"Jack, you have not been very frank with me lately, and I feel rather hurt, for I have been very frank with you, and have spoken more freely to you than most fathers would speak to their sons. Why did you not tell me you were writing? Why did you leave me to find it out for myself? I discovered it this morning accidentally. Why did you not tell me?" His son's brown face flushed deeply while he listened. "I wanted to tell you all along," he answered. Jack set his umbrella spinning in his He scarcely seemed to know quacked, another umbrella coming "Then what kept you back?" El- "Jack," he said. Jack looked up in surprise, his eyes gradually losing their inward expression in a flash of recognition. "Hullo, pater! Why, what are you doing in the rain ? " His father turned back and accompanied him towards Hyde Park Corner. "I might retort the question upon you, Jack," Elliot said, in a rather constrained manner. "But I think I needn't, for I could supply the answer. You are here to think?" He tried not to give to the words an expression of uneasy suspicion, but hardly succeeded in his endeavor. The young man was obviously a little "That's perfectly true," he an- "I should have told you, only — only somehow it seemed very difficult to speak after that first evening, pater. Don't you see that it was difficult ?” "Why?" Well, after what you said, after your advice. You did not exactly encourage me to go on. You did not sympathize with my enthusiasm much. I saw that. It seemed to be almost flying in your face to write after your remarks about ambition." "But still you did write." The young man looked at him with eager brown eyes. "I had to write," he said. "I had got hold of a fine idea. All through the voyage I lived with it and turned it over in my mind. I was simply longing to get to work on it.” "When did you begin?" asked suddenly. Elliot Jack looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Father, don't be vexed, don't think I disregard your words, only after all "No, on a life in particular, to be we must each do something in life, and exact." "Your own?" if we don't hope we can do nothing. I began the book that night." After our talk? After I had gone "In a sense," Jack said, rather eva- "Yes." They walked on in silence, leaving the Serpentine behind them. They passed the deserted band-stand and the little green seats soaking in the rain. Elliot glanced at them mechanically and pictured the summer evenings when they would be thronged with shop-people listening to the gay music of the orchestra. He felt mor bidly hurt by what his son had told him, morbidly and preposterously vexed. Knowing it was absurd and unnatural, he was yet unable to banish the feeling. From Blackwood's Magazine. TWO GREAT SHIKARIS. WE always feel reassured as to the immediate future of the empire when we read the memoirs of men like Baker and Braddon. For both have attained the honorable distinction of dispensing with the titles their sovereign bestowed and representatives of the Raleighs and on them. They are the descendants the Drakes - animated to incessant action by an irrepressible spirit of adventure, versatile in their gifted manhood, prompt in emergencies, ready of resource, with iron nerve and unflinching courage. The two had much in common in their tastes and qualities, although physically very different. Baker was of enormously powerful build, with broad shoulders and masAnd, after all, you sive chest. Braddon is tall, spare, are perfectly right. Why should what and sinewy, yet with all the appearance I told you influence you? It would of being preternaturally tough. Jack broke the silence at last. Surely you are not angry, pater,' he said, "because - because "Because I have failed, that is no reason why you should fail too. That is what you mean, Jack," Elliot said with an effort. 66 not have influenced me when I was your age. No, we must all make our effort. It is that necessity, that impulse, which keeps us really alive. Make yours, my boy, and God grant that it may be successful." It cost him much to say those words, SO much that he was intensely ashamed, for he dissected his own feelings as well as those of others, and he could not hide from himself his own unworthiness at that moment. But Jack was unaware of the struggle within him, and easily touched. The son guessed the pain of failure that gnawed at his father's heart. That was all. He did not guess the wakening jealousy. He put his arm through his father's. "Thank you, sir," he said. "And now let me into your literary secret," said John Elliot. "Tell me how you reached the page I read, and how you mean to pass on from it. Let me live a little in your work, now that my own is done.” Jack obeyed eagerly. Thus a certain confidence was reestablished between them. 1 In deed, neither could have gone through their trying experiences had they not originally been of exceptionally robust constitution, although Braddon's health was shaken by a severe attack quently brought to the doors of death of jungle-fever, and Baker was frein the malarious swamps of Central Africa. Both braced