a bend. At this turning our horses began to exhibit symptoms of anxiety. As to the one I rode, it got obstinate, and neither spur nor whip could get it to take a step further.

"It scents an elephant," said my horsekeeper, taking it by the bridle, while I jumped down, and, rifle in hand, turned the corner. My keeper was in the right, for not a hundred paces off I saw an elephant. It was attached to a great iron roller, which it was dragging after it in order to level the road. At a little distance there was another, with its keeper, employed in piling stones for a parapet. It is needless to say that, although such mistakes have occurred, roadster elephants and mason elephants were not considered to be legitimate game, so we continued our way to Bintenne.

Arrived at Bintenne, we had to leave our horses and cut our way through the jungle. This was in pursuit of elephants whose traces had been discovered by the natives some days previously. Progress was very laborious: there were nearly two leagues of jungle to cut one's way through. At length we arrived almost breathless at a small round space, about twice as large as the corn-hall in Paris, which had only been recently left by the elephants. Everything was trodden down by the bulky weight of the animals, who had made litter of the trunks of trees!

There were two wide pathways in the jungle; the herd, separated into two bands, had gone off in different directions.

We stopped short; we had arrived.

Sir William, who was more familiar with elephant hunting than any of us, imparted his final instructions. These instructions were more particularly addressed to me, as a novice in the art. I listened to him with a pulsation in my ears, which told me very plainly that my blood was not in its ordinary condition.

I must acknowledge that I had been terrified on contemplating the evidences of destruction around me, and I could not help asking myself why a man-a mere pigmy, whose footstep only bends the grass, which raises itself up again when he has passed by-should come and attack monsters that crush forests under their feet, and tread down trees never to rise again.

Sir William had slain six or seven hundred elephants. He had kept a record up to five hundred. Beyond that he had given up enumerating his victims. He had never met with but one accident, when, having fired at a young one, the mother had rushed at him before he could get another rifle from a runaway attendant, and had taken him up in its trunk, only throwing him away to resist the accumulated aid that had come up. He had been a month laid up, and was upwards of two before he could take a full breath.

Well, Sir William's instructions were, that we were not to shoot at elephants with tusks-they are kings; nor at white elephants-they are holy. Nor was it safe to shoot young elephants, as the mother would charge the party. As to shooting the remainder, there was only one vulnerable point, and that was in the centre of the forehead, where there is a depression in the skull about the diameter of a man's hat. If fairly hit, the animal would be killed at once; if not, it would single out its assailant from a hundred, and charge him. The point was, then, to

* We have been before told that there are no elephants with tusks in Ceylon.

await the animal till it was within a few paces, then step hastily on one side, and give it another ball in the ear.

According to Sir William, this was all the most common-place proceeding imaginable. I inwardly resolved to surprise my companions by doing some feat that went beyond the instructions.

It was time to make up my mind, for the attendants were shouting out that the elephants were coming back to us. Soon we heard what appeared to be the sound of a hurricane, and we felt the earth quake under our feet.

About twenty elephants were coming along one of the tunnels; only three, a male, a female, and a young one.

"Sir William," I shouted out in English, "I leave the troop to you and your friends. All I ask is, that I shall have these three !"

Then calling to my attendants to come along with the spare rifles, I rushed before the elephants. I could have sought shelter behind a tree, but I disdained to avail myself of such aid, and took up my place in the middle of the path.

As to my attendants, they changed colour like cameleons. From black they gradually became grey. Only one seemed resolute.

"Let those who are frightened go away," I said. And I told the more courageous one to take a rifle in each hand and to stand by me. The others disappeared in the jungle.

I had my eyes fixed upon the three colossuses; they appeared to me to be real mastodons. When they were no more than thirty paces from us, I took aim at the young one. It was trotting along between its mammy and its dad.

I pulled the trigger, and the pet staggered as if drunk, and then fell like a heavy inert mass. The mother uttered a fearful cry-a parent's cry-at once grievous and threatening, and then stopped to lift up her offspring.

The father rushed at me at once.

When he was within six paces I planted a ball in his forehead.
Carried away by his impetuosity, he went on beyond me.

