ground in the vicinity of the metropolis but had deen the scene of a contest between them, and had witnessed a victory or defeat of the respective opponents.

In the year 183- I had become a widower, and the grief of losing my young bride (I may almost call her such, for our marriage had been but of twenty months' existence) had taken from me the desire of beholding the scenes and companions which I erst frequented. Seclusion and grief were the order of the day, and pleasures and business alike seemed to pall on the senses. During the previous two seasons my name had been absent on the roll of our pigeon club at Wicks's, and frequent were the inquiries made of Barber whether "Forward" was still in existence. Having heard of my loss, he frequently called round, on his road to the Ferry House, to tell me the news in his world, and to try and wile me from home and seclusion. He had taken a peculiar fancy to me from the moment of our first acquaintance, and, though a pigeon-fancier, was in truth a real Mentor to my inexperience in the ways of the world and its sporting flat-catchers. I believe he liked and respected me, and, although always ready to accommodate me with a dozen (or any amount) of birds on an emergency, would always advise me as to the known or concealed reputation of those who endeavoured to draw me into a match. One particular morning he had called round, and for the sole purpose of advising me of a private match which had been made between Groom and Bloodsworth by their respective partisans, and which was to come off on that afternoon in the enclosed ground of the then-prospective Islington Cattle Market. My readers must not confound this with the present Metropolitan, but must call their memories to the time of the celebrated conflicting interests between Mr. Perkins and the Corporation of the City of London.

I told him that I did not intend to resume my place in the pigeon arena; but, after much persuasion, consented to accompany him, if he would call for me. Some of my readers may recollect his little cart and the old bay pony; and, when I tell them that a pound would have drawn the scale between us, they may think there was plenty of weight for the trap and horse. He wanted me to take my pigeon-tool with me (one of Jackson's, of Enfield Lock, and a 12-bore); but I would only consent to take a favourite double, in the event of scouting out. When we arrived at head-quarters-a new Public just licensed for the intended new market-we went into the bar, and had a cosy chat with the host and wife. My name having been mentioned by Barber, the landlady asked me some particulars about my family, and we traced out some sort of family connexion, through the intermarriage of a relative with a sort of third cousin of the querist. Whilst discussing these matters over a glass of port wine, some of the spectators began to arrive, and, whilst waiting for the principals, it was proposed to knock up a friendly contest at sparrows for a jorum of punch. I declined the invitation to join in it, but agreed to pay for anyone who would take my place. I found a substitute-a fortunate one for mewho shot very well, and eventually landed me harmless, by being neither first nor last in the scored returns. One of the shooters, not content with this, began bantering me about my want of pluck, and, having taken up my double, expressed his doubts as to my capabilities with it, and challenged me to shoot a few pigeons with him.

I declined his invitation, and told him that I came there to see what others could do, not to show off my own shooting. Just then Barber came up, and said, "It is no use of your chaffing! If he was in the humour, he could beat you if he tried." This put up the stranger's "monkey," and he began to lose his suavity, and continued his challenge to me. I told him I had no tool with me; and, pointing to his own gun, asked him if I should be wise to tempt my fate with a man who came prepared with a tried weapon. More and more irritated, he reiterated his taunts, and said he would shoot with me for twenty pounds, and let me name time and place. Truthfully assuring him that I never shot for money, I tried to shake him off; but he would not have it, and Barber said, "Shoot with him, and I will back you for five or ten pounds."

Just then the landlord came up with a gun belonging to a gentleman (left in his charge), and urged me to shoot with the stranger, which I took carelessly up and sighted along its barrel. Again was the challenge renewed, and at last with the addition that he would give me four birds dead out of the dozen. Feeling annoyed, I said, "Perhaps you think with a strange tool I am foolish enough to take the first four ; but if you will let me take any four I claim out of the twelve, I will try what I can do." He assented to this, and I said I would shoot for the birds and two bowls of punch. Barber wanted to have a "fiver" on, to which I objected.

I claimed to fire first, and succeeded in killing the five first shots, and my opponent having missed one, left me in a majority at this part of the match. At the sixth round I killed my bird; but the gun I was shooting with snapped its stock in two just behind the lock-bar, and I remained with the butt in one hand and the barrel in the other, and fully anticipated that I should lose my match, although I had a certain score of ten with the "given birds. My rival, however, winged his pigeon only, and left a sure tie, even should I miss the next six shots. At this moment Mr. Bloodsworth came up, and very handsomely put his gun into my hands, assuring me that I could not miss with it. Mr. Groom also offered me his if I preferred it; and, feeling reassured by their sympathy, I went on my way rejoicing; and, steadying myself up with a glass of punch, I killed my seventh and ninth birds, having missed the eighth.

