till we suddenly come on the dry end of a log or a sunny pile of stones, where he has been asleep, and the snuffling hounds break out in loud chorus, and spring for ward on the hot scent.

The portion of the Genesee Valley which is hunted is about twenty miles long by six or seven wide. It harbors some forty odd covers, and extends north of Avon and south of Mount Morris, and from Conesus Lake on the east, westward across the Genesee River. Streams running crosswise through this tract to the river or the lake make deep gullies, which foxes affect, and to which it especially edifies them to fly when pursued. The windings of the river make various “oxbows," of which the Big and Little are definitely known by those names, while divers others are anonymous. The river and its tributary creeks are usually ford able, but it happens now and then that after rains, when they are running bank full, a hard-run fox will take to one of them and swim across, followed by the pack and as many riders as have waterproof convictions and water-wise mounts. Wherever a hunt starts, it is seldom long out of sight of the river and the valley, and rarely fails to get down on the flats before it is over. A series of hospitable homes at convenient intervals down the valley make good stopping-places for the weary, the hungry, the lost, and the other wise unfortunate.

By the rules of the club, members are authorized to ride in blue coats and drab waistcoats, and to dine in red coats and white waistcoats. The red coats are actually worn to a mentionable extent, but the blue coat habit has never spread, and you may hunt with the club for a good while without suspecting that it has an authorized out-door costume. Pea-jackets, flannel shirts, breeches, and boots (of ten, horribile dictu! of rubber) are more popular.

Mr. Wadsworth's hounds, originally of native strain, are crossed with blood from Lord Fitzhardinge's, Sir Bache Cunard's, and the Badminton packs, and lately, to improve their "music." which suffered from these admixtures, with Lord Tredegar's. In 1891 there were usually thirteen couples in the pack.

Four institutions that are closely associated with the hunting in the Genesee Valley are the Mount Morris Horse Show, the Hunt Ball, the Point to Point Steeple

chase, and the Fourth of July sports. The Horse Show, under the special supervision of Mr. S. S. Howland, of Belwood, is held on the last Saturday in September, and marks the opening of the hunting season. It attracts all the horsemen in the valley and tributary to it, and many visitors from the world outside. It is the special and particular feast of horse-trading, a business which sustains the same intimate relations to fox-hunting that ship-building does to commerce. The show takes half a day, and is an important social function, involving basket lunches and much good human company, besides very desirable equine associations.

The Hunt Ball is another institution, and develops a great deal of social activity and a number of red coats.

The Point to Point Steeple-chase was supposed to punctuate the latter end of the regular hunting season, but irregular hunting continues long after it whenever the weather admits, which happens, year in and year out, about two days a week during January, February, and March. The Point to Point is a race across country for about four miles. change with the season. contestants were taken up a hill, shown a hay-stack of convenient remoteness, and told to ride to it. In 1890 the course was flagged. Last year there was no Point to Point. Its expediency is still under discussion, and the duration of its existence is uncertain.

Its conditions One year the

An institution of much surer hold is the Fourth of July sports. On the great American anniversary the club holds its midsummer meeting at the Homestead. After lunch there the members compete at the Genesee Fair Grounds in such equestrian contests as tent pegging, picking up the hat, riding for scarfs, Turks' heads and rings, and the like; and the festive farmer transmogrified into a cavalryman is a sight for gods and men.

Such is the hunting in the Genesee Valley, and if in the exigencies of narration undue space has been given to describing a drag-hunt, the reader is expected to remember that that has been on the lucus a non lucendo principle that a draghunt in the Genesee Valley especially deserves description because it is such a rarity. They only happen in October, and in that month last year there were only three, whereas the October wild-fox hunts numbered seventeen.

While the burden of starting the Hunt and keeping it up has fallen chiefly on Mr. Wadsworth, he has at all times had the support of enthusiastic coadjutors. Some of the faithfulest and most persistent of them are recruits of very recent years, whose youth and energy promise well for the long continuance of sport in the valley.

These many decades the man who can make two blades of grass grow in place of one has been held up as the typical benefactor of his kind. But it is doubtful if to us Americans, in our plenty, he is so pre-eminently helpful as the man who teaches us how to realize the full value of the grass that we have got. Critics

have been used to say that our great fault was a defective ability to stop work and enjoy ourselves. It has been hard for us to stop work, particularly at home. If, as somebody has computed, Americans spent a hundred millions in Europe last year, it was partly because they were ashamed to be seen enjoying themselves in their own hard-working land, or didn't know how to do it. It will not always be so. We will realize after a time that recreation is really worth providing for at home, and as that time comes nearer, the Genesee Valley Hunt Club will become in an increasing degree an interesting study as an institution of a meritorious species, and very good of its kind.

OF

F the dealings of Edward Bellingham with William Monkhouse Lee, and of the cause of the great terror of Abercrombie Smith, it may be that no absolute and final judgment will ever be delivered. It is true that we have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself, and such corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles, the servant, from the Reverend Plumptree Peterson, Fellow of Old's, and from such other people as chanced to gain some passing glance at this or that incident in a singular chain of events. Yet, in the main, the story must rest upon Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that one brain, however outwardly sane, has some

subtle warp in its texture, some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of nature has been overstepped in 'open day in so famed a centre of learning and light as the University of Oxford. Yet when we think how narrow and how devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which the human spirit may wander.

In a certain wing of what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a corner turret of an exceeding great age.

