send a two-ounce ball crashing through her skull!

She drops off dead; and Piage, gradually recovering from her panic, is brought round to the scene of her late confusion, and it is all over. The pad elephant is called in, and the work of loading commences. I may here mention as we travel slowly back in the slanting rays of the declining sun-that although a tiger, from its inability to climb, can seldom advance farther than its first spring, yet an incident like the last related, however happily it may terminate, cannot be considered other than a misfortune, from the fact that it is very apt to destroy the future staunchness of the shooting elephant. Pitching out the occupants of the howdah, stumbling and falling over of the elephant, coming into contact with some low-branched tree, smashing the howdah and making mincemeat of its contents, are some of the eventualities that may and have occurred.

I

THE SETTING SUN.

SATE myself, a pilgrim at my rest,

A silent gazer at the quiet west

A simple pilgrim to myself confest,
And in my loneliness a soul all blest.

For, wandering through a day now well-nigh done,
I sate me down before the setting sun,
And wondered how, since first the morn begun,
What newer glory to the world was won;

What noble deed could lie with slumbers light
In holy dreams within the coming night;
What noble thought had thrown, in silent flight,
Its seed to blossom in the morrow's light.

For sure, I thought, in this eternal peace,
That grows into the twilight with increase,
Some godlike soul has scorned the mad release
From those immortal hopes that never cease.
Look down, O even star, through these dim lanes;
The long years come, the latest of them wanes;
Pure through the ages thy fair light remains-
Earth only thy calm innocence disdains.

MY FRIEND MRS. TIMEPIECE.

A GENERAL OUTLINE OF HER CHARACTER.

martyrdom, and fastened upon the "contumacious" the character of persecutors. But really Mrs. Timepiece was no martyr at all, and her trespasser no persecutor. She was a woman who loved power-who never ceased to try for more and more of it, in any and every shape conceivable; but sometimes she found her fine network of plans stopped half-way in its circles, and she drew back into the minor hollows of her armchair, as a disturbed spider into the corners of its web, and protected her dignity by assuming an injured air and tone.

I cannot tell exactly what a terrier's feelings are at the mouth of a fox-hole; but my feelings on these occasions must have had some resemblance to them. I felt a desire to unearth the old fox, and expose all her crocodile tears to daylight and analysis. Sometimes I followed the impulse, and traced, in what I considered rather eloquent terms, the last line of the web to its very centre. It was like a miniature Day of Judgment; and it was quite funny to see how it acted upon what one may call her "nassal nerves," which worked underneath the skin, and vibrated like fiddle-strings that are being alternately tightened and loosened; and there was a snappish look all over the face, not unlike that which you see when you come near a dog with a bone. Oh, how she did hate me at these times!

Mrs. Timepiece was deeply and thoroughly saturated with the opinion that all men were bad.

In reading family prayers, she laid a special emphasis upon words which indirectly referred to sins that chiefly belong to the masculine gender. The Psalmist said in his haste that "all men were liars;" but Mrs. Timepiece both thought and said it at leisure.

She seemed to feel it necessary to be always on her guard against them, and had trained her daughters to take up a kind of half-military position of defence in their pre

not.

deal about the matter, but she will She will exercise the Christian spirit of forbearance. Let him be unjust. She can afford to repose upon the grandeur of her conscience."

This was an attitude in which Mrs. Timepiece often placed herself. You will obYou will observe that underlying it there is a considerable subtlety. It gave her the hues of

Now, observe, Mrs. Timepiece rarely out and out, in Murray's words, told her daughters that men were bad; but words are not the only medium of understanding between a mother and daughter. They talk to one another by signs in the eyes, in the shaping of the cheeks and eyebrows, by sighs, and by slight elevations of the muscle at the apex of the shoulders. And Mrs. Timepiece

had, by continuous repetitions of these signs, taught her daughters to read them accurately. Her face to them was like a clock's face, and they could tell at all times pretty nearly what time it was before it audibly struck. In other words, they knew her wishes, thoughts, opinions, ideas, and feelings, as they came naked from her brain, without the ordinary clothing of words.

It is only just to say that, though her daughters thoroughly understood these signs, they never used them by way of answer to their mother. Odd enough to say, but true, I don't think she would have liked them to do so; and I half suspect that she would scarcely have understood them if they had. It was an alphabet she had taught them to read; but it was one she, at the least, disliked herself to read. It was quite right she should use it, but not sufficiently respectful to be used to her.

The utility of this alphabet was that, whilst very significant, it was not subject to challenge. It acted something like an air gun: you saw the bullet strike yourself or some other man, but heard no noise.

Being somewhat of an original character, and fond of adventure, I have sometimes, as before hinted, dashed some sharp sentence, like the lance of a cavalry man, into the midst of these evil thoughts of hers lying in ambush, and it was extremely funny how she immediately drew herself into herself, with a frosty expression of injured innocence, as a snail does into its shell when you have grazed its horns with your boot.

