the guard of a musket. I saw more than once a male, and on one occasion, a female, actually, though impaled on a soldier's bayonet, cutting away with fiend-like fury at the soldier who had thus transfixed her. The children also were armed with short knives, doing their work of butchery, creeping down, and stabbing the wounded and the unwary. The men, who were of splendid make, and considerable muscle, were generally speaking taller than Europeans. Their eyes rolling with rage, their teeth displayed in grinning anger, gave them the appearance of demons. Wounded, and even on the very point of dying, they still kept on hacking at us. There were also a few spearmen. The lieutenant of our grenadiers was singled out by one of these men. At that instant he fortunately stumbled, and, as he did so, the lance passed over his head, and buried itself three inches in the trunk of a tree. The Waabee was instantly cut down by the lieutenant's covering serjeant. His strength must have been prodigious to drive the spear thus deep into the wood. During the action more than one woman was seen flying about, cutting and stabbing, while her new-born infant was strapped over her shoulders. To spare them was impossible. We had to fight to a disadvantage, since regular troops are seldom called thus to dispute hand to hand. But at length we triumphed. The survivors fled; but we were too tired to pursue them, though they retreated in the greatest disorder; nor were we quite sure that we might not fall into some ambush. The bugles announced to us a retrogade movement. We retired half a mile, and despatching an orderly to bring up our provisions and baggage, we quietly bestowed ourselves to rest, only leaving a few sentries in case of the foe re-mustering. This, however, did not happen.

About noon, the hospital-carts having come up, the surgeons, with a detachment of men, went to the late scene of action, to bury the dead, and afford succour to the wounded. In several cases the enemy refused all assistance, and even once or twice attempted to attack the kind-hearted soldiers, who would have helped and cured them. At length the party came to a fine-looking Arab, apparently insensible, but not dead. A bayonet had pierced his chest. The sergeant commanding the detachment, one of the best soldiers we had, seeing him thus dying, as he thought, from want of care, went up to him, and pulling out the little flask of spirits he carried, raised him, and applied it to his lips. The treacherous Arab suddenly drew out from beneath him a sword which he had concealed, and as the English soldier strove to lift him up, with one stroke he severed his head from his body.

To dwell further on this scene I am unwilling. Retaliation is wrong; but alas! it is a feeling inherent in our nature. The fury of the party at seeing their loved brother-soldier thus murdered, was beyond bounds. I have heard (I fear with truth,) that no wounded men were suffered again to betray us. All that were living of the enemy were instantly dispatched.

It was for this campaign the 65th regiment obtained the honourable distinction of bearing a royal tiger on their accoutrements and banners.

THE DEAR-SLAYER.

BY ALBANY POYNTZ.

He is gone to his long account,—and a plaguy long account it must be,-that handsome cousin of mine, that terrible fellow, Major Manvers, whose memory I have taken upon myself to redeem from oblivion.

By common accord of the writing and reading world, the honourable title of Major has long been tinged with that worst of odium, ridicule. Mrs. John Prevost' has immortalized

'The odious Major Rock,

Who drops in at six o'clock;'

and the author of 'Pelham' was once on the eve of having to fight through the two United Service Clubs, on account of certain jests levelled at this only too highly-respectable grade of the military community. Even the apostrophe of the great Wellington to the gallant Napier,Well done, my Majors!" did not suffice to render classical his much-degraded grade.

Be it understood, however, that my Major differed widely from the majority of Majors. He was no more like Major Sturgeon or Major O'Flaherty, than Canis Major is like Ursa Major. It is not, however, in his Major-ical capacity that I am about to consider him. I am about to treat of my Major, in the first instance, as still a minor.

Willoughby Manvers appears to have been born for the vocation of Dear-slaying. Even in his days of coral and bells, his future leaning toward the belles must have been perceptible; or his godfather and godmother would scarcely have bestowed upon him at what the newspapers call the baptismal-font, the euphonious and most three-volumelike name of Willoughby.'

It is true his mother made vague allusions to a rich cousin in Yorkshire, who, though unapparent among the sponsors, had requested that the infant might be named after himself. But, strange to relate, the most careful investigation of the maps of the three ridings imparted no insight into the localities of Willoughby Park; nor, among the rolls of that stout and honourable county, was the record of a Willoughby family whatever, saving one small esquire, the sire of eleven junior esquires; a John Willoughby, of no park at all, who could not by any possible process of magnification, be redeemed from the infinitesimals or placed in the category of rich cousins. The bright blue eyes and dimpled chin of the smiling infant must, consequently, be accepted as Mrs. Manvers' sole apology for heroicizing her third son by the touching name of Willoughby.'

