6 sort of joke, and that it was 'awfully nice' to be your own kitchen-maid. I did not tell her how often we were hard up for a meal, and that my microscope, my watch, all the little jewellery I had, and some of the surgical instruments I was least likely to want, were then at the pawnbroker's. That horrible pawnshop! It is useless to attempt to describe again what has been so often described before, but the misery of those visits to my 'uncle's' can never be told in words. I must do the pawnbroker's assistants the justice to say that they were always most civil and good-natured; I never had a rude word from any of them. I remember when I went to redeem my watch and some rings, when better days had dawned on us, I could not help remarking: "Thank God, this sort of work is done with; I hope I shall never see the inside of this box again! Well, sir,' said the assistant, I hope for your own sake you never will. It's hard lines for a gentleman, sir, I expect, and we have a many of them here, and ladies too. I've known ladies drive up in their carriages to the front door, and then go into the back-shop to pawn their jewels.' Occasionally, odd bits of another sort of life thrust themselves into this state of existence; for instance, an invitation to a conversazione at South Kensington once reached me, having been addressed by somebody or other (I never knew by whom) to my father's house. I had all my 'dress things,' still, and so I went. As I could not afford a cab from where I lived, I took my clothes in a bag and dressed at my father's, and then went to the conversazione, where I admired the wonderful strength of Lord Brougham, who presided, and who was, in fact, the whole evening shaking hands with everybody as they were announced, and talking incessantly. I met several people that I knew, who chatted with me, and wondered what had become of me lately! I remember feeling as if I was a sort of impostor, and had no right to be there, and thinking that the waiters and attendants would not have been so respectful if they had known that I had dined off a red herring the day before. I stopped for a year at this wretched hole, living in misery the whole time, when just as I was about giving up altogether, I got some money left me, and recommenced in another locality. A strange ill-luck seemed to follow me, and although my income was a little larger, yet so were my expenses, and for three years it was only by dint of the severest economy that I could keep my head above water. Then, too, a tailor to whom I owed what I thought an insignificant balance, sued me for it, and as I could not pay, expenses ran up, and I was in danger of arrest. Ultimately, I arranged to pay it off by instalments, and these crippled me terribly. Having no money to make a show with, the British public, with its usual discrimination and accurate judgment, decided that I could not be a good doctor, and none but the working-classes and small tradespeople employed me. Thus with a pretty extensive practice I had a very small income. On one occasion, having only threepence in the house, and having exhausted our credit, I had to pay this threepence away to take an omnibus to a neighbourhood where I ran no risk of being known, in order to pawn some instruments, with the proceeds of which I bought food for our dinner. For three weary years this went on with little or no improvement. People said: Wait, and your practice will certainly improve.' But I did wait, and it didn't improve, and I was getting very heart-sick and weary, when one day an appointment abroad, with a fixed salary, most unexpectedly offered itself, which seemed a fortune to me. I need hardly say how eagerly I accepted it; and from that day to this I have never known what it is to suffer want. Abroad, everything seemed to prosper with me; and although I have been home several times since, yet I always feel chilled and depressed by the knowledge that I might again have to suffer the privations I endured in my earlier years of practice, and know what it was to want a meal, and to be obliged to wear boots that let in water. Those years of misery have made a permanent impression both on my wife and myself, which will never be effaced. We have known what it was to want food and clothing, and we have been more charitable to the poor ever since. But we have had our dispositions soured, and our lives embittered, and we can sympathise with those who, seeing the awful contrasts between the enormous wealth of some and the frightful poverty of others, in 'happy' England, think that all is not quite for the best in this best of all possible worlds. OUR FEATHER FARM. IN FOUR CHAPTERS.