careful step, and, if possible, keeping the trunk of the tree between him and the musical unknown. Should he thus succeed in surprising him, he will see perched up aloft there a little green frog, with a square bull-dog-shaped head, and quick, black, intelligent eye, whose puffed throat, moving with the modulations of his song, as though water were trickling down it, announces plainly that he is the vocalist, to whose amorous or contented mood it is to be ascribed.

They are often kept in confinement, in which state (merely in a glass, covered with muslin) they will survive a long while; the only food they seem to require or care for being house-flies, which they display extraordinary quickness in seizing and swallowing. The instant one is put in under the muslin cover, a small bright eye scans it for a moment; there is a dart from below, and the fly has disappeared; the whole process being so rapid that the eye can hardly follow it.

Talking of flies, would that all the powers to which they are welcome as food, or unwelcome as company, would join in annihilating them at once and for ever! Had I my choice as between them, midges, gnats, fleas, and other strange bedfellows with which travelling (as well as poverty, according to the old proverb) is calculated to make one acquainted, the one on whom I should first pass extreme sentence would be the common House-fly. In bed or out, sleeping or waking, in hot or cool climates, as soon as summer brings them forth, there they are, ever present, ever ready to renew their intolerable persecutions.

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After suffering from their attacks for some months, one is really almost tempted to consider Domitian a benefactor to his species, or, at any rate, to fancy that the author of Busy, curious, thirsty fly, etc." if he did not write it in a spirit of bitter mockery, would never have given utterance to a piece of such maudlin sentimentality if he had not been indued with a skin of more than ordinary thickness, or been fortunate enough to live in a country where they confined their

visitations to the sugar-basin and creamjug.

Were they to limit themselves to one feeding-ground, and simple downright biting, one might, perhaps, sleep through it and forgive them; but who can endure the determined, pertinacious attacks of a regular man-eating fly? Watch one, as with eager, hurried pace, and wings nervously raised and half quivering with excitement, he approaches the face of a person enjoying (perhaps after a disturbed night) the quiet sleep of the early morning. Of a flea's presence he would probably be unconscious till he awakened; the step of a gnat is so light, and his bite so gradual, that, should his humming not have disturbed the sleeper, he, while enjoying his meal, would have left his victim in undisturbed enjoyment of his sleep; he "lives and lets live." But otherwise is it with the fly; he feeds as he goes, and the titillatory powers of his six feet and extended sucker, would be together too much for the skins of reapers, thick even in proportion to the proverbial hardness of their ilia. Again and again may the hand, half in sleep, be raised to brush away the intruder; no sooner have the muscles once more become relaxed, and the hand has sunk inactive after a vain attempt to scratch the face he has left, than he renews his attack, to be again driven off by the disturbed slumberer. Again and again will he return with undiminished pertinacity, only giving up the attempt when his victim, at length, resigning himself to his fate, relinquishes further sleep as hopelessly unattainable, and betakes himself to the active business of the day. Of a truth, no more appropriate or suggestive title could have been devised for the arch-enemy, or one breathing a deeper hatred for the accursed insect, than that of "Beelzebub," "the Lord of Flies," the prince of torturers.

In mentioning the fly as nearly ubiquitous, I am bound to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Venice as a singular exception. Whether it be always so, I cannot undertake to say, but las

summer, at any rate, during a stay of more than a week at the very hottest period of the year, in a situation apparently favourable to them, not a single one did I ever see in-doors or out.

Though it is impossible to render oneself entirely proof against the annoyances of these tormentors, yet, by a very simple expedient, a person may be enabled in great measure to set them at defiance, and travel in comparative comfort, as far as they are concerned; it being merely a square yard (or rather less) of light mosquito net. It occupies a very small compass when doubled up, and can just lie under the pillow if required for service in the morning, or be carried in the pocket should a siesta be deemed advisable while travelling, or during the heat of the midday halt. The comfort of life depends, to say the least of it, fully as much on little, as great things; and this, though apparently a mere trifle, contributes towards it, experto crede, fully its share.

