clos for their own wine and a field leading up to it, where boys can play in the sun. Opposite the college is a hospital run by a religious order, and a fine stalwart nun kindly took us into the pharmacy, which keeps the furniture of 1760 with adorable faïence jars for drugs all round it-holding nothing nowadays. They get many offers to buy, but they stick to their treasures as well as to a set of cane-seated chairs of that period, a beautiful buffet, and other fine things, and rightly. Their visiting specialist, who comes all the way from Lyons, often brings people to see their pharmacy, and it increases their glory and their self-content. We ate our last meal in Belley on the lavish scalebut I must say no more except that it ended with a pintadon, or guinea-chicken, and that after it we said that we would eat no more that day; yet when dinner came it found us, as the French say, frais et dispos. M. Pernollet does not produce repletion. That dinner was at Culoz, whither an autobus had taken us, passing through little hamlets and picking up their letters, and making it very clear that we had only tapped the charm of that countryside. From the hill above Culoz we had a glimpse of the Lac de Bourget, which inspired what passes for Lamartine's masterpiece. Frankly, I would not give Brillat-Savarin's book for a wilderness of Lamartines. Looking back on it all now, I have only one regret-that we experimented so often with Rhone wines. Côte Rôtie and the rest are good to drink when you cannot get Bordeaux or Burgundy; but Burgundy is at home there, and the Corton and. Vosnes - Romanée which we did try at M. Pernollet's house, though not very old, shook for the first time my conviction that there is nothing so good as the best Bordeaux. Yet for a light wine to drink in hot weather, the local Virieu or Manicle, or, perhaps best of all, Maretel, are impossible to beat. They have sharpness without acidity, and a bouquet like some wild fruit-as if it were a blonde strawberry. MAINLY ABOUT TIGERS. BY AL KHANZIR. THE tale which follows does not purport to be a serious treatise on the art of tigershooting. Have not the giants of the past recounted their tiger exploits, and their worthy successors completed our store of knowledge? When Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands, who am I to prate of my beggarly score? No; the tale I have to tell is nothing better than an everyday tale of trivial happenings, seeking at best but to reproduce, however faintly, the intimate flavour of the jungle. On two heads, however, I shall venture to generalise, as a very brief preliminary. The first is this people will tell you nowadays that-unless you have friends among the Great -you will never see a tiger outside the Zoo; and that, besides, the cost of a shoot is prohibitive. Do not believe them. Was it not Sydney Smith who claimed that he "did once know a lord, but he's dead"? That, alas about the extent of my own acquaintance with the Great. Yet I have had the luck to meet a number of tigers. The truth is that in many districts there are far more tigers now than there were before the war, while the expenses incurred in the shooting of them have risen is extraordinarily little. To what, then, you may ask, are we to attribute this increase in tigers? Primarily, of course, to the war, when almost all shooting ceased; thereafter, to that blessed word "Indianisation." Already in jungly districts the white official is all but extinct. White officials and tigers were antipathetic. On the other hand, we all know the Jo'burg Jew's reply when asked if he went lion-hunting: he hadn't lost any, he said. The Indian official has seldom lost any tigers to speak of. Secondly, it has become quite the fashion of late to impugn the moral character of the tiger because he kills cattle, and to disparage him as a beast of the chase, all to the greater glorification of the lion. Even 'Maga' has subscribed to this campaign. Well, as to the first charge, if the tiger takes to a cattle - diet in districts where the balance of Nature has been upset and game is scarce, after all one must live; but the tiger generally is a somewhat larger and more powerful beast than the lion, and needs none to teach him how to hunt and kill the heaviest game. Further, the methods by which the tiger is normally hunted are the direct result of his environment. Exclude the artificial battues of the Great-who are, indeed, helpless in the matter, and you will find that most people who hunt tigers are ready, and anxious, to take a shot on the ground when opportunity offers. But in miles of continuous forest choked with grass how are you to find your tiger on foot? Usually it can't be done. Hence the beat to produce your tiger; and the machan in a tree, or the elephant's howdah-to increase the field of fire. But remember, there may be wounded tigers to be followed up on foot now, belike alone, and hating every moment of it, if you are a sportsman of the obscurer sort. Here I cannot do better than to quote from Mr Dunbar Brander's recent and charming book-he has been in at the death of two hundred tigers. After discussing the claims of the elephant, the buffalo, and the lion, he comes to the conclusion that "the most dangerous performance in the world which a sportsman is called upon to do is to follow up the trail of a wounded tiger." So there need be no lack of excitement. With this apologia for the tiger and his hunter, let us resume the story. The land that I would tell you of is the Gondwana, the land of the Gond. The Gond nowadays is becoming civilised and Hinduised. He is beginning to wear more clothes, and has changed his totems for anthropomorphic godlings, who the same whose theft of the hero Rama's wife forms the theme of the great Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. But there is nothing really demoniac about the Gond. He is a simple soul, living apart in his forests. There he dances; he sings; I regret to say, he drinks; he makes love. Any time left