REVIEW. 143 
The present writer once stalked a black buck, to whom, just as 
the stalk was drawing to a close, came another on battle bent. It 
was a very pretty fencing match, and the spectator, lying flat with 
uncocked rifle along the friendly bank of a rice field, could hear the 
panting of the combatants and see their eyes flash. He had the 
pleasure of seeing the matter end by the retreat of one champion, 
sore, pummelled and exhausted, but not mangled. The victor seemed 
to have had enough, and did not care to pursue, but walked off to 
where the ladies had been when the fight began. They, however, 
had long ago resented the intrusion of “strangers in the gallery,’ by 
walking off,-so the buck sniffed at the ground where they had 
stood, and presently seemed to “get their line” and trotted off 
with little further attempt to puzzle it out, To the end he never saw 
that he had a human neighbour. 
There was a pleasure in watching that fight, but a battle of elephants 
maring isas vulgar asa “dog-worry.” If there is any exception 
to be made at all, it should be in favour of cock-fighting. The 
natural man, however disciplined, has a secret joy in a cock-fight, 
though he knows itis wrong. With the beast-fights, and with one 
illustration of a doctrine of his own, we part with so pleasant a writer as 
Mr. Kipling. He delights in remark upon the “ topsy-turveydom ” 
of things oriental, as all great Western travellers in the Hast have 
done since Herodotus compared the ways of Greeks and Egyptians. 
But of all the “contraries,” in religion and nature, between 
England and India, the most contrary is the Indian Daddy Longlegs 
that does say his prayers, and is “ chucked” all the same, 
