the lawyer kept his stationery. In the latter he
found but one unaccustomed article—- an old
continental Bradshaw for the month of March.

"It wasn't there this morning," mused this
amateur detective, taking up the Guide and
turning it over inquisitively. "It's the same
he had when he went to that place in Switzerland
—- page turned down and all."

And then Mr. Keckwitch uttered a suppressed
exclamation, for the turned-down page was in
the midst of the Italian itinerary.

"Lucca—- Magadino—- Mantua—- Mentone—-
Milan."

What, in Heaven's name, could William
Trefalden have to do with Lucca, Magadino,
Mantua, Mentone, or Milan? How was it
possible that any one of these places should be
mixed up with the cause of his present
restlessness and preoccupation?

The clerk was fairly puzzled. Finding, however,
no further clue in any part of the volume,
he returned to his desk, and applied himself to
a diligent search of the financial columns of the
Times.

He would have been still more puzzled if, at
that moment, he could have seen William
Trefalden, with the same weary, half-impatient look
upon his face, leaning over the parapet of the
Temple Gardens, and staring down idly at the
river. It was just one o'clock—- the quietest
hour of the day in nursemaid-haunted squares—-
and the lawyer had the place to himself. All
was still and dreamy in the old gardens. Not
a leaf stirred on the trees. Not a sound
disturbed the cloistered silence. The very sky
was grey and uniform, unbroken by a sunbeam
or a cloud. Presently a barge drifted by with
the current; while far away, from crowded
bridge and busy street, there rose a deep and
distant hum, unlike all other sounds with which
the ear of man is familiar.

It was a dreamy day and a dreamy place, and,
busy man as he was, Mr. Trefalden was, to all
appearance, as dreamy as either. But it is
possible to be dreamy on the surface, and
wakeful enough beneath it; and Mr. Trefalden's
dreaminess was of that outward sort alone. All
moody quiet without, he was all doubt, fever,
and perturbation within. Project after project,
resolution after resolution, kept rising like
bubbles to the troubled surface of his thoughts—-
rising, breaking, vanishing, and giving place to
others. Thus an hour went by, and Mr. Trefalden,
hearing the church clocks strike two,
roused himself with the air of a man whose
course is resolved upon, and went out through
Temple Bar, into the Strand. His course was
resolved upon. He had made up his mind
never to see Helen Rivière again; and yet . . . .

And yet, before he had reached the gates of
Somerset House, he had hailed a cab, and
desired the driver to take him to Brudenell Terrace,
Camberwell.

In the mean while, Mr. Keckwitch, who had
been anxiously studying the closing prices of all
sorts of Italian Railway, Banking, Telegraphic
and Land Companies' Stock, believed that he
had found the key to his employer's trouble
when he read that the Great Milanese Loan and
Finance Company's Six per Cent Bonds were
down to sixteen and a half in the official list.

AN OGRE.

THERE are two kinds of leopards found in
India. One is the cheetah, the common leopard
of the plains of Hindostan. This creature
confines his attacks chiefly to small antelopes, barking
deer, and jungle-sheep. He is frequently
caught when young, and tamed by the native
shikarees, who teach him to assist them in
hunting and driving game within shot of the
guns of the sportsmen. The other kind of Indian
leopard is the " luckabugga," a much larger and
fiercer animal, who, when he has once tasted
human blood, becomes an ogre, with a frightful
appetite for children. He is chiefly found in the
lower ranges of the Himalayas and vast jungles
of the Terai.

One summer's evening I was out with a
couple of friends on a shooting excursion, from
Almora into Nepâl. Our tents were pitched
on the banks of the Kala-nuddee, a river which
parts the British possessions in the hills, from
those of the Nepâl rajah. We were getting our
guns ready to go out after some black
partridges for supper, when the head man of the
neighbouring British village of Petoragurh
came up to entreat our assistance in killing a
leopard, which had haunted some neighbouring
villages for many months, and had already
carried off twelve children. Traps and pitfals
had been set for him in vain. He had evaded
all. A poor Zemindar had just come into
the village with a woeful story about his
six-year-old boy his only boy who, when
playing before the door of his father's hut in
the dusk of the evening, had been seized by
the leopard and carried off before his father's
eyes. The poor man followed the animal
and struck it repeatedly with an iron hoe, but
it held on and vanished in the jungle. At
daylight he had hunted on the track with some
friends, but found only a few bones and some
bloody hair, remains of his child, that a jackal
was picking at, and a vulture watching. The
man said he had watched the place every night,
but had never again seen the leopard.

The recital of this tragedy excited us, and we
pledged ourselves not to leave the district until
this cruel ogre was destroyed. Ram Bux, our
head shikaree, was called, and ordered to make
every inquiry as to his present whereabouts,
and to offer a reward of ten rupees to any native
who should give such information as would give
us a shot at him.

It would be endless to relate the many false
alarms we had. We sat up all night in trees,
with a goat tied below as a bait, near the place
where the leopard had been last seen. One night,
while sitting in a tree with a gun-coolie who
held my weapons, I fell into a doze. A friend
in a tree about twenty yards off with a goat