She splashes through the water to the ruined bank that dams it; and, after much rummaging, makes a dash into a tuft of grass, and away skims a partridge at his best pace. He drops dead, but is hardly fallen when another rises, likewise to share his fate, and five more are flushed and away before we can re-load. We are lucky to have found them, for when the Devonshire partridge takes it into his head to hide and lie fast, it is difficult to make him show himself. How often have we walked for hours, even in early September, over farms where we knew birds to be plentiful, and failed to find a single one. If they wish to conceal themselves there is always a great bank within a hundred yards of them, where any number of coveys could find shelter, and you may tread on them before they will rise. We remember once to have driven a covey of fourteen into a scrap of copse not forty yards square. Two men and two dogs went through it with busy sticks and hideous noises, and, finding nothing, joined us in abuse of the man who said that he had marked them down. He, like a sensible fellow, said nothing, but simply stayed by the copse for half an hour after we had left it, and presently saw the whole fourteen run out as if nothing had happened, to seek new lodging in an adjoining bank.

By this time we are beginning to look forward to an extraordinary day's sport, and wishing that we had brought more cartridges. A couple more snipe and a couple more rabbits heighten our hopes, and we talk big about killing more game than we care to carry. After such luck we should not altogether be surprised to come upon black game, though in truth we have never seen a poult, as they call him in Devon, anywhere within twenty miles of the place where we stand.

But we can never tell what we may flush next in this country; a bittern, a wild goose, or even a pelican would be no great surprise, and would be more welcome to us, to be seen and saluted, than a hundred pheasants to be shot at and killed. But it is not safe to count on the yellow clay for a day of continuous sport, and though we try every likely spot, for the next two hours not a cartridge is fired. Magpies, hawks, crows, and a dozen of the keeper's pet abominations greet us at a respectful distance, and as we draw for a time nearer to the cliffs we have leisure to admire the red bill of the Cornish chough, and the graceful wheeling flight of two pair of great blunt-winged buzzards. But game we see none, though we tramp on with exemplary diligence; and our scattered coveys seem to have vanished into thin air.

At last we resolve to forsake the open, and draw a long strip of ragged gorse-brake adjoining our boundary; and lest we should give to our neighbour what we want for ourselves we draw it down wind. We steal down to the leeward end, take our stand in the middle of a tiny stream, which we select as on the whole the driest and firmest spot to be found in an extremely treacherous patch of ground, and wait for what may come. A woodpigeon, evidently scared by the keeper, comes first, sailing down over the hedge under which we stand concealed, a fine rocketing shot. Have we held far enough before him? Yes, the swift wings close, the ringed neck sinks, and he falls far beyond us in a cloud of white down. We hear the spaniel speaking faintly on the lower side of the brake, and watch sharply for a rabbit. A water-ousel comes flitting down over our head in panic terror, and a water-rail, which for a moment we mistake for a jack-snipe follows him three jays, which have

been screeching irresolute for some minutes, at last make up their minds to face the open and be off; but still the spaniel speaks three hundred yards above us sharply and savagely, we know not upon what scent. Then there is a slight rustle in the hedge, a lithe brown body appears for an instant and, just giving a glimpse of a yellow belly, vanishes instantly into a rabbit-hole. Where there are stoats there are no rabbits, and we cease to watch for them accordingly. The spaniel has fallen silent, the blackbirds now begin to stream out past us with terrified screams, and we therefore conclude that, though we can hear nothing of them, keeper and dog have nearly beaten the brake out to

us.

Another rustle in the hedge and out comes very leisurely and slowly within ten yards of us a great gray fox. Quite unconscious of our presence he stands for a moment listening, and we can study him at our ease; a great gray fellow as we have said, evidently old and well stricken in years, with a bit of a ruff round his neck that gives him almost the appearance of a wolf. His teeth are past their first sharpness, as we guess; but we suspect that he would lead even the best pack of hounds a merry dance, and make a brave fight at the end. We remember to have seen just such another on Exmoor, draggled, bent, and beat, hurl himself into a tuft of gorse and turn defiant as a stag to meet his doom. The pack had begun to tail after a long chase; a single hound first came up to him, and, after one glance into the gorse bush, decided that it would be more prudent to wait for assistance before going any further.

There he stands, the hoary-brushed old vagabond, his mind little perturbed, but inclined to think on the whole that he had better move. They are not his sworn enemies that have intruded upon him, he is sure of that. No. 438.-VOL. LXXIII.

