After the Lives of the Saints, Chateaubriand, and after Chateaubriand, Rousseau. The daughter of Victoire Delaborde, the granddaughter of the Voltairean Madame Dupin was not of the stuff of which saints are made. Yet her experiences had the effect of making her tender and respectful to every form of sincere religious belief.

At the age of sixteen her grandmother took her away from the convent, and began to think about establishing her in marriage. But the activities of the gallant old gentlewoman were nearly at an end. Soon after the return of Aurore to Nohant, Madame Dupin had a paralytic stroke. The day after the attack Aurore was told that in all probability her grandmother would be "childish" for the remainder of her life. The girl, who, when all was said and done, loved passionately the woman who had brought her up, rushed out into the garden to be alone with her grief, and the indifference of Nature struck her to the heart. Years afterwards, she remembered the "insolent" beauty and calm of that summer morning.

During Madame Dupin's lingering illness Aurore was left very much to herself. She read all the books she could lay her hands on with the zest of a newly awakened intellectual passion, she rode about the country unchaperoned, and scandalised the neighbourhood by her disregard of convention and gossip. The Superior of the English nuns had called her Sleeping Water, and through all her

life she astonished those who thought they knew her by the volcanic energy which was usually concealed beneath a quiet indifferent manner.

The death of her grandmother left her in possession of Nohant, with the recommendation that she

should have recourse to the protection of her father's family. They did not, however, see fit to countenance her when she went to live with Madame Maurice Dupin. She soon found that her mother's faults of temper had grown upon her

to such an extent as to make her almost an impossible companion. It is not surprising that she should have sought to escape from these unsatisfactory conditions of existence by a marriage which seemed to promise comparative independence and a quiet life.

As Madame Dudevant she lived for some years not unhappily. The care of her two children absorbed her, and for the time she was all mother. Then there awoke in her the spirit of her lawless ancestry, the scorn of convention, the hatred of restraint, the craving for adventure, which she lends to all her heroines, even the most reasonable and respectable, to Consuelo and Caroline as well as to Lelia and Indiana. The rest of her life belongs to the history of the Romantic movement in French literature; but it all lies in germ in the games of the girl who played with the village children in the meadows of Nohant, or dreamed vague dreams of impossible self-devotion in the garden of the Couvent des Anglaises.

I.

THE Assistant Collector and Magistrate of the First Class, aged twentyfour, tilted his crazy office-chair as far back as he knew to be compatible with safety, and dispassionately scrutinised the two hand-cuffed specimens of native humanity that stood before him. The evidence for the prosecution was complete. Caught red-handed stealing a goat from the village grazing-ground the two thieves could. only offer a bare denial of the charge; and as the denial was not backed by a shred of probability, it only remained to award sentence.

The taller of the two criminals was whining in a dull monotone the usual platitudes indulged in by his class on such occasions, his shifty eye roaming round the office-tent as the monotone proceeded. "The police have thrown a net round me, an unfortunate and innocent man. These witnesses have all perjured themselves. We Ratias are hunters and trappers and junglefolk, and why should I steal a goat?" Here his glance fell on the Court Flogger untying a bundle of canes outside. Fascinated by the sight, he paused abruptly.

But at the word Ratia the smaller thief, a beady-eyed, cheerful-looking little man protested in a shrill cracked voice: "This is no Ratia but an outcaste of some city. If he be a Ratia, let him show the Ratia mark. for me, I am a Ratia indeed, and this son of shame is a liar also."

As

The Assistant Commissioner started from his reverie. This might be worth investigating, and further, he remem

bered with pride a lesson learned far back in the last rains when as yet he was new to the country. Riding out of some scrub-jungle on to the cultivated lands he had come upon a gang of brown beady-eyed little men busy setting snares for a herd of antelope feeding hard by. They worked silently, driving in their long pegs by thumps and blows with the palms. of their right hands. An hour later, the sight of a fine black-buck kicking in the toils had enormously raised these children of Esau in the Englishman's estimation. "Hard on the hands, your trade," he had observed to a patriarch of the tribe. Whereupon, being simple folk and knowing a friend when they saw one, they had all pressed round his skewbald Arab to show how every male of the tribe bore in the right palm the hall-mark of the Ratia, a horny grey callosity about the size of a shilling.

