comrades think when covering him up with
gravel, how their departed friend would be
disinterred and "sat upon."

With the elephant's bones found at Abingdon
were mixed fragments of the horns of
several kinds of deer, together with the bones
of the rhinoceros, horse, and ox; showing that
those creatures co-existed with the elephant,
and that they formed a happy family.
There were carnivorous races also then
existing. We have only to go further down the
Great Western Railway from Oxford, and,
getting out at the Weston-super-Mare station,
ask the way to Banwell Bone Caves. There
may be found evidence enough of the former
existence of more savage and rapacious
animals than elephants or deer. The caves
are situated at the western extremity
of a lofty grass-coloured range of hills. The
hills contain ochre, calamine (carbonate of
zinc), and lead. Some years ago, when
sinking a shaft into them, caves were
discovered, and the quantity of bones then
brought to light excited as much surprise
among the learned as among the unlearned.

The principal cavern is about thirty feet
long, and there is a branch leading out of it
thirty feet further. Of course it is quite
dark, and visitors must carry candles. The
visitor must take heed that he keeps his
candle alight; no easy matter, for the water
comes down pretty freely in large heavy
drops from the stalactites above. By help of
the light there are to be seen bones, bones;
everywhere bones.

They are piled up against the wall; they
stick into the floor; they fill up recesses, in
the most fantastic shapes. Here a candle is
stuck in the eyeless socket of a skull: there
John Smith, London, has inscribed his name
in letters of hyænas' teeth. We are invited
to rest halfway upon a seat composed of
horns and leg bones. They may be handled
by the most fastidious; having lost all traces
of corruption for some ages past. Yonder
deer's bone was picked, perhaps, by the teeth
in this huge hyæna's skull; and as for the
hyæna himself he died of a good age—that
his teeth tell us. His tough body, after death,
may have been dainty dinner to the bear whose
monstrous skull is employed as the crown and
summit of the monument of old bones raised
in the cave in honour of a learned bishop—
the Bishop of Bath and Wells. When the
caves were first discovered, in eighteen
hundred and twenty-six, it was he who took
every means in the most laudable manner to
preserve them and their contents intact.
Mr. Beard was appointed curator, and he has
arranged in his own house a fine collection of
all the best specimens that have been found
below.

To Mr. Beard I went, and by him I was
most hospitably welcomed. His museum
displays a very fine collection of the remains of
the ancient British Fauna. The bones of the
bear claimed first attention, and especially
one large bone of the fore leg, which
measured at the joint seven inches round;
being larger than the corresponding bone in
any known species of ox or horse. It is quite
evident that the inhabitants of the bone caves
lived before the times of King Edgar the
wolf-destroyer—for the museum contained
wolves' bones in abundance. Fine patriarchal
old wolves they must have been that run upon
them. Many a fine old English deer, all of the
olden time, they must have run down and
devoured on the Mendip hills, their cry resounding
through the valleys and over the dales
where now the screaming whistle and the
rush of the express train startles timid sheep,
who live in a land where their great enemy
exists only as a fossil.

Then, again, in those old days there were
foxes living in a country that contained no
hounds, who ground down their teeth to the
stumps that are exhibited in Mr. Beard's
pillboxes, and died of sheer senility. Glorious
to foxes were the good old times, and the
poor little mice that lived then, as we see by
the contents of other boxes, had their bones
crunched.

MOONRISE.

A MAN stood on a barren montain peak
     In the night, and cried: "Oh, world of heavy gloom!
     Oh, sunless world! Oh, universal tomb I
Blind, cold, mechanic sphere, wherein I seek
In vain for Life and Love, till Hope grows weak
     And falters towards Chaos! Vast, blank Doom!
     Huge darkness in a narrow prison-room!
Thou art dead—dead!" Yet, ere he ceased to speak,

Across the level ocean in the East
     The Moon-dawn grew; and all that mountain's side
     Rose, newly-born from empty duck. Fields, trees,
And deep glen-hollows, as the light it creased,
     Seemed vital; and from Heaven bare and wide,
     The Moon's white soul looked over lands and seas.

MOLDO-WALLACHIA.

Beyond railways, beyond diligences, beyond
post-chaises, out of the track of travellers, but
full in the high road of conquest from the
north to the south, lie the sister provinces of
Moldavia and Wallachia, which, for shortness,
some are accustomed to designate as Moldo-
Wallachia. Their names have become
notorious of late by taking place in the vocabulary
of political writers and speakers; but it may
be doubted—certain vague statistics set apart
—whether in most men's minds any ideas at
all arc connected with them. When we talk
of Paris we picture to ourselves the Place de
la Concorde or the Boulevards; an allusion to
Berlin implies a recollection of Under the
Linden Trees; to Naples of the Strada di
Toledo; but who thinks of the Pô de
Mogochoya at mention of Bucharest, or has any