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her mother to dwell with them. "And you, my poor Stepau, ," he said affectionately; "I know you cannot leap and Idance like the others." I saw his face darken as he remembered why, and the fear came over my heart again. But," he continued, “ 'you must nevertheless be one of my bride's escort, and be a witness of my carrying her across my threshold. I cannot do without you at the happiest occasion of my life."" I promised I would come, and we kissed each other lovingly, and then he went out from my house, singing a Turkish love-song, as happy as any man the sun shone upon,

The next day I went to the house of the bride to join in the escort which was to accompany her to my brother's house. You know that our custom is that the bride, veiled from head to foot and mounted on a horse, should be taken by her own friends and those of the bridegroom to the bridegroom's house; there he lifts her from the horse, carries her into his house, bids her welcome, and unveils her. Afterward is the marriage-feast. So the procession started; on my account it advanced at a slow pace; but it was none the less merry and joyous for that. At the head was an improvvisatore, playing wild and happy music on his clarionet, and the men were dancing and leaping round the bride's horse, firing their pistols into the air and shouting her praises aloud for all passer-by to hear, while the summer sun shone down upon us to gladden our hearts. When we neared my brother's house, and I saw the door wide open, and I thought of my brother waiting inside in rich happiness, his heart beating as he heard the bridal noise drawing close, I felt my own heart beat in sympathy with his, and I was happier than I ever thought I could have been after the wreck of me by the bastinado; I loved my brother so dearly. I looked for him when we were quite close, but he did not show himself. When we stopped at the door, the firing and the playing ceased, and we waited for him to appear. "Come out, thou sluggard, Agostin!" called out one, "art thou afraid of our firing at thee?" Then there was a laugh, and another shouted, "Nay, he is shy, and is hiding from the eyes of his wife," and they laughed again. Still Agostin came not. "We must go in and drag him forth," called a third, and indeed, as

Agostin gave no answer, two or three of his most intimate friends entered the house, and I tottered after them. But before I had reached the door they came out again with surprised faces; he was not there. The clarionet played joyfully again, and the firing of the pistols recommenced in order to call him. For more than an hour we waited, and the weddingguests began to ask me impatiently what we were to do, when two mounted Zaptiehs suddenly rode up to the house. "What's all this?" said one. "Go away all of you, while we seal up the house."

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"You are mistaken," I said, with a great fear at my heart; this is Agostin Boda's house, and his wedding day, and we are waiting for him to come and take his bride."

"There will be no wedding to-day." said the Zaptieh, not roughly; he seemed a good fellow enough and sorry, "Agostin Boda is in prison at the Konak."

"In the name of God, what for?" I cried.

"He has killed the Mütessarif, and is in prison," said the Zaptieh ; "it is no use your waiting here; you had better all go away.

The wedding-party had commenced rapidly to break up in dismay, when I heard a sobbing sigh and a heavy fall. We had forgotten the bride; she had fallen from the horse in a dead faint. Poor child! it was a sad unveiling; instead of the loving bridegroom proudly unveiling her, while she blushed and smiled and thrilled under his touch, it was I, with heavy fear and bitter sadness at my heart, who, hastily enough indeed, tore the veil from her to give her water and restore her, and saw her there with her face deathly white, and the long lines of tears wet upon her face. When she came to herself again she got up and, sobbing the while as if her heart would break, she disposed her dress to look as little bridal as possible. Then she said to me through her tears," Stepan Boda, take me home. So I seated her on her horse and we set our faces homeward. We passed over the ground which only two hours before we had trodden with joyful hearts, surrounded by the merry noisy wedding party; now we were alone, I tottering painfully and leaning heavily on her horse for support, she riding by my side, her face hid

den in her hands, shaking with sobs. Well! my Effendi, I tried hard to see my brother in prison, but they would not let me; so I have never been able to find out for certain by what evil chance it happened that he met his opportunity for vengeance on his wedding morning. From what the Zaptiehs, whom my friends and I questioned continually afterward, let drop, I believe that he had seen the Mütessarif pass his house apparently alone, that he had seized his rifle on the spot and shot him dead there and then. But there was an escort, which my brother had not seen because it was hidden by a rise in the ground, only a hundred paces or so behind, so that he was taken redhanded. I say I believe that to be true, though nothing is certain, because Agostin was a hot-headed youth, and would not have waited to consider, if he thought he saw his chance.

