breach of the law, he would come to my study, and over a jug of ale discuss plans for a lesson in the ways of night and night-prowlers. So the following afternoon saw us in the heart of the country, prepared to practise, up to a certain point, the poacher's wiles on those lands over which I myself, or a friend in the secret, held the sporting rights. Soon I became conversant with the paths usually trodden by unprincipled thieves, and from what I saw I gathered quite enough to convince me that the poacher has never yet revealed his ways to a book-reading public. Fortunate, indeed, for the average sportsman is his silence!

Old Evan's friendship for me dates back to such a day with the beagles as I have already mentioned. Immediately the fussy little hounds had "found" among the ferns at the top of Corrwg woods, and just as I was buttoning my coat for the long run I had promised myself as a welcome exercise, I felt a hand on my shoulders and, turning, saw the famous poacher retreating toward the copse, and beckening me to follow.

"Come with me, sir. We'll see the hare a precious deal more than them as goes after her. What's to be gained in watchin' her runnin' at such a bat as them ther' little beagles will never catch her in? I owes a grudge to that huntsman, too, and with all his toottootin' I'll bet he won't get that ther' hare to-day, unless p'raps my reck'nin's out. No! No law-breakin', sir; I'm too old for larks now. But we'll see some fun, and help the poor hare. The odds is fairer now, twenty to three, not twenty to one timid thing."

Wondering at what he might mean, I followed my guide about half a mile at right angles to the direction taken by the hunt, over turnips and a wheat stubble to the entrance of a narrow grass-grown lane, where only the ruts made by the wheels of great hay wagons showed a sign of traffic. Walking quickly along the hedgerow Evan stopped at one gap after another, examining the briars and soft spots in the bank. Apparently satisfied, just as we reached the end he whispered that

we would retrace our steps. Upon coming to where we had entered the lane, he again closely watched for a sign, at the same time muttering: "Yes, jus' so; I think we're about right; from the direction of the hounds it must be the same one as has this run." Then, after listening to the far-away music to our left, he motioned me to crouch in the bracken which grew along the ditch.

"Now, whatever I do, mind follow me, sir." Five minutes passed. "Here she comes. Keep low! "With a shambling, leisurely stride, down the lane. came the hunted animal, straight toward us, betraying no anxiety but for those she knew were on her track, her ears turned to catch the distant babble. Just as she passed our hiding-place out shot old Evan's arm to clutch her hind leg in a firm grasp. As quick as thought the other hand was placed over her mouth to stop her cries. Then up we jumped, and off we started along the fence toward the crest of the neighboring bank, where last we had heard the beagle's music.

As we came in sight of the furzecovered hill, the last of the hounds could be seen leaving the tangle in the opposite direction. Down we rushed along another hedgerow to the bottom of the dingle. There the hare was carefully dipped in the clear, cold stream that overflowed a cattle-trough, and afterward released among the thickest of the brakes.

Aye, it seems to me they'll come to a check up yonder. And if they hunts this scrub again I misdoubt me if they'll wind her well after that cold bath she took." We wandered back in time to see the beagles completely puzzled, and to hear the members of the hunt make sage remarks anent "riding over the hounds" and "a wretched hunting day, sir; scent lies bad!" Presently the puppies, intent upon some sort of sport, spread out in a long line, with whimpering tones, in pursuit of the farmer's sheep dog, which they chased for over a mile toward the farmyard.

Many an October night I have watched the silent lurcher at work, beating the fallow as systematically as

any setter, till presently the net flew out and the screaming hare fell entangled in its folds, oftener than not to be released for another chance of life when the old pointer should stand over her in the furrow. Or in the evening, completely hidden among the strewn leaves of late autumn, and enveloped in thick coats and mackintoshes, old Evan and I have crouched together watching the movements of a covey which, enticed by the "tse-wheet! tse-wheet!" of the charmer, had come over the hedge to within a few yards of where we lay. The use of a binocular would frequently enable us to see what they were feeding upon.

