boy,' says Sir William, 'is still in the village (1851); he wears no clothes, prefers raw meat to cooked, and feeds on carrion whenever he can get it. The boys of the village amuse themselves by catching frogs and tossing them to him. He catches and eats them. When a bullock dies and the skin is removed, he goes and eats it like a village dog. The mother has never experienced any return of affection for him, nor has he shown any for her. Her story is confirmed by all her neighbours, and by the head landholders, cultivators, and shopkeepers of Chupra and its neighbourhood.' Sir William, however, never saw the boy himself.

Here is another circumstantial account of one of these wolf-boys, which I have abridged from Sir W. Sleeman's interesting volumes. About the year 1844 a trooper in attendance upon Rajah Himdut Sing was passing near a small stream that falls into the Gogra not far from the Rajah's seat at Bondy. He saw two wolf-cubs and a boy drinking at the stream. The trooper had a man with him, a sort of attendant, and between them they contrived to seize and carry off the boy. It was not without trouble that the boy was secured.

He

fought desperately, tore the trooper's clothes, and bit both his captors severely. However, he was carried off in triumph to Bondy, where the Rajah put him into a cannon shed and gave him raw flesh to eat. After three months' trouble with him, the Rajah tired of him and let him go. A mimic or comedian from Cashmere took possession of him, hoping doubtless to turn him to profitable account, but at the end of six months he too got tired, and returned him to the Bondy bazaar, to be a pensioner on the charity of the inhabitants. Here the wolf-boy was guilty of some acts of petty larceny. He one day ran off with a joint of meat from a butcher's stall, a butcher who supplied the Moslem inhabitants with animal food. On another occasion he upset some things in a cloth-merchant's shop; the shopkeeper sent an arrow after him which stuck in the boy's

thigh. At this time a Cashmere merchant from Lucknow was at Bondy, selling goods to the Rajah. A lad of the name of Ianoo was in the merchant's service, and seeing the wounded wolf-boy, had compassion on him, and extracted the arrow. Ianoo made a bed for him near his own, and tried to wean him from eating raw flesh by giving him rice and other vegetables to eat, but for some days the wolf-boy was obdurate, and would eat nothing. Ianoo, however, persevered, and the little savage gave in at last. It took fourteen or fifteen days of severe treatment to make the young savage take civilized food without opposition. Ianoo's next aim was to remove the offensive smell from the wolf-boy's body. For this purpose he rubbed him all over with mustard-oil and mustard-seed soaked in water, and this treatment he continued for some months, but the smell, although diminished, was never removed. The wolf-boy had 'hardened marks upon his knees and elbows,' from having gone on all fours. It was not till after six months of Ianoo's indefatigable treatment that he consented to walk upright, like other human beings. He pronounced only one word, and that was 'Abudya,' the name of the Cashmere merchant's daughter, who was kind to him. In four months more he began to understand and obey signs; he would prepare the hookah and bring it to Ianoo when told. This was a great triumph. At length one night when the wolfboy was lying in his bed under the tree as usual, secured to a fent-pin, for Ianoo had still but little confidence in him, Ianoo saw two wolves come up stealthily and smell at the boy. They then touched him, and he got up and began to play with them. Ianoo was alarmed, and called out to a sentry near that the wolves would eat the boy, but the sentry paid no attention to him, and after some time Ianoo succeeded in driving the wolves off. The next night, according to Ianoo's account, three wolves came and played with him in the same way, and so for several nights. They showed great affection to the wolf

boy, licking his face, whilst he played with and patted them. The Cashmere merchant being now about to return to Lucknow, told Ianoo to let the wolf-boy go, but Ianoo would not. Even when his master threatened to drive him from his service, Ianoo would not consent to give up the half-tamed savage. The merchant at length relented, and Ianoo, tying a string to the wolf-boy's arm, led him along, making him at the same time carry a bundle on his head. Several times did the wild lad throw down the bundle and attempt to break off into the jungle, but Ianoo beat him and made him resume it. During three months that Ianoo kept him in Lucknow, he became much more docile, but at length escaped and was never found again. Two months after

wards a woman came to Lucknow, sent by the Rajah from Bondy, who said her son, then four years of age, had been taken from her six years ago by a wolf, and from the description she heard of Ianoo's protégé she had no doubt that was her son. She remained four months in Lucknow looking for him, but without success. The merchant, the trooper, and Ianoo,' writes Sir William, are still at Lucknow, and before me have all three declared the above facts to be strictly true.'