He had the hand-cuffs opened and examined the four perspiring palms held out for inspection. Those of the taller prisoner were plump and smooth, the hands of a thief. Delay in this case was superfluous; "Thirty stripes," the sentence rang out and the man was taken away. But in the palm of the little prisoner there was the mark right enough. The Assistant Commissioner was distressed. Why, with the Central Indian Jungle teeming with edible roots and berries barely two miles away, and around him the black and yellow antelope roaming in herds. through the fields of ripening grain, had this man stooped to steal an old

village goat? He put the question point-blank.

The answer was satisfactory. The police of the District, hot on the track of a dacoity, had raided the Ratias' camp a month ago, arrested the party and seized all nets and snares found on the spot together with two stalking-bullocks. The human portion of the spoil had been released, but the traps and nets and, above all, the priceless trained bullocks, were still in custody. He, the accused, was no kisan (cultivator) nor such a one as should work for hire; he hungered for meat, and so he stole the goat.

"Twenty stripes," said the Assistant Commissioner and shut the register of Summary Trials with a bang. "Having been whipped," he added, "you will be given your bullocks and gear this evening."

In a little while the beast-like howls of the first accused bore witness to the assembled villagers to the justice of the Sirkar. The Ratia took his twenty stripes in silence, wriggling prodigiously. On being released, he snorted, slipped a morsel of opium into his mouth and, from force of habit, bent himself to slide into the squatting posture natural to the Oriental. Half-way through the action he appeared to remember something and straightened himself with a jerk. Some one in the crowd (it was the owner of the goat) laughed; the Assistant Commissioner laughed also, and, true flattery, the laugh became general. "When your Highness goes to Durbar," asked a waggish constable of the victim, "will he be pleased to accept a chair?"

The little crowd melted away and the camp resumed its normal aspect of repose. It was the middle of the afternoon. Kingfishers, emerald (the smaller kind) and pied black and white (the larger), hovered in pairs above

the blue tank and dropped like plummets amid a shower of diamond spray. The crumbling fort of some by gone aboriginal Rajah took up half the village side of the sheet of water, and the battlements were lined with grey monkeys basking and blinking in the warmth. Below the monkeys, out of broken casements and ruined cell-like chambers, burst a wealth of tropic grass and bush and flower. A rustle, and the crest and shining eyes of a peacock were thrust tentatively through a rift in the masonry; the whole bird followed and with him his four mates. They took up statuesque poses full in the eye of the declining sun and backed by a sculptured slab set above a doorway. Below them, again, the lotus-covered surface of the tank crept up to the yellow wall. Small chuckling grebelike creatures bustled and dived among the vermilion flowers. A bluish-black bird, with preposterously long toes and a cocked-up tail, was racing over the unsteady rafts of leaf in pursuit of an invisible prey, and two baldheaded ibises with scarlet-rimmed eyes stood dreaming in the shallows. all hung the fluttering kestrels, patientest of all hunters of the air. Not the faintest zephyr was abroad. The jungle encircled tank and village and cultivated lands with a dense wall of vegetation, and from time to time the broad teak leaves fell, dry and clattering into eternal silence.

Over

The Assistant Commissioner yawned and called for his shot-gun. There were a few acres of snipe-ground below the tank among the rice-fields, and to shoot his dinner had formed for the last month or two part of the daily routine of his life. His silent bearer brought him his weapon and in the other hand his master's heavy 500 Express. There was a significant gleam in his eye, as he awaited permission to speak.

The Assistant Commissioner looked, noted, and said one word, "Why?"

The words tumbled out of the man's mouth in his haste. "It is that rogue of a thief, the twenty-stripe fellow, he says he has sure news of a panther not a mile from here, and if the Sahib will sit up for it, in one hour from now he will obtain a shot. The man is a thief, but he is a jungledweller, and perhaps, but let the Presence himself question him." Now the Sahib was perfectly aware that had not the tale seemed to his servant a genuine one the rifle would never have been taken from its case. "Produce the man," he said.

The thief stepped out from the flies of the tent and salaamed. He appeared but little the worse for his flogging, and in his uncouth dialect began, "Concerning my nets and bullock," only to be cut short by a snort of indignation from the majestic Mussulman behind the Sahib's chair. "To the point, oh scum! Speak about the panther or thy head will be broken. Thy nets-pah!"