The cry of the trapped leveret-a high-pitched, long-drawn "aht! aht!" mimicked perfectly, would-sometimes long before we knew it-bring the anxious mother from the summer corn to where we lay in the clover.

Speaking generally, it is well to keep away from hedgerows when luring creatures by mimicking their cries, for blackbirds all through the year frequent the thickets which divide the fields, and of all notes of alarm theirs are most observed by fur and feather. Many a carefully laid plan have I known spoiled by a blackbird's rattling warning. A furze clump in the middle of the field is a capital spot for observation. Waterproofs and dry leaves screened us almost invariably, and, in certain places used frequently, heaps of these withered leaves were collected beforehand. Consequently, no suspicion was entertained by the field and woodland dwellers, for we were clothed in the garment worn by the woods themselves.

One night, after a varied entertainment had been afforded us by creatures that prowled around for food, a vixen. stole into the moonlight of the woodclearing, and took up her post beside a warren. Presently we heard the "yap! yap!" of the fox in the neighboring stubble, and shortly afterward saw a rabbit come quietly down the glade, till, when almost touching its crouching enemy, it was seized and killed. The vixen, taking her prey in her mouth, then went to meet her lord. At the end of the glade he appeared in view, his

eyes glittering like live coals. Together they proceeded, quite amicably, to feed upon the rabbit which, apparently, the fox had driven in from the stubble to the burrow where his mate was waiting. Just as they were finishing their meal, old Evan, mimicking the call of the vixen, uttered a wild "yah!" The effect was instantaneous. At once the jealous creature, with her fur standing ruffled up around her neck and along her spine, came with crouching stealth toward the brambles among which we lay concealed, and actually sniffed at the twigs which hid my companion's face. Something-unknown to us, as we dared not move our heads-must have now occurred, for, after listening intently for a moment, she passed behind and disappeared with the fox into the wood.

The utmost discretion and preparation are needed for the successful study of wild creatures in their haunts. And it is quite an error to suppose that everything concerning the wonderful intelligence displayed by our field and woodland dwellers has appeared in print. Even the earthworm, the commonest of creatures, irrigating our, gardens and ventilating the roots of our flowers, was never understood till Darwin wrote the story of its life. Sportsmen are more or less degenerating into_mere riding or shooting machines, and as a rule. know little of the habits of the creatures they pursue. How few there are who possess, in even a trifling degree, that insight and patience displayed in the writings of White of Selborne, Richard Jefferies, and "The Son of the Marshes!"

The rooks have left their summer haunts on the hillside for the great trees which stand in the valley, whither, in dense array, they fly at approach of night. The squirrel, now that the nuts and acorns have fallen from the hazels and oaks, is frequently seen about the fields near the woods, searching for winter stores.

At the fall of the year, birds and beasts, with the exception of those which are gregarious, forcibly drive their young from their homes. In some cases of speedy maturity the no

tice to quit is given earlier still; in others only when food in the immediate neighborhood becomes too scarce to supply sufficient for more than individual

wants.

Before the end of October-the time of the first frosts-nearly all our feathered visitors have forsaken our shores. Frosts kill the insect life of the year. Our emigrants-warblers, swallows, woodpeckers, nightjars, cuckoos, and certain other insectivorous birdswhen unable to procure their food, leave us for the south, where flies and grubs are always abundant provender. Grain and berry feeders, birds of prey, and those which subsist on almost anything and to whom a change of diet is welcome, as a rule remain in Britain, for winter with us is rarely severe, and they are always able to procure sufficient food when scattered over a suitable district. Then, too, the holly and larch and furze are snug shelter.

Our immigrants arrive about the time that northern regions are frostbound. They are either marsh or coast birds, or grain feeders, and come hither only when their former haunts have become frozen, and aquatic life and grain and fruit too safely protected by the grim frost-guardian. This is part of nature's great scheme:

the northern dwellers fly toward more open and hospitable shores, away from the direction of the biting blast. Our summer songsters, to whose light pinions a hundred miles are but a trifling distance, when they flit away in their turn toward more genial climes are probably guided to a great extent by the same desire to leave behind them the cold winds.

