driven into a corner by a dog will stand at bay,
I faced the Gallas, and I believed even
concealed from them that I was not at all a
my ease. In the mean time my men were
lungeing away with their spears, but fortunately
without effect, for the Gallas easily
parried their thrusts. I shouted to them to be
quiet, for that if they wounded any one we
should all be killed to a certainty. The chief
now gasped out, "Soultain, taib:" "Soultan,"
or master, being the term they all apply to the
English, and "taib" signifying good.

"It is all very well to say 'Soultan, taib,'"
I replied, he not in the slightest degree
understanding my words: "order your men
to leave my mules alone."

My gestures, and the threatening proximity
of the pistol, enlightened him as to my country's
language; and, seeing that I was thoroughly
in earnest, he did order the men to leave the
mules alone. This, however, they hesitated
considerably about doing; and it was only
after much talk, and a considerable pointing of
the revolver, of which they have a great horror,
that they let go the animals, and I directed
my men to drive on at once. I now saw that
all danger was over, and that the Gallas,
although ready enough to plunder—as their
experience had taught them they could with
impunity when not absolutely caught in the
act—were yet very unwilling to shed blood,
or to injure an officer; the punishment which
had fallen upon Theodore, having taught
them a rather striking lesson. They have a
great national respect for their own lives,
besides.

But I determined to prevent, if possible,
the unfortunate girls and women, whom they
had already seized, from being carried off. The
Gallas are slavetraders, and the fate of these
poor creatures would have been terrible. I
therefore went back, and insisted on their being
given up. To this there was great demur. "The
soultan was taib," they said, "but these people
were not soultans." I replied by pointing to
myself, and saying, "Soultan," and then patting
the women on their heads, and pointing to the
road, to show that they were travelling with
me. I had, however, harder work than in
recovering the baggage. A hostile group
gathered round me, but the chief interfered; and
I could gather from his looks and gestures
that he was warning them that assuredly
vengeance would be taken if they killed an officer.
He pointed to my revolver, too, and held up
his fingers, showing that it had six barrels;
lastly, he pointed to the women with contempt,
and then to the villages round, as much as to
say, "Why run all this risk for these creatures,
when you can get as many as you like
anywhere?" This argument settled the business,
and, with many exchanges of taib, we
parted and proceeded on our respective ways,
my party with no greater loss than that of
four or five native donkeys, which had been
carried off at the commencement of the row.
Thus I came out of it, like a hero—to all external
appearance—and with the rescued women
kissing my boots, as if I had performed prodigies
of valour.

A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL.

IT was part of the ineffable system of sweetness
and light known as the wisdom of our
ancestors, to whip up the children on the
morning of Innocents' Day, "in order that the
memorial of Herod's murder might stick the closer."
The wisdom of our contemporaries, while it has
discarded the brutal practice of annually reacting
the Massacre of the Innocents on a secondary
scale, still retains a trace of the disagreeable
mediaeval custom, in respect of the strict
connexion maintained in many households between
Biblical study and afflictive punishment, and the
intimate alliance between chapters from Jeremiah
to be gotten by heart, and bread and water
and dark cupboards. Who the philanthropic
discoverer of child-torture as a prelude to a
church festival may have been, is uncertain;
perhaps he was a near relative of the bright spirit
who hit on the ingenious devices—to which the
puddling of iron and the glazing of pottery
are but trifling puerilities—of confining black
beetles in walnut shells and binding them over
the eyes of infants; or of that ardent lover of his
species—connected with the educational profession—
whose researches into the phenomena
of physical pain led him to the inestimable
discovery that by boring a hole, or any number of
holes, in a piece of wood with which a child's
hand is struck, a corresponding number of
blisters may be raised on the smitten palm.

Our good ancestors—can we ever be sufficiently
grateful for the rack, or for the whirligig
chair framed by medical wisdom for the treatment
of acute mania!—blended the Innocents'
Day custom with many of the observances of
social life. If they were wicked, these ancestors
of ours, they were at least waggish in their
wickedness. If the boundaries of a parish or
the limits of an estate needed accurate record,
they laid down a boy on the ascertained
frontiers, and flogged him so soundly that he never
forgot where the parish of St. Verges ended, or
where that of St. Brooms began. Fifty years
afterwards, if he were summoned as a witness
at Nisi Prius, he would relate, quickened by
the memory of his stripes, every topographical
condition of the land under discussion.
The phantom of this sportive mode of combining
cruelty with land surveying yet survives in the
annual outings of charity children to "beat the
bounds." Formerly the charity boys and not the
bounds were beaten; but now the long willow
wands with which bricks and mortar are castigated,
are falling into desuetude, and although
the ceremony is still kept up in some parishes—
the rector in his black gown, and a chimney-pot
hat, and bearing a large nosegay in his hand,
being a sight to see—it is feared that beating the
bounds will, in a few years, be wholly abolished,
owing to the gradual but sure extinction of