All over Oudh the natives speak of 'wolf-boys' as being quite common, but regard them as irreclaimable. I have never seen any of them, nor apparently did Sir William Sleeman, with all the resources of the presidency, succeed in procuring one for actual inspection.

No

A WEEK

[O great affliction, perhaps; no great tax upon a man's heroism, or his fortitude: but a grievance nevertheless, an undoubted grievance, whether we look forward to it or look back to it, or contemplate the eighty-four hours of enforced idleness, on either side from noon of the intermediate day. Yet, apart from acute physical pain, or the prostration of really serious illness, a week in bed is not without its advantages both to body and mind. It is not even devoid of a round of pleasures and amusements peculiarly its own; and it is perhaps in no case so beneficial as in that of the active, energetic temperament which chafes the most at want of occupation or necessity for restraint..

We are not, of course, speaking of the labourer or mechanic, the hardworking man to whom the loss of a day's employment is the loss of a day's bread, who tries the powers of his enfeebled frame, or looks wistfully at his shattered limb, with the sad consciousness that the wife must be overworked, and the children hungry, till he is strong and sound again. Well for him if he be a member of some friendly society; well for him if he be neighbour to

IN BED.

some Good Samaritan, who affords both sympathy and assistance_comforting to the poor sufferer, and good for the Samaritan too. No, we have in view now a person of the middle or upper classes, well to do, and supplied with the necessaries, and, indeed, the luxuries of life, one to whom the loss of a week is an inconvenience rather than a misfortune, an infliction which is not an affliction, with a tendency more to irritate than to depress. Such a person, we hold, derives many advantages he little dreams of from a week's confinement to bed.

We will put the matter, then, in its most favourable form. We will suppose that you have received some considerable injury of limb: say, for instance, a broken leg, or an ankle very badly sprained, for which you have been obliged to call in medical assistance, and you are told that perfect rest is the only chance for speedy recovery, the doctor, more suorum, blandly ignoring your eager anatomical inquiries, and leaving you in profound ignorance of the nature and extent of your ailment, also in the vaguest uncertainty whether you will be out of bed after eight-and-forty hours, or

as many weeks. You are married of course, and subject to no more than the normal state of matrimonial thraldom; there are three or four pretty little shafts in the quiver; and you have a business of some sort which must not be neglected, but which can yet bear well enough the short absence of its head without derangement to its professional routine.

Under these conditions, we repeat, you are not the least to be pitied for your week in bed.

In the first place, you are released from one of the most unwelcome duties of every-day life-viz., the effort of getting up, and when you wake from habit at your usual hour you can enjoy, with a good conscience, the sluggard's luxury of slumbering again.' Everybody knows the value of those 'forty winks,' generally purchased at the price of an uncomfortable toilet, a hurried breakfast, and a haunting sense of being too late for everything all day. To you who have got to stay in bed for a week, such considerations are of no importance. You turn on your side as far as circumstances permit, and treat them with the contempt they deserve. Waking at last, thoroughly refreshed and comfortable, every limb steeped in an atmosphere of equable warmth, and with not the slightest intention of shaving, you like to remember that breakfast and the newspaper will be brought, without effort on your part, the instant you are ready for them. You will not even have the trouble of making your own tea, or buttering your own toast; and your wife bustles about with appliances for your comfort, in the highest possible spirits and good humour.

A cynical friend of ours, not a bachelor, says that women make good nurses, because they take a pleasure in the contemplation and infliction of pain. Far be it from us to endorse such a sentiment! It seems rather, to our limited perceptions, that they make good nurses because their whole position in life relating to ourselves, is that of the wise attendant on the fractious child, because their province is to soothe, dissuade, and cajole; on occasion to

merge admonition in reproof, and scold in downright earnest; at all seasons to bewail, not without a leavening of approval, the violence and self-will of their charge.