She knew well enough that my arrow had hit its mark; but Mrs. Timepiece was a fox, and had two or three chambers of reserve in her capacious brain.

I have never forgotten, since I read Paley, the phrase "undesigned coincidence;" and I also vividly remember Lord Palmerston's sentence "the concurrence of fortuitous atoms." Illustrative of these expressions, I may quote the case of the Misses Timepiece. Their defensive, half-military attitude in the presence of gentlemen led, I may say truly, more than one of them on to matrimony: it inspired the idea of a siege. Here, at least, was evidently something to conquer-the forethought of the glows of victory was most exhilarating. It gave the feeling of a sort of crusade; and soon-very soon-after the eldest Miss T. had, as the term goes, "come out," one of the hated sex was in the field-determined,

but sly, resolutely wise, to melt, by ten thousand lawful influences, the perpetual ice upon her lofty brow.

Mrs. Timepiece's way of walking showed that she considered herself not an ordinary person: it is not easy to describe, for she seemed, in a manner, to walk with her head as well as her legs. Almost every step, she had a way of throwing up her head, and there seemed continually to be going on some inward process of pumping of her blood to the summit. The strong, red current was visible through the expanding and contracting skin of her face. Her appearance when on the move sometimes put into my mind the image of a war-horse stretching his ears at the sound of the bugle. She looked in advance, with eyes formed for long range-a natural telescope by which she could detect the minutest object on the distant horizon, either of a person's mind or the sky. She nearly always carried an umbrella with her, and held it, during locomotion, somewhat as an officer does his sword.

All this had a great effect. The quiet, undemonstrative thinker who grows pale over writing scientific essays is considered by most people to be at least odd, and by many to be rather crooked in his brain. They look at his thin form and settled countenance, and they see no sign of inward power. But a clever person like Mrs. Timepiece, who shows it as distinctly as a railway engine does its steam, makes rapid headway. Her power is so evident, and she inspires fear if not respect; and these two feelings, in outward sign, are twin brothers, and cannot be distinguished one from the other. You know that she could dissect your moral and mental nature if she chose; and that, if she did it at all, it would not be done with a very fine edged knife.

It is all very well for some people to stand erect in the strength of their conscience, and say with the Laureate-"Even the dead shall look me through and through." This kind of people is as scarce as royal stags in the herd. Most of us, to say the least, dislike a process of this kind; most of us, if there be no "skeleton in the chest," suffer under the operation; and many of us have a good deal behind lock and key that, both in chrysalis and fact accomplished, is fitter for darkness than light.

And so it came to pass that Mrs. Timepiece was, apparently, much respected. The idea generally amongst the farmers and la

bourers in her neighbourhood was that she was "up to snuff," and I have heard more than one describe her in this sneezing kind of language.

Mrs. Timepiece's religious views were in keeping with her general character. Her grandfather had been a churchwarden for twenty years, and, by some sort of process of ratiocination, I fancy she connected the future of her soul with this historical fact. I feel quite sure that if any one had asked her to explain the connection of the two events, she would have ridiculed the idea that there was any connection between them; but all human nature contains many roots and fibres in its sides and corners which never show much of a flower or even a leaf above ground. The height of astonishment would be to see ourselves as we really are. But we never are treated to a sensation of the kind. We form ideas and conceptions of ourselves from our wishes. The difference between what we think of ourselves and what others think, even the favourably inclined, may be said to be laughable as well as great. All this is very unnatural, and to be lamented, but it is true.

If the art of photography revealed our characters as faithfully as it does our faces, how very few of us would be taken a second time! We should decidedly get a permanent shock. It is very easy to talk about loving the truth, and easy to love it when it is agreeable and pleasing. But it is not very easy, when the truth teils you that you are very ugly and very bad, to love it.

I have a notion that plain people don't trouble the looking-glass much, just as wicked people don't trouble themselves much with self-inspection. We all prefer to think that the Devil still remains in the Garden of Eden, to the faintest suspicion that he may have taken lodgings within our selves.

Mrs. Timepiece was not a very distinct exception to the general rule. I never heard her describe the Devil; but from indirect remarks, I infer that she secretly believed that he had a tail. I need scarcely say that poetry and metaphysics were not at all in her line. She, no doubt, had heard of Milton's "Paradise Lost;" but, as she seemed in all her bearings to regard pride as a virtue, I cannot think that she fairly believed that to be the cause of Satan's ruin. It was not easy to get her to speak plainly

out on any subject; but I should not be surprised if, in her thought of thoughts, she attributed the fall of his Sable Majesty to a want of self-respect. At least, any declension in that article of the smallest kind in human beings, rich or poor, was, in her eyes, a very dreadful sin.

She herself never lost a vivid consciousness that her heart was the abode of stern virtues and severe morality. Of all the seasons of the year she preferred winter-I suppose, because it chimed in with her own frigid nature; and she never seemed so powerful, either in mind or body, as when the thermometer was below zero.

To return again to her views of the Devil, I may add, that if she had heard any one say "that there was no Devil," she would have called him an "infidel.”