themselves for the more serious business of their lives by daring indulgence in the dangerous wild sports which were their favorite pursuits, before turning their many sided talents to account in adminis trating, organizing, and in directing successful irregular warfare. The chief difference between them is, that Baker, being born to affluence, was more absolutely master of his actions, and so found opportunities for exploration and travel which Braddon never enjoyed. He had the fortune to associate himself with the solution of the great problem which had puzzled the savants of Europe since the days of the father of history. In the way of Baker was perhaps unsurpassed sport, "the mer as an elephant-hunter, although ri-ern sweep of the Nile. Description," An excellent biography of Baker has been lately published.1 But the authors had to face one insuperable difficulty. As to all the most exciting periods and episodes of his life, Baker had been his own best biographer. Few men who have followed literature as a profession had a more picturesque or fascinating style; his dramatic power of sharp presentation is remarkable, and he excels in concise but most effective description. His early volumes on Ceylon are graphic in the extreme; but perhaps he is seen at the best in the opening chapters of "The Nile Tributaries; "at least, within a narrow compass, they are the best example of his literary power. Nothing can be more strangely impressive than the description of the terrible Nubian desert, traversed by the shorter cameltrack which cuts across the long west1 Sir Samuel Baker: A Memoir. By T. Douglas Murray and A. Silva White. Macmillan & Co. of Egyptians. In their agcnies of thirst, the men were delighted by the vision of a broad sheet of water shimmering in the distance. They refused to listen to the warnings of their guide; and when he would not lead them in the desired misdirection they slew him. Then they rushed away headlong over the sands to see the delusive mirage vanish before them. The guide was gone; the way was lost, and every man of that ill-fated regiment perished. The caravan-track is only marked by the skeletons of camels, which lie thicker and closer as the wells are approached. Movrahd (the bitter well) is a mournful spot, well known to the tired and thirsty camel, the hope of which has urged him fainting on his weary way to drink one the dry desert air had converted the hide there were no worms to devour the carcasses; but the usual sextons are crows, though sometimes too few to perform their office. As many wretched animals simply crawl to this place to die, the crows, ... from long experience and practice, can | stood on the banks of the noble Atbara form a pretty correct diagnosis upon the case of a sick camel. Passing onwards beyond Khartoum, in a short sentence or two he gives a vivid idea of the volume of the Nile, which has reclaimed in course of ages, from the shallow sea and the sands of the Libyan desert, the Egypt that has become a synonym for luxuriant fertility. As we travelled along the margin of the Atbara and felt with the suffering animals the exhaustion of the climate, I acknowledged the grandeur of the Nile that could overcome the absorption of such thirsty sands and the evaporation caused by the burning atmosphere of Nubia. For nearly twelve hundred miles from the junction of the Atbara with the parent stream to the Mediterranean, not one streamlet joined the mysterious river, neither one drop of rain ruffled its waters. Nevertheless the Nile overcame its enemies, while the Atbara shrank to a skeleton, bare and exhausted, reduced to a few pools that lay like blotches along the broad surface of glaring sand. It would have been difficult to indi cate with more concise eloquence the two great problems he had set himself to solve. These were, in the first place, the river-sources, and in the second, the origin of those masses of loam in solution which at a certain season swell the Nile to the turgid flood that annually renews and irrigates the surface of the Delta. Nor can we refrain from one other ... River at the break of day. The wonder of habitants of the pool? He had told how crocodiles, hippopotami, and monster fish had been all crowded together in a lakelet. The prison doors were opened, the prisoners were released, and rejoiced in the mighty stream of the Atbara. We have quoted enough to do some justice to Baker as a writer, and to illustrate the unavoidable difficulties his biographers have had to face in attempting to reproduce the brilliant narrative it is well-nigh impossible to condense. But to return from the style to the man, we are indebted to the biography for valuable information not otherwise accessible, especially as to Baker's beginnings in life. The eldest son of a wealthy merchant of Bristol, he inherited a comfortable fortune. So it was that he undertook his first sporting trip to Ceylon with every advantage money could supply, and that afterwards he was enabled at his own expense to fit out his costly expedition extract which reminds us, though on for African