-CHAPTER II. As the Bolivar drew near to Buenos Ayres, we found that a mighty visitor had been beforehand with us, and that his grim presence had frozen the springs of commerce and of social intercourse, as an actual frost turns limpid water into stone-hard ice. From pilot-boats and fisher-craft, we had gathered some inkling of the fact that yellow-fever was rife at the port for which we were bound. But Buenos Ayres, a comparatively healthy town, as its name implies, has not merited the ill repute of other cities nearer to the equator, and we were not prepared for the scene of desolation which the plague-stricken place presented, with black flags flying over two-thirds of its public buildings; the church bells tolling with hollow, doleful clangour from the innumerable baptisteries; and gloomy funeral processions, with flaring tapers and loud wailing chant, perpetually traversing the grassgrown streets, whence trade and the healthy bustle of stirring life seemed to be banished. The drone of the nasal litanies so continually sounding beneath my windows, and the sight of the tonsured friars, black, white, and brown, of the flickering candles in the hands of the squalid hags who are hired to represent mourners at a funeral in New Spain, and of the open bier itself, heaped with flowers, but carried hastily and indecorously as the negro bearers stumbled on over the stones, grew so unendurable that I longed to breathe some freer air. M. Pinson, too, had been one of the earliest victims to the plague, for the yellow-fever, unlike its eastern sister cholera, mows down poor and rich with ruthless impartiality, and this outbreak of the disease had been especially destructive in the wealthiest quarters of the town. I had no reason for remaining in the city, and it was plain that my best chance of obtaining employment would be found elsewhere than in the midst of its gloom and stagnation. This is St James-of-the-Horses,' said one of my fellow-travellers, as the yellow, melon-shaped, slow-moving diligence rumbled into the dusty and straggling street of what would in England have been considered as a slovenly village; and this' as the mules were pulled up in front of a barnlike building with glaring white walls, sparingly relieved by the green shutters of its windows-is-Don Miguel Ramon y Cerrado's station, ten the Hotel de la Posta, the best, I can tell you, Sir Englishman, in all the city of St Jago de los Caballos.' St Jago, uninviting in itself, was, however, the chief town of an agricultural and pastoral district teeming with natural wealth, and I had been advised to make it my headquarters while I sought an opportunity for work. I soon discovered that, even in the New World, it is one thing to desire profitable employment, and another to get it. I explored every nook of the adjacent country, but disappointment attended all my efforts. man of perhaps forty, decorously dressed in black broadcloth, in defiance of the heat of the weather, who was enjoying a mint julep, one hot Sunday afternoon, at the bar of the Hotel de la Posta: 'wall, sir, if you do hanker after employment, you can't do better than happen up to our estancia miles away, say to-morrow. This is Sabbath, and we are off work, of course; but if you look in to-morrow, I dare wager you will be able to come to terms with our boss. I suppose you are not too nice' [pronounced 'nash,' as in Staffordshire] to draw pay as a saladero? I'm one myself.' 'A saladero!' I repeated with some hesitation, for the word was new to me, and the American's pronunciation of Spanish being eminently AngloSaxon, he had laid such stress upon the 'salad' as to suggest market-gardening. 'It's just butchering, the trade,' said a quiet, One great advantage I had over the majority of decent-looking young man with light hair and a northern emigrants, and one notable drawback. I Glasgow accent, who stood beside his taller comcould speak Spanish well and easily, and so far I rade; 'and I follow it as well as Mr Hicks here, was fortunate, for I found civility almost every- though not bred to that sort of occupation. It where, and in some instances friendliness, among is disagreeable till you are used to it; but it is strangers. But then I had no special skill in any well paid when the demand for hides and tallow art and mystery other than that of keeping bank is sufficient. These '-pointing to three or four wild books, which was not in request. Often did pro- swarthy fellows in the holiday finery of coloured prietors of estates, hearing of me as an English-velvet suits, silver bell buttons, ribbons, and yellow man who could speak Spanish, ride leagues out of their way to ask whether I were a smith, or a joiner, or a maritime engineer, since, had such been the case, some forge or workshop lacked a superintendent, or a small steam-boat on the gigantic river lay idle for want of European management. If I had been fit to shoe a horse or to bleed and cure