How God, to his long-waiting hope,
More than it asked had given;
How his dear bells had borne him up
To dearer ones in heaven.
But when the boatmen's toil was o'er:
His sold had reach'd a brighter shore.

MIGHTY HUNTERS.

THE Squire Western tribe of sportsmen is
extinct. When squires lived in remote
mansions—with few roads, one newspaper, no
books, the chaplain for a buffoon and bottle
companion—they had few other resources for
diversion than field sports in the morning, and
dining and drinking confusion to Hanoverian
rats in the evening. But the progress of commerce,
and all the aids to commerce in easy
travelling and complete commingling of all
classes of society that enjoy leisure, has refined
without destroying that love of sport
which is innate in those bred in a northern
soil.

The term, once synonymous, of a fool and a
foxhunter, is no longer significant; and some
of our most amusing and not least instructive
books of travel are from the pens of sportsmen.
Of course, sportsmen are but men; and,
with them, as with graver men, the famous
old story of "Eyes and no Eyes" closely
applies.

The London bred attendant of an African
traveller described a rhinoceros horn as "the
penetratingest thing as is;"—we should say
that observation describes admirably well
our modern sportsmen, who rush from all the
luxuries of civilisation to the most remote
and savage regions, to try their courage and
enjoy a new excitement in the shape of cold,
hunger, wet, heat, drought and furious wild
beasts.

John Palliser, by birth an Irishman, by
education an Oxford man—six feet four in height,
with inexhaustible spirits and humour, a taste
for the polka, a talent for singing and making
himself agreeable in all company, a fearless
horseman, a tolerable cook, and a dead shot,
having exhausted the excitement of European
game, panting for fresh fields and pastures new
—determined to take himself to the prairies,
and to have a shot at the buffalo and the grizzly
bear. In his voyage out to America he had
for one fellow-traveller General Tom Thumb,
whose great amusement was climbing to the
shoulders of the tall Irishman, and then
making a perilous descent at one leap to
the bottom of his shooting-jacket, until by
repeated droppings the bottom of the garment
gave way. At New Orleans, he commenced
operations in the marshes by waging war on
snipe to the extent of twenty-one brace, and
the following day took the solo parts,
first of Goliah, and then of Saul, in the
oratorio of David, performed by amateurs to
purchase a new organ for an Episcopalian
church.

In Arkansas Mr. Palliser shot deer by night,
with a fire-pan, and carried off seven deer-skins
for buck-skin clothes, as trophies. Here,
too, he met his first experience of the
hospitality of American sportsmen, and tried
his first experiment in camping out. He
remarks "It is only when left to our own
resources that we sportsmen feel how very
helpless we are rendered by our civilisation.
Very delightful is the refinement of sport in
England, rising not too early, shaving with
hot water, and tea cream-softened waiting
for you in the breakfast room, guns clean as
if not used the day before, the gamekeeper
following with the load of shot, and an excellent
dinner awaiting, without any stint in
consequence of the birds being wild, or your
shooting nervous. Such were my thoughts
as, for the first time, I sat solitary by my
fire; but they presented themselves much
more forcibly on subsequent occasions when,
tired, cold, and hungry, I encamped after a
day's unsuccessful hunting on one of the
wild plains of the Rocky Mountains." His
first night's lonely camp was marked by the
stealthy approach of something in the dark;
which something turned out to be a panther.
He became tired of tame life in Arkansas,
and joined a fur party travelling across the
prairies from Independence to the Yellow
Stone River. On this journey, daily before
sunset, they unsaddled and unpacked the
horses; formed with the pack a circular enclosure
about ten feet in diameter, and hobbled
out the horses with straps and chains to
prevent their straying; then cut and gathered
wood, kindled fires, fetched water in kettles,
put meat on to cook, roasted coffee-berries,
pounded them in deer-skins on the stump of
a tree with the back of a hatchet, put them
in the coffee-pot and boiled them; then, the
meat being cooked, set to work to eat, made
beds of saddle clothes and buffalo robes, then
smoked their pipes, and so to sleep, as only
travellers in the prairie can sleep.

One day they arrived at a lake, and
camped when their meat was exhausted and
they had nothing but beans to eat; so our
sportsman was set to work to kill ducks
for dinner, and Mr. Palliser naively observes:
"I had to work hard for my ducks that
evening. They all fell into the water and I
had to swim for them, but they formed a
great addition to the boiled beans we had
been reduced to."

After a long journey, sometimes "struggling
through immense wastes where, feeling
my own insignificance, I seemed carried
back to some long past age, and as though
encroaching on the territories of the
mammoth and the mastodon," Mr. Palliser
reached Fort Vermillion and found it surrounded
by a camp of six hundred Sioux
Indians just returned from a successful foray;
so he witnessed a scalp dance, and then
bought the scalp and the "poor devil's head-dress
made of the scalp of a black bear, for
fifteen rounds of ammunition." He also got