grounds, to preserve the plants from snails and caterpillars.

In the district of Eger, the youths procure from the woods a straight and tall pine or firtree, full of rosin, and fix it on some elevated spot, while the maidens adorn it with green wreaths, coloured ribbons, and garlands of flowers. A pile of firewood is then built up around the tree, and at night the whole is kindled. While the bonfire is blazing, the young men climb the tree, to obtain the garlands hung on by their favourite maidens. When the tree is consumed, the young people place themselves round the remaining fire, and look at each other, through garlands, to discover whether they are still mutually faithful; and they also throw the garlands to one another through the fire, three times, without failing to catch them, if possible, for their falling would be a bad omen. When the fire has burnt still lower, each youth, holding his maiden by the hand, leaps with her, three times, over the glowing embers. The scorched wreaths are taken home, and hung about the pictures, cupboards, and windows. The peasants plant the half-burnt brands and charcoal in their fields and gardens, and under the thresholds and the eaves of their dwellings, to act as charms against evil and witchcraft. During a tempest they throw fragments of the garlands into the hearth-fire, and while they are burning apply themselves to prayers. They give morsels of the charcoal to their cattle when sick, or about to calve, and also on holidays; and with portions ignited they fumigate the house and offices, to preserve the health of the inmates; consequently, the scorched garlands are preserved for these purposes from year to year.

In some places, the people, during the bonfire, wear wreaths of St. John's wort on their heads, or as girdles round the waist, for preservatives against sickness and witchcraft, but especially to prevent diseases of the eyes. The maidens about Eisenberg plait garlands of wild flowers, through which they look at the bonfire, while repeating some rhymes, to invoke its favour on their eyes till they see it again; and when this is done three times the prayer is expected to be granted. About Jungbunzlau, the people throw up their blazing brooms into the air, repeating a verse to ascertain how many years they have still to live; and believe, that as many times as the besom falls and continues to burn, so many years are they sure of life; but should it be extinguished by the fall, their death is certain within the Others cast garlands into the water, which, if drawn down by the water-sprite, betoken the speedy death of the owner. A

year.

yellow-blossoming fern is sought for on this night, from a belief that its possession confers good fortune, and the power of discovering hidden treasure. The blossoms, however, must not be touched by the fingers, but sprinkled upon a white cloth, otherwise they vanish like vapour. A like precaution must be taken when a maiden collects nine differently coloured flowers for a garland, which she places under her pillow, in order to see her beloved in a dream. To ensure success, the cloth should be washed with dew; and she must bring home the blossoms, avoiding to meet any one on her way.

In the villages of Leitmeritz, the maidens use seven variegated flowers, gathered in a peafield; and, placing the garland as a pillow, under the right ear, receive their answer, in a voice from underground. For the same purpose, wreaths are twisted of nine different sorts of twigs, and, being placed on the head, the wearer, by starlight, gazes into a stream where it is overhung by a tree, and there sees in the water the image of the future helpmate. Ostrovetz, near what is called the "Hellpool," on Midsummer-eve, may be seen a horse without a head, who for awhile accompanies the wayfarer, and then leaps into a piece of water a little beyond the pool. Others, instead of a horse, see a woman without a head, and sometimes a black dog or pig, a hare, or a white duck. On this night, also, the wood-demons have extraordinary power.

At

The numerous bonfires may be seen blazing for miles around in the valleys, and along the mountains, especially on the crest of the "hoary Schöninger," near Budweis, which, as well as the fireworks displayed from an old tower upon it, are visible to a great distance.

St. John the Baptist is, in Bohemia, after the Holy Venceslas, the saint most in repute, having no less than 151 churches dedicated to his honour, besides giving his name to many places and persons, since it is believed to be endued with specific power against Satan. The day of his nativity is the only one that is observed as such, beside those of the Virgin and the Saviour, among the festivals of the Roman Church. On this day, at noon, it is believed that all the treasures hidden in the earth are laid open; but, as they are again closed as soon as the hour strikes one, those who may have entered must remain shut in till the next St. John's Day.

