White mentions stone-curlew as heard clamoring nightly from the early spring. Of late, however, they have not been heard; but seagulls, which I do not think he mentions, are sometimes observed flying high overhead.

The village of Selborne is remarkable for the comparative opulence of the inhabitants. There is no squalor-there are no decayed hovels in the village. The cottages are nicely built, generally thatched; they are neat and trim, and many of them possess pretty gardens.

The casual visitor to Selborne can scarcely fail to be struck by the almost exact correspondence between White's description of it and its present appearance. This is evident in the greatest as in the smallest particulars. White, for example, mentions an immense hog, the age and history of which he narrates with the utmost precision. In the yard of the "White Hart" Inn is an enclosure within which dwells a sow of colossal size, such as would with difficulty be matched elsewhere. This animal is of a friendly disposition and evinces the utmost curiosity when a carriage enters the inn-yard. The Hanger, with its steep ascent and its innumerable beech-trees, is crowded at eventide with the youth of the village, whose shouts re-echo far and near, just as they did in White's time.

The Plestor is still the resort of "talking age"-still the playground of the vil lage. The hop-poles and the hop-kilns, the frequent tillings and dressings of the hop-ground, are as noticeable as they were a hundred years ago. The saunterer may hear the hour slowly and reproachfully measured by the church clock, or see it traced on the sun-dial in the garden of the Wakes.

The cuckoo, the swallow, the nightingale, combine still to form, as it were, the Easter festival of Nature; the anemone, the spurge-laurel, the lungwort, the cuckoo-flower, rise from their long slumber to a glorious resurrection of beauty and joy.

More than a hundred years have flown since White was laid to rest in the quiet village churchyard; four generations of word-speaking men have trod

den the road to the Priory or toiled up the Hanger. And yet, we ask ourselves, not so much what remains of the past as what substantial change is here.

Our country has changed; old institutions have passed away; the railway and electric telegraph have transformed society. Yet in Selborne, whatever change there may be, is almost imperceptible.

We are told that White preached a favorite sermon of his no less than fifty times, and that his text bore on the duty of love to man.

Were he with us again he would be gratified to find that the passage of time had left unchanged the natural objects he so dearly loved; that the gen'eral aspect of his beloved village, as affected by the hand of man, was as he knew it; and that any changes in social and domestic life were such as are based on the duty of loving others and trying to improve the condition of mankind.

H. P. PALMER.

From Macmillan's Magazine. THE BEST SNAKE STORY IN THE WORLD. The beauty of the best snake story in the world is that there was really no snake in it; which is more than can be said even of the Garden of Eden.

It had been very hot that summer on the ranche. Men work in the fields in California with the thermometer at 110°, while they fall down of heat apoplexy in the streets of New York and Chicago at 90°. That is the maxim they preach to the stranger in the West, and it has truth in it; but it is a mistake to suppose that even in California men work in the fields in comfort in such a temperature; and that summer the thermometer had gone very near 115° So we were grateful enough to get away into the hills for a spell, with a wagon and a tent and the usual outfit of pots and pans, three of us, white men, with Louie, the Mexican (whom called, in the vernacular, the

we

Greaser), to mind the horses and make himself generally useful. Our programme was to fish the rivers, shoot deer, and possibly a grizzly-bear, discover a gold mine, and go back to the ranche with a prospective fortune.

We had just pitched our tent. Down on the plain for weeks before we had been sleeping out on our verandahs, but the air of the hills had a nip in it by contrast. It was late in the afternoon, but there was still plenty of sunshine. I followed Louie round a shoulder of the hill, going to fetch water at a little stream tumbling from somewhere among the snowy peaks that capped the zone of firs on the great mountains above us. These mountains had, at some time or other, sent down a little avalanche of small rocks that lay heaped on our left as we walked. The scene was the most peaceful imaginable.

In an instant a succession of small incidents sent the peace to limbo. Louie dropped his pannikin with a tinkling clatter, crying "Sancta Maria!" in a voice of terror. At the same moment I heard the dread rattle of a snake, and saw its length gleam under Louie's feet and vanish among the rocks.

"Sancta Maria!" he tottered back into my arms, his dark face livid with fear,

"What is it, Louie? Did the snake strike you?"

"In the foot," he said, "yes."

