agriculture, there suddenly rushes in a poet,
retained for the purpose, called a Praiser.
This literary gentleman wears a leopard's
head over his own. and a dress of tigers'
tails; he has the appearance of having come
express on his hind legs from the Zoological
Gardens; and he incontinently strikes up the
chief's praises, plunging and tearing all the
while. There is a frantic wickedness in this
brute's manner of worrying the air, and
gnashing out " Oh what a delightful chief he
is! O what a delicious quantity of blood he
sheds! O how majestically he laps it up!
O how charmingly cruel he is! O how he
tears the flesh of his enemies and crunches
the bones! O how like the tiger and the
leopard and the wolf and the bear he is!
O, row row row row, how fond I am of
him!"—which might tempt the Society of
Friends to charge at a hand-gallop into the
Swartz-Kop location and exterminate the
whole kraal.

When war is afoot among the noble
savages—which is always— the chief holds a
council to ascertain whether it is the opinion
of his brothers and friends in general that the
enemy shall be exterminated. On this occasion,
after the performance of an Umsebeuza,
or war song,—which is exactly like all the
other songs— the chief makes a speech to his
brothers and friends, arranged in single file.
No particular order is observed during the
delivery of this address, but every gentleman
who finds himself excited by the subject,
instead of crying " Hear, hear! " as is the
custom with us, darts from the rank and
tramples out the life, or crushes the skull, or
mashes the face, or scoops out the eyes, or
breaks the limbs, or performs a whirlwind of
atrocities on the body, of an imaginary enemy.
Several gentlemen becoming thus excited at
once, and pounding away without the least
regard to the orator, that illustrious person
is rather in the position of an orator in an
Irish House of Commons. But, several of
these scenes of savage life bear a strong
generic resemblance to an Irish election, and
I think would be extremely well received
and understood at Cork.

In all these ceremonies the noble savage
holds forth to the utmost possible extent about
himself; from which (to turn him to some
civilised account) we may learn, I think, that
as Egotism is one of the most offensive and
contemptible littlenesses a civilised man can
exhibit, so it is really incompatible with
the interchange of ideas; inasmuch as if we
all talked about ourselves we should soon
have no listeners, and must be all yelling and
screeching at once on our own separate
accounts: making society hideous. It is my
opinion that if we retained in us anything
of the noble savage, we could not get rid of it
too soon. But the fact is clearly otherwise.
Upon the wife and dowry question, substituting
coin for cows, we have assuredly nothing
of the Zulu Kaffir left. The endurance of
despotism is one great distinguishing mark
of a savage always. The improving world
has quite got the better of that too. In like
manner, Paris is a civilised city, and the
Théâtre Français a highly civilised theatre;
and we shall never hear, and never have
heard in these later days (of course) of the
Praiser there. No, no, civilised poets have
better work to do. As to Nookering
Umtargarties, there are no pretended
Umtargarties in Europe, and no European Powers
to Nooker them; that would be mere spydom,
subornation, small malice, superstition,
and false pretence. And as to private
Umtargarties, are we not in the year eighteen
hundred and fifty-three, with spirits rapping at
our doors?

To conclude as I began. My position is,
that if we have anything to learn from the
Noble Savage, it is what to avoid. His virtues
are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his
nobility, nonsense. We have no greater
justification for being cruel to the miserable
object, than for being cruel to a WILLIAM
SHAKSPEARE or an ISAAC NEWTON; but he
passes away before an immeasurably better
and higher power than ever ran wild in any
earthly woods, and the world will be all the
better when his place knows him no more.

THE MAHOMMEDAN MOTHER.

MUSSOORIE and Landour, situated in the
lower range of the Himalaya mountains,
form the favorite sanitarium of the upper
part of India. The scenery is more beautiful
than that of Simla; for Mussoorie and
Landour command a view of Dehra Dhoon,
which resembles (except that the Dhoon is
grander and more extensive) the plains of
Italy as seen from the ascent of the Simplon.
The Mall of Mussoorie is crowded every
evening with visitors; some on horseback,
some on hill ponies, some on foot, and some in
the janpan (something like a sedan-chair
carried by four hill men). A gayer scene it
would be impossible to conceive. Every one
knows his neighbour; and, in passing along
the narrow road stoppages are frequent.
Compliments must be exchanged, and the
news or scandal of the day gossipped about.
Every now and then you hear a cry of
"What a shame! " from a terrified lady in a
janpan, while a couple of lovers gallop past on
spirited Arabs, at full speed: sometimes a
shriek from a nervous mamma reverberates
through the valleys, when she beholds her
children in the way of the heedless pair.

Accidents sometimes occur. A few years
ago, a lady and a gentleman were riding round
a place called the Camel's Back; the road gave
way and they fell down a precipice several
hundred feet. The horses were killed, but
the riders miraculously escaped with only a
few severe bruises. On another occasion, a
gentleman of the civil service was taking his
evening walk, when one of his dogs ran