urged to gaming, there remains this substantial one, that those who try their luck, as the phrase is, must expect in the great majority of instances to lose both their labour and their money. The bank has, quite legitimately, certain chances in its favour, and it is backed up with a large capital; whereas the rash adventurer has usually no more than a few pieces in his pocket. Very possibly success may attend his earlier ventures. He may win a stake or two; but luck changes more rapidly than April weather-a run sets in against him; and in the twinkling of an eye he finds himself without a florin to pay for his dinner. Those who have watched the fluctuations of the tables can bear testimony to the frequency of such a phenomenon ; and we really have not much pity to bestow on the poor lad who has so stupidly burned his fingers. If he has but one grain of sense in his numskull, that may prove to him a most wholesome and salutary lesson -indeed we have known men who, after a week's experience of rougeet-noir, have registered a vow never to engage in games of chance; and -what is more to the purpose— have kept it.

One great advantage of a Continental watering-place is, that by repairing thither you are almost certain to escape for a time from the petty annoyances which continually assail you at home. It is a blessed thing, when you wake in the morning and prepare to go down to the spring while yet the dew is glittering on the grass, to be assured that you will not be called on to answer the letters of some half-dozen of idiots who, without any kind of justification, persist in pestering you with their correspondence. Also, you are freed from the domiciliary visits of those sanctimonious fiends, who, armed with subscription-books, force their way into your lobby, and will not leave it until you have surrendered a certain portion of your substance. Neither

are you liable to be deceived and distracted by those demons of deeper dye, who, under pretext of special business, induce your servants to usher them into the dining-room; but who are simply hawkers and touters of some book of prints or serial publication which, with a hearty malediction, you consign to the depths of Pandemonium. The best way of getting rid of such vermin, who otherwise are extremely pertinacious and troublesome, is to ring for the servant, and desire him to count the spoons. That method we have found effectual when all other modes of liberation seemed hopeless; for under no circumstances should a gentleman be betrayed into an exhibition of violence in his own domicile-besides, there are special reasons against laying hands on persons of so questionable a character, whose greasy apparel may possibly contain the seeds of contagious infection. But it is of no use going over the catalogue of domestic grievances. We all know what they are; and infinite is the relief when we are able, for a time, to escape from them. Moreover, you may depend upon it, that it is an excellent thing for men and for women too-occasionally to shift their quarters. If you remain shut up for the whole year, without intermission, in that mansion which you call your home-or rather if, like the old man of Cremona, you never venture beyond the precincts of your native city-you are, depend upon it, in a fair way of becoming a candidate for the honours of fogeydom. Your brain softens, or becomes utterly obtuse. You occupy yourself entirely with the miserable gossip of the place, and twaddle about the sayings and doings of Tom and Harry, as if they were by far the most wonderful fellows in the universe. Should it so be that you are a person of any kind of celebrity-as among the readers of Maga we know that there are many such-you begin to entertain the most ridiculously exag

ay,

gerated ideas of your own importance, and look for adulation at all hands; whereas you would be much the better of as stiff a dose of punishment as ever was administered by an acrimonious and unsparing critic. Be wise. Go forth into the world and enjoy your annual holiday. Mix with mankind, and study their customs, their habits, and their ways. So shall you shake off that slough of petty provincialism which, if you remain stationary, is sure to gather round you, just as green slime adheres to stones when the watercourse is low in summer. Strengthened and refreshed by that salutary change and relaxation, you will return to your work with tenfold energy and power, encounter with a cheerful heart the toils of the winter; and when spring returns again, and the singing of birds is heard in the woodland, you will hail the appearance of the primrose and the crocus as signs of your coming emancipation. They blossom long before the rose; but ere their fragile petals have disappeared, the bright green buds have clustered on the bush from which Flora's choicest garland shall be culled; and when the crimson streaks break out from the mantling sheath, then is it time for you to close your books, to quit the dusky town, and to let your heart be regaled with nature's sweet

est music from the throat of the thrush or the nightingale.

Gush forth and sparkle perennially, ye healing fountains of delight! Generations come and pass away, and yet still you flow from the cool bosom of mother Earth, as bountifully as in the days when the Romans first slaked their thirst and bathed in your pleasant waters. Grateful was the sound of your murmuring to the iron-clad chivalry of the north, when, wearied with war and oppressed with heat, they stretched their heavy limbs on the thick grass that rose around you like a coronal, to shelter the shimmering basin from the fervid noontide ray. And now, decorated by art, and in the midst of the comeliest of gardens, you give health and relief to the wanderer who comes from afar to partake, with a grateful heart, of those inestimable blessings which the Giver of all good things has provided so plenteously for His children. Farewell, ye pleasant haunts! Often, in the dreary nights of winter, when the snow is on the roof, and the wild winds are piping shrill, shall we think of the happy hours we have spent in those abodes of summer, and long for the return of the season when we may again sally forth to partake of that recreation without which life were a burden and a pain.