Preparatory schools have nearly the same faculty for mutilating names as a provincial footman. Our ineffable Willoughby was abbreviated in his nankeens into simple Will,' like the vulgarest William of them all. The first time the chariot of Mrs. Manvers rolled into the courtyard of Prospect House Academy, and she overheard a shout in the playground of 'Hallo, Will! here's your mother!' she was forced to have recourse to her salts-bottle. Of what avail to be choice in the specification of one's offspring,' thought the dainty lady, 'if such curtailments be sanctioned by academic authority!'

Names, however, are regulated by a sliding system,-elongated or shortened, even as the glasses of the great Herschel, or still greater Omnibus, when the latter extend their focus from the proximate petticoat of Cerito to the remote box of a beauty in the two-pair' at the opera. At Eton, Willoughby was himself again, i.e. again 'Willoughby.' His dame was, fortunately, of a romantic turn; and, next to lordlings and little honourables, adored a lad in three syllables. He was, accordingly, flogged as Manvers, but coaxed and kept up to supper by the gentle name of Willoughby. Need it be added that, while other lads were duncing their way through Homer, the favoured youth stuck fast in his Ovid; and that before he was out of his second apprenticeship to fate, Ang. before he had attained the mature age of fourteen, and the height of a Shetland pony, he had perpetrated a sonnet to ANNA; whom other boys, more in favour with Anna's tender parent the pastry-cook, familiarized by the unpoetical name of Nancy.'

It was no fault of Willoughby's! Willoughby had an eye of tender blue,' as Camoens and Lord Strangford have it as well as 'locks of Daphne's hue,' as they also have it; and what they mean by having it I never could exactly determine, but conclude that Manvers' fair curls must be pretty near the mark. His hands, moreover, were as fair as his curls, and his brow fairer; everything about him, indeed, was fair but his verses, which Anna and the under-master pronounced to be only pretty fair.' The rest was both fair and pretty.

Unluckily for Willoughby, Parnassus and the Pierian spring so far outweighed with him the attraction of the Christopher and its claret, that he suffered himself to fall into the anti-Etonian error of acquiring an admirable hand-writing. Even at Prospect House he had been base enough, (probably under the influence of his prenomen of Will,') to obtain the silver pen bestowed by the writing-master, as the annual prize of penmanship; and now his sonneteering had betrayed him into the still further disgrace of writing a legible hand. In those days,

penny postage was not, and franking was; and, by a process of logic not admitted in the schools, though intelligible enough at Eton, it was clear that Willoughby Manvers was not intended for a member of parliament. But there are many steps and gradations between writing oneself down M.P. and the ignominious designation to which the young calligrapher was thenceforward devoted by his matter-of-fact parent. Manvers, senior, who had been christened by the plain and deteriorating name of Thomas, on finding his third hope so admirable a penman, actually destined him, in spite of his Willoughbyship, for a mercantile desk!-Oh! hapless child of the Muses! - a merchant's desk! Had Nature Anna-thematized thee with so poetical a temperament only to be thus miserably degraded in the scale of Annamated being ?

The boy rebelled,—that is, the man of which the boy saw himself about to become the father, rebelled. On leaving Eton, and finding the preliminaries of a treaty in progress for transferring himself and his penmanship to the long-established firm of Messrs. Macpherson, Mumpson, and Spragg, of Great St. Helens, he grew desperate; and the sequel of his success in running-hand was, running away. Instead of answering to the name of either Will' or Willoughby,' the return was 'non est inventus.' But Willoughby had no will to return. It appeared probable that the inspired youth had betaken himself to

the wolds of Yorkshire in search of the hall, park, or lodge, and cousinly-squire, its proprietor, rejoicing in the name to which his own nature was respondent. His pilgrimage was, perhaps, that of Willoughby in search of a godfather.'

Even his conscience-struck mamma appeared to participate in the notion; for, synonymous with the mysterious advertisements which appeared in The Times' and 'Courier,' requiring all parochial and municipal authorities to have their eye upon a genteel youth, with blue eyes and light hair, whose linen was marked W. M., 'the Leeds, York, and Hull Intelligencers were made to implore the young man who had disappeared from the neighbourhood of Hanover Square, to return to his distracted parents, by whom matters would be arranged entirely to his satisfaction.' There was a great deal of the mother in such an intimation.

It is a wise man who knows his own child (in initials); and in the 'young man,' as depicted by the Leeds Intelligencer, Thomas M. knew not his rebellious boy. It mattered not,-for no W. M. presented himself. Where there is a Will, there is a way; but, where there is a Willoughby, there is no way to grow wealthy and wise in the way of clerkhood. To W. M. the neighbourhood of Hanover Square,' seemed only too excruciatingly connected with the neighbourhood of Great St. Helens; and he accordingly turned a blind eye to the appeals of the newspapers.