I thus won the only match I ever shot with Mr. Mann, whom I found to have been my challenger, when Barber thanked him for the money for the birds; and Groom and Bloodsworth, who had been made awake to the circumstances, congratulated him on not having dropped the twenty-pound note he had proposed risking. The gun which had thus broken was the identical one which Weare had with him when murdered by Thurtell, and was then the property of a gentleman at Finchley, who had purchased it at the sale of Probart's things after the trial. But for the courtesy of Mr. Bloodsworth, I must have concluded the match with my double, and might have lost it, I fancy for a "Flat" I made a tolerably safe match, although I never thought my terms would have been acceded to; but even then I was eventually a loser, as old Sturman charged me thirty shillings for re-stocking the damaged gun.

"OTHER DAY S."

BY ATHELWODE.

No. XXVI.

"I've known young Juba rise before the sun,
To beat the thicket where the tiger slept,
Or seek the lion in his dreadful haunts:
How did the colour mount into your cheeks,
When first you rous'd him to the chase!
E'n in the Libyan dog-days, hunt him down,
Then charge him close, provoke him to the rage

I've seen you

Of fangs and claws, and stooping from your horse,
Rivet the panting savage to the ground."

The hunter who enacts the part of hero in a drama of the chase by an actual combat life for life, has no opportunity of studying effects during the struggle for victory; and neither comrades nor attendants can so far divest themselves of apprehension for his fate, depending on an encounter in which they may be unable to take their share, as to become commentators on a sight approaching very nearly the sublime. But amongst the things of this world capable of exciting those varied. emotions which have an indescribable fascination, the conflict between wild animals themselves, such as lions, tigers, panthers, and a few other brutes of great power and ferocity whose mutual anger has been provoked, must have pre-eminence.

Montaigne thought it a reflection upon human nature that few people take delight in seeing beasts caress or play together, though almost everyone is pleased to see them lacerate and worry each other. The cause of this we conceive mainly attributable to certain passions of the mind being awakened, which are usually dormant, pleasure resulting from surprise. The courage displayed, together with the sagacity manifested in the tactics of attack or defence, and diversity of attitudes and postures, are all calculated to call forth feelings which partake of an admiration inconsistent with any reproach for cruelty.

Amongst the ancients, whether at Ephesus or at Rome, from the accessories associated with the arenas for wild beast fights, there must have been a degree of grandeur about the displays which raised them infinitely above the barbarity of Spanish bull-baiting, and such brutalities. The daring courage, too, which induced men in those days to contend with the savage animals brought from the desert or the forest, surpassed even the chivalrous spirit of the middle ages. There was evidently a magnanimity of soul evinced amongst such glory-loving people as the Greeks and Romans. With regard to the former, this is strikingly evidenced by that appeal which St. Paul makes to the Corinthians, "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?"

And not only Roman senators and citizens sought to gain the highest encomiums of the public by thus risking their lives, but an emperor, licentious and profligate-a coxcomb so intense, that the profusion of golddust he powdered his hair with made his head glitter his flatterers declared as though surrounded with sunbeams-desirous to be called Hercules, would apparel himself in a lion's skin, or naked appear before the assembled multitude at the amphitheatre, to win their applause by his prowess and dexterity in slaying wild beasts. And yet so fearful was

this aspirant to divine honours of death itself—at least death unattended with these deistical hallucinations—that he never trusted himself to the hands of a barber, but burnt his beard when it required dressing; Dionysius the Tyrant having adopted this singeing process before him. More than a thousand years before the instance we have just spoken of, a deed of daring happened which stands recorded in the Bible, of a valiant man, who went down and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow." It was Benaiah, one of David's mighty men, who had killed two celebrated warriors of Moab, and done. many brave acts, but this being obviously considered to surpass them all by its being detailed.

Nimrod having been noted as a "mighty hunter," it is to be presumed that "mighty" would not have been an epithet applied, unless he had hunted animals for other objects than food, and very serious sport it must have been in those days, hence his renown.

The chase of any one of the nobler animals after prey gifted with speed, stratagem, and spirit enough for resistance at its last extremity, in a modified manner creates similar sensations as the sight of a fight; but to the credit of the humane side of one's nature, the majority of us find our sympathies enlisted in favour of the weaker against the stronger, and the final escape of an intended victim (without any compunction for the disappointment inflicted on the famished seeker of dinner or supper) affords us undeniable satisfaction.

