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be amputated. Bovary dares not cross the threshold of his house; he cowers inside, his head on his breast, his hands clasped, his eyes fixed; the screams of the boy reach him from across the narrow street. In his misery he turns to his wife for comfort, and she repulses him with passionate contempt. The pain of it all is almost more than we can bear. But with what force the dissonance suggests the might-have been, the glorious harmony of a true home and true wifehood! Picture the scene with a pitying, comforting, loving wife: the world outside indignant, contemptuous, cruel; inside, husband and wife and love. If, even after her struggles and temptations and sins, Emma had had that grace of womanhood and wifehood left in her to be stirred by this bitter suffering and had flung her arms about the man, and bidden the bruised spirit sob itself to rest upon her bosom ; even then the seven devils had come out of her, and she had won a crown of everlasting glory. Love had turned the mean surroundings, the stupidity, the suffering, to " a blaze of joy and a crash of

song.

The episode of the club-foot has been put in the fore-front of their objections by friends and foes. It has been criticized as a piece of naturalism, as mere ugliness, as but an occasion to indulge in description of painful and unnecessary detail. Flaubert's method of setting everything before the reader as distinct and vivid as language will make it, is, of course, open to serious criticism, when he has to treat of things which are physically or morally revolting. Whether in this episode

the artist has wrung music out of the dissonance, whether out of the strong he has succeeded in bringing forth a strange, new, bitter sweet-that is a question upon which taste may be expected to always differ. But it is not naturalism, it is not mere ugliness. It is an integral part of the spiritual tragedy, the fatal triumph of half science and false sentiment; it is the revealing instance to exhibit Emma's heart, that was a living heart once, morally paralyzed by indulged sentimentality. And it is a turning-point in the action. It is this last revelation of her husband's uninteresting incapacity, which urges her tottering soul to its final plunge to perdition.

And

"Moralist, you know everything, but you are cruel." It is in these words that Sainte-Beuve apostrophizes the creator of "Madame Bovary." Cruelty there is in his unrelenting irony, cruelty born of the bitterness of disillusion towards the commonplace, but cruelty chiefly towards sentimentality and ignorant self-conceit. knowledge there is deep, wide, minute. And a moral there is, as there must always be in any true picture of life; a moral, guiltless as Flaubert is of seeking to enforce a moral, almost painful in its force. But first and last, there is art art in the intensity of vision that pierces beneath the surface of fact; art in the note of tragedy, the inevitable march of fate; art in the scrupulous avoidance of everything not essential to the idea; art in the impersonal directness of presentation; art in the style.

W. P. J.

THE HILL-TRIBES OF CHITTAGONG.

THE military expedition sent by the Indian Government against the tribes who dwell in the hill-country between Chittagong and Burmah has made an effective beginning of its work. It has opened roads into the hills, and established fortified posts at the dominating points of communication. The column has advanced into the enemy's country and has destroyed the stockades of the chiefs who were specially inculpated in the late raids on the plains of Chittagong. The avenging force has now stayed its hand for the present. A proclamation has been issued exhorting the hill-men to submit themselves to British authority, and they have been told that whatever happens a military expedition will be despatched in November to march over the hills into Burmah. It is very much to be hoped that the tribes may see the wisdom of tendering their submission before it is too late. They have neither the strength nor the heart to resist the British power. I will now venture to record something of my own experiences with these mountaineers dating back more than forty years ago, to show that they have not always been unmanageable or unreasonable in their dealings with us.

I will try to dispense as much as possible with hard Indian names. The Bengalis, who dwell in the plains, used to call all the hill-men by the name of Kookees. On further acquaintance we learnt to distinguish them as being divided into Kookees, Looshais, and Shindoos. But these distinctions were, I think, devised by the tribes as much for their own convenience as for anything else. If there was any raid or foray from the hills, and we taxed the Kookees with it, they said, "Please sir, it was not our doing; it was some of those wicked Looshais" and then

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if we asked for satisfaction from the Looshais, they replied that it was none of their doing, but that the Shindoos must have been the offenders. To my fancy, these hill-tribes were all very much tarred with the same brush. If this had not been so, we might have been able to employ one tribe to punish the other; and we might have decimated the warriors of the contending tribes by some such policy as that which led to the immortal combat between the Clan Chattan and the Clan Quhele.

My first introduction to the hillmen was in this wise. In December, 1845, there had been a Kookee raid on one of the villages in the south of Chittagong, when twenty persons were killed, and as many more men, with numerous women and children, were carried off into captivity in the hills. One morning on going to the little court-house, where I sat as an assistantmagistrate, I found a large crowd at the door. They were staring at four big hill-men, heavily fettered and handcuffed, and guarded by policemen with drawn swords. I found a letter from the district-magistrate directing me to hold the preliminary trial of these men, who were charged with having been concerned in the raid just mentioned. The police reported that the prisoners had been apprehended by a friendly frontier-chief as they were returning to the fastnesses of their native hills.

