enemies, is but the work of an instant; but the avengers crowd round
him with their gnashing jaws and piercing cries, and the brute darts
up the tree like a flash of red fire, and crouches not twenty feet
above the heads of the horrified spectators! The father, however,
after some agonising moments of deliberation, brings him down with his
rifle; and the cougar, falling among the eager crowd below, is torn to
pieces in a moment. But this does not get rid of the peccaries, who
set up their fiendish screams anew as they discover two other victims
in the tree. The father fires again and again, dropping his peccary
each time, till five lie dead upon the ground; but the rage of the
rest only becomes more and more furious--and the marksman is at his
last bullet. Here we shall leave him; and such of our readers as may
be interested in his fate--who form, we suspect, a very handsome
percentage on the whole--may make inquiries for themselves at his
Desert Home.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Or the Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness. By Captain
Mayne Reid. London: Bogue. 1852.




THE VATTEVILLE RUBY.


The clock of the church of Besançon had struck nine, when a woman