armed with guns, traps and poison, were required. Consider what this means-men who are hired to provide a big head of game, privileged to carry a gun day and night all the year round, to shoot just what they please! For who is to look after them on their own ground to see that they do not destroy scheduled species? They must be always shooting something; that is simply a reflex effect of the liberty they have and of the gun in the hand. Killing becomes a pleasure to them, and with or without reason or excuse they are always doing it-always adding to the list of creatures to be extirpated, and when these fail adding others. "I know perfectly well," said a keeper to me, "that the nightjar is harmless; I don't believe a word about its swallowing pheasants' eggs, though many keepers think they do. I shoot them, it is true, but only for pleasure." So it has come about that wherever pheasants are strictly preserved, hawks-including those that prey on mice, moles, wasps, and small birds; also the owls, and all the birds of the crow family, saving the rook on account of the landowner's sentiment in its favor; and after them the nightjar and the woodpeckers and most other species about the size of a chaffinch-are treated as "vermin." The case of the keeper who shot all the nightingales because their singing kept the pheasants awake at night sounds like a fable. But it

is no fable; there are several instances of this having been done, all well authenticated.

Here is another case which came under my own eyes. It is of an old heronry in a southern county, in the park of a great estate about which there was some litigation a few years back. On my last visit to this heronry at the breeding season I found the nests hanging empty and desolate in the trees near the great house, and was told that the new head keeper had

persuaded the great nobleman who had recently come into possession of the estate to allow him to kill the herons because their cries frightened the pheasants. They were shot on the nests after breeding began; yet the great nobleman who allowed this to be done is known to the world as a humane and enlightened man, and, I hear, boasts that he has never shot a bird in his life! He allowed it to be done because he wanted pheasants for his sporting friends to have their shoot in October, and he supposed that his keeper knew best what should be done.

Another instance, also on a great estate of a great nobleman in southern England. Throughout a long midJune day I heard the sound of firing in the woods, beginning at about eight o'clock in the morning and lasting until dark. The shooters ranged over the whole woods; I had never, even in October, heard so much firing on an estate in one day. I enquired of several persons, some employed on the estate, as to the meaning of all this firing, and was told that the keeper was ridding the woods of some of the vermin. More than that they refused to say; but by and by I found a person to tell me just what had happened. The head keeper had got twenty or thirty persons, the men with guns and a number of lads with long poles with hooks to pull nests down, and had set himself to rid the woods of birds that were not wanted. All the nests found, of whatever species, were pulled down, and all doves, woodpeckers, nuthatches, blackbirds, missel and song thrushes, shot; also chaffinches and many other small birds. The keeper said he was not going to have the place swarming with birds that were no good for anything, and were always eating the pheasants' food. The odd thing in this case was that the owner of the estate and his son, a distinguished member of the House of Commons, are both great bird

lovers, and at the very time that this hideous massacre in mid-June was going on they were telling their friends in London that a pair of birds of a fine species, long extirpated in southern England, had come to their woods to breed. A little later the head keeper reported that these same fine birds had mysteriously disappeared!

One more case, again from an estate in a southern county, the shooting of which was let to a gentleman who is greatly interested in the preservation of rare birds, especially the hawks. I knew the gound well, having received permission from the owner to go where I liked; I also knew the keepers and (like a fool) believed they would carry out the instructions of their master. I informed them that a pair of hobbyhawks were breeding in a clump of trees on the edge of the park, and asked them to be careful not to mistake them for sparrowhawks. At the same time I told them that a pair of Montagu's harries were constantly to be seen at a lonely marshy spot in the woods, a mile from the park; I had been watching them for three days at that spot and believed they were nesting. I also told them where a pair of great spotted woodpeckers were breeding in the woods. They promised to "keep an eye" on the hawks, and I daresay they did, seeing that both hobbys and harriers had vanished in the course of the next few days. But they would not promise to save the woodpeckers: one of the under-keepers had been asked by a lady to get her a few pretty birds to put in a glass case, and the head keeper told him he could have these woodpeckers.

Did I in these cases inform the owner and the shooting-tenant of what had happened? No, and for a very good reason. Nothing ever comes of such telling except a burst of rage on the part of the owner against all keepers and all interfering persons, which

as

lasts for an hour or so, and then all goes on as before. I have never known a keeper to be discharged except for the one offence of dealing in game and eggs on his own account. In everything else he has a free hand; if it is not given him he takes it, and there is nothing he resents so much as being interfered with or advised or instructed as to what species he is to spare. Tell him to spare an owl or a kestrel and he instantly resolves to kill it; and if you are such a faddist to want to preserve everything he will go SO far as to summon his little crowd of humble followers and parasites and set them to make a clean sweep of all the wild life in the woods, as in the instance I have described. No, it is mere waste of energy to inform individual owners of such abuses. The craze exists for a big head of game, or rather of this exotic bird of the woods, called in scorn and disgust the "sacred bird" by one who was himself a naturalist and sportsman; the owners are themselves responsible for the system and have created the class of men necessary to enable them to follow this degraded form of sport. I use the word advisedly: Mr. A. Stuart-Wortley, the best authority I know on the subject, an enthusiast himself, mournfully acknowledges in his book on the pheasant that pheasant-shooting as now almost universally conducted in England is not sport at all.