"And what became of him?" I asked. "God knows only," replied Stepan; "from that time to this I have never seen him, nor even been able to obtain any news of his fate. He may be living still; he may have died then. The Turkish authorities here would never tell me anything or give me any clew. I even went to Stamboul, and after much time and great difficulty my whole story and Agostin's were laid before the Padischah. They told me that the Padischah was furious, and declared that the Mütessarif richly deserved to be killed, and that Agostin had done no more than was right. They bid me return to Antivari happy, for the Padischah would give the order that Agostin should at once be restored to me. And I did return happy with the hope in my heart. But either the Padischah forgot me, for I am humble, or else the order was given and they could not restore me Agostin and were ashamed to tell me. It is nearly thirty years since I saw him. walking away from my house in the light of the setting sun, joyfully singing his

Turkish love-song, his heart full of his beloved and the morrow which would give her to him. I long clung to the hope that one day I should see him return to us, but now that hope has quite died away. Only the priest says that I shall meet him again in the Afterward, and I try to content myself with the thought of our joy, his and mine, and hers who was to have been his wife, at meeting."

Stepan's voice trembled as he concluded his story, and the big tears stood in his eyes. Far away behind the blue Adriatic the setting sun was sinking, and the plain below us was glowing in the mellow golden light, the warm shadows growing longer and longer as if they were striving to carry a message of hope for the morrow to the East. From a distant Khan the wild music of an improvvisatore's clarionet faintly reached my ears; it seemed like the echo of Stepan's story, and I fancied I could almost see the happy wedding-party dancing their way to Agostin's house, and then the lonely, mournful couple, the sorrowful and enfeebled man and the broken hearted weeping woman, returning from it. I felt a sob rising to my throat and my voice was thick as I asked my last question.

"And what of the bride ?" I said.

Very shortly after what should have been her wedding-day her mother died,' replied Stepan, and she was left alone, ill with grief. I sent my wife to her to tell her to come to us and make our home hers; she came, and we have loved her always, and love her as a most dear sister. Poor child she never could become happy again, but like me she has faith in the Afterward. You know her," added Stepan after a slight pause and with a queer sad smile on his face-" she is

Maria."

And then I understood the scene I had witnessed at the partition of the Boda property.-Murray's Magazine.

WHEN I say weeds, I do not mean cigars. The fragrant weed, as cheap essay ists of the Dick Swiveller school love to call it, is not a weed at all, but on the contrary an expensive and legitimate prodNEW SERIES.-VOL. L., No. 5.

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uct of commerce and agriculture. So far from growing wild anywhere in the world. in that kind of profusion which weediness implies, tobacco is indeed a dainty plant that requires careful drainage, excellent

shelter, and such an amount of rich manure as seldom or never occurs on any field casually in a state of nature. In fact, the Virginian nicotiana is well known to be a most exhausting crop, rapidly using up the potash and lime of the soil in which it roots, and grown to the greatest perfection as a garden plant in virgin land only. Hence it has nothing at all to do with the present philosophical discussion, any more than widows' weeds or the gay weeds of poetry the sole weed I contemplate for the moment being the common weedy weed of the average cornfield or of the domestic flower-garden.

But what exactly constitutes any plant a genuine weed it would be hard to say: only as dirt is matter in the wrong place, so, I take it, a weed is simply a herb or flower which grows where the agriculturist or the gardener doesn't want it. A curious instance of the relativity of weediness (as John Stuart Mill would have put it) will point this moral to greater advantage. There is a well-known blue garden-flower which rejoices in the tasteful scientific name of ageratum, and which adorns the old fashioned "mixed border" in the grounds of many an innocent suburban villa. Now, the wife of a former Governor of Ceylon, says veracious legend, anx ious to transport loved memories of other days to her new home, brought over a plant of this familiar hardy annual from Clapham or Lee to her garden at Colombo. The climate of the Indies suited the new comer down to the ground, and it began to spread over the adjacent plots with marvellous rapidity. Furthermore, it has winged seeds, which the balmy breezes that (according to the poet) "blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle'' immediately wafted to every part of that fertile region. The consequence is that nowadays the people, as in Lord Tennyson's apologue, "call it but a weed," and with good reason for it has been calculated that it costs the unlucky planters over 250,000l. yearly to keep down that blue ageratum in their coffee plantations.

The great moral lesson of this interesting little tale is not far to seek. A herb or shrub is a "garden plant" as long as it grows only where you want it to grow: the moment it begins to spread beyond control and flourish exceedingly of its own accord, it is considered as a weed, and receives no quarter from the hard heart and

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harder hands Clover is a crop," where it is deliberately sown but when it comes up lawlessly of its own mere motion in a flower-bed on the lawn, it is treated at once to Jedburgh justice-decapitated and mutilated at sight, without form of trial.

of the irate agriculturist.

