one thing that made life splendid. I confess without shame that I felt a deep envy of Arden; I realised that she would have suffered any torture for his sake, have gone, if there are hells, to any hell; and the thought of my own loveless, solitary life became suddenly hateful. What a thoroughly damned fool Arden was! Superficially she might be awkward and commonplace, but essentially she was finest gold. She had come through fire; for the first time she had doubted her lover, but her last ory told me that her love had trampled doubt to death and shone like a star.

I sat there in silence, feeling insignificant. She remained standing in front of me for about a minute, then she turned and walked slowly away. For once her clothes didn't seem absurd. If Arden could have witnessed our interview, I thought, even his self-absorbed soul might have been aroused.

I wandered restlessly through innumerable churches all the afternoon, and did not return to the Cà Loredan till nightfall. When I entered the door Marietta met me with the information that the English Signorina had packed her baggage and departed, canaries and all, no one knew where.

That was the end of the episode. I saw her walking with Arden two or three times during the following week, then they disappeared from Venice. I heard nothing of their being married, and Mrs Perivale had no information. I left Italy with a strong sense of having played a small part in two acts of a drama, and of having been ruthlessly eliminated from the third. After some time I wrote to Arden at Trieste (Mrs Perivale knew the name of the shipping firm which employed him), but I received no answer. The third act remained mysterious blank.

A year ago, and two years after the events in Venice, I

was reading a paper in a café when I came upon the following paragraph:

The Count and and Countess Federowski, who have been on trial for political conspiracy, were yesterday sentenced at St Petersburg to twenty years' confinement in Siberia. They will be permitted to take their younger children with them into exile. Their English governess, Miss Erica Fane, has obtained leave to accompany them.

Poor Lordessa! I wonder if she remembers the Cà Loredan. I don't think, really, that I want to meet Lewis Arden again.

I DOUBT whether anything in the way of sport can surpass red deer stalking in the highlands of Otago. Gorgeous scenery a climate so bracing that a man can walk from sunrise to sunset without feeling unduly tired; glorious trophies in the form of stags' horns far surpassing anything to be found in our own country! What more can the heart of hunter desire?

The district is a perfect paradise for deer, which have plenty of food both winter and summer, unlimited ranges of mountains and valleys to roam over, high grassy slopes to feed on in fine weather, and thiek evergreen beech forests wherein to find shelter during bad weather.

The first deer were imported from Lord Dalhousie's forest in Scotland. Eight yearlings, turned down near Lake Hawea in 1868, have increased to many thousands, covering an area of some three thousand square miles. And whilst still keeping the beautiful wild and graceful heads of their ancestors, they have developed length and strength of horn far superior to those of any stags in Great Britain at the present day. On my deerstalking trips I considered myself unlucky if I did not get at least three stags with horns over forty inches in length, and I am prepared to

believe that in an exceptionally good season horns might be found to measure at least another ten inches. I noticed that the farther west I went, the better the heads were. My conviction is that the heads in the heavy forest near the west coast are equal to any of the forest heads of Central Europe.

I was the first Englishman to shoot in the Hunter River Valley. On my first visit to the country in 1902 the Secretary of the Acclimatisation Society at Dunedin told me that an Australian sportsman had found tracks of deer in the river-bed of the Hunter, though he had not actually seen any deer, so I settled to go there. Travelling to Pembroke by train and coach over the Crown Range, I drove on to Hawea Flat, and taking packhorses there, reached the mouth of the Hunter in four days from Dunedin. Then gradually moving my camp up the river for thirty miles to Mount Macpherson, I explored all the Hunter Valley, and did so well that in the following season the valley was full of sportsmen. The proverb which deals with cooks and broth conveys a salutary warning to the big-game hunter, so I spent most of my time that year in the side valleys, and in that and three subsequent seasons explored every side valley up

Lake Hawea and the Hunter, some of which, owing to the difficulty of approaching them through the rocky gorges, no Englishman had ever entered. There are as many as twenty valleys on the west side, from ten to twelve miles in length, most of them holding deer; on the east side there are no deep valleys, but many corries and much nice ground for deer in summer, though there is a scarcity of bush, and consequently of feed for them in winter.

