"He won't be lying about here, then."

Ou-opp shook his head. "Soon we find fresh bone," he said, and led us forward. Sure enough, in quite a few minutes we came on much fresher remains, including still recognisable portions of a pariah dog, which, however, Ou-opp disdained to linger over, on the ground that they were a week old. He almost gave the impression of having seen the luckless dog brought there on the day of its demise: yet the jungle must have been inaccessible except to elephants. Indeed from this time on we had to get them to clear the way for us, by tearing off with their trunks such boughs as threatened to sweep us from the pads, and only Ou-opp's calm certainty prevailed on the Collector to remain patient. He hated a thick jungle, reasonably enough, for it gives the leopard every chance of sneaking off unseen when you are just on top of him. Still, he let Ou-opp go ahead, and we came on more remains-calf again this time, and possibly fresher. I don't know why I say possibly, for Ou-opp said they were not more than four days; and when the chuprassie, who also boasts himself at shikar, differed from him, Ou-opp carelessly supported his own view by pointing to a tree close by which was all scored with leopards' claws, and saying

"Panther scratch him four nights off."

The chuprassie gave in before so much detailed woodlore.

A little later, after we had just crossed & dry tangled gully in Ou-opp's wake, we came up to find that he had descended from his elephant, and was making a reconnaissance on foot. The chuprassie murmured to us that they had just come on fresh leavings, and that there was a sort of hole in the bank hard by.

"But where is Ou - opp Sahib?" demanded the Collector.

"He look in, your Honour, to see if panther is there, " said the chuprassie; and following the direction of his finger, we perceived in among the undergrowth, with his gun held carelessly in one hand, Ou-opp down on his knees peering into a hole in the bank.

Here, I say," began the Collector in tones of remonstrance, "supposing there is a leopard inside."

Ou-opp had already got quietly to his feet again. "Otter," he said, and slung himself up the tail of the elephant. I thought to myself that it would take a good deal to persuade me to go on all fours in front of a leopard's possible lair and decide it was only an otter's.

Another quarter of an hour's thorny going, such as the elephants hate, brought us out of the wooded area on to the edge of the river. of the river. Crossing it, we got at once into a great grass waste, and the Collector was about to stop Ou-opp and ask him what his plan of campaign now was, when Ou-opp himself called a halt. His own elephant was at the time close

to what might be described as a dense tussock of grass, some ten feet high and the same in diameter, and as ours came up Ou-opp held up his hand warningly.

"What is it?" asked the Collector, expecting, as he told me, to see a pig break away.

"Panther, sir," said Ou-opp, and pointed into the tussock. His gun lay carelessly across his knee and his legs swung idly down. It is not a position in which I have ever seen an English gamekeeper, but somehow a smart young English gamekeeper was what Ou-opp reminded me of at that moment. I fancy it was the respectful air of patronage with which he offered something irreproachable in the way of sport to the amateur gentlemen before him. He as good as said, "It will amuse you, but I have seen so much of it"; and while I was being amused, and just beginning to wonder vaguely whether it was usual to shoot at leopards before you saw them, the Collector had let fly into the tussock, there was a snarling hiss, and something had bounded out on the side away from us and was leaving behind it a wake of shivering jungle-grass. After that we were in the thick of the chase. The mahouts had become yelling fiends, the elephants were going at a floundering gallop, the jungle was like a sea swept by a violent squall. Then, as I was wondering how much practice it required to be able to be in an upright position on the pad at the critical moment, we had all, so to speak, pulled

up on our haunches, and Ouopp's mahout was pointing excitedly at a patch of grass. Ou-opp evidently had his eye on it, but his gun still lay across his lap idle. He did not lift it even when, a second later, the leopard, with another sudden snarl, leapt at his dangling legs. The elephant wheeled right round trumpeting.

"Look out," I said involuntarily, and Ou-opp smiled slightly.

"Panther leg broken," he said, and it was so. Owing to that fact it had missed its spring by inches and dropped back in the grass, a bunch of snarling, crouching yellow. Another bullet and it turned over on its side dead, and Ou-opp had dismounted to measure it.