So your wife brings you your breakfast, and you watch her glossy hair, her flowing garments, and her busy white hands, wondering the while you do not find more time to admire her fascinations when you are up, and wandering dreamily back to the days when a fair young girl sat with you under the limes at noon, or walked with you in the summer sunset by the sea, and you believed earth possessed no treasure like the love you are trying so hard to win.

Well, well, madly as you thought yourself in love then, you might have cared, and perhaps did care, for half-a-dozen others in your life as much as for her; nevertheless you feel now, though no longer dazzled by her glances, though wide awake to, and, indeed, somewhat impatient of, her faults, that nobody else would have suited you for a life-companion half as well, and that without her the mornings would never look bright and joyous again. Besides, is she not the mother of your children, pattering on the stair carpet, and drumming at this moment at your door? Enter the little people in a high state of triumph and jubilation. Any casualty, of whatever nature, that upsets the domestic routine of a household is to them a subject of intense and unalloyed satisfaction; and they execute a war-dance on the threshold, and march in, as though to triumph over a fallen enemy, and take possession of a conquered place. The youngest, a demure little fatty of two-and-a-half, is lifted up at her own request, to squat with short straight legs upon your pillow, far the gravest and quietest of the troop, and notwithstanding that she gets one shoe into your tea, impressed with a deep conviction that her superintendence greatly furthers the progress of breakfast, and is indispensable to your comfort. The others, kept with some difficulty at skirmishing distance by mamma, hover lightly about the room,

settling, for choice, at the dressingtable. How rosy, and fresh, and happy they look, and how pleasant to know that they will pay you a visit precisely at the same time, and with the same ceremonies, every morning till you get well.

Tea never tastes so good as when drank in a recumbent position; and thin bread and butter, cut by a pair of white hands that you can trust, is a food of which it is almost impossible for the supply to equal the demand. Breakfast goes on slowly indeed, but with considerable enjoyment; and when it is at length concluded, and taken away with the children, instead of putting a filthy bit of tobacco in your mouth, and hurrying off to catch a train or an omnibus, behold the broad sheet of your newspaper aired, ironed, nicely spread out before you, and nothing to do for the next two hours but to pore over it at your leisure.

On other occasions you know well that you never get the worth of the penny stamp out of your paper till the evening. The subtle arguments of a leading article are necessarily thrown away when absorbed alternately with hurried gulps of hot tea and wedges of half-masticated muffin. The usual process is to glance at consols, skim births, deaths, and marriages-called by one of our most formidable wits 'Hatches, matches, and despatches,' stare vacantly at the foreign news without obtaining the slightest clue to the Emperor's policy, or the future of Germany, and put off the perusal of the rest to that leisure interval of business which you know by experience is never uninterrupted for ten consecutive minutes, or, failing such respite, to the arm-chair after dinner, when the happiest efforts of the journalist shall prove but pleasantly provocative of sleep.

To-day you go regularly through the two sheets, including the advertisements. You are surprised to find how numerous are the facts of which our readers can scarcely be ignorant,' yet concerning which you are totally in the dark. It is humilating, but you pass on nevertheless, tolerably at ease, to the columns of

smaller type, in which are detailed matrimonial differences, romances in real life (often more romantic than real), generally acted in the south of France, and police cases that make your blood run alternately hot and cold. You clinch your hand involuntarily, reading of the poor hard-working victim with her disfigured face, and the brute who has so maltreated her. You wonder whether he was maddened by drink, or literally possessed by a devil; and you speculate a little also, perhaps, on the amount of provocation he may have received. At this juncture your wife, who can be provoking too sometimes, but not to-day, taps gently at the door, and enters half-pitiful, half-radiant, to tell you the doctor's carriage is in the street.

