would, will you not likewise say that the Chair of English Literature will fulfil its purpose, if its occupant can succeed in doing for the verse of Shakespeare and Shelley, for the prose of Milton and Landor, all that his colleagues do for Homer and Plato, for Virgil and Cicero, for a chorus of Sophocles or an ode of Horace ?

Ac. Most certainly I shall. But permit me to say that this is precisely the point to which I was directing the steps of your exhausted metaphor, when you so peremptorily compelled me to dismount.

PAG. I do not doubt it; but I think we have done better to make the journey on foot.

Ac. Perhaps so; if it makes it clearer that we have arrived at the same point.

PAG. Well, that is clear enough, at any rate. And now that I have disabused you of the notion that I look upon a Professorship of English Literature as a useless institution, let me point out to you why, so far from that, I think that there was never more need to maintain and fortify not only this particular Chair but every other which assists either directly or indirectly to uphold the interest of the "humanities."

Ac. Ah, I can guess that easily enough. You simply mean, I suppose, that there was never more need of resisting the spirit which at present threatens to become supreme in the direction of academical studies, the spirit which

PAG. The spirit which (excuse my interrupting you) is better illustrated by the one sentence which I am going to read from our "University Intelligence" than it could be by pages of disquisition.

"The Professor of Poetry," says the correspondent, "was put upon the Board of Studies on the proposal of the Warden of Wadham; but his proposal to add the Professor

of Greek and Latin was rejected by 38 to 24 votes, Professor Earle maintaining that the fallacious notion that English literature was derived from the classics was so strong that it was unwise to place even the Professor of Latin on the Board." So much for the poor Professors of Greek and Latin. And, now, what should you say of this dictum of Professor Earle's?

Ac. Well, I should say that it is unfair to judge of it from a brief and condensed newspaper report.

PAG. I admit that it is generally unfair to criticise any man's paradoxes without having heard his paradoxical justification of them. But it seems difficult to do the Professor any very grave injustice when we have his vote before us to explain his speech. Whatever he means by "the fallacious notion that English literature is derived from the classics"-a statement almost as clear and informing as it would be to talk of the fallacious notion' that Latin literature is derived from Greek -whatever he meant by that, his vote said plainly enough that in his opinion a mastery of the Greek and Latin classics is a positive disqualification for directing the study of English literature. Must he not have meant that at least?

Ac. I suppose he must.

PAG. Well, then, think of all that that implies. Go home, my dear Academicus, and think of it long and earnestly. And when you have grasped its full significance and measured all the consequences to true culture which it imports, I think you will agree with me that "chatter about Shelley," or chatter about anybody or anything else is hardly a luxury to be much indulged in by men who see the academical study of English literature in danger of passing entirely into such hands as these.

H. D. TRAILL.

HAVING in my time wandered over no small part of the globe, and being now laid up in ordinary, it is my chief delight to toss over the sere and yellow leaves of my memory by the help of travelled visitors. Such wayfarers are the most honoured and welcome guests of my old oak-panelled smoking-room, on whose walls hang many an antlered trophy of the chase; and many a weapon, from my own well-used English guns to the "curst Malayan kreese" from Perak and Salangore, serves, if not to point a moral, at all events to invite or suggest many a tale.

was

My old friend Captain P here at the end of last year for a week's visit and the reversion, in the matter of pheasants, of my more modern friends' leavings. Those young gentlemen are not satisfied with anything less than twenty brace a day to each gun, but we old stagers are not such epicures,-we who know what it is to shoot for our suppers, and to go hungry then. P -'s best stories, I think, hail from the West; though there are few of the parochial divisions of this planet that would not furnish him with a text. But he handles the West as if he loved it, as Izaak Walton bade us handle the frog. He is at home anywhere there on the Prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Panama. He had been, many years ago, a Government officer, magistrate, gold-escort captain or the like, in British Columbia.

On the evening which I will take as an epoch to start with, our party consisted of a certain Chancery barrister, who shot well, drank fair, and had the sometimes provoking gift of summing up the merits of one of our tales of outland with a judicial neatness often not to be anticipated from their wild ingredients: the parson of the parish,

who might sometimes, I fancy, have preferred whist, short or even long, to our everlasting travellers' tales: P and myself.

We had been conversing on the subject of flies. Our remarks had been severe on those works of Nature, and devoid of any shade of Brahminical charity. Their splendid impudence had been dealt with, and the barrister had even cited Mr. Ruskin against them. The rector had reminded us of the etymology of the title, "Beelzebub." I, for my part, though certainly against the grain, had assumed the brief of devil's advocate, and pleaded that some doctors (names unknown) had held that mosquito bites (in quantity unknown) will act (in circumstances not precisely stated) as a prophylactic against fever.

