THE KEEPER.

(With an Excursus on Beaters.)

Or the many varieties of keeper, I propose, at present, to consider only the average sort of keeper, who looks after a shooting, comprising partridges, pheasants, hares, and rabbits, in an English county. Now it is to be observed that your ordinary keeper is not a conversational animal. He has, as a rule, too much to do to waste time in unnecessary talk. To begin with, he has to control his staff, the men and boys who walk in line with you through the root-fields, or beat the coverts for pheasants. That might seem at first sight to be an easy business, but it is actually one of the most difficult in the world. For thorough perverse stupidity, you will not easily match the autochthonous beater. Watch him as he trudges along, slow, expressionless, clod-resembling, lethargic, and say how you would like to be the chief of such an army. He is always getting out of line, pressing forward unduly, or hanging back too much, and the loud voice of the keeper makes the woods resound with remonstrance, entreaty, and blame, hurled at his bovine head. After lunch, it is true, the beater wakes up for a little. Then shall you hear WILLIAM exchanging confidences from one end of the line to the other with JARGE, while the startled pheasant rises too soon and goes back, to the despair of the keeper and the guns. Then, too, are heard the shouts of laughter which greet the appearance of a rabbit, and the air is thick with the sticks that the joyous, beery beaters fling at the scurrying form of their hereditary foe. It is marvellous to note with what a venomous hatred the beater regards the bunny. Pheasant or partridge he is careless of; even the hare is, in comparison, a thing of nought, but let him once set eyes on a rabbit, and his whole being seems to change. His eye absolutely flashes, his chest heaves with excitement beneath the ancient piece of sacking that protects his form from thorns. If the rabbit falls to the shot, he yells with exultation; if it be missed, an expression of morose and gloomy disappointment settles on his face, as who should say, "Things are played out; the world is worthless!

But the head-keeper recks not of these things. All the anxiety of the day is his. If, for one reason or another, he fails to show as good a head of game as had been expected, he knows his master will be displeased. If the beaters prove intractable, the birds go wrong, but the burden of the host's disappointment falls on the keeper's shoulders. His are all the petty worries, the little failures of the day. The keeper is, therefore, not given to conversation. How should he be, with all these responsibilities weighing upon him? Few of those who shoot realise what the keeper has gone through to provide the sport. Inclement nights spent in the open, untiring vigilance by day and by night, a constant and patient care of his birds during the worst seasons, short hours of sleep, and long hours

of tramping, such is the keeper's life. And, after all, what a fine fellow is a good keeper. In what other race of men can you find in a higher degree the best and manliest qualities, unswerving fidelity, dauntless courage, unflinching endurance of hardship and fatigue, and an upright honesty of conduct and demeanour ? I protest that if ever the sport of game-shooting is attacked, one powerful argument in its favour may be found in the fact that it produces such men as these, and fosters their staunch virtues. Think well of all this, my young friend, and do not vex the harassed keeper with idle and frivolous remarks. But you may permit yourself to say to him, during the day, "That's a nice dog of yours; works capitally."

"Yes, Sir," the keeper will say, "he's not a bad 'un for a young 'un. Plenty of good blood in him. His mother's old Dido. I've had to leave her at home to-day, because she's got a sore foot; but her nose is something wonderful." "Did you have much trouble breaking him ?"

"Lor bless you, Sir, no. He took to it like a duck to the water. Nothing comes amiss to him. You stand there, Sir, and you'll get some nice birds over you. They mostly breaks this way.'

That kind of conversation establishes good relations, always an important thing. Or you may hint to him that he knows his business better than the host, as thus:

All these characteristics are the keeper's despair; though, to be sure, he has staunch lieutenants in his under-keepers; and towards the end of the day he can always count on two sympathising allies in the postman and the policeman. These two never fail to come out in the afternoon to join the beaters. It is amusing to watch the demeanour of the beaters in the policeman's presence. Some of them, it is possible, have been immeshed by the law, and have made the constable's acquaintance in his professional capacity. Others are conscious of undiscovered peccadilloes, or they feel that on some future day they may be led to transgress rules, of which the policeman is the sturdy embodiment. None of them is, therefore, quite at his best in the policeman's presence. Their attitude may be described as one of uneasy familiarity, bursting here and there into jocular nervousness, but never quite attaining the rollicking point. You may sometimes take advantage of this feeling to let off a joke on a beater. Select a stout, plethoric one, and say to him, "Mind you keep your eye on the policeman, or he'll poach a rabbit before you can say knife." This simple inversion of probabilities and positions is quite certain to " go." A hesitating smile will first creep into the corners of the beater's eye. After an interval spent in grappling with the jest, he will become purple, and finally he will explode.

