between two tame animals, to the adjacent river,
where they drank as only elephants can after
nearly a week of fasting.

"Thus terminated the most successful, if not
the most exciting, kraal known for many years.
Rapidly the gathering dispersed: horses, nags,
tats, and bullocks, were all once more in requisition,
and soon the dusty road was covered with
vehicles of every conceivable description, wending
their way homewards."

It may be added, that a series of stereoscopic
photographs of the kraal were executed by a
professional photographer in the island.

HOW KING CHARLES'S HEAD WAS
LOOSENED.

WHEN Charles the First came to the throne,
somebody prayed that his head might be set in
the right direction, for if he made a false start
there would be no turning him from it. As
this was said by a friend of Divine Right in
Kings, we may be permitted humbly to take up
his parable, and so, comparing Sacred Majesty
to a nag, go on to remember how Charles the
First, when first harnessed to the gig of the
constitution, was trotted out upon the king's highway
by the handsome George Villiers, alias Duke of
Buckingham, who had been groom to his sire;
and how this groom, having him by the ear,
turned him with his head looking down the road
when it ought to have looked up the road, and
still holding him by the ear, ran by his side while
he trotted him off the way he shouldn't go. Old
Parliament, who drove then and still drives
the national gig, did his best to whip off that
impudent groom, and gave the nag a flip or
two, to make him shake his ears free of the
fellow. The groom ran until he dropped, and
the horse that still wouldn't be turned steadily
galloped headlong down the road instead of up
the road, running the gig against every post,
tumbling one wheel or both wheels into every
ditch, viciously hoping to pitch old Parliament
out, and leave him behind to die of a cracked
crown. But the old driver kept his crown
uncracked, and the obstinate nag that wouldn't
turn, had his head pulled at until it became so
loose that a little more would pull it off. And
so at last it was pulled off; only in time to save
the gig and its driver from destruction.

Now, if we would know all the history of the
false start that ended in this tragedy of the nag's
head; if we would actually see George Villiers
running at the horse's ears, with old Parliament
firm in his seat, laying his whip over the impudent
groom's shoulder; if we stand at our windows to
note how the mulish animal still rears and plunges
upon its false course after that unhappy man has
dropped down dead and been run over by the
gig-wheel; let us read the book that every one
who cares about the history of English liberty
and right is now reading: MR. FORSTER'S Life
of Sir John Eliot. For, the spirit of the English
parliament was personified in Sir John Eliot
during those first days and years which determined
issues that were, of all great issues affecting
the welfare of this country, the most momentous.
And of all that Sir John Eliot and
the parliament whereof he was the right hand,
did, while the head that disdained the curb was
loosening, Mr. Forster, by help partly of a large
mass of Eliot's own papers, which are the
precious heirlooms of his descendants, and partly
by help of unwearied research among other unpublished
documents in the State Paper Office
and elsewhere, and chiefly by help of his own
clear judgment and quick wit, gives for the
first time full and exact account. We take leave
to say that as Eliot was born for his work, so
Mr. Forster was born for the recording of Eliot's
work. Nothing but a perception of the spirit of
that time, perfectly wonderful in its original distinctness,
and sharpened to the utmost by study
and ripe sympathy, could have produced this
book out of fifty-fold the materials at Mr. Forster's
command. The old life stirs again in his
pages. From the other side of two centuries,
the voices of the patriots come to us no longer
as from the other side of a dead wall, with
muffled sound of which we can make out only
here and there the sense; but they are clear and
familiar as the voices of the kindred who are
sitting by our own hearth; the old debates of
Charles's parliaments being, in fact, made as
fresh to us as the debates in to-day's newspaper
— and a good deal more interesting.

Eliot himself put thus into a formula, the
whole tragedy of Charles's reign; it was: " To
make the men most obnoxious most secure, and
those that were most hateful to the public to be
most honoured and esteemed." Eliot's biographer,
in speaking of the precedents drawn from
the reign of Elizabeth, for injustice in the reign
of Charles the First, points out that the queen,
to whose reign the parliament always referred
as to a time of greatness past, made no secret
of her mistakes, but showed a prompt redress
of them. "This," he says, "is what her example
should have taught a court which unhappily
was incapable of learning anything. She
understood, if ever a ruler did, the art in which
the highest government consists, of so conforming
to the veracities and necessities around it,
as to make itself really the expression of the
people governed, in their changing condition, in
their new and impatient wants, in their increasing
intelligence. But Charles the First
had no one to tell him this, nor probably would
have listened if there had been. The people
around him could only see that he was not as
brave as the great queen, and lament that he
should rather have taken example by his father.
But it would have been well for him if he had
done even this. He suffered for want of his
father's cowardice, quite as much as for want of
Elizabeth's courage. His was one of those natures,
not uncommon, which having no real self-reliance
have yet a most intense self-reference,
and make up ever for yielding in some point by
obstinacy in some other; and it was his misery
always to resist, as he yielded, too late. After
giving up everything that had sustained the