"Well, well, what a fat one! Holy Moses, what an animal! You son of a devil, I can kick you now and you never know it." Then he looked sadly at the bodies of his three dogs, saying, "Poor Campanilla, she's the one I'm most sorry for: what a beauty she was!"

Then he caressed the others, which were panting and gasping with protruding tongues, as if they had only been running a stubborn calf into the corral.

José held out to me his clean handkerchief, saying, "Sit down, my boy. We must get that skin off carefully, for it's yours." Then he called, ་ Lucas!"

Braulio gave a great laugh, and finally said, "By this time he's safe hidden in the hen-house down home."

"Lucas!" again shouted José, paying no attention to what his nephew was saying; but when he saw us both laughing he asked, "What's the joke? >>>>

"Uncle, the boaster flew away as soon as I broke my lance." José looked at us as if he could not possibly understand. "Oh, the cowardly scoundrel!"

Then he went down by the river, and shouted till the mountains echoed his voice, "Lucas, you rogue! »

cio.

"I've got a good knife here to skin him with," said Tibur

"No, man, it isn't that, but that wretch was carrying the hamper with our lunch, and this boy wants something to eat; and so do I, but I don't see any prospect of much hereabouts."

But in fact the desired hamper was the very thing which marked the spot whence the fellow had fled as he dropped it. José brought it to us rejoicing, and proceeded to open it, meanwhile ordering Tiburcio to fill our cups with water from the river. The food was white and violet green-corn, fresh cheese, and nicely roasted meat; all this was wrapped up in banana leaves. Then there appeared in addition a bottle of wine rolled in a napkin, bread, cherries, and dried figs. These last articles José put one side, saying, "That's a separate account."

The huge knives came out of their sheaths. José cut up the meat for us, and this with the corn made a dish fit for a king. We drank the wine, made havoc with the bread, and finished the figs and cherries, which were more to the taste of my companions than to mine. Corn-cake was not lacking,- that pleasant companion of the traveler, the hunter, and the poor man. The water was ice-cold. My best cigars ended the rustic banquet.

José was in fine spirits, and Braulio had ventured to call me padrino. With wonderful dexterity Tiburcio flayed the jaguar, carefully taking out all the fat, which they say is excellent for I don't know what not.

After getting the jaguar's skin with his head and paws into convenient bundles, we set out on our return to José's cabin; he took my rifle on the same shoulder with his own, and went on ahead calling the dogs. From time to time he would stop to go over some feature of the chase, or to give vent to a new word of contempt for Lucas.

Of course the women had been counting and recounting us from the moment we came in sight; and when we drew near the house they were still wavering between alarm and joy, since on account of our delay and the shots they had heard they knew we must have incurred some danger. It was Tránsito who came forward to welcome us, and she was perceptibly pale.

"Did you kill him?" she called.

"Yes, my daughter," replied her father.

They all surrounded us; even old Marta, who had in her hands a half-plucked capon. Lucía came up to ask me about my rifle, and as I was showing it to her she added in a low voice, “There was no accident, was there ? »

"None whatever," I answered, affectionately tapping her lips with a twig I had in my hand.

"Oh, I was thinking-"

"Hasn't that ridiculous Lucas come down this way?" asked José.

"Not he," replied Marta.

José muttered a curse.

"But where is what you killed?" finally asked Luisa, when she could make herself heard.

"Here, aunt," answered Braulio; and with the aid of his betrothed he began to undo the bundle, saying something to the girl which I could not hear. She looked at me in a very strange way, and brought out of the house a little bench for me, upon which I sat and looked on. As soon as the large and velvety skin had been spread out in the court-yard, the women gave a cry; but when the head rolled upon the grass they were almost beside themselves.

"Why, how did you kill him? Tell us,' " said Luisa. All looked a little frightened.

"Do tell us," added Lucía.

Then José, taking the head of the jaguar in his hands, said, "The jaguar was just going to kill Braulio when the Señor gave him this ball." He pointed to the hole in the forehead. All looked at me, and in each one of those glances there was recompense enough for an action which really deserved none. José went on to give the details of the expedition, meanwhile attending to the wounds of the dogs, and bewailing the loss of the three that had been killed. Braulio and Tiburcio wrapped up the skin.

