certainly she might have sat for a picture of Diana, from her beautiful contour of face and symmetrical figure. Although the sport was somewhat of a masculine character, and the situation might have been certainly trying to a lady, yet the matchless grace of her attitude, and perfect ease of her riding, as she held the bridle of a noble black horse-an Arab of the purest breed-her green flowing habit, and her hat with its waving plumes, caught every eye, as the first glimmer of the dawn opened upon us.

The huntsman talked long and proudly of the noble pack of hounds which he had (he said) only received a few days' before. They were, apparently, in as good case as though they were in their native land, which they had not very long left for the sea voyage, and then they, on their arrival, had been consigned to a trustworthy agent, who brought them carefully under charge to this huntsman, a civilian in the Company's service. This functionary took care to send them up to the hill station, in the Himalayan Mountains, during the heats of summer; and there they had remained, enjoying as bracing an atmosphere as that of England, until the month of November arrived. But on the morning in question, some time about the end of November, the huntsman appointed a place for meeting five miles from the cantonments of Cawnpore, in the province of Oude. The sportsmen found it necessary to be up at three in the morning: I shall give the native names for the servants who attended us this morning. The masaulchü (or lamplighter) lit the lamp, the khitmutghar (or waiter) brought the coffee, the sahib (or gentleman waited upon) dressed quickly and went outside to where the saces (or groom) was waiting with his horse. Another saces had been sent on to the village on the other side of the river Ganges, and this servant was the person who had charge of the best and fleetest steed, who was destined to do the rough work of the day. The first steed mounted was for the rider's reaching the place of meeting. On the way to this trystingplace which was a small assemblage of rude native huts-different groups of officers, some dressed in orthodox pink, some in black coats, but altogether presenting a great mélange of costume, were seen on the first grey dawn of the morning galloping onwards.

They all met at the bridge of boats, which crosses the Ganges from Cawnpore to Oude. The framework over this bridge was formed of bamboos, which were laid across the large lumber-boats, closely placed together from one side of the river to the other. When a boat had to pass up or down, one of the large standing boats had to be drawn out, and the passage was stopped for a time.

The framework of bamboo was covered over with clay, and the horsemen were obliged, on reaching the bridge, to slacken their speed. Then, having crossed the river, the riders pressed on, and several curious accidents happened before it was quite light. One man's horse got stuck in a quicksand, and the rider had just time to jump off and hold his bridle whilst the horse floundered about, and by dint of instinct (it was supposed) climbed up on terra firma. Another officer, who lingered behind, was unable to find the way to the place of meeting, as he could not make the natives understand him when he questioned those whom he met. But by far the most perilous contemplation, this dark morning, was the

circumstance of the number of sunk wells, deep and unfenced, which lay through the face of the country. However, no accident, further than a disappointment, occurred to damp the spirits of the party. They were, indeed, in great glee. They felt the freshness of the morning air, the bracing influence of the exercise, and the prospect of the exciting gallop over the wide expanse of country. When they reached the little hamlet of bamboo huts cased in mud, where the rustic villagers of Oude turned out with "stupid gaze" to watch the meeting of the horsemen and the hounds, it was just verging on the first dawn of day. The hounds had been sent on, as I said before, by the huntsman, and the numerous saceses' and officers' horses were here met by their masters. After the sportsmen had mounted, the huntsman sent the hounds into a sugar-cane cover, whose plants were about twelve feet high, and the cover lying thick and wide for the breadth of about a quarter of a mile square, kept the keen-nosed dogs at their mettle for some time. At last a deer, which had escaped from some neighbouring copse, broke out at the side of the plantation farthest from the village, and the sport began in earnest.

The beauteous day of Eastern sunshine, with its gorgeous tints, just broke out as the antelope bounded over the vast extensive plain. The most beautiful hour in the twenty-four hours during the cold season in India:

The morn was up again, the glowing morn,

With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,
Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,
And shining as if earth contained no tomb.

Then the antelope began a series of bounds which, combined with the swiftest running, strained the speed of the hounds to their wildest efforts. The flying leaps which the creature dashed on at comprehended in their stride at least eight yards each, until, as it were, exhausted with their energy-like a water-fowl, after he has ceased to fly over the surface of the waters in a chase, and takes to good steady swimming-this swiftest of the deer kind toned down his speed to the comparatively tame flat race run, and bore away over the surface of the country dead on end, straight over the muddy small walls which divide the cotton and corn ground, through fields of dall or vetch, through plantations of castor-oil plants-across immense downs of jhow-then, bearing onwards to the sugar-canes, avoided their thick groves, as likely to impede the play of his wing-like stride, until, after about an hour and a half of a killing pace for any horse or hound, his stride grew fainter, his steps heavier, and he at last drew up to bay in a small grove about nine miles from the village where we started from. The hounds dragged him down and tore him to pieces, and before a quarter of an hour was over we saw the bones of the "swift footed" animal nearly dry on the ground in the centre of the grove.

Even then, though it was scarcely more than nine o'clock in the morning, the great heat of the sun warned us that we should go homewards soon and get to breakfast after our exertions. We had no road to guide our steps in retracing our way homewards, and we mostly trusted to the information which we got from the natives as we passed them, as

VOL. LVI.