over from these pastimes he devotes to the ploughing of his little patchwork fields, and to the pursuit of live things great and small-he is particularly fond of a nice dish of mice. A vote he believes to be something edible-else why should all men want it. Yet, strange to relate, he belongs to one of the most contented communities in the world. My last visit to the Gondwana was timed for winter. I arrived just before Christmas, with six whole weeks of leave before me. The jungle has its fascination at all seasons. But to appreciate its full charm 1 'Wild Animals in Central India.' you must know it in the glory of the Indian cold weather; the fierce summer heat melts much of the gilt off the gingerbread. The soldier, luckless wight, has usually to take his gingerbread as he can get it; an obdurate Staff decrees that the winter shall be sacred to training. So I knew how lucky I was, rating my six precious weeks at their proper value. unlike a well-timbered park at home if only the grass had been a little greener and more tidy. And in the background, where the bārah ended, began primeval forest, stretching, but for kindred bārahs, in an almost unbroken expanse right from sea to sea. No campaign can be fought without a map, so I soon had mine spread out before me. In the forest landmarks are few. But that line of wooded bluffs there, silhouetted against the evening sky to the westward, must surely mark the course of the Sukha Nala, the stream draining the whole of the country round. Water means game, and game means tigers. The Sukha Nala was obviously the key-point of the enemy position. Picture, then, my entry upon the seat of war on that December day. We had had a longish march, so the sun was already. low when my two toy bullockcarts, rolling painfully on prehistoric disc-wheels of solid wood, had creaked and lurched, to their journey's end, to come to anchor at last in a delightful mango-grove beside the jungle village of Jakora, destined to be my headquarters for the Meanwhile the village campaign. Thereafter, while worthies were dropping in to that old campaigner, my bearer, salute the new arrival. They busied himself with the pre- were all cast in much the same paration of tea, and my orderly mould, these worthies. Fiveperformed sleight of hand with foot four of brown muscular collapsible camp furniture, I humanity; a diminutive loinhad leisure to survey the scene cloth; a fantastic little axe of operations. In the fore- like a miniature halberd; and ground, over the intervening a tobacco-pipe of twisted green dāk-scrub, appeared a cluster leaf tucked behind the ear— of thatched roofs. They be- there you have the Gond. longed to the mud-and-wattle There was the maqadam, the huts which go to make the village headman, to whom I township of Jakora. And signified my commissariat restrangely picturesque they quirements. There was the looked in the warm evening village shikari, proud possessor light, festooned with creepers of a fearsome Tower musket and the luxuriant greenery of and of a family history interthe pumpkin-crop. Beyond, in woven with the death of tigers the middle distance, lay the for three generations. And village bārah, a clearing of there was the Baiga-of whom some five hundred acres, not more anon. Soon there was VOL. CCXVII.—NO. MCCCXI. quite a crowd assembled, smok- left his hollow tree to plane ing the fags and drinking the tots of "country" rum doled out to them by my orderly while they retailed the local news. That was the thin end of the wedge; before many days were past every Gond for five miles round would know that he was safe for a drink and a smoke if he came with news of tiger. For every man who walks this earth there is, somewhere, his proper milieu. The railway company had mislaid my tents, so I was the sport of every breeze that blew. And we had just beaten off an invasion of red ants. But these were mere details. As the evening drew in on that first day at Jakora, I knew that it was good for me to be there; good to be back in the jungle again; to be listening once more to the well-remembered sounds. There was a joy in recognising the sequence of these sounds, like the joy of greeting old friends. The day's xylophonic chorus-in which the "coppersmith " had led gradually faded; only the dove carried on industriously till after sunset. Then came the peafowl's hour, when he moved out to feed in the clearing. Next, the jungle-cock made the forest ring with his crowing as he settled him to roost just after the sun had set. Thereafter, as it grew dark, the night-jar, flitting bat-like in the glades, began his oft-repeated liquid chuckle, and the flying squirrel his sonorous booming as he out into space on a nocturnal foray. Finally, the jungle was silent, but for the drone of the cicadas and the occasional distant yelp of a sambar or a cheetal. And a great peace descended on me. That first night, however, the silence was not to remain unbroken; the local menagerie had determined to serenade me properly. With the soup came the vicious, sawing, long-drawn snarl of a panther who paced the cart-track on his nightly beat. And, with the coffee, a herd of sambar arrived with a mighty splashing to disport themselves in the village tank on the jungle's edge about half a mile away. Later, from somewhere beyond the village, came sounds of a vulgar brawl. Bears are always badly brought up; these had fallen out tonight over their supper of berfruit. And in the "wee sma' 'oors" I woke to hear that best sound of all-the call of a hunting tiger away towards the Sukha Nala. Next day the campaign began. In any campaign it were well to arrange that the stars in their courses be propitious. Which, obviously, leads us up to the subject of the local gods. These gods of the Gond are many and wonderful, ranging from woodland spirits with picturesque names, enshrined in pools or rocks or trees in the forest, to celebrities with real thatched huts to live in, whose fame extends from Beersheba to Dan. Further, in every |