So he spoke of the panther. At dawn that day he had come upon the beast licking his bloody chops over the body of a dead heifer in a field hard by the jungle-line. He had

scared it off its prey and at evening, when the fields were deserted, it would certainly return to the kill. No time was to be lost. Let the Sahib start, and let a kid also be taken along, for, if the kill had been dragged into the jungle, as was probably the case, the kid could be tethered in the field near a convenient tree and by its bleating lure the panther into the open where a clear shot was possible.

The plan was approved and at once the expedition started. Snipe rose in whisps at their feet as the party picked their way along the narrow rice embankments out towards the drier fields and the fire-line that divides

No. 536.-VOL. XC.

the Government Reserved Forest from the tilled village lands.

II.

The social nature of the domestic goat of India has gained for that animal an unenviable reputation as the best possible bait for the larger carnivora of the jungle. To employ the offspring of the sacred cow is in a Hindu country impracticable. Your young buffalo stands in moody silence under the tree to which he is bound, or, with an indifference exasperating to the watcher, in the machan lies down quietly to sleep; but the kid of the goats, separated from his fellows and deserted by those who have tethered him down, calls heaven and earth to witness the lonesomeness of his position, till for far and wide the round ear of many a beast of prey cocks as at the sound of a dinner-bell. Should the eye of the victim, however, fall upon the watcher in the tree above, the insistent bleatings cease; there is company, and he is not afraid. Hence the black and white kid was elaborately elaborately blindfolded before the

Assistant Commissioner climbed up into the acacia tree, when, the bandage removed, the natives departed, talking loudly, accordingly to custom, in order to impress on any neighbouring panther the fact that they had really and truly quitted the scene. The goat tugged and strained at the cord in his effort to follow them; then he lifted up his voice in a shrill incessant stream of bleatings.

The watcher sat like a graven image and abandoned himself to a mental attitude of pure receptiveness. To right and left before him stretched the line of Government jungle, a wall of forest cut off sharply from the fields by the regulation forty foot burnt fire-line. Somewhere behind that screen was moving the beast he

K

had come to kill. Mysterious noises, rustlings, and scamperings over the carpet of dried leaves, told of the presence of the smaller folk of the jungle whose play-hour it was. As the sun sank lower so the voices of the jungle acquired new character in the unearthly stillness of the evening. Peafowl called like great cats from one forest giant to another, as they ascended with leaps and flappings to their immemorial roosts in the higher branches. A sambhur stag, a full mile away, sent a challenge to his rival across the river; the call, half bellow, half roar, was taken up vigorously, and the echoes of the river-bed played fantastic tricks with the sound. Near at hand a family of mongooses, hot on the trail, hunted along the fireline, doubling in and out of the forestscreen like monster weasels. And the goat, in an agony of loneliness, tugged at the cord and shook the air with long quavering bleatings.

The sun was now so low that its rays seemed to strike the wall of jungle in horizontal shafts, lighting up dark alleys where the screen of verdure was thinnest, and flooding the cultivated lands with a warm amber-coloured glow. It was the hour of perfect peace, when, for a brief space, time becomes a word without meaning and seconds are interchangeable with years. Then there came a change.

A band of spotted deer (three hinds headed by a stag) broke at full gallop from the forest, and dashed recklessly across the fire-line and over the bare fields, heading for the further belt of jungle. They passed within gun-shot of the Assistant Commissioner, the stag's antlers thrown back almost to his haunches, his liquid eye distended with terror. The noise of flying hoofs died away and was succeeded by a silence unbroken but for the reedy shrilling of a tree-cricket above the

With head sunk below his massive shoulders he stood on the blackened fire-line, an old and heavy panther. The dying sun shone full on his broad chest and bowed fore-legs which at fifty paces distant seemed a pinkish white. So still was he that, save for the eyes, the sleek dappled body might have been of moulded bronze; but the eyes, malignant, intense, inscrutable, were fixed in an unblinking stare upon the goat. The goat, with the pluck of its kind, faced the beast in silence, stamping and challenging with pathetically useless little horns.

A fine perspiration burst from the palms of the watcher in the tree, until it seemed impossible to him to hold the rifle firmly. On a sudden, too, the weight of the barrel resting upon his thigh became intolerable. Cramp threatened his bent limbs, yet to move or shoot at this stage was out of the question. The very motion of breathing made the creaking of his leggings horribly audible to his quickened sense of hearing. Minutes passed like hours and still the beast stood, staring.

The sun dropped into the ocean of forest in the West. Then, stepping delicately with noiseless pads, the beast walked across the fire-line, The ground was thick with last year's year's teak-leaves, but the heavy