Hence it also results that a weed, wherever it shows its weedy nature, belongs to what Darwin used to call " a dominant species," that is to say, one that then and there can take care of itself, and live down or kill out all feebler competitors. It is this vivacious peculiarity that constitutes the original sin cf all weeds: they are plants that you don't want to grow, but that nevertheless possess qualities and attributes which enable them to oust and overshadow those that you do. Most of the flowers or fruits man selfishly tills for his own base purposes, to smell at or to eat, are more or less exotics in most countries where he tills them. Left to themselves, they would soon be overrun by the hardier natives, the strong and vigorous plants that exactly suit the soil and climate. Therefore cultivation-tell it not to the Cobden Club-consists essentially in the suppression of weeds, or in other words the restriction of free and natural competition. It is protection run rampant. We clear a given space, with plough, spade, hoe, or cutlass, from its native vegetation; we plant the seeds of species that do not normally grow there; and then, as far as possible, we keep down the intrusive aborigines that seek always to return, by continuous toil of hand or instrument. And this is really and truly almost all that anybody means by cultivation.

Man, however, is not the only animal who has discovered this eminently practical division of the vegetable world into weeds on the one hand and garden plants on the other. Our ingenious little sixlegged precursors, the ants, have anticipated us in this as in so many other useful discoveries and inventions. They were the first gardeners. I need hardly add that it is an American ant that carries the art of horticulture to the highest perfection only a Yankee insect would be so advanced, and only Yankee naturalists would be sharp enough to discover its method. This particular little beast who grows grain resides in Texas; and each nest owns a small claim in the vicinity of its mound, on which it cultivates a kind

of grass, commonly known as ant-rice. The claim is circular, about ten or twelve feet in diameter: and the ants allow no plant but the ant-rice to encroach upon the cleared space anywhere. The produce of the crop they carefully harvest, though authorities are still disagreed upon the final question whether they plant the grain, or merely allow it to sow its own seed itself on the protected area. One thing, however, is certain-that no other plant is permitted to sprout on the tabooed patch: the ants wage war on weeds far more vigorously and effectually than our own agriculturists. Even in our less go-ahead eastern continent, Sir John Lubbock has noticed in Algeria (and the present humble observer has verified the fact) that ants allow only certain species of plants, useful to themselves, to grow in the immediate neighborhood of their nests.

But the very fact that we have to root out weeds proves that the weeds, if left to themselves, would live down the plants we prefer to cultivate. Everybody knows that if a garden is allowed to " run wild," as we oddly phrase it, coarse herbs of various kinds-nettles, groundsels, and ragworts-will soon crush out the dahlias, geraniums, and irises with which we formerly stocked it. On the other hand, everybody also knows that very few garden plants, even the hardiest, ever venture to look over the garden wall, ever sow themselves outside and naturalize themselves even in favorable situations. Of course there are exceptions, like the ageratum in Ceylon, or the ivy-leaved toad flax in England and to these, the parents of the future cosmopolitan weeds, I shall hereafter address myself. For the present, it is sufficient to notice that a weed is a plant capable of living down most other species, and of taking care of itself in free open situations.

I say of set purpose "in free open situations," for nobody regards any forest tree or woodland herb as a weed because such plants don't come into competition with our crops or flowers. To be sure, some of these forestine types are quite as obtrusively pushing, in their own way, and therefore quite as truly weedy at heart, as charlock or couchgrass, those dreaded enemies of the agricultural interest. For example, the beech is a most aggressive and barefaced monopolist-a sort of arboreal Vanderbilt or Jay Gould

and under the dense shade of its closelyleaved and spreading branches, no forest tree, except its own hardy seedlings, stands the faintest chance in the struggle for existence. Even the most unobservant townsman must have noticed (like Tityrus) that the ground is always bare or at best just lightly moss-clad patula sub tegmine fagi. It is known, indeed, that in Denmark the beech, with its thick shade of close-set foliage, is driving out the lighter and more sparsely-leaved birch in the forests where the two once grew like friends together. At touch of the stronger tree, the slender silvery birch loses its lower branches, and devotes all its strength at first to its topmost boughs, which fade one after another till it succumbs at last of old age or inanition. So, in a minor degree, among the lower woodland flora of America, the beautiful May-apple, a most poetic plant (which in its compounded form supplies the returned Anglo-Indian with that excellent substitute for his lost liver, podophyllin pills), has large round leaves, eight or ten inches across, and expanded by ribs from a stalk in the centre exactly after the fashion of a Japanese parasol, on purpose to prevent rival plants that sprout beneath from obtaining their fair share of air and sunshine.