What gnats, fleas, and midges feed upon, when what we consider their ordinary food is unattainable, has always been to me a mystery nearly as difficult to solve as the question how the number of attorneys and beer-shops in some small country-towns can possibly be supported. Gnats are found swarming in out-houses, where they have no visible means of subsistence. A person stepping into a deserted hut will sometimes come out with the legs of his

trousers blackened with fleas; while midges, which may seem through many days of cold or stormy weather to be utterly extinct, suddenly issue forth on a warm afternoon in countless clouds, assailing the unfortunate sportsman with the appetites of giants refreshed with sleep.

Although I believe the contrary to be the case as regards mosquitos and midges, yet there can be no doubt that people who live in a country infested by fleas become acclimatized to them, and thus almost totally disregard their attacks. They resign themselves to their presence as a necessity (scarcely as a necessary evil), and cease to trouble themselves about them in any way what

ever.

To how great an extent this is carried, the following incident will convey some idea. A waiter, who had brought something to my breakfast table. (at one of the best hotels in Naples), seeing a flea taking his morning stroll on the tablecloth, took him up gently with his finger and thumb, and put him, without killing him, on the floor. This rather exciting my surprise, I said to him, What, don't you kill the fleas when you catch them? "Ah, no, Signore," said he, "que fare; la vita è breve." By which, whether he meant that his life was too short to be always at the trouble of killing fleas, or that of the flea was naturally so short that it would be a shame to curtail it, he left me, as I leave the reader, to judge.

ways, the existing state of what is now felt to be a great national interest.

In the Proceedings of the National Rifle Association for 1861 we have the last statistics of the British art of rifle-shooting. A little while ago there was no such art among us. Our soldiers had their muskets, and our sportsmen had their guns; but for the population at large the sight of a firearm, except in the window of a gunmaker's shop, was a rare thing, and the notion of ever possessing one, or being

in the habit of using one, an absurdity. Almost in an instant this state of things was changed. By a mere stroke of the pen on the part of Authority at a suitable moment, there was effected perhaps the most important, and certainly the most sudden, change in the system of our national manners which this generation has seen. It became lawful, and was even declared desirable by the Crown, that all over England and Scotland the inhabitants should form themselves, in a regular manner, into companies and regiments of Volunteer soldiers. It seemed that a strong demand for this change, as a matter of necessity and right, was already pent up in the national breast; for the response was immediate. Our streets in cities and towns, our village-greens and commons, burst at once into a bloom of uniforms -light-grey, dark-grey, dark-green, red, and so on-worn by men who had never worn uniform before, and had thought to descend into their graves without ever having done such a thing. It was not merely our very young men, in quest of novelty, excitement, and exercise, that so appeared as Volunteers, but our men also of more staid age and habits in even greater proportion-men who almost reluctantly incurred the trouble of thus personally showing how heartily they approved of the movement, and who for some time spent no end of half-crowns in cabs, out of sheer horror at being seen in their uniforms, and only gradually learnt to walk in them unabashed. Among the mixed motives that drew the Volunteers together there was none that was not innocent; most were laudable; and at the heart of all, we believe, to give dignity and endurance to the others, was a conviction entertained by thousands that in the Volunteer System a noble addition had been made, not a bit too soon, to the institutions of the freest country in the world, and that, in personally supporting it, one would be exercising a real privilege, and discharging a real duty.

Well, the thing succeeded; the Volunteer system did become an institution of the country; and there arose