We went on afterwards for two or three hours, but we got nothing else, and there was no particular reason why we should. Panthers do not herd together, and there is not much beating to be done with two elephants. two elephants. Only I had the fanciful impression that Ou-opp was not interested in producing another bagh for us. His preserves, so to speak, had been shot over sufficiently for the day. Or else he had an engagement to keep. He courteously showed us more bones here and there, and many fascinating bits of the jungle. woodcraft was unexceptionable, but it did not result in any more panthers. And on the way back, which took us near the village, he requested to be put down, merely asking lacon

His

ically, when the Collector acknowledged his services, if we would care for further sport on the morrow. On the morrow, unfortunately, we had to move fifteen miles farther, the Collector explained; whereat Ou-opp Sahib saluted and walked off, having told us no word about himself or his lineage.

We learnt a little about him that evening from one of the chuprassies, who had got it from the schoolmaster; and it appeared from this source that Sigi Ou-opp Sahib was son to yet another Sigi Ou-opp Sahib, who had settled in the village many many years before. What had this original Ou-opp Sahib been? Nothing less than an English Tommy. No wonder that our Sigi had jaunty legs and a devil-may-care bearing that was not of Bengal. The elder Ou-opp had come out for the Mutiny, and had taken part in some of the later operations against hill tribes, for which services Government or a Maharajah had rewarded him with a grant of land in the hill country. Presumably he was not a man of the hills -not of such hills as the Himalayas, at least, and he had sold his hill estate and drifted down to this village, where there was a hill indeed, but a hill that only served to make the plains more conspiouous. Here, too, the British cantonments had once been, and here no doubt he had once camped among his own people. I expect that was the call. The regiments had been marched away long since, but

he would know where the tents had been and the drillground and the Colonel's bungalow and the canteen and the cells; for him in this sweltering Indian village there would be echoes of the bugles and of the songs that he had sung with his mates. The Eastone is told-never changes, but that is true only of the spirit of the East. The landscape changes amazingly fast, especially up country. There in a night a river will change its course, and leave leagues of country high and dry, making endless marshes of ploughed land, and itself reappearing, a day's march off, as smooth and as limpid in some new channel. Always, too, the jungle-grass keeps rolling up like a tide, removing landmarks.

We looked for signs of the old cantonments and found none. But Ou-opp Senior had known where to look, and, war-worn and changed into an Indian landowner, he had settled down-that English soldier-in the place which (one may guess) he had come to first as a raw recruit, full of England and fresh as the six months' voyage of those days would leave him from poaching the Squire's rabbits. Now he was a Squire himself, but in a far country, where jackals howl all night and the only keepers that try to stop a man's sport are the great beasts themselves that keep the jungle. And since Squires have land to leave and must have heirs to leave it to, Ouopp married some brown girl

of the village. I choose to think that he knew her before he went off to fight-met her at the village - well when he was off duty and sick for the Pollies and Letties he had left behind him. He liked her soft eyes and the poise of her as she held the pitcher on her head, and he helped her to draw up the water, and told her in his alien tongue the things that every woman understands. And she, I expect, was taken by the jauntiness of his legs and the devil in his eyes, and waited for him to come back gladly.

All that is certain is that he did come back and marry, and that the result was the Sigi Ou-opp of our acquaintance. Charles Godfrey? Christopher George? His father must have known, but I doubt if Sigi himself remembered or had known himself to bear any name but Sigi Ou-opp for many years. It was twenty, the schoolmaster said, since the old man died; and all that survived of him-besides Sigi

-was the topi and the puttees and the jacket that Sigi wore, and the muzzle - loading gun which he carried so professionally.

Not much to leave? Perhaps not. He was an English soldier, and might have gone home and married an English girl, and left white sons to strengthen our army and help to govern the world. Perhaps before the end he himself may have thought that he had lost too much and was leaving too little, and leaving that to a strange people. Nobody can say. He would not have told that to the Bengali schoolmaster. He could not have told it to Sigi, his son.

And even if he

thought it, it does not follow that the thought corresponded with the reality. If the legacy he bequeathed was indeed to the East and not to the West, yet in its way it was an English legacy-this son, who, for all his brownness, was the only sportsman to be found in fifty square miles of country.

R. E. VERNÈDE.

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VOL. CLXXXVII.-NO. MCXXXV.