"Let us get back to camp. Quick, lean on me."

"What's the good, boss?" he asked. "I'm a dead man." Nevertheless he came with me, leaning on my shoulder, and making a lame walk of it.

Down in the plain we had no rattlesnakes. For miles about the ranche there were no rocks for them, and though there were plenty of groundsquirrel holes, we never saw snakes about them. The thought of such things did not enter our heads, and Louie, weary of his boots, had kicked them off, with the long spurs, and come with me in his stocking-feet on this quest for water.

A word explained to the boys what had happened.

"Strychnine's the best," said Jock Peters, who was our authority on the question of snake-bites, which he had studied in Australia; "but we haven't got it; so we must do what we can with this. But it's a poor chance," he added in a whisper, as, to save time, he knocked the neck off a bottle of brandy. "Drink it, Louie," he said; "never mind cutting your lip; get it down,-that's the chief thing."

The Mexican's teeth chattered as we forced in the neck of the bottle; but he drank a great gulp without winking. The liquor, or pickle either, to scorch the throat of a Mexican has yet to be found.

Jim Kelly, the Irishman, was saddling the freshest of our horses, to ride at best speed into Lindsay, eleven miles away in the haze of the plains, for the doctor. In a minute he was pounding away among the hills. "Fix up a light as high as you can put it if it's dark before we get back," he shouted as he went.

We pulled the sock off the Mexican's foot. Already it was swelling fast, with a purplish tinge round a tiny blue spot, from which the smallest imaginable drop of blood had welled.

"Any good cauterizing it?" I suggested.

"Not a mag," Jock said shortly. "Go on with the brandy and keep him moving; that's his only chance."

The Mexican's face was dreadful to see; he called, in his terror, on every saint in the Church; but he declared he suffered no pain. Jock, improving the occasion, began relating in a low voice to me anecdotes of all the snake-bites he had known. "One boy I've seen that did recover," he said; "and that was from the bite of a brown snake, and a brown snake's as bad, they say, as a rattler, an Australian brown snake, that is; a rattler can't be worse. But this boy was stupid all his life after; not as quick-witted as the average, which is not much to say. And at times, just at the time of year at which he'd been bitten, the wound got

red again and swelled, and he was stupider than ever. Louie had on a sock; the rattler'd have had to go through that; he might have spent a bit of his poison there; that gives Louie a sort of a chance. 'Louie?"

Does it hurt you now,

"No, boss, no, not hurt."

The swelling was spreading; going up the ankle and right up the leg, and the man began to talk slowly and painfully.

"I remember," said Jock, "going along a ridge of a terrace on a steep river-bank. The river was full of sharks, and I met a brown snake coming along the ridge towards me. There wasn't room to turn, and I couldn't take to the river for the sharks, and 1 hadn't a gun. But my pal coming behind had a gun, and he poked the barrel in between my legs and blew the brute to bits."

"Is that true, Jock?" I asked.

"My heaven, d'you think I'd lie at such a time as this?" with a glance at Louie's face.

"Are you getting sleepy, man?" he said; then, as Louie did not answer, he took him under the arm, and signalling me to do the same on the other side, we kept him moving between us up and down and round the tent. From time to time we made him drink more brandy. He had taken half a bottle, but it seemed to have no effect on him. "It stimulates the heart's action, you know," Jock explained, "just as the poison goes to stop it; but strychnine's the best; acts as a nerve-tonic. deal to do with the nerves, this snakebite business."

It's a

We heard the little ground-owls begin whistling to each other from the mouths of the squirrel-holes away down in the plain, and the bats and moths began to come out as the sun sank out of sight. They brushed our faces as we continued to march the Mexican to and fro. Presently I left the work to Jock, and rigged up a pinetorch for a signal-light on the pole which I took from the wagon. The job took some while, but at length I got the light fairly flaring.

"Look at his face," Jock whispered to me as I came back to him.

It was a shocking sight under the flickering rays, swollen, distorted, livid. The man's arm was swollen, too, as I felt when I took my place to support him. His movements were lethargic and heavy, so that I wondered that Jock, unaided, could have kept him moving so long.

"Give him more brandy," Jock directed, "more; that's it, he's had nearly all the bottle. There's a chance," he went on presently; "I really believe there is. I thought he'd have been dead before now, Maybe he don't mean dying after all. A white man'd have been dead half an hour ago."