While she speaks, smoothing your bedclothes the while, and, running a comb through your hair, a ring at the door-bell seems to vibrate over the whole house. Quick as lightning she hides away one or two feminine articles not intended for exhibition, and hurries off to receive the man of art in the dining-room, an apartment the least of all adapted for comfortable conversation by daylight, yet invariably selected in all establishments for important colloquy, professional or otherwise.

It seems a very long time since you heard that dining-room door shut, and you wonder what she can have to say to him, though you have not now to learn how dearly all women love a good long chat upon matters of medicine, especially with a practitioner of the healing science. Presently voices are heard in the hall, and the cough, half-cautious half-reassuring, without which no doctor ever yet ascended a staircase; then, above and besides the solemn measured footstep, your ear, a little nervously sharpened, detects smothered titter and a childish scuffling of feet high up on the next floor. Remembering with grief and shame little Charlie's proclivities (he was always a pickle) you devoutly trust that he may not be so fascinated by the bald and glossy surface of the doctor's ascending head, as to drop on it, through the

a

bannisters, the heaviest of his playthings.

The injury you have received is considerably below the waist; nevertheless, the first thing you have to show is your tongue, and you put it out perforce as if you were ashamed of it; then he feels your pulse for about five beats, asks how you slept, but does not wait for an answer, and proceeds at once_to a dissertation on the weather, and a light summary of the news of the day.

Fortified by the morning's study, you might meet him here upon something like equal ground; but you reflect that, though he seems so good-humouredly to ignore it, his time is of value, and you take the initiative by demanding at once an inspection and consideration of your injury.

Here I defy you to gather from his countenance the slightest clue to his opinion of your case. Whether you are to draw a boot on to-morrow, or amputation is unavoidable to-day, it bears the same calm, profound, and somewhat disapproving expression; but he has his instruments and other appliances at hand. Your wife, who entertains her own misgivings about Charlie, and has been upstairs to place him, for the time, under close arrest, comes in just as she is wanted, and in a few minutes you are supine and comfortable again.

And now, these two, obviously playing into each other's hands, begin to treat you, a man of forty, exactly like a very helpless and somewhat spoiled child of three years old. You inquire, with pardonable interest, about your diet, and he replies, looking at her, exactly as you feel they settled he should a quarter of an hour ago. You are to live generously, of course; but this generous living, being analyzed, dwindles down to a basin of beef-tea and a glass of sherry and water. You would like to get up for halfan-hour to have your bed made, and you suggest this arrangement as the merest matter-of-course. Again the pair of traitors glance responsive across your prostrate form, and it is provoking to feel that this wish

too has been anticipated and negatived in the dining-room downstairs.

Lastly, you ask the doctor point blank how long he thinks it will take you to get well, not believing it necessary to tell him that it is of some importance to attain at least an approximation to the length of time you are to be debarred from business or pleasure.

Aio te, Eacide, Romanos vincere posse! Make out of his answer anything less dubious than the oracle if you can! He will call you 'my dear sir,' but pooh-pooh you nevertheless, as if you were no more a reasoning being than you are a free agent while under his hands. He will tell you that these matters require time, my good sir, time. Nature has great restorative powers, but she must be allowed to work for herself. We can but assist her, and watch the case. If she were thwarted (here a long word that sounds like metempsychosis, and frightens you accordingly) might supervene. Your good lady would inform me immediately, but I have no apprehension of this so long as you keep still. Patience, my dear sir, patience and rest will do more than the whole pharmacopoeia. will see you again, shall I say this time to-morrow?' and so exit, attended by your 'good lady,' who shoots down at you a triumphant glance as she goes by, which experience has taught you to read, 'I told you so.'

I

Everybody who has been ill knows that the doctor's visits are succeeded with great regularity by alternate fits of elation and depression. Tuesday he leaves you buoyant and hopeful, Wednesday resigned but despairing, Thursday better, Friday worse, and so on. Under any circumstances your wife confirms his opinion directly he is gone, and impresses on you the necessity of slavish submission to his authority, and her own as his delegate. Household affairs, however, require her presence; and when your room has been done out' you are left for an hour or two in solitude and reposc.