The four men were placed before me, and I wished to get them to plead guilty or not guilty. But they did not understand a word that was said to them. The language of my court was Bengali, and my native clerks knew no other tongue. There was a court-interpreter who spoke Burmese, which is called Mughee in Chittagong,

but the prisoners did not understand what he said. At last we got hold of a man who knew both Burmese and the Kookee language, and so we opened communication with the prisoners. It was a tedious process. I took notes in English of the questions put and answers given. I spoke Bengali to my clerk, and he passed it on to the Mughee interpreter, who could not understand my classical Bengali: the interpreter communicated it to the Kookee, whom we had impressed for the occasion; and so eventually it got to the accused, whilst their answers came back through the same roundabout channel. I was very young and zealous, and in the intervals of interpretation took sketches of the prisoners, with their broad faces and flat noses and Tartar eyes, and masses of hair rolled up on their heads, like the Thracians of Homer. Eventually it came out that these men had been sent in as having confessed their guilty share in the raid, and they were expected to repeat their confession to me. But meanwhile something had happened; the special interpreter, who had been sent in with the prisoners, had been taken ill on the journey and could not appear. It would have been his business to interpret the prisoners' statements as confessions of guilt, and we should not have been able to detect him. But the improvised Kookee interpreter who talked Burmese, not having been primed for the occasion, very innocently repeated what the accused men really said, which was that they did not know anything about the crime imputed to them.

This was a grave interruption to the course of justice, according to the ideas of the native police. When I examined the Bengali witnesses for the prosecution, who were supposed to be the survivors that had fled from the village when it was raided, I found that they all deposed, with perfect confidence, to the identification of each of the prisoners, although they had never seen them before in their

lives, and never stopped for a moment to look at them. Of course, inexperienced as I was, I was not to be misled by such incredible evidence; and after a long day's work at the case, I sent up my notes with a report to the magistrate recommending that the accused should be released. The magistrate had left his office, so they had to be taken to jail for the night.

The next day the magistrate ordered the prisoners to be released; and as I had taken so much interest in the case I went to the jail to see that their fetters were knocked off and their handcuffs removed, for the police had suggested to me that this could not be done with safety until these formidable savages had been returned to the frontier-chief who had apprehended them. But when the poor fellows, who had never before seen a white face, found that I was taking an active part in their deliverance, they soon showed that they valued my kindness, and made several attempts to say something. I again got hold of my Kookee interpreter and, after a long struggle with our linguistic difficulties, I elicited the story that these men were Kookees, who had come down to trade about an elephant at Bunderaban, the residence of the Mugh frontier-chief, styled the Phroo. They had first been plundered by the Phroo's people, and then found themselves put in irons and sent in to Chittagong, with the intimation that they would be hung without benefit of clergy. The Phroo thought he had thus done a great stroke of business, for he had first plundered his Kookee enemies, and had then offered them up as a peace-offering to the English Government, who wanted to punish some one for the raid. I tried to make some compensation to the poor men for what they had undergone; and though I never set eyes on them again, I believe that they went home with the impression that a white man was not such a demon as they had been told. It may be that the sons or grandsons of these

men are among the hostile tribes who are now arrayed against us. I can only remember their ugly but smiling faces when they had been brought to my house that my wife might see them. They went away delighted with the present of some tobacco and some paltry strings of glass beads for the adornment of their wives and children; and for some reason or other unknown to us there were no more Kookee raids in the south part of the district for some time.

Two or three years afterwards, about 1848, I had temporary charge of the district of Chittagong as magistrate. One afternoon as I was leaving my office there was a great hubbub among the people, and I found that some policemen had just arrived with six corpses, which were the headless bodies of some villagers who had been killed in a Kookee raid, at a place only about thirty miles due east of the station near the banks of the Chittagong river. The raid had occurred two days previously, and the native police-inspector had sent in a long report that he had been to the village and found the dead bodies, and that the rest of the inhabitants-men, women, and children -had been carried off by the Kookees up the Chuktai-Nullah, a tributary of the Chittagong river. I consulted the officer commanding the native troops at the station, but he was unable to let me have any of his men without orders from the general of division, which it would take several days to obtain. So I determined to set off at once with such feeble forces as I could raise, six men, to wit, armed with old Tower muskets from the jail-guard and my own guns and rifles, to see if we could rescue any of the people who had been carried off. We embarked in the guard-boat, and a strong tide carried us rapidly up the river to the raided village, which was a scene of misery and desolation. Then we pushed on as far as the tide would serve us, until a dense fog compelled us to stop for the night. The next day we rowed