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our now established toast at public dinners, of "The Army, the Navy, and the Volunteers." And, as the Volunteer system burst out of the prior state of public feeling, so out of the Volunteer System burst the new British Art of Rifle-Shooting. In due time, when our effective Volunteers had, in the course of their drill, learnt the manual and platoon exercises, and so got accustomed to the feel and the weight of that. awful thing, the rifle, a considerable proportion of them, not unwilling to know more of the creature, were passed in squads through Position Drill, and somade free of the Rifle-ground, where they could satisfy themselves of her more dangerous capabilities, and of their own fitness to have such a pet. raw spring mornings, in fine summer afternoons, and at other times and seasons, men would be gathered together in tens or scores, in waste out-of-theway places, like conventicles of Covenanters, or troopers in search of such, save that their occupation was in gazing at white targets, with black spots in the middle of them, placed against distant. banks of earth. Some of these assembled aspirants were confident in their former experience as shots against birds and hares; others were very much in doubt what would happen when it cameto their turn to step out, and whether, when the rifle was at their shoulder, and they had to pull the trigger, it might not be best to shut their eyes and bid the world farewell. Miraculous it was, but the fact, that many of these utter novices did as well as the experienced shots, or even better. A centre, perhaps, for the first shot at a hundred and fifty yards made one think that possibly after all there was a lurking faculty of shooting in one, if it could be brought out; or, at all events, the respectable achievement of promotion to the Second Class on the first day out, put one in heart. And so out of the crowds who went so far, and who, contracting a natural affection for the creature that had wakened in them such sensations on the first day's real acquaintance, took her home and cleaned her and oiled her and put her carefully in a

corner, many went to the butts again and again, and, through difficulties of wind and sun and all sorts of botheration, won their First Class, or even attained the honour of being Marksmen. And still the attractions of Rifle-Shooting as an amusement and an exercise continue undiminished; and the numbers of those who, to their own surprise, betake themselves to this amusement increase steadily; and in every district over the country the "crack crack" of practice in the Rifle-ground has become a sound familiar to the natives. The very language and thought of the nation have been affected by the prevalence of the new pastime. Travelling in railway carriages, plain passengers of purely commercial mind find themselves bewildered with talk going on all round them of outers and centres and bull's eyes; friends will sit together by the halfhour recounting their splendid scores, exulting in their yesterday's three centres running at five hundred, and, in fact, running the risk of lying and boasting awfully before they are aware of it; and already a whole host of images, metaphors, and turns of thinking, drawn from the circumstance of the Rifleground, has become imbedded in our conversation and literature.

From the very first it was highly desirable that direction and organization should be given by some central management to an enthusiasm so widely spread, and a form of pastime so popular and important; and from the very first such direction and organization were admirably given by the National Rifle Association. Under the auspices of this body there was brought together at Wimbledon in 1860 that great Congress of the picked shots of the whole land which resulted in the recognition of young Ross as Champion Shot or Rifleman Laureate. Then, after much work in the interim, came the second year's Demonstration and Congress, when Jopling was the man. It is the pro

ceedings of this last meeting, together with all the related Statistics of British Rifle-Shooting during the year 1861, and the names and scores of hundreds

of prizemen and competitors, that the Association have now published. May the publication be as annual as the Almanack! The Wimbledon meeting of this year-the year of the new International Exhibition-ought to be the grandest and most successful of any yet. Already, in this second year's Report of the Association, there is proof that the national skill in the use of the Rifle has improved as well as extended itself

-that Great Britain has now as good a little army of Rifle Shots as there is in the world, and could, on occasion, protect her inland hedgerows, or tuft her line of seadowns and cliffs, with choice marksmen, the white puffs from whose rifles would be the calm sign of sure bullets and be followed by the leap of death.

At the same time never was truer word spoken than that of Colonel M'Murdo the other day, when he impressed upon one of the best shooting regiments in our whole Volunteer force, that Rifleshooting, dissociated from Drill, or not resting on Drill as a solid and permanent basis, would really be little more than the amusement which its votaries find it, and an agreeable periodical indulgence in cracks and puffs of smoke. The regiment to which he said this, we believe, is itself a well-drilled one; and he intended his advice for Volunteers all over the country. For Volunteering is now at its critical stage amongst us. The first novelty of the thing is over, and it remains to be seen whether it will be kept up. Colonel M'Murdo himself was hopeful on this point; and his information that, by the last returns, the Volunteer force was larger than everamounting, we believe, now to some 170,000 men-was very gratifying. But, on general grounds, as well as from the experience of some particular corps, there is an anxiety in some quarters as to the prospects of Volunteering in the year now begun. In other words, a question now going among those who are interested in Volunteering is, "Will the men still come to their Drill?”

To begin a thing of this sort, and afterwards to give it up, except for very urgent reasons, is what every man of