exploration. He was first an infinitely larger scale, of the sud-attracted to Ceylon as a magnificent den flooding of the Findhorn after a elephant-preserve. We have compared spate in the hills. Baker had been him to Selous as a mighty elephantcamping on the bank of the Atbara; slayer. But whereas Selous in achievmany of his people, with the Arab villagers, had been sleeping on its sandy bed. At midnight there was a general alarm when a rumbling like thunder was heard in the distance. The familiar warning was recognized, and in a few minutes all was in agitation, as the sleepers were saving themselves and their belongings. The river had arrived like a thief in the night. On the morning of the 24th June I ing his first great feats had to content himself with wretched and unreliable guns, Baker always prided himself on possessing a first-rate battery, selected with extreme care and utterly regardless of price. He could trust to his guns as absolutely as to his nerve. But as it was not every man who could bend the bow of Ulysses, so few could have handled like playthings Baker's ponderous weapons. After an exhaust ing chase, he would snatch from a Baker's dressing-table was decked out gun-bearer a fifteen-pound rifle, and as coquettishly as if their home had pressing onwards, "faint but still been in Mayfair; and when their tabpursuing," deliver the death-shot as ernacle had been set up among the steadily as if armed with an air-cane. savages of Unyoro, her boudoir was "The Baby," whose scream or roar draped in gay colors, and adorned with became familiar to his followers and mirrors and engravings. On the other enemies in Africa, was by far the most hand, when it was a question of exformidable. For that piece of shoul-ploration or sport, no one held anyder ordnance discharged a half-pound thing more than bare necessities more shell, and the recoil of its heavy charge lightly, and he would face imminent would send its master spinning round starvation sooner than retrace his like a teetotum. steps. "The Rifle and Hound in Ceylon" In those Ceylon days, even more is a delightful book, although, as the than now with our explosive shells thrilling adventures are necessarily of and express rifles, the records of his similar character, the climax of sensa-elephant-shooting must have sounded tions is speedily reached, and the almost incredible. Gordon-Cumming narrative latterly becomes somewhat used to expend fifteen to five-andmonotonous. On the first occasion twenty shots on a single unfortunate Baker went thither for a year's sport; animal. Baker thought little of bagsubsequently, having been charmed ging six, eight, or ten out of a single with the country, he returned as a herd-it sounds somewhat ludicrous settler with his brother. There never when he speaks of a "bag" of elewas any lack of money, and his free-phant-and grumbles sometimes at handed liberality made him friends having to content himself with two or among the forest tribes, who served three. His plan was always to come to him as gun-bearers and trackers. He close quarters. He trusted to the shot went thither when even coffee-planting at the temple or the forehead, which was still in its infancy; when there was almost always stupefying if not were vast stretches of trackless prime- immediately fatal. On the Abyssinian val forest, where no European had ever trod; when you could hear elephants trumpeting in the jungle round Newera Ellia, and shoot a buck on occasion out of the window of the bungalow. Baker lived to learn to subsist for days on wild roots with an occasional handful of the coarse durrha, and to deem kabobs from a rank old he-goat a luxury. But he confesses that he always liked his comforts, and invariably made himself as comfortable as circumstances admitted. The sylvan hunting-lodge he planned and built at Newera Ellia was a model of architecture suited to the climate, and the housekeeping was always on the most liberal scale. All his expeditions into waste places were carefully planned, with tents and portable articles of furniture, cases of wine, spirits, and liqueur, well-drilled servants, and a competent cook. So, when passing the rainy season on the Atbara, Lady frontiers he came to the unpleasant conclusion that the forehead shot could never be relied upon with the African elephant, and consequently the danger was infinitely increased. In Ceylon, the great risk at those close quarters was when the charging elephant threw up his trunk so as to protect his forehead. Of course there was the chance of being deserted by the gun-carriers, but both Baker and Braddon generally assured the presence of stanch followers by their unruffled coolness and the deadly precision of their shooting. The worst peril in elephant-shooting is from solitary "rogues,' as wary and cunning as they are vicious. In the Ceylon forests they were unusually numerous, and they were wont to go patrolling on the outskirts of each herd, although they did not actually associate with it. Baker had many of his most narrow escapes when attempting to dispose of those vigilant sentinels. On |