of encounters, I made haste to cut the cords
which held Lakdar's body on the ass's back.
I hoisted it on my shoulders, as before, and
struck across country, leaving the poor brute
chained to the spot, by the effect of terror.
When I was about a hundred paces off, I
heard a noise which sounded like the fall of a
heavy body violently dashed to the ground;
then a sort of rattling in the throat; and
then, nothing. The lion had accepted the
sacrifice which I offered him. I was re-assured
on my own account, and after making
a considerable circuit, I regained the path
which I had left."

The story ends with the vengeance which
Abdallah and his friends took on the
murderers. This was as ample and complete as
the most merciless barbarian could desire.

TWELVE MILES FROM THE ROYAL
EXCHANGE.

WE are no Cockneys down here. For
miles between us and the first tokens of the
great city cattle find pasture, and the plough
is driven a-field. There is a story of a soldier
who once heard the great clock of St. Paul's
strike thirteen times, from his post some
twenty miles off, and, being accused of
sleeping at midnight, was enabled entirely to
clear himself by proving that the clock of
Saint Paul's did actually, in some eccentric
fit, strike thirteen times upon the night in
question. But however this may have been,
no one ever heard the clock of Saint Paul's
in our village, let the air be ever so humid,
or the wind from that quarter ever so gusty;
and we are quite sure that Bow bells are
out of the question. There is not a boy in
all Rutstead parish who would not take off
his jacket upon this question, and the old
people have a horror of metropolitan habits,
which no man out of Rutstead could rightly
understand. We have a figurative expression
that the Londoners live by cutting one
another's throats, which principally refers to
their commercial rivalries; but Miss
Bunbury, for one, does literally believe it. At
the Guy Earl of Warwick, which we call
familiarly the Guy, you may generally hear
some one in the parlour discoursing of our
intercourse with the metropolis in pre-railwayite-
days, when as many as thirty coaches,
besides vehicles of other kinds, used to pass
our doors within the twenty-four hours,
startling the inhabitants with noisy horns, or
the cheers of school-boys going home. But
they have dwindled down into a single carrier's
cart—a creaking, dawdling, bony-horsed
thing, which rings a cracked bell as it passes
through the place, evidently on its last
wheels. Our last stage-coach only ceased
running a few winters ago. It was a
remarkably comfortable conveyance, when it
did not turn over upon the brink of the
chalk-pits (which the parish, by large
majorities, declines to rail in); and if the railway
had come near us, instead of stealing all
our traffic, and leaving us at last in the lurch,
it would have had no chance against it. I
am quite sure of that; and why? Because
we all knew the coachman, and would never
have dreamed of withdrawing our support
(we never regard any of our dealings but in
the light of a support to somebody or something;)
while the man was civil; and he was
invariably civil, and, moreover, had a large
family. He was a thin man, with a wrinkled
face, and short, grey hair, who did duty
sometimes as a post-boy, in a blue jacket and
white cords, and drove people at weddings;
but was as unlike my idea of a jolly old
coachman as any one I ever saw; though
he was not out of keeping with the faded
and contracted aspect of coaching in those
latter days. He was related to two well-
known jockeys, and would have gone into
that line himself if he had been a trifle
lighter, or had been capable of any reduction
in flesh by the usual process of sweating
down. But he was a real coachman, full of
the traditions of the road, and as ignorant of
what time of day you might mean by eight
forty-five, as if you had spoken of a decimal
fraction. His time for starting was a quarter
before nine; but if any passenger happened
to be shaving at that moment, what gentleman
could reasonably refuse to wait about a
little? John Jarvis was his name upon that
road which knoweth him no more; for he is
dead, and Mrs. Jarvis has got into an almshouse;
and the large family have gone out to
service; and even the coach, after a struggle
with the heavy roads and high prices of one
winter, now lies abandoned in a wheelwright's
yard, cracked, paintless, broken-windowed,
and with a rich crop of moss and houseleek
upon its mouldering roof.

When the railway proposed to come near
us, we passed resolutions at the Guy, and
instructed a lawyer to oppose. The coaching
interest, which comprised one-half of the
inhabitants, said, of course, that there was
abundant accommodation already; and the
rector said that the railway would bring
down all the loose characters in London on
Sundays, and take all the respectable people
in the village up to town: and Mr. Grinstone,
the great landed proprietor, declared that
scarcely any sum of money could compensate
him for the injury and annoyance he would
have to suffer if the hateful scheme were
carried out. We raised such a cry, that I
verily believe our village was the cause of
the railway engineer suddenly striking out a
new course through the marshes, on the other
side of a ridge of hills. Nobody repents of
that opposition, except Mr. Grinstone, who is
now known to have been willing all along to
capitulate on advantageous terms. But the
country itself is staunch and true. Gentlemen
in the House of Commons, in whom we
were once proud to recognise an exalted
embodiment of our opinions, have deserted our
cause again and again; but we are unchanged.