"Of course you were, Sir. I knew how it would be. I wanted you fifty yards higher up, but Mr. CHALMERS, he would have you here. Lor, I've never known birds break here. Now then, you boys, stop that chattering, or I sends you all home. Seem to think they're out here to enjoy theirselves, instead of doing as I tells 'em. Come, rattle your sticks!" Thus are the little beaters and the stops admonished.

་་

A. It is another term for a Mad Doctor. Its derivation is obvious "Maniac Cure." The last syllable of the first word being omitted

THE COMING OF THE BOGEYS.
I HAD a Dream, which was not all a Dream.
(By Somnus and old Nox I fear 'twas not!)
Common-sense was extinguished, and Good
Taste

Did wonder darkling on the verge of doom.
I saw a Monster, a malign, marine, [Bogey,
Mysterious, many-whorled, mug-lumbering
Stretched (like Miltonian angels on the marl)
In league-long loops upon the billowy brine."
Beshrew thee, old familiar ocean Bogey,
Thou spectral spook of many Silly Seasons,
Beshrew thee, and avaunt! Which being put
In post-Shakspearian vernacular, means
Confound you, and Get out!!! The mon-
strous worm

Wriggling its corkscrew periwinkly twists
Of trunk and tail alternate, winked huge
goggles

Derisively and gurgled." Me get out,
The Science-vouched, and Literature-upheld,
And Reason-rehabilitated butt

Of many years of misdirected mockery?
You ask omniscient HUXLEY, cocksure oracle
On all from protoplasm to Home Rule,
From Scripture to Sea Serpents; go consult
Belligerent, brave, beloved BILLY RUSSELL!
Verisimilitude incarnate, I

Scorn your vain sceptic mirth!

Besides, behold

The portent riding me, as Thetis rode
The folloping, wolloping sea-horse of old!
Is it less likely that I should remain
Than she return ?"

Then, horror-thrilled, I gazed At her, the Abominable, the Ogreish Thing; The soul-revolting, sense-degrading She, Who swayed and sickened, scourged and scarified

The unwilling slaves of fashion and discomA quarter of a century since!

She sat,

[fort

A spectral, scraggy, beet-nosed, ankle-less,
Obtrusive-panted, splay-foot, slattern-shape,
Of grim Medusa-faced Immodesty,
Caged cumbrously in a stiff, swaying, swollen,
Shin-scarifying, hose-revealing frame

Of wide-meshed metal, like a monster mouse-
Hideous, indecent, awkward!

[trapOh, I knew her

This loathly revenant, revisiting The glimpses of the moon. She shamed my sight, [men's art, And blocked my way, and marred my young Twenty years syne and more. 'Twas CRINOLINA,

The long-abiding, happily banished horror
We hoped to see no more. Shall she return
To vex our souls, unsex our wives and
daughters,

And spoil our pictures as she did of old ?
Forbid it, womanhood and modesty! [sense
And if they won't, let manhood and sound
Arise in wrath and warn the horror off,
Ere she effect a lodgment on the limbs
Of pretty girls, or clothe our matron's shapes
With shame as with a garment.
Get thee gone!"
Cries Punch, and shakes his gingham in her
face.

66

"The Silly Season's Nemesis we may stand, But thou, the loathlier Bogey? Garn away! (AS 'LIZA said to amorous 'ARRY 'AWKINS) Avaunt, skedaddle, slope, absquatulate, Go, gruesome ghoul-go quickly-and for ever!!!"