him, to paint a house or mend a lock, to construct a timber-raft or to fatten capons, my services would have been gladly retained; but, as it was, nobody wanted me. Of farming I knew something, practically and theoretically, and I might have been useful to sundry of the colonists near St Jago, if they would have consented to employ me, but they shrugged up their shoulders at my proposals. Wretchedly bad farmers, as such, they were, getting very much less than a fair yield out of their fertile lands. But they seemed perfectly satisfied, inasmuch as the rich soil, clumsily scratched by the barbaric plough, or lightly scarified by the hoes of a handful of dusky labourers, gave plenteous crops of maize, and roots, and tobacco; while, in spite of neglect, the sheep, the cattle, and the horses multiplied and throve. Care and cost would have probably doubled the annual profits, but the true Creole is too indolent to face present outlay and exertion for the sake of ultimate gains, and I found that, except in years of drought, locusts, or civil war, the settlers were far from being ill-off, despite their sorry husbandry. leather boots, who now came jingling in to bawl for glasses of aguardiente- these are mates of ours.' I now remembered that on most of the great estates in the Rio Plata district there was maintained a staff of butchers, whose sole business it was to supply the European markets with raw leather and unrefined fat. The ordinary Spanish term for butchers, carniceros, only applies to the indispens able purveyors of beef and mutton; whereas the wholesale bull-slayer of the salada allows the meat to be the perquisite of fowls of the air and wild beasts, plying knife and pole-axe in the sole interests of tanner and chandler. This was certainly a not very attractive opening in life for an educated man, but beggars, the proverb tells us, must not be choosers. I determined that I would at least pay a visit to Don Miguel's station, and ascertain whether any employment for which I was fit could be obtained. As for winning a livelihood by the actual slaying and flaying of Pampas cattle, I very much doubted whether, even at a pinch, I could pursue such a calling; but it might be that some other vacancy might present itself the rather that Don Miguel was reported to be a very wealthy man, growing cotton and coffee, tobacco and corn, as well as other South American productions, but deriving, in patriarchal fashion, the greater part of his income from his flocks and herds. I was soon on excellent terms with my new acquaintances, of whom M'Lachlanformerly a clerk and messenger in a writer's office Meanwhile, my money, or what was left of it, in Glasgow, and who had drifted to St Jago along after paying for my outfit and passage-money, was the stream of adverse fortune-was a well-behaved making itself wings, for although the bare neces- and well-principled young fellow; while the Spansaries of life are cheap in South America, loco- iards were merry, rattling semi-savages, with no motion is expensive, and hotels are dear as well apparent fault but a mastiff-like propensity to as comfortless. I presently found that I could no snarl and draw knives on any slight difference of longer afford to be a mere looker-on, but must opinion. As for Hicks, that bony Marylander enter, and that heartily too, into the great world-painted his own verbal portrait in a few quaint wide game of bread-winning. But then, where was there a vacancy? 'Wall, stranger,' said a tall gaunt man, with high cheek-bones, bushy hair, and a prominent nose, a touches: Guess this child hes been put through as many processes as a corn-fed hog hes, down to Chicago, where they push him in through one door, alive and squealin', and take him out in a barrel at the other, packed and salted. I've been soldier girl, the daughter of the then consul at Puerto and sailor, drove a stage and drove niggers, had a Bello, but who was dowerless, when he might pulpit of my own, been drummer for Philadelphia have chosen a wife among the wealthiest heiresses dry goods, and edited the Minnesota Excelsior. of the Argentine States. His young wife had died, Jest now, I'm deputy-foreman the greaser that however, and he was a widower with one child, a is foreman being gone with hides to the coast-boy, now of some five years old, and of whom his at Don Miguel's salada; and between ourselves father was dotingly fond. there's worse trades, and worse paid. Happen up, mister, to-morrow.' I did 'happen' up on the following day; and at the estancia was lucky enough to encounter Don Miguel himself, who only occasionally inspected the details of the daily labour of his subordinates. He was a stoutly built man, with keen eyes, and a somewhat stern expression about his clear-cut lips, and was simply dressed in a