2 c

they all were cognisant of that conspicuous object the bridge (or the pool, as it is called in Hindustani), which with its

Wearisome but needful length
Bestrode the flood.

We did not arrive at home till ten, and then we found the bath truly a delightful preparative to our morning meal. On other mornings during the cold season we had sometimes good sport in chasing the jackal, which frequently gave a run of six miles, but the sport is at an end when he gets into a thick grove of sugar-canes, as from the nature of the cover the hounds find it impossible to draw him from it. But many a morning have I seen these animals, which give the same sort of sport here as the fox does to the huntsmen in England, carry us through a line of country similar to that which I have endeavoured to describe, and give a check to the hounds by taking to earth like a badger-which animal it resembles in its habits-or steal through the thick cover of the canes till such time as the morn was warm enough to allow of his running to his lair without fear of being scented, as the scent will not lay after the sun has been more than two hours above the horizon. Englishmen invariably turn with enthusiasm to a sport of such an exciting kind, and such a pastime and such exercise found much more favour with the young and high-spirited than the languishing and lazy inane resources of indoor life in a large bungalow in India. There the ladies never think of engaging in work, seldom in music, but sit under the well-fringed punkah and dawdle away the hours, sometimes listening to the gossip or scandal which any new visitor comes to tell them, or engaged when alone with some new novel. During such hours and in such a climate how many are the opportunities for desultory conversation and love making, and how great must be the idleness which is universal to all females there, where the languor of their frame is brought about by the intense and overpowering heat, which almost precludes the possibility of exertion. Those who have children very soon take measures to have them sent home to a more invigorating climate, and it almost universally happens that the mother of a family is obliged to part with her children, as even if she should not be able to afford to send them home, she would despatch them to the hills, even though she herself should be obliged to remain with her husband in the plains below. Such being the case, a family, with its several ties, affections, and duties, rarely found place in India. No aged parents, no youths and daughters being educated, and no children but those young infants who were of necessity consigned to the charge of native nurses and servants. The lady of the house had no domestic duties to attend to, further than ordering her butler every morning to provide the eatables or meals for the day; as to keeping a wardrobe, or even holding the keys of one's chest or boxes, no European man or woman ever thinks of such a thing. In this state of things the young ladies who emigrate here very quickly find admirers, and may soon be enabled to make choice of husbands, and the young and unprincipled, who do not have a guard over their conduct, are very likely to fall into dangerous habits. Such instances were surely known to have occurred in Cawnpore at the time I speak of, and, in fact, it might have furnished a catalogue of instances; the most remarkable ones, however, were certainly those which the rival beauties appeared in as the leading characters.

FANTASTIC TALES.*

PARIS has been for some time past charmed by a succession of light works from the pen of Erckmann-Chatrain. "Le Fou Yégof," the "Contes de la Montagne," "Maitre Daniel Rock," and "L'Illustre Docteur Mathéus," were among these pleasant fictions, which took their readers by storm. The style was graceful; the characters new and striking; the incidents of absorbing interest; and learning and taste were made to contribute to the details, whether of objects, persons, or localities. Thus was the success of Erckmann-Chatrain's works secured, till the public began to inquire if there was not a mystification under that name. The fact is that the authors, as is not uncommonly the case in the "centre of civilisation," were two in number: Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrain, but so united by community of toil and a friendship of fifteen years' duration, that they still adhere to their primitive twin signature Erckmann-Chatrain.

This will also account for a certain difference of style, mode of thought, and selection of subjects visible when there are a succession of different tales, as in the instance now before us, the "Contes du Bord du Rhin,” which might perhaps more appropriately have been designated as "Tales written on the Banks of the Rhine," than Tales of the Banks of the Rhine. "Myrtille," for example, is almost a mere pastoral, the story of a pretty gipsy girl adopted by an honest peasant of Dorenheim, in Alsatia, and who rewards her benefactor by running away into nature-wild, free, unconstrained. The description of the peasant's home is, however, charming, and Myrtille is wilful and imprudent without being sentimental the fault of most pastorals.

The "Old Lord's Treasury" is a fantastic story of the servant of a worthy librarian of Munich becoming possessed of a large fortune by means of a talisman, which, by its magnetic properties or otherwise, led him to the grave of Gontran, surnamed the Miser, in a tower of the ruinous castle at old Brissac, where the said riches lay unclaimed. The story is graphically told, and the interest well sustained. "The Queen Bee" is another pastoral sketch of a blind young peasant girl, who, in her privation, had solaced herself by establishing a perfect intimacy with the bee tribe. "Black and White" is a fearful story of murder and of a spectral execution. The "Robber of Children" is a still more frightful story, founded, it is said, upon a fact of children being stolen and cut up for charcuterie, that actually occurred at Mayence! The " Cabalist Hans Weinland" is a purely fantastic sketch of a theoretical importation of cholera from the far East, by a disappointed professor of metaphysics wishing to avenge himself upon a world that had ignored him. The scene of the incident is placed in some waste land in the Rue Copeau, the narrow street that leads down from what was once the Panthéon, and is now the church of St. Geneviève, to the Jardin des Plantes.

* Contes des Bords du Rhin. Par Erckmann-Chatrain. Paris: J. Hetzel.