I was extremely fortunate in having a capital man, Donald by name, as gillie for my first two seasons. Always cheery and always encouraging, never down-hearted with any illsuccess, very keen, a real fine Scotsman, a splendid walker, as strong as a horse, Donald had the rare gift of not considering that he knew better than any one else, and was ever ready to follow out any suggestion made.

Most of the bush on the lower part of the Hunter near the lake has been destroyed by burning, but in the upper reaches of the river and all the side valleys there is_bush down to the river-beds. Large and evergreen beeches-birches they are called in New Zealand,-with pines and other hard-wood trees, flourish in the low ground, gradually giving place to the scrub that covers the hill - sides. Above the scrub again are grassy banks amongst rocks and rugged ridges, with occasional spacious green slopes, topped by frowning cliffs of grey

granite, and on the highest tops snow-drifts and glaciers.

Some of the ravines are very precipitous and rugged, and the walking is very hard work in most of them. Besides the perils of stone-slides and rocks, the low scrubby bush which has been laid by the snow in winter on the very steep hillsides has never properly reasserted itself, and in its semirecumbent form is very trying to both legs and temper.

The deer are easy to stalk, provided there are no precipices in the way, for on the one hand, owing to the rough nature of the ground, the stalker who pays due regard to the wind is nearly sure to get within shot, and on the other, the deer, having no enemies except man, and in many places never having heard the crack of a rifle, take little or no notice of noises such as those of falling stones, to which they are accustomed, and hardly condescend to look up.

One very pretty little valley, which has a lake at its head, I found very difficult to enter at the first attempt, but on two subsequent occasions I hit off a deer-trail, and got in comparatively easily. On the first occasion, intending to stay the night, we started from our camp in the main valley, taking a rück-sack which held a soldier's little canteen, meat, bread, plum-pudding, tea, sugar, and two sweaters to sleep in. We spent a thoroughly bad morning in trying to get through the bush and fern up a very steep gorge, where we were constantly thwarted

was 8 inches, and between bay and tray antlers 6 inches, up to that time the record in girth for Otago.

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On our return journey I carried down the rifle and rück-sack, and Donald carried the head, a pretty good performance on his part, as to carry a stag's head through low, thick bush is most trying. It is impossible to carry the head over one's shoulders, with the deer's skull resting on the back of the bearer's neck, and the horns facing forward on each side of his head, in the usual way, because the horns are apt to catch perpetually in every twig and creeper. Moreover, on very steep ground the hands must be free to hold a stick. We had often to crawl under low scrub, while the heat of the blazing sun in a breathless sky was almost overpowering. Donald never even murmured, though in a later trip another guide in a much easier valley refused to try and carry a head out, declaring it impossible. I took it myself to show him his mistake, and carried both it and the rifle, while he walked sulkily behind empty-handed, thoroughly disgusted, and we will hope as thoroughly ashamed of himself. There was one occasion, in 1903, which neither Donald nor I shall ever be likely to forget. We had spent a fruitless day in trying to get to some deer that we had spied in the morning up one of the side valleys by following the main ridge between that valley and the next. The going was so rocky and precipitous that

after five hours' hard climbing we had to give it up and make our way down to the stream which was running far below us, there to camp out for the night. It was very late, so I went ahead of Donald to try and find the best way down, as he could not move at any pace on the steep hill-side, having lost his stick, which had fallen & precipice in the morning. I thought that by keeping down a small narrow ridge, with steep rocks on each side, I could get to the stream safely enough, but when within two hundred yards of it we were suddenly checked by a precipice. It was getting dark, and too late to think of turning back and coming down another ridge. The mountain-side we were on stood at an angle perilously near 45° to the plain below, and it would have been quite impossible to lie down without rolling over the precipice, so the only mode of exit or descent that seemed possible lay in crawling along the side cliff, on which were some little tufts of grass and protruding cracks or ledges. My idea was that by groping along with my hands and feet for some ten yards, I could get to a small dry water-course leading down to the next ridge, and so on to the stream. trouble in scaling the cliff, but once there, was getting along fairly well with my face to the cliff, feeling my way slowly along it, when suddenly both feet gave way, and I found myself dangling against the side of the precipice, hanging on

I had great