MRS. R.'s nephew read out an announcement to the effect that Messrs. MACMILLAN were about to publish Lord CARNARVON'S "Prometheus Bound." "Indeed!" exclaimed Mr. R.'s excellent aunt. "That's very vague. Doesn't it say how it's to be bound? -whether in calf or vellum?"

PARTHENON."

Scarce can we venture the veriest platitude, May not its grammar be shamefully weak? You, Mr. Punch, can rely on our gratitude, If you will tell us-how ought we to speak?

A DARK SAYING.-Had HILDA DAWSON-— who, as reported in the D. T. one day last week, was haled before Sir PETER EDLIN-been a character in some play of SHAKSPEARE'S, to whom the Bard had given these words to utter

-"And this is what you call trial by Jury! Why they are not fit to try shoemakers!" what voluminous suggestions and explanations of the meaning of this phrase would not the learned Commentators have written! What emendations, alterations, or amendments of the text would not have been proposed! Perhaps, some hundreds of years hence, this dark saying of HILDA DAWSON'S will engage the close attention of some among the then existing learned body of Antiquaries.

"SOUNDS RATHER LIKE IT."-In France the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has gone to the DEVELLE.

THE HAYMARKET HYPATIA.

THAT I never could struggle through CHARLES KINGSLEY's novel Hypatia, is, as far as I am personally concerned, very much in favour of my pronouncing an unbiassed opinion on the "new classical play" ("Historical," if you like, but not "classical," and there is not the slightest chance of its becoming a "classic ") written by G. STUART OGILVIE, entitled Hypatia, and "founded on KINGSLEY'S celebrated Novel," which "celebrated Novel" is, for me at least, not only "celebrated," but "remarkable," as being one of the very few works of fiction (excepting always the majority of KINGSLEY'S Works) completely baffling my powers of endurance.

The entire interest is centred in Issachar, and had the author devised some strong dramatic climax (such as occurs in that play of SARDOU's, where SARAH B. stabs PAUL BERTON) with whieh to finish the piece, when the Prefect should have been killed either by Issachar or by Miriam (SARDOU would have made Issachar's

daughter the heroine-the SARA BERNHARDT of the piece) then, in the penultimate Act, anything tragic, or otherwise, might picturesquely and appropriately have happened to the classic Girton girl, Hypatia, and

Mr. STUART OGILVIE'S Drama may be a clever adaptation of a story difficult to adapt; but that his play is powerfully dramatic, even when it arrives at what, as I conceive, was intended to be its strongest dramatic situation in the Second Scene of the Third Act, no one but an Umbra (to be "classical"), a sycophant, a "creature," or a contentious noodle, could possibly assert. Yet, as a series of tableaux vivants, illustrating scenes in the public and private life of Issachar the Jew, and that Jew Mr. BEERBOHM TREE, SO artistically made up as to be absolutely unrecognisable by those who know him best,-the action is decidedly interesting up to the end of the Third Act. After that, all is tumult. The gay and seductive Orestes, Prefect of Alexandria (carefully played by Mr. LEWIS WALLER) is slain, anyhow, all higgledy-piggledy, by the Jew,, Issachar, whose seductive daughter Ruth (sweetly and gently represented by Miss OLGA BRANDON) this gay LOTHARIO of a Prefect has contrived, not, apparently, with any great difficulty, to lead astray, or, to put it "classically," to seduce from the narrow path of such virtue as is common alike to Pagan, Jew, and Christian. As for handsome Hypatia herself, magnificent though Miss JULIA NEILSON be as a classic model for a painter, she is nowhere, dramatically, in the piece, when contrasted with the unhappy Jewish Family of two. It is the story of Issachar, his daughter and Orestes, that absorbs the interest; and, as to what becomes of Cyril and his Merry Monks, of Philammon (which, when pronounced, sounds like modern Cockney-rendering of PHILIP HAMMOND, with the aspirate omitted and the final "d" dropped), of old Theon (who never appears but he is immediately sent away again, and therefore might be termed "The-on-and-off-'un"), and, finally, of even that charming specimen of a Girton Girl-Lecturer on Philosophy Hypatia herself, well -to adopt HooD's couplet