Runaway school-boys, as novel-wise represented, more especially when genteel youths with blue eyes and fair hair, are sure to fall in, on the Queen's highway, with a company of strolling-players; though, thanks to the great unpaid and great unpaying--the sage magistracy, and most undramatic public of Great Britain,-strolling-players are nearly as rare in the land as crocodiles or mandrakes. W. M. might have travelled from Dan to Beersheba, or from Truro to John o' Groat's House, without risk of encountering anything of a theatrical nature more erratic than a London Star flying per railroad to fulfil his engagements at Liverpool or New York; or an ex-cabinet minister on his road to speechify his constituents as a safety-valve for the overpressure of his spleen. Nay, though the green woods were just then particularly green, seeing that it was

'The leafy month of June,

When birds and babbling brooks are most in tune,'

he had not the good fortune to chance upon so much as a gipsy's camp, to sup with some 'kerchiefed beauty, of raven hair and walnut-ju ce complexion, on broiled hedgehog, under the green-wood tree, and with the terror of the constable before his eyes. On the high-road he met with nothing but broad-wheeled waggons, in the woods and fields but plough-boys, soil-harrowing, not soul-harrowing companionship for a hero. Meanwhile, had the conscience-stricken Mrs. Manvers suspected to what city of refuge her son had betaken himself, her maternal inquietudes would have subsided at once. Following the tender instincts of his heart, young Willoughby had remembered him of

'Woman, in our hours of ease,

Uncertain, coy, and hard to please; '

and, on finding that grief and danger were wringing his brow,' in

the form of impending clerkhood, fled to the bosom of a ministeringangel, who had often smoothed it with brush and comb in those happier days of infancy when no sonnet had emanated, Minerva-like, therefrom, to witch the world with its noble poesy, Having secured an outside place on the Biggleswade coach, he invited himself to spend a few weeks in Bedfordshire with his old nurse.

The Mrs. Digges in question, however, though prosaic enough in herself, was not altogether undeserving the recollection of a genteel rhymester in his seventeenth year, with an eye of tender blue, and locks of Daphne's hue; inasmuch as the son, upon whose comfortable farm her old age had pensioned itself, was the widowed father of a Miranda, nay, of two Mirandas, endowing his turnip-fields and haystacks with all the enchantments of Prospero's island.

W. M., the favourite nursling of the venerable Mrs. Digges, had often been invited to run down' in his Midsummer holidays, and take a peep at the farm which despatched such fat geese at Michaelmas, and such white Turkeys at Christmas, to the respected lady and gentleman in the vicinity of Hanover Square. Unaware, however, that there was anything to run down' there but himself, he had forborne; and his present visit was, accordingly, accepted as the performance of former promises, without exciting the slightest suspicion on the part of his hosts. The old lady still called him Willy,-her darling Willy;' the young ladies, Master Manvers;' and though the farmer sometimes thought it odd that the young gentleman and his Pa and Ma held so little intercommunication by letter, he was too busy with his hay to trouble himself much about the matter.

And now I beseech my fair readers to consider what worlds of poetry such a man as Keats, or such a woman as L. E. L., would have conjured out of a situation like that of my hero; or what tomes of prose certain living novelists would belabour it withal. Blackbirds, thrushes, and hawthorn-bushes!—what a situation! Cherubino among the hayfields of the county of Beds; Don Juan, junior, ruralizing in June, with two fair spirits for his ministers, in the form of Jane and Mary Digges! Had not their father most paternally presumed to call them Jenny and Polly, as many sonnets had been indited in their honour as were dedicated by Petrarch to his Laura; but, as it was, the number did not much exceed the volumes poured forth by Lady Emmeline Wortley in honour of the hero of Waterloo.

On the other hand, what tomes of sonnets whispered, and stanzas looked, signalized the sunsets and sunrisings, the noons and twilights of Long-croft farm! A heroine at a time suffices a rational man,two were scarcely enough for a rhyming boy. The facilities created by this double passion were inestimable. For Jane was a dark beauty, and Mary as blue and flaxen as Titian himself could desire, and all the epithets which the affluence of the English language supplies were strictly and honourably divisible between the sisters. Jenny was a laughing beauty,-Polly inclined to the sentimental; and it was easy to love them both, in their several styles, on the alternate days of the week, dividing the Sundays between the two. From the blessed Monday morning, when he rushed forth at daybreak into the hayfield to romp with the dark-haired Jane, to the exquisite Saturday night, when he wandered home through the twilight and the green lanes with Mary, her straw bonnet entwined with dog-roses and honey-suckles, and her waist entwined with his arm, the life of the youthful poet was an eclogue!