The THE Company invite Goldsmiths & Silversmiths Company Ltd Jewellers & Silversmiths to H.M. the King 112 Regent Street, London, W. 1 ONLY ONE ADDRESS. NO BRANCHES. 6 THE BEGGAR'S OPERA' IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. BY MRS COMYNS CARR, . 790 BY J. O. P. BLAND, 798 806 A CADDIE OF THE CAMPAGNA. THE VICTORIAN AGE-A PARADOX-PHILISTINES AND MEN OF GENIUS WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET, SUBSCRIBERS BOTH AT HOME AND ABROAD CAN HAVE 'BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE' SENT BY POST MONTHLY FROM THE PUBLISHING OFFICE, 45 GEORGE STREET, EDINBURGH, FOR 30S. YEARLY. THE Olivers were an outstanding couple, even in that outstanding body of men and women who form the thin but efficient bulwark against the lean wolf-men roaming the hills in packs from the Malakand to Dera Ghazi Khan, and looking down with covetous eyes from their barren fastnesses on the plains, shining with water, rich in beeves, yellow with corn, and teeming with loot and women. Over those sleek river laced lands successive waves of wolf-men have surged out of the ravenous North, century after century, from the passes which gave the Sikhs the cholera in the days of Ranjeet Singh, harrying, ravishing, and leaving their scars to the walls of that Delhi which is a far cry, as all Hind from Cape Comorin to Lundi Kotal can tell you. VOL. CCXI.—NO. MCCLXXX. I. When for the first time in history a counter-wave swept northwards from the capital of the Moguls over the prostrate Punjab to the foot of the astounded hills, that wave was crested by white men, who established themselves forthwith like a wire fence, barbed too, between the tribesmen and their prey. Our side the fence law, order, and security, said the audacious Feringhis; your side, go as you please. And the white race succeeded under conditions which had baffled the Lion of the Punjab himself, and amid men who had scoffed at the Sikh Raj. Of the many great Frontiersmen of that first wave, in the days between the overthrow of the Khalsa Army and the Mutiny, the greatest alike in stature and personality was the black-bearded giant, John Nicholson. 2 D As a merry stripling Tom Oliver had ridden the Frontier from Bannu to Peshawar with the famous Deputy Commissioner in the days when the feeling between the officers of John Company, and Queen's Service men ran to duelling point. He had accompanied his chief on his ride from Kohat through the murky pass to Peshawar at the time the mysterious lotus-flower was being passed in secrecy and silence from native regiment to native regiment, and had acted as Nicholson's A.D.C. when he succeeded Neville Chamberlain in the command of the Moveable Column that marched on Delhi after saving the Punjab. Young Oliver had been beside his chief in the narrow lane by the Kabul Gate when, after the death of the gallant Jacob, the 1st Bengal Fusiliers wavered under a terrific fire from the roof-tops, and Nicholson sprang forward to rally them to a fresh assault on the Burn bastion. At the moment his leader fell mortally wounded, young Oliver fell too at his side. "Where's Lad?" was the constant question of the great soldier during his nine days' death agony on the Ridge. And "Where's Lad? " were among the last words he muttered, blue-lipped and faintly frothing, when at last death brought relief to one of the noblest of Englishmen. To his chief Tom Oliver had always been Lad; and to the Frontier, Lad he remained long after the last gleam of boyish ness had vanished, and he had become the sombre soldier of Frontier legend, a man of a temper apt to keep the border marches and cope with the iron inhabitants of those iron hills. It was not till twenty years after the death of his first leader that his nickname changed. The dun mountains that lie across the gate of the North like some old lion, showing his bones as he dies of starvation, but majestic and terrible still, are for all their air of deadness always aflicker and not seldom ablaze. Those blazes are sudden as explosions. A hush, a long-time smouldering, perhaps a faint eddy of smoke upon a ridge, then a sudden spurt of flame stabs the darkness like a dagger, and four hundred miles of Frontier is alight. Forthwith ensues molten eruption. Down a hundred gaunt hillsides turbulent lashkars of shaven-headed swordsmen come tumbling like lava under huge green banners, and inspired by Allah-intoxicated mullahs. The origin of these eruptions is nearly always the same, as any political who has been agent in one of the passes and knows his job will tell you. The mullahs get at the women in the name of God, as the mullahs of most lands are wont to do. Thereafter the women approach their men daintily and with mocking smiles. "You are not men," they say. "You are children. We will play with you no more till |