None of these greedy woodland kinds, however, are weeds for us, because they don't interfere with our own peculiar cultivated plants. Man tills only the open plain; and therefore it is only the wild herbs which naturally grow in the full eye of day that can compete at an advantage with his corn, his turnips, his beet-root, or his sugar-cane. Hence arises a curious and very interesting fact, that the greater part of the common weeds of western Europe and America are neither west European nor American at all, but Asiatic or at least Mediterranean in type or origin. Our best-known English wayside herbs are for the most part aliens, and they have come here in the wake of intrusive cultivation.

The reason is obvious. Western Europe and eastern America, in their native condition, were forest-clad regions. When civilized man came with his axe and plough, he cleared and tilled them. Now, the wild flowers and plants that grow beneath the shades of the forest primæval won't bear the open heat of the noonday The consequence is that, whenever

sun.

the forest primæval is cleared, a new vegetation usurps the soil, a vegetation which necessarily comes from elsewhere. America, where the substitution is a thing of such very late date, we can trace the limits of the two floras, native and intrusive, with perfect ease and certainty. Strange as it sounds to say so, European weeds of cultivation have taken possession of all eastern America to the exclusion of the true native woodland flora almost as fully as the European white man with his horses and cows has taken possession of the soil to the exclusion of the noble Red Indian and his correlative buffalo. The common plants that one sees about New York, Philadelphia, and Boston are just the familiar dandelions, and thistles, and Ox-eye daisies of our own beloved fatherland. In open defiance of the Monroe doctrine, the British weed lords it over the fields of the great republic: the native American plant, like the native American man, has slunk back into the remote and modest shades of far western woodlands. Nay, the native American man himself had noted this coincidence in his Mayne Reidish way before he left Massachusetts for parts unknown: for he called our ugly little English plantain or ribgrass the White Man's Foot," and declared that wherever the intrusive pale-face planted his sole, there this European weed sprang up spontaneous, and ousted the old vegetation of the primæval forest. A pretty legend, but, Asa Gray tells us, botanically indefensible.

What is happening to-day under our own eyes (or the eyes of our colonial correspondents) in Australia and New Zealand helps us still further to understand the nature of this strange deluge of ugly and uncouth plants-a deluge which is destined, I believe, to swamp, in time, all the cultivable lowlands of the entire world, and to cover the face of accessible nature before many centuries with a single deadlevel of cosmopolitan weediness. When the great southern continent and the great southern island were first discovered, they possessed the most absurdly belated fauna and flora existing anywhere in the whole world. They were hopelessly out of date; a couple of million years or so at least behind the fashion in the rest of the globe. Their plants and animals were of a kind that had " gone out" in Europe about the time when the chalk was accumulating

on an inland sea across the face of the South Downs, and the central plain of France and Belgium. It naturally resulted that these antiquated creatures, developed to suit the conditions of the cretaceous world, could no more hold their own against the improved species imported from nineteenth century Europe than the Australian black fellow could hold his own against the noble possessor of the Remington rifle. European animals and European plants overran this new province with astonishing rapidity. The English rat beat the Maori rat out of the field as soon as he looked at him. The rabbit usurped the broad Australian plains, so that baffled legislators now seek in vain some cheap and effectual means of slaying him wholesale. The horse has become a very weed among animals in Victoria, and the squatters shoot him off in organized battues, merely to check his lawless depredations upon their unfenced sheep walks.

It is the same with the plants, only, if possible, a little more so. Our petty English knotgrass, which at home is but an insignificant roadside trailer, thrives in the unencumbered soil of New Zealand so hugely that single weeds sometimes cover a space five feet in diameter, and send their roots four feet deep into the rich ground. Our vulgar little sow-thistle, a yellow composite plant with winged seeds like dandelion-down, admirably adapted for dispersal by the wind, covers all the country up to a height of 6,000 feet upon the mountain sides. The watercress of our breakfast tables, in Europe a mere casual brookside plant, chokes the New Zealand rivers with stems twelve feet long, and costs the colonists of Christchurch alone 3007. a year in dredging their Avon free from it. Even so small and lowgrowing a plant as our white clover (which, being excellent fodder, doesn't technically rank as a weed) has completely strangled its immense antagonist, the New Zealand flax, a huge iris-like aloe, with leaves as tall as a British Grenadier, and fibres powerful enough to make cords and ropes fit to hang a sheep-stealer. For weeds are genuine Jack-the-Giant-killers in their own way; a very small plant can often live down a very big one, by mere persistent usurpation of leaf space and root-medium.

Sometimes the origin of these obtrusive settlers in new countries is ridiculously casual. For example, a dirty little Eng