THE campaign in Persia was a short and successful one. The troops under Sir James Outram had been everywhere victorious. In the course of a few months two large Persian armies, leaving their camps standing, had, after a slight resistance, fled, completely disorganised the one to the mountain fastnesses in the neighbourhood of Kauzeroon, the other to the arid plains of Khuzistan. The officer in command of the latter, a Kajar, a prince of the blood-royal, had written to the Shah, and had assured him that though in due course of time the heads of all the invading infidels would most undoubtedly adorn the gate of his majesty's palace, for the present their big long-range guns had utterly destroyed the courage of the troops of the "king of kings." A 68-pound shot, which had gone lobbing by the Kajar's Cashmere-shawl tent, had on one occasion been picked up, placed on a camel's back, and at once started off to the capital, and eventually submitted to the inspection of the august eyes of the sovereign. When the intelligence reached Teheran that whole regiments had retired en masse without firing a shot-without ever having seen the colour of their enemy's mustaches-some of the general officers and chiefs of tribes were ordered into the presence, and had there received the punishment of the stick this accomplished, the rapacious prime minister laid hands upon them, and lightened them of all their ready-money and jewelhilted daggers. The Persian soldiers, who are not to be surpassed by any troops in the world for their endurance of fatigue, and for the length of their marches through an impoverished country, were, for the want of being led by their officers, after a few engagements, ready for immediate flight at the gleam of a British bayonet. Sir James Out

ram, hampered by the difficulty of procuring baggage-animals, had been obliged to encamp on the plain near Mahamra: this small town is situated on the right bank of the Hafar Canal. At a point a few furlongs distant from the town, the canal joins the noble river of the Shut-el-Arab. A march on Shuster had been determined upon, and a good understanding brought about with the chiefs of the Chab Arabs, the establishment of which, there appeared every probability, would have brought us into camp as many baggage-animals, in the shape of camels and mules, as were requisite for the advance of the army into the interior. A few weeks more would have seen Sir James Outram at Shuster, and there, awing the capital, with a victorious army at his elbow, he would have dictated his own terms; but diplomacy, which had failed so completely in all its efforts at the commencement of the Persian difficulty, again stepped in, and stayed the sword, to whose sole arbitration the matter very justly had been deferred. Whilst Sir James Outram had been planning a campaign, the carrying out of which would have brought the prime minister to his senses, and would have forced him to accept any terms, however advantageous to the English, Lord Cowley and Ferukh Khan had been busy with their pens at Paris. The result of their operations was, that a victorious general was stopped in mid career, and a treaty of peace drawn out, in which the conquered power treated apparently on equal terms with the conquering. In due course of time, when one morning the camp was astir as usual, at an early hour, busy with the preparations for a march into the interior, the despatch bearing the treaty of peace arrived. When the news spread, a general feeling of disappointment prevailed throughout the little

camp. In a few hours the piles of commissariat stores, the mountaintrain, the light field-guns, the animals of the land - transport, were being hurried down for re-embarkation to the river-the frigates and transports lying off, ready to receive them, a few yards from the banks. More than one young subaltern, who had pictured himself arrayed in gorgeous silks of Persia's loom, the result of a successful loot, or who had indulged in a vision of rapid promotion, possibly of a brevet, now sadly turned his thoughts to the routine life of an Indian cantonment, perhaps less sadly to a favourite pony which he had been obliged to leave behind, his only regret when his regiment was ordered off, at a few hours' notice, on active service. He little thought that in the course of a few short weeks that routine life of cantonments would be a thing of the past -at least for many months to come that before two short months were over the north of India would be in a blaze of insurrection, that he might be one of those called upon to stem its tide, and that the work in store for him would be far heavier, far more harassing, than anything he had seen in Persia, or that he would have been likely to see had the war continued. A week after the arrival of the despatch saw the frigates, each with its two or three transports in tow, steaming down the Shut-elArab, bearing their living freights, some to Bushire, some direct to India. The date groves of Mahamra were silent and deserted; the bustle and stir of a camp were no more; the only objects moving on that white glistening plain beyond were a few half-naked Arabs scratching about in the sand where the camp had stood; and these, seen through a hazy mirage, were grotesque-looking enough, their heads appearing and disappearing in upper stratas of the heated air, separated by several yards from their bodies, and their arms and legs glancing hither and thither in detached fragments