It is supposed by the Taborites that their ancient heroes are still living, but buried within the mountain Blanick, where, in a trance, they are waiting the moment for sallying forth to destroy their enemies. A stream that issues from the mountain, having the

smell and colour of stable refuse, is said to proceed from their horses, standing in a row, along a wall of rock. The knights, clad in full armour, and with their weapons at hand, are all sleeping in various postures, either on the ground or on benches round the cavern ; some are stretched at full length; some are sitting, with their heads supported by their swords; and others are mounted, with their heads resting on their horses' necks. A shepherd, who once entered the cavern, found them in this condition, and saw them awaken, when they asked whether the hour for their exit had come. Upon which the leader, who slept in an elevated seat, in the centre of the hall, replied, "It is not yet time to destroy the enemies of Bohemia." On hearing this, they all resumed their sleep. The shepherd, when he at last got out, learnt that he had been shut up for a year.

A similar adventure happened to a blacksmith, who possessed a meadow close to the Blanick mountain; and went there one morning, with a labourer, to make hay. His serving-maid brought breakfast, and the smith, with his portion, sat him down at the foot of the mountain. He had hardly finished, when a man, wrapped in a mantle, came to him, and said,

"Follow me, friend!"

The smith obeyed, and both entered the mountain, where the stranger, turning round, said,

"I have brought you here to shoe our horses."

"That is impossible," said the smith, "for I have no tools."

"Be not uneasy about that," returned the knight, who then brought what was required and told him to begin, but warned him not to jostle against any of the sleeping cavaliers. The smith, however, in shoeing the last horse, did, by chance, shove against the knight who sat upon it; and who, awakening instantly, cried,

"Is it time?"

"Not yet; sleep on!" replied the smith's employer, who reproved him for his negligence, but, for all that, paid him for his trouble by giving him the old horseshoes.

When the smith came out again into his meadow, he found all these horseshoes converted into gold; and he found, also, two labourers making hay, where he had left but one; and, on inquiry, he learnt that a year had passed since he had gone away and been given up for lost.

A nail-smith once bartered with a knight of Blanick a sack of nails for a heap of stablesweepings, which afterwards changed to gold.

The same change took place with some dung, which a hind had swept out of their stable ; both events taking place on St. John's Day. The peasants affirm that strange noises aro often heard within the mountain, at such times as the knights are furbishing their arms for battle; but their outburst is not expected till the dry pond near Blanick is filled with blood, and the withered trees on the banks of the rivulet put forth fresh blossoms; and then the knights will come forth, with Duke Venceslas at their head, mounted on a white horse, aud bearing in his hand the standard of Bohemia.

The Bohemians entertain many amiable fancies associated with the native fruit-the strawberry. The first handful gathered, and those which may slip through the fingers in gathering, are reserved for the poor, for whom they are placed on a tree-stump or other conspicuous spot.

A mother who has lost her infant in the previous part of the year must gather no strawberries before St. John's Day; for, if she does, her child will not be permitted to join the blessed children when they go with the Virgin | Mary to gather strawberries in the groves of Heaven. According to another version, the child will indeed get some strawberries, but not so many as the others; for the Virgin will

"See, darling, your share is small, because your mother has eaten the rest."

Cherries are, in like manner, forbidden to the bereaved mother.

In the valley at Tetschen, it is believed that a certain crag, resembling a human bust, and called "The Stone Strawberry-Lass," which projects from a mountain, may become animated on St. John's Day, provided a pure and pious youth, who, from his seventh year of age, has never missed or neglected the Sunday churchservice, nor, during it, looked at a maiden, should strike it three times on the breast while High Mass is being performed. The tradition states that the crag was once a giddy maid, called Petronella, who lived with her pious grandmother, in a cottage lying far away in the valley.

On St. John's Day, in 1614, which fell upon a Sunday, Petronella, disobeying her grandmother, instead of going to High Mass, went to dance and sport among the strawberrygrounds; and, as she saw her grandmother returning from church, she made game of her. The grandmother was angry, and said she would rather see Petronella a stone than as wicked as she was; and the wish was no sooner spoken than Petronella, with her strawberrypot, was transformed into stone, as she appears

now.