But hark! the keeper opens his mouth to cheer the spaniel, and the gray ears listen intently. No! it is not the sound that he dreads; certainly it is not, but it is disagreeably near of kin to it, and it is best to beat a dignified retreat. A muffled note from the spaniel confirms his resolution, and he trots slowly away at his ease. It is perhaps a shame to shake such a confiding nature, but old foxes must not be suffered to relapse into imprudent repose. We used to be able to halloo once upon a time, and here is an excuse for recovering our lost art. The gray brush gives a whisk, the stealthy trot becomes a gallant stride, and the old sinner vanishes in haste away to the cliffs, or he best knows whither. The keeper hurries out to the sound; he has been busy with the study of a heap of feathers, and the spaniel not caring to face the gorse has been whiling away the time with a dance round a hedgehog.

But this interlude has broken the spell. As we strike away back to our ground of the morning, we get a shot into a flock of golden plover and add one of them to the bag. A ragged fence unexpectedly produces another woodcock, and the adjoining moor a jack-snipe; then, just as we are wondering whither we shall go next we hear a familiar shrill voice, and Mr. Buzzacott, riding a barebacked cart-mare, with a halter, comes splashing through the clay to tell us that he has flushed one brood of partridges on his arish (stubble) and marked them down. Poor unfortunate birds! but we make haste after them, and are presently blundering, not quite so fresh as in the morning, over tussocks of furze and sickly rushes in pursuit. They are wild, but we manage to drop one, and the indefatigable Buzzacott, galloping heavily on the cart mare, marks

F F

them down again. Once more we hurry after them, for the light is beginning to fail. They are scattered and rise singly; two are easily bagged, and then an ominous cloud from the sea breaks into sharp cutting rain. The moisture is a small matter, for we are wet through to the waist already, but the growing darkness is more serious. The third bird rises and is missed with both barrels; the fourth has the same luck, and the fifth we lose sight of altogether. It is of no use; we never could see well in the dusk, and having but two cartridges left decide to try no more. Mr. Buzzacott smiles with kindly contempt, and suggests that we should jump on to the back of his mare and go on ; nor for all our argument will he believe that we stop not because we are unwilling to walk, but because we are unable to see.

Well then, if we must go home, he will show us the shortest way. We know what that means, but indeed a little food with rest and shelter is not unwelcome after our walk, and it is not unwillingly that we follow Mr. Buzzacott into his house. A pale girl, looking doubly ghastly in the flickering light of the fire, rises as we enter, and the hacking cough, which even so much exertion entails, tells too plainly what is amiss. She answers in reply to our inquiries that she is better, but Mr. Buzzacott will not hear of it. "Oh! her's weaker," he says cheerfully and encouragingly, "weaker every day, I can see that." The girl, we are glad to say, is well and hearty at this moment, but it is not from want of preparation for death on her father's part.

But

in truth all of Mr. Buzzacott's class and below it, in Devon at any rate, and we believe elsewhere, seem to feel a positive delight in feeling

the presence of death. Even in their letters, whenever inspiration fails the monotonous phrase, "Dear father and mother, may we meet in heaven," recurs again and again. But all such reflections are cut short by the entrance of Mrs. Buzzacott, who with many apologies leads us into the parlour, and there, after a few minutes' solitude, which we eagerly devote to an old hawker's print of Commerce restoring Prosperity to France and England, Anno 1803 (three imposing females measuring four feet from forehead to waist, five more from waist to knee, and three more from knee to heel), we are set face to face with tea enough for a dozen hungry men.

With difficulty we take our leave before we have seriously over-eaten ourselves, and walk off with the keeper through the driving rain. He has been well-cared for too, and is talkative. Gradually he reveals to us unasked that, in spite of Mr. Buzzacott's influence, who is of course a Radical, he himself is a reactionary Tory. There is too much schooling nowadays, he thinks. Boys can't do naught nor maids neither; soon they'll be too grand to wash their Own chemises. Three miles are traversed quickly in listening to these outpourings, and it is only when we reach our door that it occurs to us to count our bag. One cock-pheasant, a venerable bird with spurs an inch long, we left with Mr. Buzzacott, who, we hope for his own sake, will stew it for many hours. Besides that we have four brace of partridges, three woodcock, four snipe, four rabbits, a plover, and a pigeon; and we do not ask for a better day over any country than we have enjoyed over the yellow clay.

THIS is the story of the mine at Ara Tiga in the district of Kinta in the State of Perak. In the beginning Youp-bin Mahomed and Abdullahbin-Daud his nephew had decided that they would not trouble to irrigate their rice-field, but would leave the water in the dam and sell the fish. Something miscarried, we know not what; at any rate they found it necessary to hold an informal council one evening, squatted on the bamboo floor of Youp's cottage. Between them was a heap of sirih-leaves, some morsels of betel-nut, and a little pot of quick-lime; over which they discussed the situation, and spoke of pence and halfpence in the gentlest voices and the sweetest language that the tongue of man can compass; each with a quid of tobacco between his lower lip and his front teeth.

Aih, vexation!" said Abdullah. "Money there is none."