One odd result of this over-protection of an exotic species and consequent degradation of the woodlands is that the bird itself becomes a thing disliked by the lover of nature. No doubt it is an irrational feeling, but a very natural one nevertheless, seeing that whatsoever is prized and cherished by our enemy, or the being who injures us, must come in for something of the feeling he inspires. There is always an overflow. Personally I detest the sight

of semi-domestic pheasants in the preserves; the bird itself is hateful, and is the one species I devoutly wish to see exterminated in the land.

But when I find this same bird where he exists comparatively in a state of nature, and takes his chance with the other wild creatures, the sight of him affords me keen pleasure: especially at this season, or a little later in October, when the change in the color of the leaf all at once makes this familiar world seem like an enchanted region. We look each year for the change and know it is near, yet when it comes it will be as though we now first witnessed that marvellous transformation-the glory in the high beechen woods on downs and hill-sides, of innumerable oaks on the wide level weald, and elms and maples and birches and ancient gnarled thorns, with tangle of varicolored brambles and ivy with leaves like dark malachite, and light green and silvery gray of old-man's-beard. In that aspect of nature the pheasant no longer seems an importation from some brighter land, a stranger to our woods, startlingly unlike our wild native ground-birds in their sober protective coloring, and out of harmony with the surroundings. The most brilliant plumage seen in the tropics would not appear excessive then, when the thin dry leaves on the trees, rendered translucent by the sunbeams, shine like colored glass, and when the bird is seen in some glade or opening on a woodland floor strewn with yellow gold and burnished red, copper and brightest russet leaves. He is one with it all, a part of that splendor, and a beautifully decorative figure as he moves slowly with deliberate jetting gait, or stands at attention, the eared head and shining neck raised and one foot lifted. Many a writer has tried to paint him The Saturday Review.

in words; perhaps Ruskin alone succeeds, in a passage which was intended to be descriptive of the coloring of the pheasants generally. "Their plumage," he said, "is for the most part warın brown, delicately and even beautifully spotty; and in the goodliest species the spots become variegated, or inlaid as in a Byzantine pavement, deepening into imperial purple and azure, and lighting into lustre of innumerable eyes."

But alas! not infrequently when I have seen the pheasant in that way in the colored woods in October, when after the annual moult his own coloring is richest and he is seen at his best, my delight has vanished when I have lifted my eyes to look through the thinned foliage at the distant prospect of earth and the blue overarching sky. For who that has ever looked at nature in other regions, where this perpetual hideous war of extermination against all noble feathered life is not carried on, does not miss the great soaring bird in the scene-eagle, or vulture, or buzzard, or kite, or harrier-floating at ease on board vans, or rising heavenwards in vast and ever vaster circles? That is the one object in nature which has the effect of widening the prospect just as if the spectator had himself been miraculously raised to a greater altitude, while at the same time the blue dome of the sky appears to be lifted to an immeasurable height above him. The soaring figure reveals to sight and mind the immensity and glory of the visible world. Without it the blue sky can never seem sublime.

But the great soaring bird is nowhere in our lonely skies, and missing it we remember the reason of its absence and realize what the modern craze for the artificially reared pheasant has cost us.

W. H. Hudson.

About half way down the sea-board

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of the colony of the Gold Coast the great forest that has marched many hundreds of miles parallel with the long lines of heavy surf abruptly recedes thirty miles inland, to spread itself over a range of low mountains, covering them with the heaviest tropical timber, leaving a vast grass-covered plain dead flat, of unbroken monotony and highly cultivated. The flat country, with hardly a tree, ends abruptly at the foot of the hills, and the traveller along the three-foot track from the sea leaves in a moment the hot sunlight and dust of the plains for the gloom and shadow of green canopies and the coolness of mountain streams and heavy undergrowth, and journeying along the ridges he looks on the hot land below, apart and distinct as though it had been cut away with a knife. Dusky mountain and sun-scorched plain, the contrast is complete. But there is an exception. Five miles, or perhaps a little more, from the mountain's edge there rises sheer out of the plain a single great rock. It is five hundred feet in height. and a mile or more in circumference. On the south side its suinmit is covered with timber, on the north a slightly sloping surface of smooth and slippery rock runs to the edge of the precipice. It stands by itself, an outpost to the mountains; not a boulder lies near it-only the one great rock, and its name is Krobo Hill.