"I wish the doctor'd come." "Mighty little good wishing." The weary tramp went on. Twice I had to replenish the beacon-torch, and once more we gave the Mexican a gulp. of the brandy, which finished the bottle. As I was fixing the torch for the third time I heard a shout down the cañon. I answered with all my might, and in a few minutes Jim Kelly and the doctor rode into the circle of the flaring light.

"Alive?" the doctor asked.

"Alive, yes," said Jock; "alive and that's about all. He can't speak." "What have you given him,-brandy? -that's right. How much?"

"A bottleful."

WonHe'd

"Right, and you've kept him awake? That's it. He won't die now. derful fellows, these Greasers. have died before this, if he meant dying. Let's see the wound."

The candle burned as quietly in the still air as in a room. The Mexican's foot was swollen, so that it scarcely looked like a human member; but in the midst of the purple swelling was a white circle with the little blue mark, plainly evident, for its centre. The Mexican seemed to feel no pain, even when the doctor handled the wound and pressed it upward with his fingers.

"Hold the candle close," he said. "It's blamed strange," he added, "blamed

"You've seen a strange thing to-night, gentlemen," he added, rising again, and addressing us collectively; "such a thing as neither you nor I are likely ever to see again. And I'll tell you another thing about it, gentlemen; it's a thing that you won't find you get a deal of credence for when you come to tell it to the boys. There's a fashion in this world for men to believe they know the way things happen; and the thing that happens in a way they don't know they put aside as a thing that didn't happen.

So of this," the doctor adued simply, "I should only speak, as among gentlemen, with a hand on the pistol-pocket at the hip."

After a while the awful distortion of Louie's face began to go down: "You can almost see it settling, like a batter pudding," as Jim Kelly said; and the fearful purple tinge died out of it. His heart was beating naturally again, and the doctor said we might let him go to sleep.

It

In the morning he was difficult to rouse, as he might be after so heavy a night, but the doctor said he would do right enough if we gave him rest for a day or two. And so he did, though his nerve was so shaken that we had to send him back to the plain again, where there are no rattlesnakes. appeared later that Louie had cherished a morbid dread of snakes for a long while, ever since he had had a hand in the killing of one six feet long down in the Republic of Mexico; though after a couple of years on the ranche he had almost forgotten that there were such things. A man that is nervous about snakes should never go barefoot in the hills.

"It only shows what I told you," Jock Peters commented. "Strychnine is the thing for snake-bite, because it is a nerve-tonic. If a man could make believe he had not been bitten he need never die of snake-bite. If ever I'm bitten I shall make believe it was a cactus-spine."

This is a true story, although it's such a good one. If any one doubts it, he can see the thorn.

From The Argosy.

A GLIMPSE OF MARIA EDGEWORTH. More than half a century ago, a party of happy young people were travelling by train in England. At one end of their carriage two elderly ladies were seated. One of these, small in person and with plain features, would probably have attracted little or no attention anywhere, so long as she remained silent. As soon, however. as she began to talk, the charm of her conversation and the intelligence and good humor of her countenance made every one forget that she was not blest with outward beauty. Strangers at the beginning of the journey, the travellers in time began to exchange remarks with each other, and books soon became the subject on which young and old evidently preferred to talk. At last Miss Edgeworth's works were mentioned: they were great favorites with the young people, and they spoke warmly of the delight that "Simple Susan" and "Lazy Lawrence" had been to them in their childish days. Suddenly two of the party looked at each other and smiled, and one of them, turning to the little old lady in the corner, said:—

"We always feel guilty when we hear Miss Edgeworth spoken of, for when we were children we did such a dreadful thing; we cannot imagine now how we could have been so bold. We were very fond of drawing pictures of our pet characters, and of course were always trying to illustrate "The Parent's Assistant," and only think! tually made up a packet of what we considered our best pictures, with our Christian names written under them, and posted it to Miss Edgeworth! What must she have thought of such children?"

We ac

Can we not fancy how the little lady's kindly face lighted up with pleasure, as she replied: “And I can tell you that those drawings are still carefully treasured, for I am Maria Edgeworth!"

The scene changes. It is the year 1844, the seventy-seventh of Miss Edge