Highlanders exultingly followed up the trail. The fugitive heard their shouts behind him, and practised every trick he might to deceive his pursuers; but the sleuth-hounds have not truer noses for blood than had his hereditary enemies. So they tracked him to the general hiding-place.

It was a curious natural cavern :— -the entrance through clefts and chinks of riven rock, overgrown with the furzy shrubs and dark fern which constitute the principal vegetation of these barren islands. Within were collected the women and children of the clan, with a few of the men-principally the old and infirm. The secret cave was long a secure and unsuspected hiding-place; but they were the last refugees who ever sought its shelter. With shouts of triumph and exulting wrath, the assailants gathered wood and sea-weed, and the dried heath, and piled it round the entrance to the cavern.-Those within maintained the silence of despair. In a short space, a huge bonfire burned at the cavern's mouth, and the scorching heat and stifling smoke rolled in upon its occupants. Then rose the dismal wail of their misery. Over the crackling and roaring of the fire-over their yelling hurrahs over the triumphant screams of their pibrochs, -the murderers heard the cries of the stifling women, the clamour of the dying wretches-fighting desperately, as it seemed, with each other, or struggling to burst through the fiery barrier which kept them from the cool fresh air. One by one these sounds ceased, the blaze sank :-died away. It had done its workno living creature remained within the rock. There was a clan less in the Highlands. The invaders sailed away in triumph, leaving the dead unburied as they lay. They never were buried. The island was deemed accursed-haunted by the spirits of those who met their fate there. And often during the winter's storms, and sometimes even when the summer sea and sky were alike tranquil, the western fishermen said they

heard low wailings and sharp piercing shrieks,ghastly and unearthly, come from the deserted island. In process of time these superstitious notions died away. Now the island is inhabited; but the evidences of the truth of the legend are still in being; and many a summer tourist has seen the bones whitening in the sand, which lie in wreaths in the celebrated cave of Uig.

And now there is another cave in the world with a similar legend. Future travellers, in future times, will often toil up the hot ridges of the Atlas Mountains, to see the cavern of Dahra, where a whole tribe of Arabs were foully murdered :—and how? Were they halfnaked savages, in deadly feud with another tribe as barbarous as themselves? Were the murderers some nameless African clan, obscure in the world's history as those they put to death? Was the whole catastrophe one of those which inevitably must occur when savage wars against savage? No:-it occurred in a struggle between civilised man and semi-savage man; and (foul disgrace!) the civilised were the murderers-the savage the victims. It occurred in a war between the invaders of a country, and the inhabitants, who fought for their old possessions their property, and their rights; and (foul blot!) the assailants piled up the faggots, and the defenders perished! It occurred in a war, waged by the nation which arrogates to itself the position of leader of European civilisation :-which claims the title of the most civilised, the most enlightened, and the most polished people of the earth. The Arabs pretend to no such distinction. They form roving clans of uncivilised men living a primitive pastoral life, in caverns and tents:-yet it was the enlightened, the polished, the humane aggressors, who roasted some eight hundred of the savages, for the crime of defending their own country-of daring, in legitimate warfare, to resist the legions which would have wrested it from them.

The work was coolly gone about too; the murder was no deed of a few minutes, no sudden outbreak of wrath, no massacre prompted by fiery longings for revenge. The cavern, into which the Arabs retreated, was a vast one; it had many chinks and crannies, and it was long ere the stifling smoke and baking fire did their work.

The Frenchmen heard the moans and shrieks, and the tumult of despair, as dying men and women turned furiously on each other, and thought to free themselves from lingering agony by more sudden death: they heard the butchering strokes of the yatagan and the pistol-shots, which told that suicide, or mutual destruction, was going on in the darkness of the cavern: they heard all this renewed at intervals, and continued hour after hour, but still they coolly heaped straw upon the blaze, and tranquilly fed the fire, until all was silent but its own roaring; and burnt, maimed, and convulsed corpses, blackened (some of them calcined) by the fire, remained piled in mouldering, rotting masses in the cave, to tell that a few hours before a tribe of men, women, and children, had entered its dreary portals.

And now, La grande Nation, what think ye Europe says of you? You plume yourselves on being the most mighty, the most advanced people of the earth, the very focus of light, intelligence, and humanity. Of course the claim is just,—the Cave of Dahra proves it. All is fair in war, and war you hold to be man's chief and noblest employment on earth: the false glare of military glory which continually bedazzles you, shows massacre and rapine decked in the colour of good deeds. The itch of conquest seems to make you confound good and evil. A prime minister in his place in your legislature, coldly "regretted the occurrence.' The most influential of your journals preserve a guarded silence. No word of censure is breathed against the man who caused the massacre of Dahra-hardly a word of pity

for his victims. Had Colonel Pelissier been an English commander, we tell you that his fame, his position, his very life, would have been sacrificed before the shout of indignation which would have arisen from every English heart. We know you Frenchmen to be brave-you have been proving it for centuries. Reprobate the Dahra massacre to prove that you are not cruel. If fight you will, fight like civilised soldiers; not like lurking savages. Mow down your enemies (if you must have war) in the fair field. Face them foot to foot, and hand to hand; but for the sake of your fame; for the sake of the civilisation you have attained: stifle not defenceless wretches in caverns-massacre not women and children by the horrible agency of slow fire. DOUGLAS JERROLD. Dahra, in Algiers in Africa. In 1827 the French, ostensibly to punish an insult to their consul, but really with the intention of making a new conquest, fitted out a powerful armament, having above 34,000 soldiers on board, and after some fighting gained possession of the city of Algiers. The progress of their arms was long resisted by the Bey of Massara, the celebrated AbdelKader, who, placing himself at the head of the Arabs, kept the French at bay for upwards of fourteen years. It was during this struggle that the disgraceful incident in our extract occurred.

Sleuth-hounds.-Blood-hounds, from the old noun sleuth, meaning the track or mark of a man or beast, known by the scent.

Uig.-The name of a parish in the Island of Lewis, which forms one of the group of the Hebrides or Western Isles of Scotland.

Atlas Mountains.-A large range of mountains in Morocco and Algiers in the North of Africa.

La Grande Nation.--French for "the great Nation," a name which the French arrogate to themselves. Colonel Pelissier.-Colonel Pelissier, afterwards Duke of Malakhoff, and Marshal of France, was born 6th November, 1794. He commenced his career in Algeria, and on the 18th of June, 1845, he suffocated 500 Arabs in a cave. He was appointed to a command in

the Crimea in 1855, and on the 8th September of that year he took by storm the Malakhoff tower, from which circumstance he obtained his titles.

THE MOSAIC VIEW OF CREATION.

[HUGH MILLER, born in Cromarty, 12th October, 1802, commenced life as a stone-mason; but found time to cultivate a taste for letters, and to prosecute the study of geology, to which he was passionately attached. In 1839, he became editor of the Witness newspaper, a position which he occupied until his death, 24th December, 1856. He is the author of several works on geology, which have taken a high place, not merely for their scientific value, but for their style, which has been pronounced by competent critics to be one of the purest in the whole range of English literature. Overwork produced temporary insanity, during which he shot himself.]

SUCH a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one given by Milton of that vision of the future which he represents as conjured up before Adain by the archangel, would be a task rather for the scientific poet than for the mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the Midian Desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of St. John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A " great darkness first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the 66 horror; " and as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, "Let there be light," and straightway a gray diffused light springs

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