I had stepped on one side, and while doing so had got another rifle. The colossus attempted to return upon his steps, but in doing so he stumbled. I saw by his eyes that he would never get up again. Soon his hind legs followed the example of his fore limbs. He uttered a deep moan that faded off into a sigh, and fell dead!

At this cry of agony the female, abandoning her young one, turned

towards me.

It occurred to me not even to take advantage of having her head in front as she came down upon me. I waited till the animal was only two paces off, then jumping a little on one side, I placed my rifle close to her ear and fired off both barrels at once.

Half of the beast's head went in by the same hole as the discharge. Powder, balls, and paper showed the way!

"Well!" I exclaimed, "let every one do as much: three elephants in four shots. C'est joli !"

And taking my seat on the young one, which was about the size of a horse, I took out my tinder-box and lighted a cigar.

Such is the history you asked me for. It is not very interesting, but it is very veracious!

BY-WAYS OF HISTORY.

PROTESTERS WHO WERE NEVER "PROTESTANTS."

AMONG those results of civil strife, whether political or religious, which, though seldom noticed, are not the less important, is the cruel necessity imposed on moderate men of taking a side whether they will or no. If this necessity reached only to those who have been well called "times' observers" (abbreviated into "time-servers"), men who stand by and watch their occasion to declare for the winning side, we should cordially concur in the old Athenian law, which declared neutrality in civil conflict to be treason; but in all ages, there have been men of calm minds and indisposed to violent action of any kind, who as reluctantly as inevitably have been drawn into the vortex of public affairs, and sometimes, by the fatality of overruling circumstances, have found themselves attached to the party and associates to which natural bias or acquired principle would least have inclined them. In our great English seventeenth century convulsion, many a thorough friend to liberty was ranged, by ancestral and hereditary obligation, under the standard of prerogative, while many a loyalist, who by all his secret sympathies should have been banded with "the gallants who fought for the crown," drifted on the flood of popular enthusiasm into the levies of "the Commons of England," each and all held by a kind of necessity in the ranks in which they were first arrayed, until the great questions of the age had been brought to issue.

The same remark applies to the great religious revolt of the preceding century. Had Luther never replied to the incremation of his writings by burning the Pope's bull at Wittemburg,† and in thus solemnly repudiating the рарасу, raised the standard of Protest, we should now have been hearing of many, known for his opponents, as strenuous Reformers. No candid or thoughtful Romanist ever denies that a reform in his Church was loudly called for, though of course every Romanist-as such-must deny that revolt or protest against papal usurpation was the mode for effecting that reform. In discipline, morals, practice, all confess that things had come to a very bad pass in the days of the Tenth Leo, but no

Some individuals on each side "cross over" in the course of all conflicts, but scarce any with a good grace or a good result. The Hothams, father and son, who, by shutting the gates of Hull in the king's face, may be said to have fired the mate which set the nation in flames, tried soon after to retrieve their first disobedience by an ill-concocted treachery, and were hanged for their pains. Not even Mirabeau, much less Egalité, in France, found themselves "at home" when they left their "order" for the "tiers-état." To all probability, had not a "kind fever" cut him off, Mirabeau might have lived to find himself execrated by the idolising populace of Paris; and the result to which the first Prince of the blood brought his fraternising with the canaille, is known of all men. Nor do popular leaders, when they leave the popular cause for the court, fare better; they are received into court ranks rather as forgiven culprits than as equal associates. Lord Brougham, in some pointed remarks on the gyrations of politicians, has happily said, that the "when to turn," and the "where to turn," are equally serious questions with the wheeling statesman.

† December 10, 1520. This may be called the date of the Reformation era.

thorough adherent of the papacy can admit that the root of vicious practice lay deep in corrupted doctrine, whereas the shape and justification of the Reformation is found in a recognition of the truth asserted in our Article (XIX.), which declares that "the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in living, and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith." Until this conclusion had been arrived at, many a clear-headed and satiric papist was as willing to have a gird at papal abuses, as the most thorough-going of those who were first called Protestants at

Augsburg."

