used, but as it is difficult to sharpen, it is mals whose delight it is to make pitfalls in the ground large enough to receive a horse's hoof. When a horse is thus snared, his leg usually breaks, and his rider, after a brief trip through the air, tries the experiment of viewing the landscape in an upside-down position. Then there are frequent nullahs, or sunken water-courses, which the hunter does not discover until he is on their very brink. If the nullah can be leaped, the hunt goes on without interruption. If, however, it is too wide, the rider dismounts, and leads his horse through it. The dismounting is a very simple operation; and the horse, if he is well trained, and has saved himself from plunging into the nullah, expresses no surprise when his master has slid over his neck, but waits quietly until the latter has picked the pebbles from his face and is ready to remount. Meanwhile the pig, with grunts of sarcastic joy, has put half a mile between himself and his pursuer, and is mentally prepared to offer odds that he will finally escape. When riding, the pig-sticker carries his spear with the butt down, and the point well forward in a line with his horse's ears. When closing with the pig, he aims to reach his left side, so as to use the right arm freely. The pig is to be stuck immediately behind the shoulder, so that the spear will pass through his lungs and out at the breast. The rush of the horse drives the spear home, and a sudden wheel to the Armed with this weapon, and well mounted, the pig-sticker rides off, sometimes alone, but usually with a gay company of pig-sticking brother officers, and halts on the border of the jungle while the native beaters drive the inhabitants of the jungle down toward the hunters. The master of the hunt posts the sportsmen here and there in pairs, so that each hunter has an especial rival, against whom he is pitted, and whom he must, if possible, forestall in spearing the hog. When the line of spearmen is in readiness the beaters advance, usually with shouts and the beating of tom-toms. Presently one of them sounds a horn, and the hunters then know that the game has been started. | left withdraws it, and leaves the hunter A little later, and out from the jungle marches the "sounder," led by the patriarchal boar. When the master of the hunt considers that the game has had a fair start in advance of the hunters, he sounds his bugle, and the horsemen, with poised spears, bear down upon the devoted boar, which bounds away with a speed more worthy of an antelope than a pig. The one great secret of success in pigsticking is to ride straight after the pig with all the speed that your horse can muster. The pig must be "blown" within the first two miles, or else he performs the curious respiratory feat known as "getting his second wind," in which case the chances are that he will outrun the horse, and squeak derision at the baffled hunter. But to ride straight after a flying pig over a grass-grown Indian plain requires courage as well as skillful horsemanship. There are several small ani ready to receive a charge in case the wound is not immediately mortal. If the pig does charge, he is received on the point of the spear, and permitted to insert as much of it into his interior as his ferocious temper demands. A good pig-sticker nearly always kills the game at the first blow, and a novice who is charged by a powerful boar incurs great danger, unless he is thoroughly cool and self-possessed. There are pigs which do not wait until they are wounded before charging. A young and high-spirited boar will abandon the attempt to escape by flight as soon as he finds that the hunter is gaining on him, and will suddenly turn, and dash at the horse's legs. If the rider is master of himself and his horse, the pig is promptly spitted. If not, the pig gathers the laurels of the hunt, and rejoins his "sounder" to boast of having spoiled a horse and discomfited a British officer. IN WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS. Y acquaintance with Western Massa lived on the high ridge between the Connecticut and the Westfield rivers, to say, "Come," I informed him of my intention confined to a ride of making a descent upon from Springfield to Pittsfield by rail, when, tired of waiting for my friend, who VOL. LXI.-No. 366.-56 An ascent would be more correct considering their topography. My railroad ride might have been a tolerably æsthetic ex- | bravely once with this amusement, when perience but that I went to sleep just suddenly my count was spoiled by a log before we came to the beautiful part, and on which were perched some twenty or did not wake up till we had got well past thirty at the least calculation. As it was, it. On another occasion a friend had the liveliest incident upon my journey taken me up to the top of Mount Holyoke. was the coming in of a big wasp at the It was the hottest of hot days, and the car window. On the opposite side of the whole landscape had a dull and ashen car sat three large-hooded Sisters of Charlook. The Connecticut meadows, "geo- ity, so serene, so imperturbable, that I metrically diversified," as said the bill, with strips of corn and other cereals, looked like a piece of fady patchwork. As I looked across the winding river to the hills beyond, I little thought what joy and peace they had in store for me along their woodsy roads and in their quiet hollows. Indeed, I did not think of much of anything