"Although," said P —, after meditatively filling up his long tumbler and cramming a fresh charge of kanaster into his vast meerschaum, "although flies once did help me to a little fortune (it was over seven thousand dollars), yet they must not call me as a witness to character. I'm dead against them: 'La mort sans phrase' is my verdict."

We waited, for indeed he was the last speaker on the subject, and we were quartering the ground to flush a story, or some subject to shoot a story at.

"The best fellow, the very best out and away, of my acquaintance in the French army-and in the Crimean days and before that I knew manywas Hector Cardec, a squadron-leader of Macmahon's out there in the mud in Algeria-as good a soldier and comrade as ever slapped a sword home in scabbard. He was mighty quick at pulling it out, too, by the same token."

We thought a story was to the fore

now, but none of us could think how the flies were to come in.

"Well," resumed he after some solemn puffs of his calumet, "well, he died of the bite of a bluebottle fly on the sands of Boulogne! A queer fate for such a fire-eater! Poor Hector! his bold soul must have made the air shake over those meadows of asphodel yonder, when he realised it, and commented there on it in his free fashion!" And P——, in the character of Hector's vates sacer, here blew out so vast and indignant a volume of smoke that it seemed to be that hero's shade in person and in the very act of the utterances suggested.

All this was very moving, but we clearly had not yet flushed the story; and the barrister found voice for us by saying drily, "Let us have the case for the flies, such as it is the seven thousand dollars."

"Well," said P-, "in the year 1860, or thereabouts, I was taking the pay of our Sovereign Lady, and giving no small share of very hard work for it, in her Majesty's colony of British Columbia. I was a justice of the peace, and had somewhat indistinct and multifarious duties connected with the maintenance of order generally, and of the gold-escort in particular. In the fall of that year I was in the northern, and in those days extreme, limits of the colony at the Forks of Quesnelle, to speak by the the card—as an early winter began to whisper hoarsely and frostily to the various mining-camps that it was time to be pulling up flumeboxes, and for prudent folk to be turning their faces south. Men who had done well began to think of the amenities of the saloons and billiard-halls of Victoria; if very well, they dreamed of even 'Frisco as a place of hybernation ; while men who had been avoided by the quick wings of Fortune were fain to balance the prospect of taking the down road only to re-measure its weary miles after a long winter, against that of hibernating in the society of icicles and tree-martins.

"It cost money then to insure the

The

safe transport of dust' from the mines to the lower country. The smart red jackets of the gold-escort had to be paid for as smartly; nor, if the truth must be told, was the security so provided altogether equal to that of a Chubb's safe in a bank-cellar. escort boys were only men of mould. They could fill a pit like other men; and though there was never a serious attack in my time, we had plenty of alarms to season our excursions with, and one abortive ambuscade. Many owners of 'dust' wouldn't trust it to the escort, and some didn't like the toll; and so it came to pass that many a little Jew trader, of furtive proclivities and frugal mind, would sneak down the forest-trails carrying his wealth himself, and make his way (ay, marry, and sometimes fail to make it!) in a hunted sort of fashion to the lower country. And many a stout Californian with buckskin belt well filled, or heavy saddle-bags, preferred his own insurance to that of the petticoat government' it was often his ungallant humour to rail against. Between these two sorts of wayfarer, the one fleeing like a partridge on the mountains, and the others in jovial Chaucerian sort of cavalcade, banded together for safety and good company, swaggering and ruffling through the primeval woods, there were many grades of travellers. These fellows, however, stick to one's memory -gay with the glow of anticipated pleasures, pleasures to be all the sweeter by long and forced abstinence from them, comfortable and secure with a fortunate season behind them, with the bravery of bright revolverbutts and scarlet shirts, in hard training from successfully bucking at the tiger' of Nature in her most primitive form like men who had been warring with mammoth and mastodon and had come off winners-these boys made bright pictures enough. If there was no soldierly clash of stirrup and scabbard, no jingle of consecrated romance, no feather and flourish of war, yet the tin drinking-cup clinked

gallantly against frying pan or kettle as they rode, and these paladins of pelf were, to do them bare justice, as full of fight as any soldiers who ever wore their country's colour.

If

"Part of the way I happened (having a duty just then to be performed in a quiet, non-official way) to join such a party as I have described going from the Forks of Quesnelle down to Williams's Lake. These two points are some hundred and fifty miles apart, and thirty miles a day in the woods was very good travelling. Slow it was, but not monotonous. there were a monotone, it was of the dark and sombre twilight of the constant ceiling of pines through which the sun and upper air reached us arrow-wise. Below, there was a variety of travel here a wet bottom of mud, deep enough and thick enough to pull an animal's shoe off there a big fallen tree across the trail, to be negotiated with cattle which could fly as soon as jump; and these would be relieved by a red-wood tract of cedars, with a slippery carpet of needles so clean, so sweet, and in all weathers so dry, that it used to seem a shame not to off saddle and camp then and there instead of leaving it. At times the road would climb over a hogsback, or divide, and the travellers would toil and struggle up hill, to emerge in time upon some bare scalp of mountaingranite, syenite, or metamorphic rock —where the berberry or kinni-kinnick enamelled the white quartz with its scarlet berry and glossy leaf, or where the sole vegetation the snow-water had to trickle through was composed of peat and patches of moss-hag. There was no game, nothing to shoot at here; unless, which Saint Hubert forbid foul murder were done upon the chipmunks, a friendly gracious little race of striped squirrels, who frisk and flirt, and play at hide-andseek with the human traveller along the wayside trees, or upon the whiskyjacks, portentously tame birds in Prussian colours of white and black, in size between a magpie and a wag