loosely-made suit of white Brazilian cotton cloth, with a broadleaved sombrero of the delicate Panama straw, and coloured morocco slippers in lieu of boots. He carried a weighty whip in one of his bejewelled hands, and his seat on the handsome horse that he bestrode was firm, if not graceful. My introducer, Mr Hicks, had told me some particulars of the early life of Don Ramon y Cerrado. That personage was of a different caste to that of the careless Creole landowners around him. He was a native of Old Spain, and in some freak of juvenile rebellion had run off, and shipped as a cabin-boy on board a ship bound for Peru. Then, after one or two coasting-voyages, he had run away afresh, this time from a tyrannical | captain, and had found himself ashore at Buenos Ayres without a dollar or a pair of shoes. A long hiatus in his history succeeded; but he presently turned up at St Jago, no longer a beggar, but the chief owner of one of those long strings of laden mules that transport merchandise, at heavy cost, across the Cordilleras and the plains, from Chili to the Atlantic seaboard. Then he purchased, from the spendthrift heir, the rich but apparently ruined inheritance of a colonist lately murdered by the Indians—a fair and fertile tract of country, very extensive as to acreage, but just then harried, burnt up, and desolate, from a savage inroad of the border tribes. 'I've heerd tell,' said my American informant, that a more complete scatterment couldn't hev been than all the way from Blue Creek to near St Jago-houses, mills, corrals, and gardens, all smoke, and blood, and ashes-the very grass fired for leagues and leagues, and every hoof of cattle or horse-flesh driven off at the point of the spear. The government sent no troops till the mischief was nigh done, and then the soldiers didn't dare to march two days out into the llanos. Don Mig. was thought crazed to buy the land at all.' How all things had prospered with him-how the estate, recovering from the calamity, had yielded fivefold, under his intelligent proprietorship, more than before-and how, organising a volunteer force, and bringing all manner of influences to bear upon the feeble executive of the republic, so as to obtain a guard of regular soldiers, he had effectually put a check to Indian outrages in that province, Mr Hicks briefly told. Also how Don Miguel, who was the son of a poor Castilian gentleman (I always imagined him to have set forth in quest of fortune from much such a home as that of Don Quixote, where there was weekly roast-mutton and as many hares as the greyhounds could pull down), had married a very pretty and accomplished English The rich colonial landowner lifted his broad straw-hat, with ceremonious politeness, in answer to my salutation, as the Marylander mentioned my name and errand. 'I am afraid, Mr Warburton,' he said, using the English language, which he spoke slowly and painfully, 'that I have nothing to offer you that you would like. If you please, you can go over the station with me, and we will see if anything suggests itself. It is too far for a walk,' he added, with a half-smile, such as seldom lit up his earnest, melancholy face; nor do we much care to walk here. Boys-Pedro, Sancho, Juan-a horse for the English señor!' Juan, a lathy, dark-visaged lad, whose lank hair denoted that the Spanish blood in his veins was mingled with that of the Indian, swung himself into the saddle of the horse that stood nearest to him, at the same instant, by a dexterous twitch of his practised hand, jerking down the bridle from the post on which it was secured. One of the other young men withdrew a slanting bar giving access to the stockaded inclosure; and Juan spurred into the corral, stooping carelessly over to detach the ever-ready lasso from his saddle-bow, and then, uncoiling the rope, he dashed among the crowd of neighing, bare-backed steeds that occupied the centre of the inclosed space. Then ensued a scene that would have gladdened the eye of the painter of the Horse-fair.' The half-broken mustangs, many of which had once been wild, and none of which had been subjected to the systematic education which we in Europe deem needful, plunged, and flung, and reared furiously, while some broke away and galloped madly round the corral. Through the midst of this mob of equine rebels Juan rode forth at a canter, dragging after him a fine young chestnut horse, round the muscular neck of which the noose had been thrown, and which came along snorting indignantly, while the foam-flakes hung thickly about its quivering mouth and heaving flanks. Pedro was ready with the bridle, and Sancho with the saddle, while Juan jumped off and offered me the loan of his spurs. 