his purchase from a well-known dealer, whose final closure of the business might have involved some social refreshment, making Andrew more than ordinarily triumphant, candid, and well nigh loquacious on the subject. Still, if he knew the fact, he did not then let it out, by the faintest allusion, that "Rutherford" had some time or other been used as a hunter, and had actually this could have pointed those coinci- PRIAM AND HECUBA. ILIAD. BOOK XXII. [The scene preceding the death of Hector is, perhaps, the most pathetic picture in the whole range of poetry. Achilles has defeated the Trojans and driven them into the city, but has been prevented from following them close by Apollo, who, in the shape of Agenor, has lured him away in another direction.] THUS, flying wild like deer, to their city hurried the Trojans ; There from their sweat they cool'd, and assuaged the rage of their hot thirst, Leaning against the crest of the wall; and on the Achaians Nearer came, with their shoulders join'd, close locking their bucklers. But outside to remain, his malign fate, Hector ensnared, There in front of the Ilian wall and the Skaïan portals. And thus then to Pelides outspake Phoebus Apollo: Why, O Peleus' son, in rapid pursuit dost thou urge me,— Me, an immortal, a mortal thou?-nor, blindly, discernest That I deity wear, and that thy anger is futile. Carest thou not to distress thy Trojan foes, who have fled thee Him, in wrath profound, thus addressed swift-footed Achilles : Now from me thou hast snatcht my glory, and them thou hast savèd; Swift should my vengeance be, if vengeance on thee were allow'd me." Thus spake he, and in ire majestic toward the City Bent his rapid career, like some victorious racer When to the goal he his chariot whirls, swift scouring the champain; Him then aged Priam saw, first marking his motion, Blazing like to a star in the sky, as he travers'd the champain Like the autumnal star, that, brightest of all in the heaven, Shines in the stillness of night 'mid a crowd of scantier splendours,- Fever he brings and disease to the dwellings of mortals unhappy : Then did the old man wail, and smote his head with his two hands, Him the old man, with hands stretcht forth, thus piteous urgèd : "Hector! my son beloved! wait not thus alone, I implore thee, Creature abhorred and feared! O were he to the Immortals Slain by him, or sold to distant isles as a captive; And e'en now there are two, Lycaon and eke Polydorus, But if they live in the Grecian host we will ransom them, surely, As it lies at the door. In the youth, even death has its graces, But when the silver beard and the hoary head of the agèd So the old man spoke, and his silvery locks in his hands full, Tore from his head; yet still unmov'd was the spirit of Hector. And on the other side his mother wept and lamented, Baring her bosom and showing her breasts on this and on that side, And with a flood of tears thus in wingèd accents besought him : "Hector! O look on this, my child, and pity thy mother: Thus with weeping words did the parents plead with their son, and But still waited the mighty Achilles as near he approachèd. W. W. NEW BOOKS OF SPORT AND NATURAL HISTORY: A GOSSIP FOR SEPTEMBER. BY HENRY ARE any of our readers in town still? Not many, we hope, this droughty September day. We would rather wish that they may be scattered to the four winds, after the manner of Englishmen, to meet again at the end of jolly October to compare notes about what they have seen nay, we are pretty sure that the large majority are away, and consequently we have visions of this present Number, in its elegant puce-coloured wrapper, being read in all sorts of queer places. We cannot help wondering what its own brother, the May Number, would say if he had to go through the experiences of this one. May (lucky rogue!) was in town at the very height of the season. He lay about on drawingroom tables, and was cut with the most beautiful paper-knives ever you saw, and altogether lived a rose-coloured existence. This fellow will have a very different time of it. After being kicked about through country post-offices for a day or so, and surreptitiously read on his way by people with dirty fingers, who get deep into "Tom Brown," and are driven mad by finding the leaves uncut just at the critical place-after all this, I say, he will probably have his leaves cut with a fishing-rod spike, and be dropped into the bottom of a ferryboat to take his chance. But although A may be on Loch KINGSLEY. Corrib, B on Loch Awe, C at Tal-y-llyn, D in the Njordenfels, and E trying to break his precious neck, and those of the fathers of five large Swiss families, by