tail, who enjoy all the immunities of our robin, and will perch on a man's knee while he is eating his dinner. No there is nothing for the sportsman on these trails. What game there is listens to the freeborn accents of the white man, and shrinks deeper within the forest shades, and no traveller has leisure to seek it there.

"Well, we got down in time to Williams's Lake, a broad valley with two ranches or farms, about а mile apart, where onions, at fifty cents apiece, and milk (those two antiscorbutic longings of the man of pork-and-beans) were to

be obtained-a foretaste of the luxuries of the lower country. The houses were both well filled with guests, for other mining-districts were swelling the downward stream of travel. I will spare you a description of the manners and humours of these caravanserais, and go on to say that, having secured a tolerably promising corner for my blankets, I had rolled myself up in them, with my saddle for a pillow, and was well in the first dreamless sleep of the tired man, when-it was only about ten o'clock-a galloping horse suddenly pulled up outside, and loud cries-Oh, Williams! you've got the judge there! judge there! We want the judge!'

waked me up. In that country it doesn't take much to open the weariest man's eyes, nor, on the other hand, is undue excitement fashionable among Anglo-Saxons; so, while the slight discrepancy between night and day dress was being rapidly adjusted, the whole story was told in a few curt sentences to this effect.

"At the other house a little difficulty had occurred a shooting scrape. The victim was not dead yet, but as the manner of it-a felon shot from behind had alienated the sympathies of the boys, it had resulted in the offender being 'corralled' and detained, and the judge, who was reported to be at the other ranche, being sent for.

"The interior of the other house, which was soon reached, to eyes fresh

"There was, as a matter of course in these womanless lands, an efficient and beautiful manliness in the atmosphere. Death! What is death to dwindle, peak, and pine about? Still as little a thing to be frivolous, or cynical, or to bluster about. A fact of what we call life, like any other fact, but with the gravity of finality about it: one of the more emphatic facts, and to be reckoned with as such, but no more. Such was the feeling that animated these men. Few of them, probably, had read Hamlet," but his thought was their thought If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be

now;

if it be not now, yet it will come the readiness is all.' And if the hard life at close grips with Nature brings about the same results as divine philosophy, who would not rather hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak?

"Before the fire, not unskilfully propped up, was the victim-a poor, weak, vicious-looking creature. He had been shot through the lungs, and was bleeding fast to death internally. The murderer sat a little way off with his back to the wall, fenced in by a long table. Opposite him sat two silent guards, one with his cocked revolver in his hand, the other with a similar weapon on the table before him. Like the other's, his was no true miner's face. He looked a villain of the town, like the understrapper of a gambling hell; not a villain of the open air at all. The crowd, who had been withheld from their sleep by this red business, welcomed my entrance with a grave silence.

"Good evening, gentlemen, where is the owner of this house?'

"He stepped forward and quietly said that the two men had arrived together from the northern road on the evening before, and had rested at his house the whole day; that about nine that evening he observed them come in from outside together; that they had a drink of whisky at his bar, and he now remembered that they seemed sulkily disposed to each other. They must have gone out again, for half-anhour later he heard a pistol shot close outside, and, the door opening, the wounded man staggered in, and fell on the floor, bleeding freely at the mouth. It was found on examination that the shot had entered the back and come out at the breast. The poor wretch was unable to say more than, 'Let-the-old-man-take-care!'

"To my request for further evidence, a respectable-looking man, Joe Davis of Antler, deposed that he was coming in from doing up his mule in the barn when he saw in the dusk two figures near the house door: he heard words of apparent dispute, then the report and flash of a pistol shot: then a man ran almost into his arms, whom he seized and disarmed of a dragoon revolver (produced). The man sat there (pointing to the prisoner).

"I then approached the victim, for whom there was obviously no aid in surgery, and, having improved the position in which he lay a little, could get nothing from him but a faint answer, by sign and look, to the effect that the prisoner was the man who had shot him.

"I then asked the prisoner, What is your name?'

"James Connor.'

"Where of?'

"Shirt-tail Cañon, Cariboo.' "Did you shoot this man?' "That's for you to find out, if it's your business.'

"Do you know his name?'
"Silence.

James Connor, you are

my prisoner in the Queen's name, on the charge of attempting to murder a