It is rarely in their adventures that travellers meet with any of these combats or chasings. Lain wait for and pounced upon, or paralyzed with fear, the humbler animals incapacitated from resistance helplessly succumb to their foe, instances perhaps occasionally occurring where terror inspires an unlooked for struggle by a maddened defiance, for

"to be furious

Is to be frightened out of fear; and in that mood

The dove will peck the ostrich."

Baron Humboldt alluding to the numerous oxen, horses, and foals seized upon by crocodiles in South America and crushed by their serrated tails presently to be devoured, observes that not unfrequently both of the former may be seen which have escaped from the prey of this terrible reptile, bearing on their legs the marks of its pointed teeth.

Such animals, however, that seek the most succulent and tempting pasturage have no chance of escape from the treacherous jaguar, who lurking concealed in the luxuriant grass watches them slowly approach, and accurately measuring by his eye the extent of the requisite leap, darts on his unsuspecting prey, and so prodigious its strength that it can drag to the summit of a hill the body of a young bull.

A contest between an eagle and a dog of the Newfoundland breed which lately took place in the far West is worth recounting from its singularity. An eagle measuring twelve feet from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other, had pounced down upon the dog, which we may assume to have been asleep when descried, or the attempt would not have been made to carry it off. A violent struggle instantly ensued, the eagle trying to use its beak and claws, and the dog avoiding its blows with clever agility, but missing no occasion to bite its wings. Thus the attack and defence proceeded, when by a sudden and successful grab Nero disabled one of the eagle's pinions, and a witness of the fray at this moment coming up with a pitchfork, the bird was secured.

A cat and a snake would seem to be about as unlikely combatants as could be, nevertheless a case has recently occurred of deadly conflict between the two. A favourite cat belonging to a family living in Danbury, Connecticut, was missing, and a search being made for it in a neighbouring lot, wrapped within the coils of a snake Tabby was discovered. They both were dead, the cat from the pressure of the snake's folds, and the snake from the bites of the cat.

Forests in the torrid zone teem with animal life of every description, these forests bearing no resemblance to ordinary forests. Impenetrability is the grand characteristic of a "primeval forest," and Humboldt endeavours to impress upon his readers the difference between a wild forest so called, and a "primitive forest." Every tropical forest is not primeval forest he argues, much less every wild forest densely covered with trees as it may be, on which man has never laid his destroying hand, because were this so, in the temperate and in the frigid zones various primitive forests may be found. Impenetrability is an essential, its crowning attribute; and as an illustration of what he means by primeval forest in the strictest sense of the word entitled to be so called, he points to that region connecting the river basin of the Orinoco and the Amazon. In such a forest it would be impracticable to clear a path of any length between trees measuring from eight to twelve feet in diameter, while we know there are many trees measuring a far greater girth.

"The chief obstacles are not the vines," he says, "but shrubs, plants, or undergrowth, which fill up every space betwixt these trees, all vegetable forms having a tendency to become arborescent.' He omits we may remark any mention of those spiculated impediments which, from the scarifying wildness of a Somersetshire teazle, to the sickle-hooked thorn are ready to tear and gash an intruder, or of those prostrate monarchs of the forest freshly fallen, besides hollowed logs that have encumbered the ground for ages past, the retreat of poisonous snakes, slimy from some putrid pool, or covered with insects crawling over them from their interstices, stinging the unwary hand that rests a moment near them.

We have been in a forest resembling such as these, and apostrophised these fallen great ones which countless years gone by raised their heads proudly to the sheening skies above them. Vines too we have seen matted, twisted, and intertwined into barriers, cabled and pendent from great heights aloft, intercepting our progress every half-dozen footsteps we laboured onwards.

The most striking evidence of the impenetrability of some portions of primeval forest is afforded as the Baron tells us in the habits of the South American tiger or panther-like jaguar, the largest and most bloodthirsty variety of which, living at the foot of the mountain ranges of Maraguaca and Unturan, is called the "black jaguar," from its darkbrown skin being marked with scarcely distinguishable spots.

Their love of wandering and rapacity often leads them into such impenetrable thickets of the forest that they can no longer hunt on the ground, and so they betake themselves to the trees, where they may continue for a long time, the especial terror of the monkey tribes, as well as other creatures, which, springing from bough to bough, are followed by their relentless foe.