Of those men who would have been known as strenuous Protesters, if there had never been "Protestants," we may reckon Sir Thomas More, the witty and well-living Chancellor of England, who attested at the block his adhesion to a Church, of whose abuses and maladministration he had a keen and satirical perception. More is a rare and remarkable specimen of a man writing mocking epigrams against priestly corruption and episcopal ignorance, and then giving martyr proof on the scaffold of adherence to the system which could foster and promote such ignorance. We find him classed with the pasquil writers of his day, and the following, inserted in a collection of these " paper pellets," may show with what a free pen he could once condemn the loud and ignorant zealots of that same Church, for which he afterwards showed himself as "zealous unto slaying" as he was ultimately steadfast in suffering:

The admixture of reverence and ridicule in the mind of Sir Thomas More, is not often found in Romanists, least of all is it to be found in our days. Rome has discovered the danger to her authority arising from allowing her children to disport themselves with her infirmities, to make merry

Though More and Fisher (Bishop of Rochester) suffered for the same statute-made crime, their motives were, probably, somewhat distinguishable. More died rather than take an oath which would burden his conscience individually. Fisher died "for his Church," to which he was ever an undeviating and devoted son; doubting nothing, questioning nothing. He has left little, and that scarce note-worthy, in the way of composition, but "anti-Lutheran" is the distinguishing character of all his literary remains.

†The letter killeth, but

The spirit giveth life.

in her short-comings, or point a finger at the rents, darns, and spots, in the flaunting robe of her infallibility. She has, no doubt, still many within her pale, who define their own status thus, "mauvais Catholique, bon Chrétien"-but the papacy is now careful to point out all such to her docile children as "ne'er-do-weels" with a warning-" hunc tu ROMANE caveto!"-against such witticisms as Sir Thomas More's every "good Catholic" now makes common cause all over the world, and according to a proverb derived from experience,

Touch but one shaveling's frock at home,
Cowls emit howls as far as Rome.

The sarcastic freedom with which More lashed the vices and ignorance of the clergy, did not prevent him from taking his side "ex animo" with his Church, when once open religious conflict began. No sooner had "Luther against Leo" become a war-cry, than More entered on that course of acrimonious controversy against the Reformers, in which he aimed at deserving his own "ambitious" epitaph, "hæreticis Molestum," and the free spirit which could once delight itself in the converse of the amiable Colet, and disport itself in ridiculing the ignorance and assumption of zealot seculars and regulars, became so wholly changed, as at intervals of his later career in life, to throw out against "the blessed brethren" (so he jeeringly termed the Reformers) what a learned prelate has called "the greatest heap of nasty language perhaps ever put together," being a compound of downright ribaldry, without one grain of the reason of a learned man to support it, or one flash of the author's "wonted wit" to enliven it, so that it could no otherwise add to his reputation, except as proving him to have "the best knack of any man in Europe at calling bad names in good Latin." Thus, in this case, is our original position made good, that a special misery of civil contention, whether political or religious, lies in its power to transport men of composed and regulated tempers into all the zealot extravagance of party, very often with a fury and vehemence intensified in proportion to the depths of the calm mind which civil strife has troubled; we may well mourn over the power of such influences over Sir Thomas More, when we find him punishing as an "ungracious heresie" in a poor boy named "Dick Pinser, for that he had learned his Pater noster, Ave,' and Credo,' y" Englyshe, from Mister George Joye," a confession of which he is charged with having "souked out of the boyes botickes, when he whipped him naked, tay'd unto the tree of his trowthe!" His strength and resolve of mind led

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Quod in Epitaphio profiteor me "hæreticis Molestum, hoc ambitiose feci.”— MORI: Ep. ad Eras.

†This is Bishop Atterbury's censure upon Sir Thomas More's book against Luther, and the same condemnation attaches to his English works directed against Tindal and others. The extent to which More was transported beyond all reason or judgment in his zeal against Protestants, may be judged by the fact that he laid at their door the capture and sack of Rome, by the Constable of Bourbon! work, as is well known, achieved by the troops and general of Charles V., that "Catholic" "pur et simple."

Sir Thomas More had a whipping-post in his garden at Chelsea, which he called his "tree of truth,"-being his instrument for extracting from persons accused of heresy either confession or renunciation of their opinions. Mr. Froude, in his admirable livraison of "A History of England," which we hope to see completed, mourns over Sir Thomas More, the philosopher of Utopia, the friend of