W.

stand their relation to each other so well; and the private phase of these occurrences and of his own feelings, which my nephew portrayed to me in his letters, throws such a light on the facts themselves, that I seem about to detail experiences, instead of to record occurrences in which I had no part. The combination of circumstances which led to the dreadful atrocity by which my sister's son, in the fullest flow of his hope, was foully murdered, is so remarkable, that contemplating them now, at a distance of time, the impression I receive is almost as vivid as when they were first known Time alters to us the aspect of nearly all joys or sorrows; or rather, time allows us to alter our relations to the facts from which our pleasures or troubles may spring. But, whatever may have altered around me, my own particular feeling in estimating the matter does not seem to have changed. I still feel, whenever I turn to it, much as I imagine an animal may feel when its instincts are raised to their fiercest expression on feeling itself robbed of its young. I feel all the baffled

to me.

ance.

hopes writhe, and turn where they have been so ruthlessly cut short to a thirst for vengeThis is a feeling which, had I been a young man, might have carried me to the antipodes to seek out his murderer and revenge his death. Yet I am able now, as I was then, to argue how wrong such a feeling is, how foolishly wrong. What would be the use of the teachings of civilisation, religion, or even worldly experience, if impulses which belong so closely to imperfect nature alone that we find the best likeness for them in the instincts of the brute were not to be chained or tempered by them? But our nature is so imperfect that we cannot make theory accord with practice always. There are insults and wrongs which our imperfect nature (mine at least) feels to be beyond the reach of ordinary laws. I am an old soldier, and perhaps have acquired such ideas from my profession. It is with a terrible feeling that I think upon poor Philip's murder at all times. I cannot help it. It is perhaps wrong-I know it is wrong; but still it is so. The law never discovered or overtook his murderer, that I know of. I struggle hard often to think my fearful wish, that I had been able in revenge to shoot him like a dog, is not a darling wish with me; that it grows weaker with time; that it is a weakness, and not a crime, so to wish to put our hand upon God's purposes. But I always find it fast rooted among my doubts.

He grew up

child was born under my roof. in the light of a son to me; and when we lost his mother, I promised her that I would treat him as a son. When he came back from Rugby, in 1852, he was seventeen years of age. I designed him for the army, and he would have shone in it; he would have done his duty. I know my judgment was not wrong in that. He came back, however, with a craving after adventure which puzzled me somewhat at first. It disturbed my plans for him. I did not want to check it, for it was not ignoble. Unfortunately, there was no service to be seen just then; and had I sent him, as I had at first intended, into the army at once, he might have misinterpreted the duties of a soldier in peace, and failed to appreciate the charm there is in discharging faithfully and completely the most unnoticed duties of a soldier's life. He might have viewed them in a false light. He was one of those youngsters who at school are dubbed "lucky." In every game of chance, and, indeed, almost everything he engaged in, luck seemed to stick to his fingers. Whether the incense which simple success is always greeted with may have tended to foster the idea, or whether the wonderful and highly-coloured accounts which were daily published first drew him on, I cannot tell, but he desired more than anything to go and dig gold on the Australian fields. He had an idea, which he tried to explain to me, that the small pieces of gold which were washed out of the soil by the diggers must have been detached from some rich system of gold, which could be discovered. He wished to explore, and seek fortune thus in a short time. I could not but consent, and he left I never saw him again.

me.

CHAPTER II.

Philip Fraser landed at Port Phillip on the 3rd October, 1854. His purpose was to go to the diggings at Bendigo, and to join a working party of three others already established there. Two members of this party, James and William Burlow, had been more than twelve years in the colony. They had left their home in Melbourne in the early days of the gold fever, and had breasted the rough work with varying success ever since, excepting during a few intervals. The third one of the party was Philip's friend, who had been nearly two years at the gold-fields. His name was Richard Gordon. The custom at the diggings is to work in small gangs in this way, to divide the labour, and to share the result. Philip was a creature of day-dreams and sanguine anticipations; but by the time he reached the diggings he had but few of the ideas with which he had