Intelligent caution is displayed in the direction of their flight, and, I believe, in certain deliberations which seem to precede their departure, for they choose the shortest sea-passages, and often pause to recuperate in Devonshire or Cornwall after crossing St. George's Channel on their way from Wales to the Continent. Hunger and, more especially, thirst, are their greatest enemies in migration.

"Drip! drip!" the few green boughs shake off the cold sweat of approaching death. Tread softly over the strewn graves of summer. Harvest is past. Life is falling to sleep. The sun goes early to the west, decked in red and purple splendor. At night, when the moon lies in the arms of a gray cloud, a chill mist hangs upon the shivering earth, veiling the trees and meadows in dim obscurity.-Gentleman's Magazine.

THE most interesting personage in China during the past thirty years has been and still is without doubt the lady whom we style Empress-dowager. She was never Empress, not even as imperial consort, having been but the secondary wife of Hsien-fêng, the Emperor who fled from his capital on the approach of the Anglo-French forces in 1860. But she took the title as the mother of that ill-starred monarch's heir, in which capacity she was allowed to share with the widow proper the regency during the minority of the Emperor Tung Chih (or Chê, for there is no agreement as to the transliteration of Chinese sounds). To our notions

this was a most anomalous arrangement: nothing more certain to lead to trouble could be conceived. Under such a régime harmony in the State could not have been maintained had the two women been angels, whereas only one of them could by any reasonable use of language be assigned to that order of beings, and she the childless one. The female duumvirate was not what was intended-was, in fact, an unforeseen result of the last will and testament of the Emperor Hsien-fêng, who died at his hunting-lodge at Jêho, whither he himself had been hunted by the victorious invaders; and as the consequences have been so curious and so

important, it may be well to recall the transaction in brief and very imperfect outline.

The fundamental law of the Ta-tsing dynasty is the Salic law. No woman and no eunuch can ever reign or rule. Conforming to the laws of his house, the Emperor in his will nominated a Council of Regency during the minority of his infant son, afterward known as the Emperor Tung-chih. The Council was composed of two imperial princes and the Minister Sun-chê. To his two wives, the true but childless one and the secondary one, who was mother of the Prince Imperial, he bequeathed the guardianship of the infant. The Empero placed his real confidence in the first, the legal wife; but he was fond of the other, the mother of his heir. A serious dilemma thus confronted him, which he thought to evade by placing in the hands of the Empress a private and personal testament, giving her absolute authority over her colleague, only to be exercised, however, in certain emergencies. As a matter of fact, the power was never called into exercise.

The Empress-mother was twentyseven years old, clever, ambitious, and apparently fearless. She saw with envy the whole power of the State passing into the hands of the Council of Regency, while the two widows were relegated to a quite subordinate place. Brooding over this imaginary wrong, she conceived a scheme by which the position might be reversed, and confided it to her brother-in-law, Prince Kung-the same who, for many years, presided over the Tsungli-yamên with such genial urbanity; the same who recently died and came to life again, then died for good. The ambition which the Empress-mother confided to Prince Kung was nothing less than to suppress the Council of Regency, and set up in its place the authority of the two Empresses. Inasmuch, however, as they were ignorant of affairs, and women to boot, the Prince himself was to be the real executive and de facto ruler of the empire. Prince Kung yielded to the seduction, and thus became accessory to the violation of the dynastic law of what other law, hu

man or divine, it is needless to particularize. The dilatory Chinese can be prompt enough on occasion, as has recently been seen, and Prince Kung took the very first opportunity of executing the plot hatched by his sister-in-law. The Regents were returning from the obsequies of the deceased Emperor when Prince Kung launched trumpedup charges against them of neglect of certain funeral rites, had them arrested on the road, and executed. By this summary violence the two Empresses were securely established as Regents, with Prince Kung as Chancellor of the empire.