'Can you ride, by the way?' asked Don Miguel abruptly. Now, most country-bred Britons can sit a horse more or less, and I, who had, as a boy, had many a scamper on my pony after the harriers, should have been rather nettled at such a question as this, a few weeks earlier. But now, with this ring of grinning Guachos for spectators, and immediately after the exhibition of horsemanship with which that young Centaur, Juan, had favoured us, I am not ashamed to own that I felt a certain hesitation in replying in the affirmative, as I buckled on the proffered spurs. The chestnut was hot and restless, and not easily mounted, and I saw the numerous half-wild riders gather eagerly round, inquisitive to see how the foreigner acquitted himself. Once up, however, I evidently did better than they had anticipated, for after a brace of buck-leaps and a little sawing the air with his fore-feet, the young horse obeyed the rein, and the Guachos left off laughing, and gave me a cheer of good-natured applause. Don Miguel and I rode on together. You have gained one point in the game,' said my grave host, as we passed the mule-corral and the ox-corral, and emerged upon the immeasurable Pampas, where countless droves of cattle and flocks of sheep flecked the green surface of the ocean of grass: you have pleased the Guachos. They are a sort of children, our wild lads of the desert, and take very sudden likes and dislikes, just as children do. They do not expect a foreigner to emulate their own feats, of which you will be better able to judge if you stay some time with us, but they respect him if he can perform tolerably. Now, what can I do with you, for no one here eats the bread of idleness? Yonder I am building a sugarmill, and there are canes enough in the swampy ground beside the creek; but the mill is not ready, and, besides, you never, probably, saw a juice-kettle or a vacuum-pan in your life, señor.' I acknowledged that this was the case. 'Well,' pursued Don Miguel, I have tobacco, and rice, and maize, under cultivation; but the overlookers who keep my dark-skinned peons to their work are satisfied with their rations and ten douros monthly. The salada gives more profit to those who are employed in it, but I am afraid the details would not be to your taste. Hidepacking, perhaps Ah! here is little Charles!' At this moment we came in sight of the whitewalled garden of Don Miguel's house, which latter was a handsome structure, built, at great cost, of hewn stone, and surrounded by a perfectly bewildering profusion of luxuriant shrubs and flowers. The huts in which the many farm-servants dwelt were scattered around in picturesque irregularity, but the grounds themselves were the perfection of neatness; and at the gate stood the child, a pretty boy with golden curls and a bright smile. He was led by his nurse, a plump, good-humoured mulattogirl; while a gaunt, hard-featured lady, who might have been own sister to Mr Hicks, brought up the rear. She had coloured spectacles, and carried an open book, and I rightly guessed her to be the American governess. Don Miguel's stern face grew almost handsome as he looked fondly down at the pretty child as he played with the red worsted tassels of the horse's bridle, prattling the while in the oddest jumble of Spanish and broken English that I had ever heard. It was evident that the father's whole heart and hopes were bound up in this boy, the one being on earth that he had to love. I fancied that little Charles-they called him so, instead of the more familiar Carlos-bore a great resemblance to his dead mother, and that it was partly the remembrance of her whom he had loved and lost that caused my host's deep voice to become so gentle, and his muscular hand so soft and caressing in its touch, as he laid it on the golden curls of that innocent head. I was pointed out to the boy as a fellow-countryman-a 'real' Inglese from beyond seas and the little fellow at first peered shyly up at me, and then grew confident enough to ask questions with a child's natural impulse of inquisitiveness. Children always did find themselves at home with me, somehow, and Don Miguel's manner grew perceptibly more genial as he noticed how reluctant the youthful heir of all his possessions was to part from his new English friend. Quite curtly and bluffly, and not at all in the usual flowery Spanish style of discourse, the rich planter, as we turned our horses' heads towards the cultivated part of the estate, made the following proposition. If I chose to stop, not as a hired servant, but as a guest, I was very welcome to take up my quarters in his house, to dine at his table, to ride his horses, and to shoot, if I cared for sport, among his rice-fields. If I would check the accounts of his book-keepers from time to time, and give Charles some lessons in French and English, I should more than repay his hospitality, and there need be no awkward feeling of obligation on my side. In the meantime Don Miguel would be on the look-out for some occupation for me that would give me at least a chance of realising that fortune in quest of which most immigrants, as he said with a smile, crossed the ocean. 