and red-tiled roof showing where some wealthier peasant has made his home. But for this village and its attendant palm-trees and groups of broad plantains the scene is hardly Eastern. Presently the fallow-land is left behind and the hunt passes over crops of sweet-potatoes and winter wheat. Here and there it makes a detour to avoid a patch of maturing tobacco. The villagers are still at work in this plot, carefully scrutinizing each broad leaf, searching for the parasites which unremoved may reduce their profits by half their margin. They rise from their work and gravely salute the sahibs, inwardly marvelling what folly can possess sane men that they can find enjoyment in the society of twenty half-wild dogs. Then we are into the village itself, passing between squalid buts with ill-thatched roofs. The women at the wells hastily hide their faces and flee to some shelter from which they can view the passing cavalcade without laying themselves open to the accusation of indelicacy. The little brown children, whose naked figures seem impervious to cold, come trooping to the roadside, and in shrill childish voices try to emulate their elders in the courtesy of salutation.

Half a mile from the village we find the covert which it is hoped will hold the jackal. The foxhounds are loosed from their leashes, and, with an imitation of the professional formula, the master puts his hounds into covert. But long before he had given the appointed word the fox-terriers and nondescripts were streaming in a long white line towards the tangled grass patch. Almost before the serious elders of the pack could set about their business Master Rip or Mistress Jemima had found their heart's desire. A couple of yaps, and then the "music" is taken up in a dozen different keys. But one of the dog-keepers has viewed the old grey jackal stealing away to

wards the river-bank. One view-halloo is enough, and then all semblance of the English sport is formally abandoned. It is a case of field, jackal, and pack each for itself and Providence for us all. The great long-striding greyhounds easily take the van, then come the better mounted of the field, followed at intervals by toiling, breathless terriers and deep-throated, mystified foxhounds. But the jackal has heard of greyhounds before. With a twist and a turn just under the bank of the river he sends them off at a tangent, while taking advantage of the tamarisk fringe he follows a line at right angles. In a country where hounds can barely work by scent, it is essential that man should use his head. The huntsman had put jackals out of that very grass before, and experience had taught him the usual manœuvre they made when they reached the river-bed. He was prepared for it, and manfully sounding his horn, he conveyed part of his pack by a short cut: he hit off the line truly, and gave his greyhounds another view. The jackal had three hundred yards' advantage, but the greyhounds had seen him, and they bent to the work of catching him. It was then coursing of the best, and though a covert with an earth in it was almost within reach, the leading greyhound rolled him over. He was up again and away. Over he rolled again, and then had another chance. But he turned full into the face of the fleetest of the nondescripts, and was pinned down for ever, to be worried into his next life by a multitude of terriers, who on these occasions prove the busiest sportsmen that ever ran a jackal on sight.

You who are not satisfied unless you have forty minutes of the best in a grass country will be inclined to scoff at our poor attempts at hunting. But then we can have a dozen of these brief moments in a morning, and we are satisfied with the small mead

which the country and circumstances will allow us! While the terriers are worrying the carcass, and the foxhounds piteously looking for water, and the man on the seventy-five-rupee pony, who was unfortunate enough to ride into a silver-fox earth, is brushing the soft mud from his coat, an excited villager arrives with the startling intelligence that he has discovered a tiger in a neighboring patch of tamarisk. We know well enough that in this highly cultivated country there is the smallest possible chance of a tiger being so far away from the jungles. But as the

man is most eloquent in his description and marvellous in the details of the beast, we feel sure that he has seen something. The covert is conveniently close and is consequently drawn. As a sign of his confidence in his own story the villager for the purpose of safety climbs into a babul-tree, and from this point of vantage directs the operations. His directions are not needed long, for out of the thickest portion of the tamarisk bounds a beautiful neilghi. Now here is a run to tax the efforts of the best of sportsmen. For a man who will ride down a neilghi must ride as cunning and as hard as any fellow-sportsman in the Shires!

The

It was some hours before the whole of the field with the residue of the pack returned to the rendezvous. majority of the hounds, however, from want of wind and want of length of limb, had long given up the hunt, and found their way back to their temporary kennel. This is a common failing in over-enthusiastic sporting dogs. The want of discipline in a "bobbery" pack is very similar to the lack of the same quality in irregular troops in a longprotracted war; in fact, without being unduly discourteous, we have had

4 Blue ball. 5 Lunch. 'Marriage-settlement money paid by the

many incidents recently forced upon us which find a parallel in the inconsequent behavior of an Indian scratch hunt.