The women went back to their tasks, and I took a nap in the little parlor on the bed which Tránsito and Lucía had improvised for me upon one of the benches. My lullaby was the murmur of the river, the cries of the geese, the lowing of the cattle pastured on the hills near by, and the songs of the girls washing clothes in the brook. Nature is the most loving of mothers when grief has taken possession of our souls; and if happiness is our lot she smiles upon us.

HELEN FISKE JACKSON

"H. H."

(1831-1885)

HE brilliant woman who bore the pen-name of "H. H." was endowed with a personality so impressive, a temperament so rich, a mind so charming, that her admirers were ready to prophesy for her as large a measure of immortality as falls to the lot of any preoccupied modern singer who serves the Muse with half-vows. It was only after her radiant presence was withdrawn that they perceived her genius to have been greater than her talent, and saw that, fine as was her ear and delicate as was her taste, her craftsmanship sometimes failed her. More

over, her strong ethical bias often turned her genuine lyric impulse into forms of parable and allegory, to overtake the meaning of which her panting reader toiled after her in vain. This habit, with a remarkable condensation of structure, occasionally put upon a phrase a greater weight of meaning than it could bear, and gave a look of affectation to the utterance of the most simple and natural of singers.

HELEN JACKSON

Yet when all fair abatement is made, H. H.'s place in literature is won. Twenty years ago, Emerson thought it the first place among American woman poets; and he affirmed that no one had wrought to finer perfection that most difficult verse form, the sonnet. Some of her sonnets, like 'Poppies in the Wheat,' 'October,' Thought,' and 'Burnt Ships,' show great beauty of execution, a fertile fancy, and a touch of true imagination. Other poems display rare felicity of cadence; like 'Coming Across,' which holds the very roll and lift of the urging wave, and 'Gondolieds,' where a nice ear catches the rhythm of the rower's oar, whose sound gives back to memory the melancholy beauty of a Venetian night. In another group of verses appears the note of familiar emotional experiences, as in The Mother's Farewell to a Voyager,' 'Best,' and 'Spinning,'-a noble and tender lyric which deserves to

live. It is no doubt the sweetness and genuineness of these household poems which have gained for H. H. her wide and affectionate recognition. But her meditative, out-of-door verses are most truly characteristic. 'My Legacy,' 'My Tenants,' My House not Made with Hands,' 'My Strawberry,' 'Locusts and Wild Honey,' breathe that love of nature which was with her a passion. In color and definiteness of drawing they recall Emerson's 'Nut-hatch,' or Thoreau's 'Mist.' But their note of comprehension of the visible natural world and of oneness with it is her own. And where she is simply the imaginative painter of beautiful scenes, as in 'Distance' and 'October,' her touch is faultless. Her last poems were personal and introspective, and the touching 'Habeas Corpus' fell unfinished from her slight hands not long before she died.

Helen Fiske was born in 1831, in the village of Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father held a professor's chair in the college. Her education was the usual desultory and ineffectual course of training prescribed for well-placed girls of her time. At twenty-one she married Captain Edward Hunt of the United States army, and began the irresponsible, wandering existence of an army officer's wife. Travel and social experience ripened her mind, but it was only after the death of her husband and her only child that she set herself to write.

From 1867 to her death, eighteen years later, her pen hardly rested. She wrote verses, sketches of travel, essays, children's stories, novels, and tracts for the time. Her life in the West after her marriage to Mr. William Jackson, a banker of Colorado Springs, revealed to her the wrongs of the Indian, which with all the strength of her ardent nature she set herself at once to redress. Newspaper letters, appeals to government officialism, and finally her 'Century of Dishonor,'—a sharp arraignment of the nation for perfidy and cruelty towards its helpless wards, - were her service to this cause. Her most popular story, 'Ramona,' a romance whose protagonists are of Indian blood, was also an appeal for justice. This book, however, rose far above its polemic intention; the beauty of its descriptions, its dramatic movement, its admirable characterization, and its imaginative insight entitling it to rank among the half-dozen best distinctively American stories. Two novels in the 'No Name Series' — 'Mercy Philbrick's Choice' and 'Hetty's Strange History'-show the qualities that infuse her prose: color, brilliancy of touch, grace of form, certainty of intuition, and occasional admirable humor. She had not the gift of construction, and she lacked the power of self-criticism; so that she is singularly uneven, and her fiction may not perhaps survive the generation whose conduct of life inspired it. But it is genuine and full of character.