over the surface of the baking soil. As we passed up the river on our way to Baghdad, on board the little river steamer the Comet, a glance up the Hafar Canal showed us the tall masts of an English sloop-ofwar, her long 32-pounders peering out ominously at the low mudwalls of the town of Mahamra. The sloop, lying at anchor in the deep water of the canal, was all that remained of the fleet of some fiveand-thirty vessels that were lying off here and in the Shut-el-Arab river so short a time previous. The sloop had been ordered to anchor here, and to remain till the news reached that the terms of the treaty had been fully carried out by the Persians; also a certain portion of the British force before Bushire was to remain under the same orders. One of the terms of the treaty was to the effect that commissioners were to proceed to Herat, and see that the town had been entirely evacuated by the Persian troops. Until their report bearing this out fully should reach the officer in command, English troops were to remain at Bushire, and the sloop was to remain before Mahamra. As the sharp bows of the Comet flashed by the opening of the canal into the Shut-el-Arab, we took a last look at Mahamra, its demolished batteries, and its belts of date groves, among which scores of stout trees might be seen smashed and doubled like broken straws, where a 68-pounder from the English frigates had gone crashing through the belt into the camp beyond. Soon we reached the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates: the little vessel, steaming gaily along these, the waters of the old old world, shot into the channel of the Tigris. Three days' constant steaming, lodging now and then on a sandbank, brought us to Baghdad. Here it was determined upon by General Outram and the Honourable Charles Murray, that a mission, consisting of three officers and a doctor, should proceed to Herat. We were ordered to ac

company the Minister, and form part of his suite, as far as the capital, for which place he was soon to set forth, the war being finished. From the capital we were to make the best of our way through Khorassan, and across the eastern frontier of Persia, into Afghanistan. If we reached that place and the odds, as it turned out afterwards, were considerably against such an event-we were to remain there till orders from the Indian Government should reach us. The English Minister's return to the capital, from the day we crossed the TurcoPersian frontier, was an ovation the whole way. The boom of those big guns of the English had inspired the Persian mind with a wholesome dread of England's power of retaliation, at all events for the time being. The journey was a sort of daily-recurring fête champêtre. Tents of gorgeous hues were pitched in shady spots, tiny streams of water brought their pleasant music to our ears the livelong day and night. Lumps of snow, dipped in delicious sherbets, were handed to us in delicately-carved wooden spoons the instant our feet were out of the stirrup at the end of the morning's march. Scores of wildlooking Kurdish horsemen scoured the country in all directions. Wheeling in circles, pursuing one another at tip-top speed over sometimes roughish ground, they playfully sent their jerreeds, humming through the air, under our very noses. They plunged boldly miles away to the right and left into every wooded hollow and dell, so assuring themselves that no murderous, plundering Buktiaree was there lying concealed, meditating mischief to our precious persons. Our Mehmandar, the officer appointed by the Shah to accompany the Minister, was a stout, handsome-looking man, who had an easy, off-hand manner of telling most astonishing lies. Our early experience of his Munchausen talents dated from the very first morning he met us at the frontier. That

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day the camp was pitched on the banks of a small stream, whose clear rapids and still, deep pools were highly suggestive of trout, a fish the Persians have, I believe, only lately begun to appreciate for the use of the table. The Mehmandar, who had been some days awaiting in this camp the arrival of the Minister at the frontier, was asked whether any fish had been taken in the stream. Fish by Allah!" a fish that very morning had been taken by his people-such a fish as he had not seen for many a day. He gave us, in fine rolling language, the length, the depth, and the breadth thereof, the number of strokes on his back, and the colour of his belly; in fact, he entered so minutely into the detail, and swore so emphatically "Becheshm"-by his eyes to every particular regarding the capture of the prize, that I, for one, never dreamt for one moment but that the whole of the statement was true. On making inquiries afterwards, we learned that no fish had been taken by any of the Mehmandar's people, and what was more, the inhabitants of the neighbouring village assured us that no fish had ever been known in the stream. Four weeks' journey brought us to the capital. We rode in, smothered with dust; the Minister in front, riding on a tall, maneless, Turcoman horse, presented that morning by the Shah, and decked out in turquoise beads and gold and silver trappings. Beside him rode the Persian officer of state, who had ridden out the prescribed number of miles-not a yard beyond-to meet the English Minister, and escort him to the gate of the embassy. We, the junior members of the mission, came crowding in behind, a regular fight ensuing between the different members of the Persian official's suite and ourselves at the narrow gateways, and through the hardly less narrow streets, as to who should push through first, and as to who should get hustled into the rear of the cortege, there to be bumped to and fro by the pipe