The

THE CORNER TURRET.

heavy arch which spans the open door has bent downwards in the centre under the weight of its years, and the gray lichen-blotched blocks of stone are bound and knitted together with withes and strands of ivy, as though the old mother had set herself to brace them up against wind and weather. From the door a stone stair curves upward spirally, passing two landings, and terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge. Life has flowed like water down this winding stair, and, waterlike, has left these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned pedantic scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age, how full and strong had been that tide of young English life! And what was left now of all those hopes, those strivings, those fiery energies, save here and there in some old-world church

yard a few scratches upon a stone, and perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin? Yet here were the silent stair and the gray old wall, with bend and saltire and many another heraldic device still to be read upon its surface, like grotesque shadows thrown back from the days that had passed.

In the month of May, in the year 1884, three young men occupied the sets of rooms which opened on to the separate landings of the old stair. Each set consisted simply of a sittingroom and of a bedroom, while the two corresponding rooms upon the ground-floor were used, the one. as a coal-cellar, and the other as the livingroom of the servant, or gyp, Thomas Styles, whose duty it was to wait upon the three men above him. To right and to left was a line of lecture-rooms and of offices, so that the dwellers in the old turret enjoyed a certain seclusion, which made the chambers popular among the more studious undergraduates. Such were the three who occupied them now-Abercrombie Smith above, Edward Bellingham beneath him, and William Monk

house Lee upon the lowest story. It was ten o'clock on a bright spring night, and Abercrombie Smith lay back in his arm-chair, his feet upon the fender, and his brier-root pipe between his lips. In a similar chair, and equally at his ease, there lounged on the other side of the fireplace his old school friend Jephro Hastie. Both men were in flannels, for they had spent their evening upon the river, but apart from their dress no one could look at their hard-cut alert faces without seeing that they were open-air men-men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust.

Hastie, indeed, was stroke of his college boat, and Smith was an even better oar, but a coming examination had already cast its shadow over him and held him to his work, save for the few hours a week which health demanded. A litter of medical books upon the table, with scattered bones, models, and anatomical plates, pointed to the extent as well as

the nature of his studies, while a couple of single-sticks and a set of boxing-gloves above the mantel-piece hinted at the means by which, with Hastie's help, he might take his exercise in its most compressed and least distant form. They wth other very so well

that they coold

SIL 10 in t' soothing silene

wich is the very highest develop

ment of compan-ionship.

Have some whiskey," said Abercrombie Smith at last, between two cloudbursts. "Scotch in the jug and Irish in the bottle."

"No, thanks. I'm in for the sculls. I don't liquor when I'm training. How about you?" "I'm reading

Hastie nodded, and they relapsed into a contented silence.

"By-the-way, Smith," asked Hastie, presently, "have you made the acquaintance of either of the fellows on your stair yet?" "Just a nod when we pass. Nothing more."

"Hum! I should be inclined to let it stand at that. I know something of them both. Not much, but as much as I want. I don't think I should take them to my bosom if I were you. Not that there's much amiss with Monkhouse Lee." "Meaning the thin one?" "Precisely. He is a gentlemanly little fellow. I don't think there is any vice in him. But then you can't know him without knowing Bellingham." "Meaning the fat one?"

"Yes, the fat one. And he's a man whom I for one would rather not know." Abercrombie Smith raised his eyebrows and glanced across at his companion. "What's up, then?" he asked. "Drink? Cards? Cad? You used not to be censorious."

best men in his line that they have ever had in the college."

"Medicine or classics?"

"Eastern languages. He's a demon at them. Chillingworth met him somewhere above the second cataract last long, and he told me that he just prattled to the Arabs as if he had been born and nursed and weaned among them. He talked Coptic to the Copts, and Hebrew to the Jews, and Arabic to the Bedouins, and they were all ready to kiss the hem of his frock-coat. There are some old hermit Johnnies up in those parts who sit on rocks and scowl and spit at the casual stranger. Well, when they saw this chap Bellingham, before he had said five words they just lay down on their bellies and wriggled. Chillingworth said that he never saw anything like it. Bellingham seemed to take it as his right too, and strutted about among them and talked down to them like a Dutch uncle. Pretty good for an undergrad of Old's, wasn't it?"

"That sort of thing doesn't mean much in the East, though. It was just their

Monkhouse Lee. His father is vicar there, and he has a sister, Eveline Lee, who is as nice a little girl as you would wish to see. When Lee began to be chummy with Bellingham, he asked him down to stay at the vicarage, and I saw something of him. The mischief of it is that he's managed in some way to get the better of little Eveline, and she is engaged to him. What she can see in the fellow! But it's my belief that there are many women, and Eveline Lee is among them, who are so unselfish, and so gentle, and so frightened of giving pain, that if their fathers' gardeners were to propose to them, they would accept them for fear of hurting their feelings if they refused. Well, I suppose they know their own business best, but it makes a man grind his teeth. A dove

and a toad-that's what I always think of."

Abercrombie Smith grinned and knocked his ashes out against the side of the grate. "You show every card in your hand, old chap," said he. 'What a prejudiced, green-eyed, evil-thinking old man it is! You have really nothing against the fellow except that."

"Well, I've known her ever since she was as long as that cherry-wood pipe, and I don't like to see her taking risks. And it is a risk. He looks beastly. And he has a beastly temper, a venomous temper. You remember his row with Long Norton?"