But even after a wash and brush-up and a big midday tiffin," the festivities of the Indian Christmas had not been all exhausted. In the afternoon the sahib was prepared to receive the more distinguished of his native visitors, and about half-past four the first of these arrived. He was a very large landowner, and consequently very heavily in debt. The burden of this debt had been recently increased by the preliminary nuptials of a five-year-old daughter, who had been ill-advised and hardy enough not to succumb to the usual measure of infanticide adopted in the case of a superfluity of daughters. So grave had been the expenses incurred in the settling of the tilak," and so hard were the requests of the various moneylenders consulted, that the poor unfortunate father would fain sell a portion of his property to the sahib. The sahib, after the manner of his kind, and with 'a cunning bred of a long residence in the East, showed but little inclination to clinch a bargain which had been his prime desire for many years. Consequently there was nothing that the landowner could do that he would consider a trouble, provided that it placed him in a better footing with the white taskmaster. This day being Christmas, he selected it as opportune to show the greatest deference. Therefore he had his elephant caparisoned in its very best trapping, and, attended by his mace-bearer and his more influential retainers, he came to visit the şahib armed with a present of gold mohurs.

In consideration of the occasion the stout landowner was ushered in amongst the circle of Christmas visitors, and as a special mark of distinc

father of the bride to the father of the bridegroom.

tion was offered a chair. In trepidation he sat dubiously on the edge, and talked vaguely about the visit of the lieutenant-governor to the district, a visit which had taken place at least five years previously. Having exhausted this topic of conversation, he was as a special favor allowed to visit certain rooms within the bungalow. The silver plate in the dining-room somewhat interested him; also the table, upon which the skeleton of the Christmas dinner to be was already spread, attracted his attention. But, orientallike, his remarks of approbation or the reverse were few until he saw the billiard-table. Then even oriental gentility could not restrain his admiration. He offered to buy it on the spot, remarking that it was the kind of bed that he had been wanting for years. A printed price-list of billiard-tables was found in some obscure corner and presented to him. Armed with this he took his leave with all that courtesy for which the high-caste Oriental is famed, and returned to his elephant, Blackwood's Magazine.

we have no doubt thoroughly satisfied with the impression he had made.

The scope of this paper will only allow of reference to one more incident illustrative of the feelings which at this season move the Englishman in exile. The dinner has been served. The dignified sirdar has placed the port and sherry in front of the sahib, and has marshalled the rest of the servants out of the room. In general appearance it is much the same as any other English dinner-table. Men and women are dressed as we see them in the West; the closed doors and the pall of night have hidden away the Indian scenery; and now that the native servants have withdrawn, the moment has arrived for the drinking of a toast which to the exile is the most moving, the most solemn toast of all. The decanters pass, and then the host, calling upon his guests to take wine with him, proposes the "old folks at home." Only those who have been in exile can appreciate the spirit of this toast.

Man, though nominally a rational being, is not given to overmuch thinking, and, like Peter of old, is prone to call common-even when not regarding as unclean-much that is manifestly let down from Heaven. So it comes about that whatever is familiar ceases to excite question, thought, or even notice.

This is true not only of the works of Nature per se, but even of such of them as are modified by man himself. To take one instance, literally obvious to every wayfarer by road or traveller by rail-namely, the hedges, which in miles upon miles map the fair face of

our fertile land. Like the lines of the human face, they betoken much, and if read aright are seen to have no slight connection with the history of the country. Yet few of us, it is to be feared, have ever bestowed a thought upon their origin, their varieties, and their meaning; or, if at all, only, perchance, when we have stood upon some hill heaved high above the land, betwen the flat blue plain of the sea on one hand and the undulating earth on the other, the crests of whose solid billows are crowned by copses and woods rising among a network of thin green lines of hedgerows.

So accustomed are we countrymen to live and move and have our being among hedges, that most of us, who are not actually agriculturists, have come to look upon them as purely products of Nature, whereas, with few exceptions, hedges are the works of human hands applied to vital powers and products of Nature, and adapted to some definite end in her economy. It is only a living, growing fence that should be called a hedge; a boundary of dead wood, iron, brick, stone, and that invention of the devil, barbed wire, being walls or fences only-the last-named, however, partaking in addition strongly of the nature of an offence.

The origin and raison d'être of a hedge is to act as a fence, a boundary, a shelter, or a screen; or as a combination of any or all of these. For instance, a hedge may not only fence a field from the invasion or evasion of cattle: it may also be an inter-parochial boundary. In addition it may also serve as a shelter for cattle, "in the somer for hette, in the winter for lothe," as a Tudor writer expresses it.