that day except the story my companion told me as we sat upon a mossy crag together-the story of John Brown's famous raid on Harper's Ferry, about which he knew all that is worth knowing, having been himself one of the arch-conspirators. When, having warned my friend of my approach, I finally, in the one-hundredth year of the Republic, set my face in his direction, my journey was about as unmomentous as a journey of one hundred and fifty miles could well be. Had it been in the spring-time, and my ap proach had been by the Canal Road, as generally since, I could have counted the turtles in the old canal which gives the road its name. I was getting along could not help wondering what would be the consequence if the wasp should light on either of their ascetic noses. But he did not gratify my curiosity. At Northampton there was a prelude of happy faces to my coming joy, which would, I think, have given Jonathan Edwards, the genius of the place, a pang of doubt as to the soundness of his creed. He was a man of heart as well as brain. For every once I think of his "sinners in the hands of an angry God," I think twice of that most rare and beauteous passage in which he describes Sarah Pierrepont, his destined wife, at the age of fourteen. Dante's "Vita Nuova" has hardly anything more mystical: "They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that Great Being who makes and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him. She has a singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful if you would give her all this world, lest she should offend this Great Being. She is of a wonderful calmness, sweetness, and universal benevolence, especially after this great God has manifested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always talking with her." He married this dear girl at seventeen, and of their blessed union, in the second generation, came Aaron Burr! Northampton is so beautiful that you might imagine Edwards's wife to be its guardian angel. The tornado of 1879 made dreadful havoc among its noble elms, trailing the finest of their leafy summits in the dust, but there are still enough remaining to make the streets exceedingly beautiful, even without a bevy of Smith's College girls taking their constitutional, with eyes that look right on. It is an up grade of some 300 feet from Northampton to Williamsburg, where the railroad comes to an end, and then you must go seven miles further on, and up hill 1200 feet more, before you come to Chesterfield, which is the heart of Western Massachusetts. From various letters which my friend had written me from this proud eminence, I had formed a very distinct idea of the place, and especially of my friend's house and its surroundings. I had imagined a hill not unlike Mount St. Michel, my friend's house answering to the monastery on the top. I am bound to say it proved as unlike this as possible. But it proved wonderfully sweet and good, the journey up through overarching trees, and the hill-top itself, where all at once the hills beyond the Westfield break upon your view. They lie range behind range MOUNT HOLYOKE. to the westward, until they touch the sky at an altitude of 2300 feet. Northwest is Greylock, 3500 feet in height, some thirty miles away, and from this point of view looking wonderfully symmetrical, with a truncated top like an extinct volcano. To the northwest, The merest bulge above the horizon's rim, But the peak by which I was the most attracted was the somewhat obtuse one of the old farm-house next-neighboring my friend's pretty cottage, and only a few hundred feet off. I broke the Tenth Commandment all to pieces the moment that I saw it. I broke it into smaller pieces the next year when I came again, and the third year I had a quiet talk with the proprietor as he leaned upon his scythe under his apple-trees, and the consequence was that, immediately after, I went to my friend, and said to him, in the words of the dying emperor, "I feel myself becom ing a god." I was a landed proprietor. I had a house a hundred years old, three acres of grass land, a thriving orchard, a vegetable garden, and four barns. Since then, what comfort I have had upon my heavenkissing hill! My constant wonder is that hundreds who must leave the city in the summer do not do as I have done. It means ten times the comfort for about one-half the expense of boarding in your trunks. And New England is dotted all over with homesteads going to decay, which can be purchased for a song, and made habitable and even charming for a few hundred dollars. Chesterfield is as pleasant a village as one could desire to see. A genius of order and neatness presides over the place. At the village centre there are about a dozen houses, but among them there are some fine old mansions. Time was when Chesterfield was on the regular stage route from Boston to Albany, and in the old coaching days many were the four-in-hands that stopped at the old tavern door (nine a day sometimes), a lineal descendant of which still opens to receive the casual guest. Then there were three churches, and as many stores. Now there is one variety store, and one variety church, inclusive of all sects. I do not attend the latter as frequently as I should, but I am a regular attendant at the former. The arrival of the afternoon stage is the event of every day. It is a mysterious bond between us and the great outside world. It brings to our quiet and coolness news |