For a few years things went smoothly. Prince Kung was ably assisted in the government by Wên-si'ang, Hanki, and other patriotic statesmen, who seem to have left no worthy successors. The two Regents seldom met, for the palace in Peking is a town rather than a building, or, rather, it is a series of palaces separated by wide areas. From the relative position of the buildings in which they had their respective apartments, the ladies were known as the Eastern and Western Empresses, the former being the title commonly applied to the one whom we have termed the true Empress.

The Court on its return from voluntary exile was naturally on its best behavior, having to feel its way with the foreign Powers who had established their representatives in the capital. The Powers on their part were indulgent, moved thereto by the circumstances of the Court, a child on the throne under the guardianship of two widows. Moreover, a great calamity hung over the Chinese empire in the form of a devastating rebellion, which was a danger to foreign interests only second to that to the Chinese themselves. Hence, by common consent, the Government and the Court were treated with anxious deference by the representatives of the Western nations, who could seek no audience of the infant, and, not knowing what to do about the two women, did nothing. So the Palace and the Forbidden City were kept sealed against intrusion, and the domestic drama was allowed free

play within the precincts. The young Emperor was growing toward maturity, so, in an even more important sense, was his imperial mother, the rising and the ruling spirit in the whole ménage. Her consort, the "Eastern" Empress, was full of gentleness, meditation, and widowhood; in private life her example would have ensured the highest commendation, with a chance of posthumous honors. She was, therefore, unequally yoked with her sterner sister, and the pair could never have really worked together to any practical end. The eclipse of the weaker luminary was only a question of time.

What transpires in an oriental palace is filtered through such miasmatic media that every separate detail is open to something more than ordinary suspicion, and first impressions may form a distorted picture. But in the long run, after cancelling out contradictions and threshing the residue, approximations to the truth may be arrived at, more or less definite, according to the force of the personalities concerned. Where the character is feeble its spectrum fails to penetrate the thick vapors that surround it, and is liable to be refracted into the semblance of something unlike itself. This was the case with Prince Ch'un, the father of the present Emperor, who, so long as he remained in seclusion, was believed to be a violent reactionary, the most vehement opponent of foreigners and their ideas, head of the " war party," and so forth. But when the fall of his elder brother, Kung, in 1884, necessitated the emergence of Prince Ch'un from retirement, and his assumption of important public offices, the mask was found to have covered features of the mildest type. The fireeater roared like a sucking-dove. He was liberal and well-disposed to foreigners, demeaning himself toward them absolutely like a gentleman, and winning golden opinions wherever he appeared.

There was never such ambiguity about the Empress-regent. No veil was thick enough to hide her character. Her career has been consistent, and she remains what she has often been called,

the "only man in the empire." Possessed by three passions, of which the two having pelf and power for their object have survived the more transient one, and still gather strength with advancing years, the portrait of her Majesty that is most intelligible to the European comprehension is that which represents her as a counterpart of Catherine II. What she might have been with Catherine's Christian education, and unhandicapped by enforced seclusion, it would be idle to guess. It may, indeed, seem strange that a woman so endowed should have been content to pass her public life behind the screen; but there have been many masterful women before her to whom the purda offered but a flimsy obstacle to the exercise of their power.

Of the scandals of the Palace it would serve no useful purpose to speak in detail; while on the other hand it is impossible to ignore them altogether, since they have been a factor in Palace politics, and the source of some of the bitterest family quarrels. The eunuch, at all events, is a feature of Palace life which may be accepted as historical a convenient medium both for catering for his owner's whims and for making free with his secrets, and her Majesty has been both well and illserved by those obsequious ministrants. An intense curiosity has always been one of her marked characteristics, a feeling which she has taken every means convenient to her station to gratify. There was once a story of her salad days when her practised eye fell upon a young gallant attached to one of the European legations, to whom occult intelligence was conveyed through appropriate channels. Adonis would not have been wholly averse from learning something of that mysterious interior from which diplomatists were severely excluded, but it was supposed he yielded to the advice of his comrades, who represented that getting in might be easier than getting safely out of such a galère.

The Empress-regent ruled China for twenty-eight years, from 1861 to 1889, a period embracing two minorities of equal duration. In comparison with