'To earn a bare subsistence,' he added, more gently, is easy in a land of plenty such as this; but to lay by for the morrow, and especially to grow rich, is more difficult. I will try, however, to help you up the first rounds of the ladder which I myself toiled hard to climb; and I assure you that in teaching my little boy you will do me a genuine service, if it be only by giving him a more correct accent than he is likely to gather from Miss Cordelia Fitch, excellent and learned lady though she be. I always promised my dear wife' (here his voice faltered and grew husky) 'that Charlie should grow up at least as much an Englishman as a Spaniard, and when he is old enough, I shall take him to Europe for his education.' It was a frank and generous offer, and I frankly closed with it. I became, then, an inmate of Don Miguel's house, and was soon a prime favourite with the little heir, and on amicable terms with the numerous household, which comprised domestics of every variety of tint, from the jet of the fullblooded negro to the pale golden yellow of the mestizo, and the dusky copper of the half-bred Indian. Miss Cordelia Fitch, of Rhode Island, Mistress of Arts and Doctress of Music (for so I gathered from the letters M.A. and Doct. Mus Salem University,' which figured on her visitingcard and on the bindings of her books), was com monly austere, and occasionally tart with me, partly because I did not always understand her sesquipedalian English, as uttered in the nasal accent peculiar to the tiniest state in the Union; partly because we did not invariably agree as to the rudiments of Latin and the outlines of modern history. But she was a worthy, harmless woman, solemnly kind to the little child under her charge, and her trifling asperities of temper were more diverting than otherwise. and My duties as auditor of the accounts were so light that I had only too much time on my hands, and I was thus able to make myself thoroughly conversant with the details of Pampas-farming on a large scale. The mainspring of the system seemed to be, that there lay the billowy ocean of long waving grass, streaked by rivulets making their way to the Plate River, and that thousands of sheep and tens of thousands of oxen lived upon it. There were troops of horses, too, and a few swine, and some poultry kept for the Christmas market of Buenos Ayres, and there were many mules; but sheep and cattle were the staple, fed and slaughtered as rapidly and as remorselessly as if the supply had been inexhaustible. The oddest part of the business, too, was, that in the midst of all these continual hecatombs of bulls and wethers, nobody ever seemed to want the beef of the one or the mutton of the other. A more wasteful place than the salada I never saw. I soon learned to hate it, apart from its hideous associations, on account of the shocking though inevitable prodigality with which nature's resources were there lavished. First one, and then another and another young Guacho would ride forth into the plain, and return, towing behind him a lassoed bull, lowing piteously, and at times dropping its horned head for a despairing charge. Then came the dull thud of the poleaxe, the heavy fall, the gashes cut by the sharp knife, the blood, groans, and death inseparable from the ugly process of providing sirloins and steaks. But when the skin was stripped off, and added to the pile of 'salted green hides from Buenos Ayres,' at so much per ton, of which newspapers tell in small print, and the fat had been borne off to the tallow-caldron, and the horns to the heap for exportation, the steaks and sirloins were neglected. A few strips of beef were perhaps cut off, like long red ribbons, to be converted into the sun-dried, long-keeping meat which the people of New Spain call charqui; but the remainder of the flesh was abandoned to wolf and vulture; and as the dreadful birds, that had long been swooping and wheeling overhead, mere black specks, came rushing down to gorge their yellow beaks and greedy maws, I thought regretfully of the hungry millions at home in England, while such was the South American fashion of dealing with superfluous food. Yet I am bound to confess that vultures and coyotes were very useful scavengers, and that without them we should have run the risk of fever, like the Greeks before Troy. The small timid wolves of which I have spoken seldom harmed the sheep. Jaguars and pumas, or, to use the popular phrase, lions and tigers, did occasionally levy toll upon the flocks, until some mounted herdsman made an