left England, unchanged, excepting his theory about the masses of gold, and the explorations he hoped to make. He had found in Melbourne all things so modified by the exceptional exigencies of the time, that his plans had to be changed, or were overthrown. He had been compelled to walk with a straggling party the whole way through the bush, sleeping how he could, and as others did. He had suffered from hunger, and was nearly destitute of everything which he brought with him from England, but he was full of sturdy determination. Nothing, however, had depressed and disappointed him more than the dreariness of the bush. His fancied picture of luxuriance and shade, made brilliant here and there by the rich yellow blooms of the wattle trees, was lamentably overthrown when he came upon the thin and peculiar maze, which seemed to extend interminably on every side of his way. The tall gum trees seemed to yield no corresponding shade, and the absence of the leafy undergrowth which is found in English woods left the naked trunks more exposed in their bewildering sameness. The ground, strewn everywhere with dry sticks and little evidences of dearth and ruin, seemed, under the hot sun, always the same weary, pathless way, without landmarks of progress. Where some great tree had fallen athwart its fellows, it seemed to him a mere evidence of present ruin; where all were growing luxuriantly in the hot sun, it seemed to him that they grew rankly on a bed of former ruin. He had privations to endure, and hardly anything but hope to meet them with; but he was strong enough in that, and on the 2nd of November he reached the Bendigo Diggings in safety.

When Philip came to understand that he was approaching Bendigo, his depressed spirits underwent a sudden change, and he began to day-dream again. He felt like reaching home at last. He thought of being welcomed, as from the old country, by the free-handed, rough adventurers who had congregated there, and by his own friends. There would be a peculiar romance for him in the fact of men standing bravely on their own resources; and where education and refinement, which in long-settled communities raise their possessors above the classes who do the rough labours of the strong hand and arm, might be found face to face with labour and duty in their simplest forms. When, however, he came upon the little community of diggers he soon found that the reality only left him the very dregs of his dream. Tents and shanties were scattered about in careless confusion. Heaps of dirt, and holes, and mud; men in all kinds of costume, and some with little enough, and all

sufficiently dirty, were working, some side by side with jealous and absorbing earnestness, some apart, equally intent, but all with the same one only purpose. Here and there he got only an oath, almost always a sneer, and a momentary reply to his inquiry for the party he was about to join. When at last he found Gordon and his friends, he was soon able to settle amongst them, and to grapple with the realities of his new life, quite freed from home fancies. Still, however, he cherished his theory about the masses of gold, and thought he found it strengthen with the observations he made.

Nothing of any great importance occurred to him during the first two months of his sojourn. He had become a regular goldhunter, like all around him, with the same continual work, and the same ceaseless avidity for work. He had been moderately fortunate, but much more fortunate than his companions, and when he told them of his character for good luck at school, they nick-named him "Lucky Phil." He had found the only nugget larger than ordinary which had fallen to their lot, a few days after his arrival. On the evening when they took stock of and divided the gold, Philip was in better spirits than either of them. James Burlow, however, was discontented with the gains, and, as he was the captain of the party, proposed a decided move. He said that, although they had succeeded in getting a good quantity of gold, it was not to be forgotten that they consumed most of it in the expenses of their living, and that the apparent gains were not commensurate with the hard work they had. He wanted to know what they thought, therefore, of making a very decided move. Some one had been out prospecting further east, and he had heard that the best accounts, as to gold, had been received from Queensleigh. He thought it would be wise to make a move. What did they think of the prospects, and did they feel inclined to chance it ?

In the conversation which ensued William Burlow sided with his brother, but Gordon laughingly said he wanted to hear what "lucky" suggestion Philip could make, for they had tried long enough what hard work could wring from Fortune; he was for tempting her still more, and he would join willingly in trying to "prospect" for themselves instead of following where others had been.

The time had now clearly come for Philip to propound his plan, and he did so. He had thought of it so long, and treasured it so much, correcting it and confirming it by his daily observations, that when he found himself actually appealed to on the very subject, and that unexpectedly, he spoke with an enthusiasm visible in