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seen, from the way the tops of the bushes rustled and flew, that almost all the shots had gone too high. You can't hit anything unless you take aim and fire from the shoulder; but these chaps fired from the hip with their eyes shut. The retreat, I maintained-and I was right-was caused by the screeching of the steam whistle. Upon this they forgot Kurtz and began to howl at me with indignant protests.

"The manager stood by the wheel murmuring confidentially about the necessity of getting well away down the river before dark at all events, when I saw in the distance a clearing on the river side and the outlines of some sort of building. 'What's this?' I asked. He clapped his hands in wonder. "The station!' he cried. I edged in at once, still going half-speed.

"Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare trees and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long decaying building on the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a background. There was no enclosure or fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently, for near the house half a dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round, carved balls. The rails, or whatever there had been between, had disappeared. Of course the forest surrounded all that. The river bank was clear, and on the water side I saw a white man under a hat like a cart wheel beckoning persistently with his whole arm. Examining the edge of the forest above and below, I was almost certain that I could see movements; human forms gliding here and there. I steamed past prudently, then stopped the engines and let her drift down. The man on the shore began to shout, urging us to land. 'We have been attacked,' screamed the manager.

'I know I know. It's all right,' yelled back the other, cheerful as you please. 'Come along. It's all right. I am glad.'

"His aspect reminded me of something I had seen-something funny I had seen somewhere. As I manoeuvred to get alongside, I was asking myself, 'What does this fellow look like? Suddenly I got it. He looked like a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland, probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red and yellow patches on the back, patches on front, patches on elbows, on knees; colored binding round his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done. A beardless, boyish face, very fair, no features to speak of, nose peeling, little blue eyes, smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open countenance like sunshine and shadow on a wind-swept plain. 'Look out, captain!' he cried; 'there's a snag lodged in here last night.' What! Another snag? I confess I swore shamefully. I had nearly holed my cripple, to finish off that charming trip. The harlequin on the bank turned his little pug nose. up to me. 'You English?' he asked, all smiles. 'Are you?' I shouted from the wheel. The smiles vanished and he shook his head as if sorry for my disappointment. Then he brightened up. 'Never mind!' he cried, encouragingly. 'Are we in time?' I asked. 'He is up there,' he replied, with a toss of the head up the hill, and becoming gloomy all of a sudden. His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next.

"When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of them armed to the teeth, had gone to the house, this chap came on board. 'I say, I don't like this. These natives are in the bush,' I said.

He assured me earnestly it was all right. "They are simple people,' he added; 'well, I am glad you came. It took me all my time to keep them off.' 'But you said it was all right,' I cried. 'O, they meant no harm,' he said; and, as I stared, he corrected himself, 'Not exactly.' Then, vivaciously, 'My faith, your pilot house wants a clean-up!' In the next breath he advised me to keep enough steam on the boiler to blow the whistle in case of any trouble. 'One good screech will do more for you than all your rifles. They are a simple people,' he repeated. He rattled away at such a rate he quite overwhelmed me. He seemed to be trying to make up for lots of silence, and actually hinted, laughing, that such was the case. 'Don't you talk with Mr. Kurtz?' I said. 'You don't talk with that man-you listen to him,' he exclaimed, with severe exaltation. 'But now' He waved his arm, and in the twinkling of an eye was in the uttermost depths of despondency. In a moment he came up again with a jump, possessed himself of both my hands, shook them continuously, while he gabbled: 'Brother sailor-honor-pleasuredelight-introduce myself - Russian son of an archpriest-government of Tambov-what? Tobacco! English tobacco; the excellent English tobacco! Now, that's brotherly. Smoke? Where's the sailor that does not smoke?"

house on the coast to fit him out with stores and goods, and had started for the interior with a light heart, and no more idea of what would happen to him than a baby. He had been wandering about that river for nearly two years alone, cut off from everybody and everything. 'I am not so young as I look. I am 25,' he said. 'At first old Van Shuyten would tell me to go to the devil,' he narrated with keen enjoyment, 'but I stuck to him and talked and talked, till at last he got afraid I would take the hind leg off his favorite dog, so he gave me some cheap things and a few guns, and told me he hoped he would never see my face again. Good old Dutchman, Van Shuyten. I've sent him one small lot of ivory a year ago-so that he can't call me a little thief when I get back. I hope he got it. And for the rest I don't care. I had some wood stacked for you. That was my old house. Did you see?'