"What can we do?" murmured the elder man. "It is the decree of Allah."

A Malay's decision is a thing to be come by only after slow and laborious deliberation. Youp would have been content to review the situation so long as a mouthful of rice and salt fish was left. But young Abdullah was a man of some promptitude (for a Malay), and a month had hardly passed before, at his suggestion, the two were equipped with the necessary

1 Perak is one of the Protected Native States on the west side of the Malay Peninsula. A large proportion of the tin that finds its way into the markets of the world comes from the mines, or rather the alluvial diggings, of these States. They are worked, for the most part, by Chinese immigrants from the province of Canton.

permission to cut gutta-trees for six months, and further with two little biting Malay hatchets, a small provision of rice, and a change of clothing. The resourceful Abdullah moreover negotiated a loan of ten dollars from a Chinese miner, in consideration of which he undertook to inform his confiding friend of any promising tin-land that they might happen on in their journeyings. Foolish Youp wanted to go to the expense of Prospecting Licenses, but Abdullah maintained that this law was an unnecessary one, not worth obeying, and he carried his point.

So they set off into the jungle, those two sturdy little brown men, clad in their cotton coats and their tartan sarongs (half kilt, half petticoat), and each with his luggage bundled on his back. Day by day they lopped and hewed about them, and in the afternoons they would run up a little shelter of bamboo and palm-leaves, collect the gutta from the trees they had felled, and cook their evening rice. They strayed far away from the broad highways and the human life that borders them; and as their business led them ever further and further on, they wandered at last round the mountain foot into a valley where the jungle grew inviolate, save for the uncertain visits of the Sakai, the wild people of the mountain and forest. Timid little creatures are these, and no lovers of notoriety; but the man who discovered the Ara Tiga tin-mine must submit to have notoriety thrust upon him. His name was Blian Tara, and many people have found their names in print who could not rival him in any one of his many accomplish

ments; who could not, for example, spit a squirrel at forty yards with a poisoned dart from a blow-gun, and who would be lost and starved in the jungle that is to him the element in which he lives and has his being.

It befell in this wise. Blian Tara had a friend, a brave man and a civilised, one not afraid to venture on the exposed white roads, or even into the rush and tumult of the Chinese mining villages, with wild durian fruit to sell. This friend had tempted him to hunt for tin, with promises of wealth in beads and matches and a great white beer-bottle, like that one the tribe had found one memorable day when the surveyor had left the new trigonometrical station on the mountain top.

Accordingly when our two Malays came upon him, he, having taken the plunge from a venatorial to an industrial state of life, was standing in the bed of a rivulet, scraping down earth from the steep bank into the water to try for tin. Now for ten generations his tribe had been harried away from their river homes by the Malay invaders; and though rape and murder had not visited them for full a score of years, and had passed into their spirit-lore, still a great fear fell on the little man when he saw two of his traditional enemies on the bank above him; not a relaxing terror such as loosens your tame man's sinews, but the instinctive stimulating fear of a hunted animal, which flashed in a moment from brain to feet. Before he realised that he was frightened, he was up on the opposite bank and safe in the forest's black tangle of brushwood; where, returning with a chastened heart to his blow-gun and the hunting of long-tailed monkeys, Blian Tara was not likely, for the remainder of his days, to rouse the anger of the mountain gods by further stealing of their tin-sand.

Abdullah stared for a moment at the black water where it sucked at the fallen bank and swirled on in a yellow stream. Youp swung his bundle from behind his back under his left arm, and after a hasty search produced half a cocoa-nut shell (that unfailing companion of your junglefarer in the land of tin), and handed it to his nephew saying, "Come, let us try it." Down jumped Abdullah knee-deep into the sludge, with which he filled the shell, kneading and working it with his fingers at the surface of the running water, while he sat a-squat on a flat stone in mid-channel. The lighter mud drifted away like a tawny ribbon on the face of the water; but when the washing was completed there was left such a residuum of grayish-black grains as to make the men stare at each other in wonder, crying. "Amboi!" and "Illahi Allah!" No tin-lander but would have seen at once the importance of their discovery. Some washings there are that yield their tin in the form of powdery black grains, so light and so mixed with iron-sand that it is a chance if the two do not swim away together from the wash-box. Others, on the contrary, give big angular crystals, that have been carried but a little distance from the matrix, which would be a treasure if they were not so entangled in the sticky clay that the wash-dirt needs puddling before they can be extricated. But here nature had done her work neither in excess nor in defect, and the result promised to be a truly golden mean.

"The hope of mines," saith the Viscount St. Albans, "useth to make the planters [and gutta-hunters no less] lazy in other things." Youp and Abdullah felt that to toil further at tree-felling was out of the question. A little further up the stream grew three wild banians, or fig-trees, with spreading bushy limbs, which, later on,