on again till we reached the mouth of the Chuktai-Nullah, where we came upon traces of the raiders, as they had left behind them the decapitated bodies of a young man and a girl, who had either attempted to escape or bad broken down with fatigue. My companions were rather dismayed at the unpleasant sight, and would gladly have stopped. But I insisted on going up the Nullah for the chance of finding some others of the captives who might have escaped into the jungle. The water in the Nullah was so shallow that we had to leave the guard-boat and proceed in small canoes or dugouts, which we impressed. We made very slow progress over the boulders and shallows, and again a heavy fog came on and stopped us altogether. This was perhaps fortunate for us, for when we began to creep on the next morning through the fog, we heard voices, and suddenly found ourselves close to the raiders and their prisoners, whom they were dragging along up a steep path over the hills. I use the word dragging, because each of the poor captives was secured by a sort of rope, made of jungle-creepers, which was passed through a gash cut under the tendon Achilles of the left leg; and as the wound must have been very sore, the captives could only hobble rather slowly whilst their captors goaded and dragged them along. I should not omit to state that at that period the Kookees had no guns, nor any knowledge of the use of fire-arms. Great therefore was their surprise and terror when we fired a volley at them, and kept up a hot fire as fast as we could reload. I do not know if we hit any of the Kookees, for they instantly fled into the jungle and disappeared, leaving their captives to their fate. These poor creatures were almost as much terrified at the firing as the Kookees had been, and tried to hide themselves in the jungle. When the firing had ceased for some time, my men began to call out in the Bengali language, and at last two of the captives-a woman and a girl

peeped out of the jungle and came to us. The rest of them remained in hiding, but eventually found their own way out of the jungle to their homes. We lost no time in getting our canoes down the Nullah, and only felt that we were safe from any reprisals when we got out into the big river again. I believe, however, that the Kookees never thought of making any resistance, but fled away as fast as their legs could carry them to their own strongholds. It was a great piece of luck that we were able to recover any of the captives and to make the Kookees abandon their prey. The firing of our guns must have had a good effect, for the Kookee raids in this quarter ceased for a considerable time.

Many years passed, and I was employed in other parts of the country. In 1861 I returned to Chittagong as commissioner of the division, and had an opportunity of renewing my dealings with the hill-men. In the mean time, however, great changes had occurred. The Government had sent a military expedition into the hills and had destroyed some of the Kookee villages. The legislature had passed a law by which a large slice of the hills was formally annexed to British territory; and an English officer had been appointed as superintendent of hill-tribes, with a strong military police to support him-their stockaded outposts being advanced deep into the hills, so as to control the movements of the hill-men if they showed any disposition to raid. A school, and a jail, and a dispensary had been established so that the hill-men might enjoy the humanizing influences of civilization if they pleased. The superintendent of the hill-tribes was always ready to hear their complaints and administer a simple form of justice to them. By this time we had also learnt to distinguish more nicely the three chief tribes the Kookees, the Looshais, and the Shindoos. The Kookees, as nearest the frontier, had been brought well into subjection. Next behind them

came the Looshais, and the Shindoos were further off, towards the south.

In 1861 our difficulties lay chiefly with the Looshais. Their chief was named Ruttun Pooiya, and it must be admitted that he had gained such an ill report for his misdeeds that his name was a terror to all the Bengalis of the plains, and quite a bugbear to almost all the English officials in Chittagong and Calcutta. But the superintendent of the hill-tribes, Major John Moore Graham, was no ordinary man. Tall and handsome, with a kindly heart and a sound head, he devoted himself to his lonely duties over his savage subjects. He went among them, and listened to their troubles; he doctored them in their accidents and illnesses, and was a general favourite with men, women, and children. He was a great sportsman and an excellent shot, and often astonished them by his prowess against the tigers and wild buffaloes. Gradually he so far gained the confidence of the men that he was able to enlist several of them in his military police. But Ruttun Pooiya, the great Looshai chief, still held aloof, and studiously avoided the interviews which Graham sought to hold with him.

At length an opportunity arose by chance. One of the wives of Ruttun Pooiya met with an accident when she was on a visit at her father's village, and Graham was instrumental in helping to restore her to health. When she returned to her husband she naturally spoke warmly in his praise, and after a while Ruttun Pooiya agreed to go to our outpost at Casalong to see Major Graham. The ice once broken, he soon took a liking to the Englishman; and the latter, without hurrying or alarming him, gradually led him on to consider the advantages of placing himself on friendly terms with the British Government.

Major Graham, as superintendent of the hill-tribes, was immediately under my authority as commissioner of the division. He came to Chittagong to consult me, and we agreed

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