For my part, I like the idea of a Devil. There is something grand in it; but I happen to be of a poetical temperament, and in my most poetical moments only thought they had spelt his name with a letter (d) too much.

One thing I know, that an admission of this kind would be a blow to Mrs. Timepiece's combative spirit; for she is a wrestler, not only with "flesh and blood," but against powers of the air.

At family prayer she looks like a warrior taking his rest before a battle. She goes to church quite with the idea that it whets her spiritual sword. She likes a preacher who beats the dust out of the pulpit cushions, and she regards "confirmation" as something like the enlistment of a young soldier. She seems, in a spiritual sense, to understand fortifications and trench work, holding strongly the opinion that neither Satan nor his angels can do much with any one who is firm and self-denying within.

She would consider it to be "an opening of the joints of her spiritual harness" to eat any tit-bits at dinner, or to shrink from her cold bath on the most frosty morning, or to sit with her feet on the fender after breakfast, or to allow any of her grandchildren to be helped in her presence to a second edition of raspberry jam, and such like.

Mrs. Timepiece is the opposite of a Ritualist. She likes a spade to be called a spade. Plain, hard-crusted, matter-of-fact words are her vocabulary in religion and other departments.

What does it matter where a clergy

man stands in the chancel? I have tried, for charity's sake, to explain that it means "a doctrine," and so forth; but it is lost labour. She answered me, snappishly

"Why can't he say what he means?" As to "vestments," they are simply puppyism in its worst shape, and akin to the impulses which lead servant girls on to the purchase of fine bonnets and shawls they cannot afford.

"What is that red piece of millinery he wears on his back?" she asked me one day, when a stranger clergyman came to take the duty.

I explained, but she pronounced it "pomps and vanities," nevertheless, and remarked, "He had forgotten his Catechism."

I will not attempt to turn her any more. I might as well try and turn the East wind. She is literal to the backbone, and believes in the resurrection of every particle. She has a place marked out in the churchyard where she is to rest, and she looks at it every Sunday without the quiver of a nerve-as any one else would look over a small estate belonging to them.

TABLE TALK.

pearance. Canon Kingsley does not say anything about the palmiste salad, but he describes the tree in that charming book of travel, "At Last a Christmas in the West Indies." He says: "The trucks stopped at a manager's house, with a palmiste, or cabbage-palm, on each side of the garden gate— a pair of columns which any prince would have longed for as ornaments for his lawn. It is the fashion here, and a good fashion it is, to leave the palmistes-a few, at leastwhen the land is cleared; or to plant them near the house, merely on account of their wonderful beauty. One palmiste was pointed out to me in a field near the road, which had been measured by its shadow at noon, and found to be 153 feet in height. For more than 100 feet the stem rose straight, smooth, and gray. Then three or four spathes of flowers, four or five feet long each, jutted out and upward. Above them rose, as always, the stem for some twenty feet; and then the flat crown of feathers, dark as yew, spread out against the blue sky, looking small enough up there, though forty feet at least in breadth. No wonder if the man who possessed such a glorious object dared not destroy it." Canon Kingsley, who is a prince of describers, has here a worthy

if there is really such an island as Palmiste, or whether it exists only in the imagination of the author of "Ready-money Mortiboy." The island called Palmiste in the story has a real existence; but, for very plain reasons, it would be indiscreet to give its true name in this note. The author has called it Palmiste. The palmiste is a tree with which all persons who have ever visited the West Indies must be perfectly familiar the Oreodoxa oleracea of botany; the palmiste, or cabbage-palm, in the islands. It is a tree of great beauty, and has some curious characteristics. From the young trees, when about twelve or fifteen feet high, the finest salad in the world is gathered. In flavour it is something like ripe filberts, but its freshness and novelty the European gourmet must taste to fully appreciate. They are-like most flavours-indescribable. The part of the tree which furnishes this peerless edible is at the top of the trunk, below the shoot whence the leaves branch off. It is only the young tree from which the salad is to be got, and each salad costs the life of the tree. The older trees attain an immense height, and are of extremely beautiful ap

productions of tropical vegetation.

WITH CERTAIN GERMAN dreamers, it is a theory that the United States will some day have a king or an emperor instead of a president. The glories of the republic are to pale before the charms of a tangible crown, and some lucky general and president is to hand this crown down to a long line of "kings to be," his children and grandchildren. There are things that will happen before this. But our cousins are "levelling up" pretty fast. Now they are proposing to adopt what in England some disaffected spirits wish to see discontinued-the advocate's honoured wig and gown. The leading American legal organ, the Albany Law Fournal, is of opinion that

"The extensive use of the robe and the gown bench and the bar, and would be an incentive to all would add lustre, distinction, and gravity to the wearers of these professional insignia to render themselves worthy the distinction. The American lawyers, before and immediately after the time of the rupture between the colonies and Great Britain, adopted the contemporaneous manners and customs of the English lawyers. But the revolution effected a great change not only in the commercial and military con