"I gave him Towson's book. He made as though he would kiss me, but restrained himself. "The only book I had left, and I thought I had lost it,' he said, looking at it ecstatically. 'So many accidents happen to a man going about alone, you know. Canoes get upset sometimes-and sometimes you've got to clear out so quick when the people get angry.' He thumbed the pages. 'You made notes in Russian?' I asked. He nodded. 'I thought they were written in cipher,' I said. He laughed, then became serious. 'I had lots of trouble to keep those people off,' he said. 'Did they want to kill you?' I asked. 'Oh, no!' he cried, and checked himself. 'Why did they attack us?' I pursued. He hesitated, then said, shamefacedly, "They don't want him to go.' 'Don't they?' I said, curiously. He nodded a nod full of mystery and wisdom. 'I tell you,' he cried, 'this man has enlarged my mind.' He opened his arms wide, staring at me round

"The pipe soothed him, and gradually I made out that he had run away from school, had gone to sea in a Russian ship; ran way again; served some time in English ships; was now reconciled with the archpriest. He made a point of that. But when one is young, one must see things, gather experience, ideas, enlarge the mind.' 'Here!' I interrupted. 'You can never tell. Here I have met Mr. Kurtz,' he said, youthfully solemn and reproachful. I held my tongue after that. It appears he had persuaded a Dutch trading eyed. (To be continued.)

Blackwood's Magazine.

COWPER'S OUSE.

The Great Ouse is undistinguished among western waters; his very title is disputed by the channel in which the united rivers of Yorkshire find their way to the Humber; and yet he is the fifth largest English river.

His is no impetuous stream, tearing down to the sea in a bed that is sometimes water, sometimes heaps of stones; he pursues a temperate career, never runs dry, and is seldom overfull. The fortresses of more troubled days are no longer reflected in his waves; no legends of hard riding Dick or other heroic robber linger in the memories of those who dwell on his sedgy banks; not even the genius of Sir Walter could weave romances in which the Ouse would play a part. He has never been a border river since the days of the Danelagh; he belongs to the Midlands, and has had no occasion for those strings of castles which once defended and now adorn the Tweed, the Tyne, the Severn and the Wye.

In the region of Newport Pagnell the Great Ouse first begins to be a noticeable river; here is the head on which are set his two horns. From the southeast comes the Little Ouse, Ousel, or Lovat, thus variously named, after collecting half the waters of the Chiltern Hills and draining the eastern region of the Vale of Aylesbury; the Ousel is still little better than a large brook, but has already travelled some score of miles. The other horn, the Ouse proper, has gathered his peaceful flood in the western uplands of Northamptonshire. His longest tributary may be traced beyond Brackley to the neighborhood of Banbury, and, being fed by numerous winding brooks, takes the shape of a river not many miles to the west of Buckingham. Eight miles below the little borough which gives

its name to a county, the Ouse receives at Wolverton the waters of the Tone. Here in the early days of railways, trains stopped half-way between London and Birmingham to give weary travellers the opportunity of rest and refreshment; and here the valley is crossed by a viaduct, which was once considered an imposing triumph of engineering. From Wolverton to Newport Pagnell is by road four miles, by river nearer ten, and there the larger stream takes up his little brother for the rest of their winding ramble to the German Ocean.

Nobody ever set out to reach a given destination with less anxiety about eventually arriving there than the Ouse, when he decided that, after leaving Newport Pagnell, it was as well to go. to Bedford. Being a river-god he may be credited with wisdom superior to that of mortals; and perhaps he was right in expatiating in his meadows, listening to the clatter of his poplar leaves, taking his pastime in broad deeps, and ever and anon losing his way among beds of reeds. The upshot of it all is that, whereas mere men make it a thirteen-mile walk, our river travels forty, and is eventually so reluctant to pass under the graceful bridge by the Swan hotel, that the Midland Railway crosses him seven times in the seven miles between Bedford and Sharnbrook.

This sort of conduct might be pardonable in a nymph or other lighthearted feminine divinity, but in a sober old river calls for reprobation. Father Thames shakes his head over it, pointing to his own noble curves, and even the twisting Tees thinks there should be a limit to capriciousness, though his conscience is a little uneasy about his performances in the neighbor

hood of Darlington. He, however, can plead mountains at his source, mountains without lakes, always trying to a river that wishes to be respectable. But the Ouse knew what was to happen to him; he knew that he would be caught up by Dutch engineers at Earith, and that the better part of him, hemmed between earth-works, would have to run in two parallel straight lines across the Fens to enter the Wash at Lynn through an ungraceful cut; and thus he made his playground in the broad meadows above Bedford before departing for those regions where unlovely science was to prevail over his artless whims.

The valley between Newport Pagnell and Bedford is Cowper's country. It is here that the Ouse gives us a scenery all his own, as he travels in his leisurely way around three sides of a quadrilateral tableland, whose greatest elevation is nowhere more than four hundred feet, but whose flanks descend to the meadows with some suddenness in places, and yet with no precipitous rudeness. The floor of the valley is flat, sometimes a mile across, sometimes a few hundred yards, and the river shifts from side to side as his fancy leads; but wherever he hugs the slopes, his stream is deep and broad and clear. It is the reproach of sluggish rivers that they are muddy, but not so the Ouse. A narrow fringe of water lilies on either shore marks the limit of earthiness; between those the channel, twenty to forty yards in breadth, is apparently paved with stone, for a twelve-foot punt-pole grates along the rocky bottom. As our river never discloses the dark secrets of his bed like the shameless Tees, we can only guess at the causes of this absence of sediment in his still deeps, and may conjecture springs breaking into his channel from below, sufficient in quantity to carry away, even in summer-time, the light depos

its of a stream not subject to the violent incursions of mountain torrents.

