battlefield shall be removed, and the plains put in a shape which will gratify the historic sentiment of British, French, and Americans alike. A museum is to be erected on the field, where the relics and the records of the past will be stored, and, lastly, the famous Dufferin Terrace, the most magnificent promenade in the world, is to be continued along the edge of the cliffs overhanging the St. Lawrence to the place where Wolfe's forlorn hope scaled the heights, and thence along the road over which he marched his men before they deployed in battle formation, across the battlefield of Ste. Foye, over the picturesque heights of St. Charles, which look out over the valley to the mountains beyond, and so back to Quebec through the St. John's Gate.

Earl Grey has also suggested that a figure of the Angel of Peace should take the place of the magazine on the extreme edge of Cape Diamond, so that the first object the emigrant or the visitor will see as he sails up the St. Lawrence will be the outstretched arms of the figure of Peace welcoming him to the new land. These are admirable and well-conceived proposals, which if carried out, as they certainly will be, will awaken and inspire the most generous sentiments and recollections. They will not unworthily commemorate the great and fruitful deeds which men of heroic mould in days gone by sealed with their blood; they will create new bonds of amity and friendship between England and France, and establish a fresh community of sentiment between the two older nations and the two great peoples which have sprung from their loins on the other side of the Atlantic.

R. J. MACHUGH.

THE BOOK ON THE TABLE1

If those who speak with authority on the subject are to be trusted, we have never been more near to a friendly understanding with Nature. There is a way in particular, neither difficult nor very arduous, by which we may quickly learn all that is essential to know of her. We must set aside inherited fears of darkness and our degraded love of roofs and walls, and, provided with pillows and a few rugs, commit ourselves bravely to a night out on some sheltered English lawn in summer time. So, in the dark and silent hours when the heavens are nearest to us, personality-as one of Nature's devotees has expressed it-glides into the stream of cosmic existence and the fellowship of all existences within the universe is made real and significant to the initiated mind. Beautiful it is after these hours of enlightened sleep to rise with the sun, our hearts new made, innocent and kind as Nature herself. Not for all, however, such cleansings of the spirit. Nature, like other ladies of high estate, has, it seems, her fastidious preferences, rigid laws of approach, and methods of avoidance. The townsman who could not, if he would, sleep upon a lawn clearly knows her not; nor the labourer who, living by toil on land and sea, dreads nothing so much as the breath of Nature in places where he sleeps; nor the sportsman who surely is but a hired servant, else would he not write essays upon her charms? Thus Nature, friendly and amenable as she is, grants access to a favoured few only, and they rejoice in her as a possession not merely lovely but exclusive.

Meanwhile here and there a sportsman breaks silence and tells us strange things of this gentle beneficent Nature of ours. Let us hear what Colonel Patterson, for instance, has to say of the fellowship of all existences as observed from the branches of a tree in the wilds of East Africa. It was a calm and perfect night, such as can be seen only in the tropics'. . . the economy in description is tantalising, but the writer has other occupation on hand than to register picturesque impressions. In these still The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, and other East African Adventures, by Colonel J. H. Patterson.

hours, when the heavens are nearest,' all the beasts of the forest are astir. From his hidden post of observation the watcher sees them as they come one by one to drink from the river near at hand water-buck, bush-buck, then a tiny antelope, pausing at every step, on the alert for traces of some unseen enemy, till it reaches the river and stoops to drink :

Just then I saw a jackal come up on its trail and begin carefully to stalk it, not even rustling a leaf in its advance on the poor little antelope. All of a sudden the jackal stopped dead for a second and then made off out of sight as fast as he could go. I looked round to discover the cause of this sudden exit, and then to my surprise saw a large and very beautiful leopard crouching down and moving noiselessly in the direction of our tree. At first I thought it must be stalking some animal on the ground below us, but I soon realised that it was Mahina [the writer's gun-bearer] that the brute was intent on.

Such is Nature's way under tropical stars, and such the simple life with its golden rule beautifully symmetrical,' as doctors say of well-defined disease. But this is a comparatively uneventful night far on in the book. Colonel Patterson has to tell of others bearing a darker, or should we say a more strikingly natural, character? Nights in human settlements made dreadful by the roarings of approaching peril and by silences more eloquent still of danger, when the shouts of terrified men pass from camp to camp the warning: Beware, brothers, the devil is coming.'