end of the four-footed depredator with the help of gun or bolâs. The great amusement, and none the less amusing because it was a source of profit, was the chase of the American ostrich. The instant that a brood of these huge birds appeared on the horizon, stalking like weird things where sky and earth meet, off galloped two or three of our wild lads, whirling around their heads the merciless bolâs, which instrument, composed of a tough cord with a heavy ball of stone or lead at each extremity, makes part of the outfit of every rider of the transatlantic desert. Hard runs, compared with which fox-hunting is lethargic, were those after the gigantic fowls of the wilderness. The pace was a racing one, and the victory of speed was often to the feathered biped. Many a time would a baffled hunter return, carrying on his shoulders the saddle of the gallant horse that he had spurred and whipped to death in the vain effort to ride down the fleet-footed quarry. In such cases, Don Miguel made no remonstrance. It was but a horse the less out of hundreds, and life, whether of man or beast, is held cheaply on the Pampas. The Guacho has his salary, but for his pocket-money he depends on ostrich plumes or on the unspoilt skin of a spotted jaguar, and a master would be held a churl who should inquire too curiously into the demise of a steed broken down in chase or cattle-herding. I was from the first on excellent terms with the half-civilised beings who were the working-bees of our hive. Some good cigars judiciously distributed, the exhibition of a few books with handsome illustrations, since a Guacho loves pictures, and a little lively chat in Spanish, pleased them greatly; but my success in backing the chestnut mustang, which they confessed had been jestingly selected by Juan as the most fiery of the stud, went farther still. And an event was presently to occur which served to endear me to these strange pioneers of society. I was returning from the half-built sugar-mill one day, perhaps a month after my first arrival at the hacienda, at about four o'clock in the afternoon. I had left the dingy complexioned masons sipping their chocolate, and had received the foreman's solemn assurance that a fresh course of blocks properly cemented should be laid before he permitted his gang to give over work. I was riding homeward, then, thinking of many things of the old Dullingham bank; of friends and schoolfellows that I should perhaps never see again in the flesh; of Alice in England; of 'What was that? A cry of pain?' Yes, a cry, certainly of pain or terror-the shrill, appealing cry of a child's agonised voice; and I started, and wheeled my horse towards the quarter from which the sounds seemed to come. The cry was repeated, more feebly than before; and as I had now no doubt as to the direction whence the call for help proceeded, I dashed across a ravine, and, scrambling up the steep bank opposite, came in sight of the chain of lagoons, connected with the mighty Rio Plata by a small river, which skirted the plantations of rice and tobacco, and on the banks of which I had shot many a snipe and flamingo. Here, at the edge of a cane-bordered creek that ran up from the nearest lagoon into the broken ground, where the hillocks were gay with purple rhododendrons and the wild geranium, I beheld a sight that chilled my blood with horror. Close to the margin of the water, knee-deep in the flowers and the tall Pampas grass, just where the white and yellow pond-lilies mingled with the rich coloured blossoms of the flowered prairie, was a child-little Charlie-Don Miguel's hope and heir-his one tie to life and its affections-I knew the bare little golden head at once. But the boy stood, rooted to the ground, transfixed by terror, crouching down, his blue eyes, dilated by mortal fear, fixed on something huge, shapeless, unclean, that drew nearer and nearer yet, a grim and monstrous thing, that had more the aspect of a large log, glistening with slimy mud, than of anything else. What is the ugly thing that has crawled out from the creek, fringed with bushes of the laurelrose, and that is clumsily climbing the bank with awkward hurry of its ungainly claw-tipped feet? An alligator, by Heaven! for I see the slanting sunlight glisten on its scaly back, and the formidable jaws open and display the curved row of gleaming white teeth, as, with its cruel red eye fixed upon its prey, it approached the spot where stood the fated child, frozen by a terror that denied him the power to flee. 'Run, Charlie, run! run towards me!' I called aloud, at the same time urging my horse down the bank. The little fellow turned his pale face towards me, and recognised me; but fear was still too potent with him, and he remained where he was, crying out to 'Mirry Warburton' to save him. I dashed |