The Ouse has never been a highway of any importance; he cannot boast of a romantic population of bargees like the Thames, or his own tributary, the Cam, which brings him much mud and no less learning, let us hope, from Cambridge. Commerce does not trouble a river that has no commodity to send seawards, except such fruits of the earth as, in the present decay of English agriculture, we are more apt to receive from beyond the German Ocean than to transmit to our neighbors. As far up as Bedford there are locks, but above Bedford not only have we those sevenfold windings which rival Styx "nine times interfused," but the river, in so much of his course a natural canal, deliberately places a well-considered impediment in the way of such as might be tempted to burden him with the vulgarities of trade, for when he elects to leave the slopes on one side or the other of his valley, and cross the meadows, he straightway breaks up into two, or even three, narrow and frequently shallow streams, and thus continuing for a mile or so, defies any but the smallest boats to travel on his current; whence it has happened that a river some two hundred and fifty miles long, running through fertile land in a populous country, has only one town of any great importance on its banks. Buckingham, Bedford, Huntingdon, are, indeed, county towns, but the first of the three is little better than a village; Bedford owes its recent expansion, not to trade, but to John Harpur, the benefactor of its schools; Huntingdon is at most a couple of sizes bigger than Buckingham; even Ely, the largest of the Ouse towns before we reach the sea, was made by monks, not by merchants, and is indebted to its cathedral, not to its trade, for such fame as it enjoys. At King's Lynn alone does

commerce fairly lay her hand upon the river, King's Lynn, from whence started so early as 1330 A.D., the first expedition in search of the North Pole; it was conducted by one Nicholas, a Carmelite Friar, who set out for the Arctic regions relying on his astrolabe, and, so the chronicles of Lynn inform us, was reckoned to have got there.

Action and the Ouse are out of harmony; from the time when Canute paused upon his waters to listen to the singing of the monks of Ely, his heroes have been men of religion rather than of war. True, there is one notable exception; Oliver Cromwell was a son of the Ouse, but a large part of him was in the traditions of his native stream. Oliver, the saint, had mused for many years among the meadows between Huntingdon and Ely, before he became Oliver, the man of war; and the warrior was not content with beating the Scots in the field of Dunbar; he set his heart no less on achieving a controversial victory over the Presbyterians at Edinburgh, where, indeed, he was confronted with greater stubbornness.

In the Wars of the Roses, Olney and Emberton witnessed the return of the King-maker, and the dispersion of the northern forces under Sir John Conyers and Robin of Redesdale; but these events have left no local record.

In the seventeenth century the restless Catesby had a house at Hardmead in the hills, four miles from Olney; Gayhurst, the home of Sir Everard Digby, a house well known to Cowper, is not far off, and the young knight was entangled in Catesby's madcap scheme by the agency of Father Garnett; whence came local traditions of underground passages at Gayhurst, of Digby's hole, a secret way to the river. Sir Kenelm Digby also lived at Gayhurst, and left a trace of himself in a breed of edible snails, which he imported for the benefit of the incompar

able Venetia; they were held by the faculty of those days to be good food for consumptive persons. The villagers of Gayhurst have not long ceased to look for "Digby's hoddies."

And Bunyan, too, is of the Ouse; was not the greater part of the "Pilgrim's Progress" written in Bedford Gaol? There are records of his preaching at Olney and other places along the river.

Legh Richmond, the well-known writer of Evangelical stories, was rector of Turvey for thirty years; in fact, the theological attitude of the river has always been in the Evangelical direction. There were monasteries near his banks, but they did not flourish; the religious houses at Bradwell, Tickford, Ravenstone, Lavendon, Turvey, were already far gone in decay at the Dissolution, and were never on the scale of the great Cistercian establishments of the north. It was the Evangelical element at Olney that brought to the Ouse its inspired worshipper, who was to give the river such fame as it might otherwise have missed. Cowper's connection with the Ouse began at Huntingdon in 1765, and ended at Weston Underwood in 1795; for the whole of those thirty years he never left its banks except for one visit of six weeks to Hayley's home in Sussex, towards the end of the period.

Olney in itself is not a particularly attractive little town; it can boast a noble church, but there is little else in it to excite the attention of a visitor. It was not Olney, but Olney's curate, that caused the place to be selected as the poet's residence; but though Olney is not itself beautiful, the surrounding country is very beautiful indeed, and the more romantic splendors of the lakes have failed to inspire prose or verse more delightful than the letters and poems of William Cowper.

The second Earl of Dartmouth married the heiress of one Sir Charles

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