In part this story of the two man-eating lions who, in a corner of British East Africa seriously disturbed the process of Empirebuilding, actually bringing work on one section of the Uganda Railway works to a standstill for several weeks, is already a matter of minor history. Colonel Patterson has here for the first time put into permanent form the incidents, and grim enough they are. Working over a radius of eight miles containing widely scattered camps of working men surrounded by impenetrable jungle, the man-eaters possessed natural advantages of which for nine months. they made use so cunning and disastrous that the natives believed they had no mere mortal enemies to deal with but the angry spirits of two departed native chiefs protesting in this manner against the desecration of their country by a railway. The author records the feelings of despair with which, as he kept vigil in the most likely places night after night, far-off cries and commotion would tell him that the lions had accomplished their deadly work elsewhere. Swift and terrible are the tragedies described. One of the author's jemadars, ‘a fine powerful Sikh,' sleeps in a tent with half a dozen

workmen. Suddenly at midnight a lion puts his head through the open door, seizes Ungan Singh by the throat, the unfortunate man throwing his arms round the lion's neck and crying out, 'Let go !' as he disappears in the darkness. And noiseless always. Through fences of thorn held to be impassable, the great cat-like mysterious creatures continually force their way without a sound. They are the embodiment of sudden destruction. A man casually opens his tent door to find himself face to face with death. Or, as he lies sick in the security of hospital, the huge brute plunges upon him through the roof, so ending his ills once for all. Or he is quietly taken from beside his sleeping wife, who wakes 'with a feeling as if the pillow had been moved from under her.' Sometimes the man-eaters betrayed fear in the presence of human beings: we read of one in his haste to be gone carrying off a mattress instead of the man lying upon it, of another mistaking a bag of rice for the coolie's head; but in the end they were very bold, and would fetch their victim as he sat amongst his friends by a brightly burning fire, and-regardless of man and his weapons-would devour him within earshot of the enclosure. One such night the author recalls when the sound of their dreadful purring filled the air and rang in my ears for days afterwards.'

The Indian coolie has no great objection to death in the abstract and-it is in this perhaps that he most differs from ourselves-is under no obligation to show more of altruistic sentiment than he feels. It was little to him that every few nights one or another of his fellow-workmen perished horribly so long as his own chances of escape stood as three or four thousand to one. But as the main railway camp moved forward, leaving at Tsavo a few hundred concentrated in one spot, then-in the words of the Hindu poet who afterwards celebrated these events-'the people would sit and cry like cranes, complaining of the deeds of the lions.' Numbers of them, after a formal protest to their chief that they had come from India to work for the Government, not to serve as food for demons, fled from the evil-haunted place, those who dared to remain building themselves 'lion-proof' huts, or sleeping in pits under their tents, or slinging their bed to the branches of any available tree.

The part played by the narrator in this strange contest between man and beast must be read chiefly between the lines. From a lightly dropped as usual' we learn that the engineer in charge of the line added to his daily work of railway construction the extra

6

duty of demon-hunting by night. There were also holidays spent in painful exploration of thorny undergrowth, where it is to be conjectured that the hunter was exceedingly fortunate in failing to meet with his desired enemy, and one critical night which might easily have crowned instead of avenging the many catastrophes that went before. It is a noticeable proof of the dread and horror inspired by the deeds of these too successful man-eaters that the author in recounting their exploits never once accords them any of the terms of respect their persistent daring in some sense, one must think, deserved. Nor were their depredations altogether without cause. In a suggestive sentence Colonel Patterson tells how as from the frail wooden platform he felt rather than saw his formidable antagonist edging his way nearer and nearer, the profound stillness of the jungle was broken by a long-drawn sigh, sure sign of hunger.' One is conscious of a futile desire to hear the story for a moment from the other side. Viewed so, the black criminality of the lions would resolve itself into skilful and perilous hunting for necessary food, and the criminals would not differ greatly from some of their human neighbours, from the Wa Kamba, for example, of whom we learn that they were 'a peace-loving people when not hungry,' in which state they would think nothing of annihilating a railway maintenance for the food stores in their possession. There is no evidence that the Tsavo man-eater killed for the sake of killing. If he was a brute, on the whole it may be said that he was not an unreasonable brute. What shall we say of his fellow-beast, the Tsavo leopard, who in one night, for the mere fun of it, destroyed thirty sheep and goats? And of many others like him well known to Nature? We shall hardly escape from the conclusion lately set down by one who ought to know. It is useless,' writes Mr. Selous, for the scientist or the divine to tell an old hunter that there is no cruelty in Nature, because the man who has spent many years of his life in a wild country knows by actual experience that such an assertion is not true.'

There are pages here also, notably those on the mutiny of the Pathan stonemasons, which throw a dark light on the human side, and are yet not to be read without pride. For the rest, the story moves fairly balanced between construction and destruction, and appeals to us in the first instance no doubt by that which measured in chapters is its least part, the epic of the Tsavo lions,

African Nature Notes and Reminiscences.