chance of getting a shot at him. After waiting
an hour I pulled out my cigar-case, but Ram Bux
forbade smoking by energetic gestures; neither
of us speaking. I had a large double-barrelled,
smooth bore No. 12, loaded with slugs, at full cock
in my hand. Ram Bux had my breech-loading
rille, with a large conical shell in it. In addition
to these, I and Ram Bux had each a Ghoorkha
kookrie, and I a revolving pistol. It was now
nine in the morning. The noise of our party
had died away over the hills for an hour or
more. I had my eyes fixed on the movements
of a regiment of white ants, that were piling
themselves over a bloody fragment of the poor
child that lay about ten yards before me.
Suddenly Ram Bux put one finger on my lips,
both as a sign to look out and to keep
perfectly still. My fingers sought the triggers,
and my eyes were strained in every direction. I
could see nothing, until, in about two minutes,
I discerned that the grass waved, and the next
instant, with a tread of velvet, the leopard
glided in front of me. The suddenness of his
appearance took my breath away for some seconds,
but, recovering myself, I raised my gun to the
shoulder, and in doing this snapped off a little
twig from a branch of the brushwood we had
piled in front of us.

The leopard turned his face full on me.
Thinking that he would jump off, I pulled
at his chest, letting off, in my nervousness,
both barrels. He sprang into the air with a
yell, and fell backward. Ram Bux was out
and by his side before I had risen from my
knees, and had discharged the rifle in the
direction of his heart. When I got up with revolver
in one hand and kookrie knife in the other, the
brute was tearing up the grass and roots with
all four paws, and dangerous to approach. My
slugs had entered his chest and eyes, and he
was blind. I discharged my revolver at his
hind quarters; but he writhed and leaped
about so violently, that it was impossible to
take good aim. Ram Bux, with his kookrie
drawn, was dodging about for an opportunity
of coming close enough to cut at the
dangerous hind legs and sever the tendons. I
went back to the trench to load my gun. As I
was capping, the grass opened, and the Ghoorkha
with his dog rushed up. He had evidently
been waiting near, and hearing the guns fire,
had hurried to revenge his child. He gave a
shout of joy when he saw the animal kicking
and bleeding, let go his dog, who darted at the
throat of the leopard, and then himself,
disregarding claws and teeth, rushed in upon him.
With two strokes of his kookrie he cut the
hind tendons, and the formidable hind legs were
harmless. At the same moment I stepped up
and discharged one barrel into the monster's
gaping and bleeding mouth. This shot killed
it. Ram Bux and the Ghoorkha began skinning,
while I lighted a cheroot. On taking the skin
off the back we came upon two fresh-healed
cuts which went right through the skin, and
remembered what the poor Zemindar told us a
week ago of his following and hacking: with a
hoe at the monster, who was carrying off his
child.

After a hot march of an hour or more, we
got into camp before noon, and had an ovation
from the people of the adjacent villages. Every
one who had lost a child by the leopard asked
for one of its claws, which was hung round the
neck of the mourner as an amulet.

The skin now lies on the floor of the billiard-
room of a castle in the North of England.

ILL IN A WORKHOUSE.

ILL in a workhouse! How many of our
readers are there, we wonder, who would form
a guess, even near the truth, as to the number
of the unfortunates who might be thus
described. The eighteen London voluntary
hospitals provide three thousand seven hundred
and thirty-eight beds; but the metropolitan
workhouses contain, according to the Lancet,
twenty-six thousand six hundred and twenty-
two sick and infirm persons, besides one
thousand six hundred and eighty-three insane.
Humanity demands that these poor creatures
should be rightly tended; and, even if we could
lose sight of humanity altogether, the dictates
of policy would guide us in the same direction.

We all know that the great requisites for the
sick are skilful medical attendance, good food,
good nursing, and pure air. These things are all
so essential that it would be difficult to estimate
their relative importance; but perhaps pure air
ought to come first. In the voluntary hospitals
of London the number of cubic feet of space
allotted to each patient ranges from one thousand
three hundred to two thousand, in different
institutions. In military hospitals one thousand
two hundred feet is the regulation minimum;
but, in workhouse hospitals for some unexplained
reason, the Poor Law Board sanctions
a minimum of five hundred cubic feet. It, is not
too much to say that sick persons cannot get
well in so confined a space. They may survive.
They may struggle through the acute stage of
disease, or through the earlier effects of an
accident, into a state of chronic feebleness; but
they will never get well, not even if they are
kept tolerably clean. Windows may be opened
in the daytime, if the weather be fine; but the
patients will poison one another at night.

The wisdom of the legislature places the
practical administration of the poor law into
the hands of guardians, who are mostly elected
because they are prominent men as local
politicians, and who very seldom have any
knowledge of what is really involved in the
questions with which they have to deal—- no real
practical knowledge of the poisonous effect of
foul air upon the sick, or, for that matter,
upon the sound. But they know perfectly
well that space costs money, and they are
apt, to think that their office of guardianship
calls upon them to guard the poor's rates,
rather than the poor themselves. The Poor
Law Board order five hundred cubic feet of