out for me, one day, with his own hand, but I
lost it. And then he left it to me in his
will—a kind thing; and he knew it would please
more than anything in the wide world."

"Ah, exactly," said Mrs. Tilney,
contemptuously—"always the way. If he had left you
a hundred pounds it would have been more to
the point. But you preferred a rubbishy old
receipt you could get out of any cookery book.
Just like you."

"No," said he, mildly—"no, my dear, it's
not so much the receipt as the mixin'."

"Stop it now," said Mrs. Tilney, impatiently.
"Go up, Ada, and look for a pair of scissors.
Why, what's this now?"

Sudden arrivals always created alarm in the
family, and always caused Mr. Tilney to rise
from his chair, like a hare out of her form, and
make for the door. "Heaven protect and guard
us!" he said, looking furtively round the edge
of the curtain; "a cab with luggage!"

         TOUCHING TIGERS.

THE native ground of the tiger has been
greatly too much restricted. Some writers have
confined it to India alone; others, to India and
the Malayan peninsula; but the animal extends
into Chinese Tartary and Eastern Russia, to the
confines of Siberia, where it is as formidable and
as much dreaded as in the Soonderbuns of
Bengal. The strangest feature in the distribution
of the beast is that it is unknown in China,
in those very latitudes which are in India most
favourable to its development. Hong-Kong,
for instance, is in the same parallel as the
Soonderbuns, but the tiger is quite unknown there,
or on the adjacent mainland. Atkinson is, I
believe, our most recent authority on the occurrence
of this animal in the countries bordering
upon Siberia. And it does not appear that its
size, strength, or ferocity, is at all diminished
by the coldness of that climate.

Tiger countries are so varied, that the tiger
cannot be strictly described as limited to any
particular form of country. It wanders much,
taking long journeys by night, swims wide
rivers or salt-water creeks, lurks in dense
thickets or heavy grass or forest when in the
neighbourhood of man, but rambles freely over
the open inlands thinly inhabited. It ascends
wooded mountains up to seven or eight thousand
feet above the sea; and in the western
parts of India, bereft almost of vegetation, finds
a stronghold in the numerous deep ravines
which cut the surface of the arid plains.

My first acquaintance with the tiger in his
natural state was made in a country which has
only of late years become known to Europeans.
Much as has been done by our countrymen
towards extirpating this animal in the jungles of
the Turraïe, and the Morung, and other parts
of India, wide regions still exist within and on
the confines of the south-west frontier of Bengal
where the shot of the sportsman has seldom if
ever broken the silence of the dreary woods.

Along the southern skirts of the Kolehân, in
Kéonjur and Mohurbunj, where the Koël and
the Byturnee wind ripples through the shades
of far extending forests, where the poor Ho, or
Sontal, in his wretched clearing, rears his solitary
hovel, and shares with the Sâmbur and the
wild pig the scanty produce of his little field,
there the tiger, instead of lurking in the jungle,
marches boldly forth in the broad daylight, and
seizes the bullock at the plough, or the poor
husbandman's half-naked daughter, while filling
her pitcher at the lonely pool. It comes with
the gathering dusk to the ill-fastened hovel
door, breaks down the fence in which the starving
kine have been immured, slays in a few
minutes, perhaps, the whole of the little herd
on which the owner relied for his subsistence,
and often thus succeeds in driving away the
settler.

But even in these wild solitudes man
sometimes maintains his supremacy over the beast
of the field. The Ho, or, as he is commonly
called by more civilised neighbours, the Kôle,
trained from boyhood to the use of the bow and
arrow, is generally an adroit archer, and many
individuals among his tribe are singularly
intrepid men. He has need to be so, who,
leaving the safety and comparative comforts of
a large village, with no weapons but bow and
arrows and a light battle-axe, and no
companions but wife and children, sallies forth into
the wide forests, where man never trod before,
and founds there a new settlement.
Sometimes two or three able-bodied persons of his
"keeley," or clan, will assist him in felling and
clearing an acre or two, and once or twice he
may revisit his native town to purchase seed
and poultry and cattle. But with these exceptions
the new settler and his little family live
and labour in solitude, and must by their
unaided efforts strive for mastery with the wild
beasts of the forest.

Many years ago—so many, that names of
persons and of some places concerned, have
passed from my memory—official duties led me
to a small village in Rengrapeer, one of the
remotest and wildest divisions of that wild country
the Kolehân, on the south-west frontier. The
hamlet consisted of some five or six cottages in
a cleared space of as many acres, surrounded by
forest. A brook, whence the women of the
village procured water, ran by the bottom of a
slope, about two hundred yards from the houses;
and (a usual feature in Kôle villages) a few large
slabs of slaty rock fixed in the ground marked
where "the rude forefathers of the hamlet
sleep." Near one of those I observed a pole
erected, on which grinned the skull of a tiger,
with the bones of one of its arms dismembered
half way up. I turned to the villagers near me
for an explanation, and heard this:

The daughter of the Moonda, or head man of
the place, was affianced, in the rude native
fashion, to one of the young men of the village,
and their nuptials were to come off in a few
days. One evening the girl with some of her
female companions went, as was their daily