scrambling into places where there is nothing worth seeing compared to what he may see in perfect safety from below; yet still I think there are some few readers left to go on parade. We still hear of marchings out from headquarters; the theatres are open; we believe some few of the clergy are left in town, and are preaching to respectable and attentive congregations; in short, there must be a few thousand or so of reading people in town, who will be pleased to get a taste of the woods, fields, and mountains, were it only done by deputy. With this view, therefore, we have three or four books to introduce to our readers' attention, whose authors we can recommend as trustworthy guides on this aerial expedition. We begin by presenting Mr. Cornwall Simeon.1 Away go streets, hot pavements, crowds, omnibuses, and dull care; we take his hand, and are off with him a-fishing. Down to the milelong meadows, where noble old Father Thames pours his brimming green flood over thundering lashers; where the 1 Stray Notes on Fishing and Natural History. With Illustrations. By Cornwall Simeon. Macmillan & Co. lofty downs heave up above stately groups of poplar, elm, and willow; where "On either side the river lie Hither, and to many other pleasant places, both on salt and fresh water, you may wander with him, gathering as you go both pleasure and profit from the stores of an acute and experienced observer. And this is the place to say that the book before us possesses in an eminent degree an excellence which is, alas! but too rarely possessed by books on natural history. I mean that the facts are thoroughly trustworthy. We have here no second or third-hand evidence, or any of that reckless want of correct observation which would not be allowed for an instant in any science but natural history, but which (in spite of the example Humboldt has given us, of trusting almost entirely to his own observation, and receiving with great caution the facts of others) prevails to a very great extent. Some men seem to think that if they have got the evidence of a gamekeeper, they have settled the question. "Why, good gracious!" say such men, "surely he must know a man who has spent his life in watching animals!" A gamekeeper is the worst evidence in the world. He walks ; The the world with a jaundiced mind. He has one idea-game, game, game. whole world is in conspiracy against him, from the young fellow who meets his sweetheart in the wood, whom he accuses of poaching, down to the waterrat that he accuses of eating his trout. He is an invaluable fellow, and one who will risk life and limb in the just defence of his master's game, but he is not the man to go to for facts in natural history. His evidence and that of all other uneducated persons should be taken with extreme caution. This class of people habitually generalise from an insufficient number of facts, often from one solitary fact, often from a merely supposititious fact, and, once having erected a theory, will cling to it with astonishing obstinacy, and are no longer capable of viewing the matter under observation without a bias. As an instance the elderly labourers in a village we are well acquainted with believe that a troublesome disease to which cows are subject in the udder proceeds from the bite of a viper. It was no use my representing to them that in cases of cattle and horses being bitten by snakes (a not uncommon accident in Australia), they were invariably bitten in the nose, and that the disease in question was natural. Nothing upset their theory or shook their faith, until a new old man came in and attributed the whole affair to the hedgehogs. This staggered them. They seemed to think that there was some degree of probability in this. At all events, it was better than our reckless and subversive theory of its being cancer or some such ailment. Thereon, hearing our especial favourites, the hedgehogs (we wouldn't like to trust the rogues too near pheasants' eggs, mind you), so grossly libelled, we left them in disgust. The first two or three chapters of Mr. Simeon's book ought to be read by all anglers, and, what is more, remem bered. He is evidently a master of the craft, and writes for masters, or those who aspire to be so. These chapters consist principally of fishing "wrinkles," most pleasantly put together, and interspersed with amusing anecdotes, and might be read, we should think, even by a German, who is not usually an appreciator of the noble art. By-the-bye, what odd notions that intellectual nation have about fishing! We tried once to make some Germans understand what the spike on our fishing-rod was in tended for, by repeatedly sticking it in