In this connection, too, a hedge, by its leaning, may afford a very good index of that quarter of the sky from which the prevalent wind is wont to blow; very strikingly evident in old, exposed hedgerows within five or six miles of the sea, or in high, upland, inland districts. To the virtue of this sheltering quality of hedges we doubtless owe, in some measure, their survival, in spite of the cheapness and superior effectiveness of the various mechanical fences. Lastly, but by no means least, the hedge may be considered as an object of ornament or a thing of beauty. Here, though man has effected much, particularly in those fantastically cut and trimmed hedges of yew or box, Nature, who "transcends our moods," however much inclined to beauty, has far tran

scended our methods, as may be particularly seen in the hedges which border and embower the lanes of Devonshire, the wild luxuriant hedges of the South Down country, or the trimmer hedgerows of Warwickshire, overshadowed by umbrageous and ubiquitous elms. These are, in fact, the three chief types of the hedges of our country.

Those of Devonshire consist essentially of high banks of earth, on the top of which grows the hedge of hawthorn, hazel, ash, and oak, beautified with splendid streamers of wild rose and honeysuckle, the banks embellished with a luxuriant growth of flowers which gleam like gems among masses of multitudinous ferns. These hedgebanks border not only the king's highways and the people's byways-which are very near akin in narrowness-but also bound and fence the fields of green pastures and the red ploughland. The origin of these peculiar hedges has been variously accounted for; and the theory that many of these deep lanes were originally water-worn tracks leaves unaccounted for the similar hedges of the fields. The Warwickshire, or Midland hedges in general, are mainly made of hawthorn, with here and there some privet or cornel.

The usual method of making a hawthorn hedge is to dig a double trench a spade-breadth wide, throwing up the soil in a ridge between, upon which are planted two- or three-year old "quicksets"; the young hedge thus formed being protected by "post-andrail."

A well set and grown hedge of this sort is practically impenetrable, and is seen at its best alongside our railways. Bordering the Midland roads they give them a neat and almost prim appearance, being usually kept well cut and trimmed; while sturdy oaks here and there, or ash trees, chestnuts, poplars,

and the ever-present umbrageous elms, afford variety to hedges that would otherwise be scarcely less monotonous in aspect than a stone wall. These wayside elms are variously treated in different parts of the country, and so modify considerably the aspect of the hedges. In the Thames valley they are very generally denuded of branches for a height of halfway or more up the main trunk; in the southern counties they are suffered to grow much as they please subject to the road-surveyor's decision. Anciently the hundred court or the leet was wont to have a say in such matters. Thus, in a hundred court-roll in the reign of Henry V. we read that the hundred men "presented" that "the trees in the Lord's park so overhang the King's Highway that the said Highway in consequence suffers detriment." The "Lord," in this case, was the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury.

The third type of hedge is that which is seen in its wild perfection in the immediate neighborhood of the South Downs of Sussex. In these hedges, which fence the fields that foot the Downs, the variety of their constituent shrubs seems extraordinary, especially to those whose lives are led among the lines of hawthorn hedges in "the Shires"-for so your true-born son of Sussex calls all counties north of the Surrey hills.

In a few hundred yards of hedgerow hereabout seven or eight different kinds of shrub may readily be found, while the number might be increased to ten or more if the distance were extended to a mile.

One of the most beautiful of these is the "traveller's joy," whose trailing vine-like stem bears masses of foliage, in which gleam the starry cream-colored flowers, to be succeeded by the curious fluffy seed-pods. When it has once been seen growing in all its wild luxuriance of foliage, flower, and seed,

there remains no question of the fitness or the meaning of its name, for under the shade and shelter of such thick umbrage the traveller finds complete harborage from a too torrid sun or from tempestuous rain. The spindle tree is another characteristic shrub of these hedges, and one not without its uses, as the charcoal made from its wood is peculiarly valuable to artists; while in the days of the spinning-wheel it was equally sought after for the making of spindles; and hence its name. In the old "spinning books" to be found in ancient parish chests items of expenditure for spindles are often met with; such as, in 1786, in one I have seen, "Item. pd. for 1 doz. of spindles 18."

This shrub bears smooth pale green lanceolate leaves, of a somewhat wavy surface; and its small star-shaped, greenish flowers in nowise give promise of the prettiness of its fruit, whose five pink segments of capsule open to disclose a rich orange-colored seed.

The cornel, another common shrub.. is too well known to need description; but it is worthy of notice as being one of the two bushes which contribute to give a strong touch of warm color to the cold woods of winter. The other shrub is the saugh-willow, and together these two combine to brighten the sombre hibernal hues with the reds, crimsons, and purples of their leafless branches. As common as the cornel is the maple, a shrub impossible to be passed unnoticed in the autumn, for then, when almost every tree is colored by the alchemy of Nature, the maple gleams brighter than them all, a veritable burning bush. Nor is it a tree of ornament only when living, for its wood is of a singular beauty in grain, which has been appreciated for ages. Among the Romans it was a prime favorite for furniture, especially for making cabinets and table-tops; and it was scarcely less sought after in medi-