In a country where everything bizarre is attributed to the supernatural, naturally Krobo is sacred. Not only is the negro superstitious but his superstition is always with him. His fondness for meetings and services when he is civilized is but a development of what he did at home, when he ate with his fingers and went about

naked. He is forever on the look-out for sign and portents, he is ever in fear that for lack of attention some evil Fetish may be seeking to injure him. He has learnt for generations to obey and propitiate the "Fetishes" through the medium of their priests. Forest, river, and plain are full of baleful and unnerving influences, and the negro suffers accordingly.

The "Fetishes," the media through which the supreme and unapproachable power works, have their own degrees. The smallest undertake the duty of watching the huts or goods of the villagers or fishermen, the greatest exercise more sway than a monarch. They have names, as have human beings. To that extent they are looked on as living entities. When a Fetish in his arrogance becomes too obstreperous, the Government pass an Ordinance directed against him by name to put him down. There are laws to regulate his conduct. By Ordinance, any Fetish who arrogates to himself the power to grant immunity for a crime, before or after its commission, renders himself liable to abolition. Only a few years ago the Fetish Katawere had a law passed for his special benefit, putting him down and confiscating his property, and these things are duly published in the Government Gazette. Now the country is well under control, but it is not so long since it behoved the British Government to walk very warily in these matters.

The Fetish of Krobo Hill was one of the greatest in the whole of West Africa. It possessed a numerous and most powerful hierarchy, it exacted absolute submission from the surrounding tribes. It was the ruler of the countryside. But it had become even more than this. Through the

powers of a remarkably able chief priest it had killed all the other Fetishes for many miles round, and stood supreme. It sent its emissaries far on either hand exacting tribute and presents. No tribe in the vicinity undertook any business of importance without its sanction, it insisted on being consulted in private matters, it could fetch in at a word neighboring chiefs who were glad to assuage its wrath with the costliest presents. The people of the hamlets planted at the hill's foot, known as the "Krobo Villages," lived humble and secure under its protection,—as did the common folk of the middle-ages squatting under the Baron's castle,-till they became identified with it, and grew into towns haughty and domineering, and plundered their neighbors, who hated them for being under the wing and immediate protection of the Fetish, where all were in the shadow of its menace and power. And so from always having been of very great importance and grandeur it grew greater and yet more great, and waxed so powerful that it reigned absolutely supreme.

But there was one rite and function belonging to the Big Fetish that was destined to get it into trouble. The able old priest, whose skull had for many long years rested in the temple concealed in the wooded portion of the hill, had instituted the custom of bringing every girl who boasted any pretension to family or good looks, when within a year or so of puberty, to the top of Krobo where she remained in charge of the priests till she became marriageable. These girls were known as the "Tail Girls" of Krobo Hill, from the costume, distinctive if scanty, with which they were invested when they were summoned to ascend and join the élite of their sex.

On their heads they wore long conical hats three feet high, shaped like an old strawberry pottle. Round their

waists were wrapped, cummer-bundwise, broad strips of dark blue cloth, the ends of which dangled down behind to their ankles, and from which they derived their name. For the rest a girl wore nothing save her ornaments of shell or bead anklets, bracelets, and necklace. During their stay on the hill the girls were allowed, on occasion when their presence was urgently required, to visit their homes, but under the strictest guard and supervision. It was not a very unusual sight to see a Tail Girl with her curious hat, in а village under the guardianship of her three duennas, surrounded by an admiring crowd of children and old folk, while the young men forbidden to approach gazed from a distance. Many a youth coveting the forbidden fruit would make up his mind to wait for that particular charmer when it came to his turn to climb the mountain.

Every year, at the season of the ripening of the yam, the great annual Custom was held at which all the waiting bridegrooms of the country below assembled on the top of the rock to choose their brides. No youth could obtain any wife but the one allotted to him by the Fetish, no youth who did not attend the Custom could obtain one at all. It did not follow that the most beautiful girls were allotted to the richest men. Not infrequently the priests were impelled to give a particularly fine specimen to a poor man. To gain devoted adherents, men who in the service of the Fetish would stick at nothing, were as great an object sometimes as the further accumulation of money, for the Fetish's money bags were already swollen to burstingpoint. By securing the custody of the girls the Great Fetish gained full control of the rest of the people. Of the older men and men of importance, because no one would take for wife a girl that had not the "cachet" of