the ground, and illustrating what an advantage it was to have one's rod stand upright instead of laying it down; but they left us under the full impres sion that, in case of the fish making off with a fly, we used the spike as a harpoon, and bodily hurled our rod, tackle and all, at the retreating "trout." The other day, in the "Fliegende Blätter," or "Kladderblatsch," we forget which, there was a series of cuts illustrating a rake's progress. The young man has a fortune left him. He takes to evil courses. He goes down the course of ruin and dissipation, lower and lower each time, through twenty-one capitally executed vignettes. In the twentysecond he is represented as a desperate, ruined, drunken gambler. In the twenty-third he is depicted fishing with a float. The measure of his crimes is now full. It is time to draw the curtain over the humiliating spectacle. In the twenty-fourth and last he dies miserably in jail. But to return to Mr. Simeon. His account of Mr. Maltby's fish-ponds near Brussels, and the method of breeding and rearing carp and tench pursued by that gentleman, are exceedingly valuable and curious, not more to the angler or scientific man than to the country gentleman or farmer. The Mr. Maltby is our Vice-Consul at Brussels, and has given his attention very much to the farming of fish-ponds. Out of a pond rented by him near Brussels, carp of no less than thirtythree pounds have been taken. largest carp mentioned by Yarrell is nineteen pounds; the largest which has come under our own cognisance, was caught in the buck stage on the Loddon, at Swallowfield, Wiltshire, which turned the scale at eighteen pounds. These are of a very exceptional size for England; but Mr. Maltby, in the February of last year, took from his ponds twenty carp, weighing from twenty to twenty-five pounds each! We must not, however, be surprised at this. England is not the home of the carp. The carp is a continental fish, and in his own waters may be expected to range much larger. These extraordinary large fish seem to be from about fifteen to twenty years old. We confess we have never participated in a successful effort to make carp a fit article for human consumption, having always, on these occasions, been left with the impression of having eaten a pumpkin-pie, into which a box of mixed pins had accidentally fallen. We would prefer "going in" for the perch and tench part of the business—either of which fish, properly dressed, is a dish for a king. Before leaving the subject of fishing we must call attention to hints given on sea fishing, which, though only too short, were very much wanted. There is plenty of room for a good long book on this same subject, on which, as far as we are aware, though the works and brochures on freshwater fishing would take a summer's day to count, we have not a single reliable treatise. The second part of the book before us is given up to Stray Notes on Natural History. Here, as we said before, we have the experience of a close and conscientious observer, pleasantly told, with a great deal of humour. To those who retain the capacity of unextinguishable laughter, we should recommend the story of the Parrot Show, at page 163; though "we are free to confess," as they say in the House, and nowhere else, that we think that Mr. Simeon's own story, at page 162, about the parrot who was naughty at prayers, and how he was carried out by the butler, and what he said when he was going out at the door, is perhaps the best of the two. As a specimen of Mr. Simeon's way of telling his anecdotes, we give the following. The subject is that of "Wart Charming," a rather out-of-the-way one : "I myself knew an instance in which the cure was so rapid and perfect, that any doctor might have pointed to it with pride as a convincing proof of the efficacy of his treatment. It was a case of warts; the patient being a little girl of about seven or eight years old, the daughter of a servant in our family. She came up one day to the house for some work, and, when the lady who was giving it to her, remarking that her hands were covered with bad warts, noticed the fact to her, she said, 'Yes, ma'am, but I'm going to have them charmed away in a day or two.' 'Very well,' answered the lady, glad to have an opportunity of convincing the child that the whole thing was a delusion; when they are charmed away come and show me your hands.' But about six weeks had elapsed after this had taken place, when she was again told that the girl wished to see her. She was accordingly shown up, when she said, 'If you please, ma'am, you told me to come and show you my hands when the warts were charmed away, and you see, |