neither the approach of yourselves, on horse-
back, nor the subsequent movements of your
dismounting, have had any other effect on the
partridges than causing a few of them just to
run a little farther off at their ordinary
pedestrian speed. Even if one or two should
take the trouble to fly, do not fancy the birds
will escape you: they do not wish to escape,
and only fly a little way to save themselves
the trouble of walking; they soon fall again,
only a little way off. As you approach, one
or two may choose to exert a few more flaps
of their wings, and therefore fly a few paces
further. You may be sure none of them will
take that trouble a third time; few a second.
You approach: as soon as one sees you, down
it thrusts its head, concealing it in the grass,
and remains perfectly motionless:—a little
touch of your stick, and the poor bird dies.
So easy and gentle is its death, that I would
term the touch that causes it a gentle one, if
the result were otherwise than fatal.

Thus the sportsman pursues his sport, if
sport it be, without molestation; that is, if he
escape a deadly and insidious foe—a certain
snake in the grass, called the Vivora. This
reptile is the living calamity of the Sierra.
Being of a greenish grey colour, at a short
distance even, it is scarcely distinguishable
from the thick grass. It is not large, being
scarcely one foot one-and-a-half inch long.
There is no remedy for man or beast bitten
or stung by the Vivora.

Although, fortunately, the instances of
people thus bitten have been rare, generally
it is the horse that is the victim, whose
curiosity leads him to thrust his nose into the
haunts of this formidable little snake; and
something more than his nose pays the penalty
of his curiosity before he can snort. Three
minutes elapse, and the blood issues copiously:
another minute or two, and the horse is dead.

THE CURATES OF TITTLEBATINGTON.

TITTLEBATINGTON is a small snug parish,
not quite three hours' railway-journey from
London. It contains plenty of people, some
of whom have plenty of money, plenty of
gentility, and plenty of other desirables. A
great many more have neither much money,
many superfluities, nor any gentility
whatever.

Tittlebatington, being boxed up, at some
distance from any great trunk line, in a shady
vale that leads to nowhere in particular,
has not felt any very sudden rise or fall
in the social tide, such as some other places
have experienced. I am not aware that the
whole neighbourhood, immediate and
surrounding, belongs to any one great family,
who "have everything from London," and
are, consequently, very unpopular with local
shopkeepers; nor do I believe that there is
any butcher, baker, or farmer, in the
neighbourhood capable of buying or selling up the
whole parish. To be sure, old Joseph Scromps,
who always dressed very shabbily, and was
continually going to law, was supposed to
be the man to do so; but, when he died, he
only left enough to pay for whitewashing the
front of the County Gaol.

Tittlebatington is quite respectable,
nevertheless. Its inhabitants live steadily on: they
envy and backbite one another as little as is
compatible with respectability in general; are
as charitable as their own interests, their
vanity, and sometimes their better feelings,
allow them to be. Those among them who
have made money laud themselves, and are
pointed out by others, as examples; and
those who have not made money are in the
same position as people who have not much
money anywhere else. It is needless to say
that such a parish possesses a tolerably
handsome church; that, the duty of the church
being rather light, the tithes are extremely
high; and that, consequently, this piece of
preferment has been always bestowed, since
the days of Charles the Second, upon a
gentleman holding a canonry worth about
fifteen hundred a year, besides an archdeaconry,
and a couple of minor pluralities
situated, perhaps, at opposite points of the compass.

The rector in possession—the Reverend the
Professor of Cingalese, as he is called by
under-graduates of the College of St. Alfred
the Great—was a most ecclesiastical character.
He had been a dashing man in his youth;
but was reformed, and was inspired with a
call to the ministry by the circumstance of a
family-living decidedly worth having, falling
in quite unexpectedly. How suddenly he
abandoned the turf and the tandem, can
only be remembered by dirty men in dirty
plaid frocks and fur caps, who hang about
the streets near St. Alfred, and pick up an
unrecognised existence by holding horses, and
expressing a wish to drink the healths of
passers-by. How firmly he answered the
bishop's question as to a "call," and how
long he was in persuading himself of its
reality, I don't know; but I do know that his
subsequent preferments had something to do
with his marriage with the cousin of the
nephew of the Earl of Grayfriars.

Of course a canon cannot be expected to
read college prayers: the chaplains, who live
sumptuously on seventy pounds a year, do all
that. Our canon's duty consisted in going
occasionally to an University sermon, and now
and then reading communion service at the
cathedral of the Most Holy St. John of
Cappadocia. He, however, sometimes preached a
sermon in Tittlebatington parish; which, being
chiefly composed of extracts from his great
work, entitled " Subjection of the Soul, its
Ideal of Reality," and being almost always
directed against some peculiar heretic who was
not among the congregation, rather failed in
its effect upon his hearers. He was very serious,
very pompous, and very indolent; but people
thought him by no means a bad sort of man.
He had a large family, whereof the sons were