COLONEL DAVIDSON'S RECOLLECTIONS.* ONE merit of Colonel Davidson's book is

its shape and size. It might very well have been brought out in one, or even two enormous volumes, expensive to buy and impossible to hold. But it has not followed this tiresome fashion, this mould into which travels and reminiscences so often cast themselves. A better taste has reigned over its production, and we only hope that the popularity the book deserves will be all the greater because of its light and unassuming form.

Colonel Davidson is a Christian. We wish to say a few words on this subject, before going on to the points in his book which interest us most, because we fear that some readers may be repelled by the way in which the author thinks it right to put forward his Christianity. It would be a thousand pities if any one were to be deterred from read- ing this spirited record of a really fine life by the peculiar phraseology which belongs to a certain school of thought and belief. A Christian of the type of Henry Lawrence, Herbert Edwardes, and other Indian heroes, Colonel Davidson's religion, though his way of expressing it may sometimes jar upon us a little, only shows, as theirs did, that the finest soldiers and keenest sportsmen are not seldom made out of the best men.

Riding and shooting were Colonel Davidson's favourite occu- pations, even in his childhood, and we may be pardoned for thinking that his father's near neighbours must sometimes have wished themselves farther off. From shooting at flower- pots and cherry-trees, bringing down sparrows, flattening the weather-cock, lying in wait on the coach-house roof to touch up the monkeys in Wombwell's menagerie, he soon proceeded to make a target of the old gardener :— " He was perched on the top of a long ladder nailing some cherry-trees, when I from the other side of the garden, seventy • Memories of a Long Life. By Lieutenant-Colonol David Davidson, 0,11., Idinbargh: David Douglas. 1890. yards off, called out. Sandy, may I have a shot at you?' e0o ay, and I'll wager ye'll no' hit me.' But hit him I did in a safe place, and made him start. He told me afterwards it was vary ear.' "

The consequences might have been rather more serious when the young marksman took to shooting at a disused door :—

" This door was in the wall of a neighbouring garden, and never having known it to be opened, I supposed it was built up on the inner side. Sticking up an oyster-shell for a bull's eye, and having paced a hundred yards, I made some tolerable shots. A few days afterwards I heard the town crier, with beat of dram, proclaiming something in the street. Listening curiously, I heard words to this effect: Whereas some evilly-disposed person has fired bullets through the back garden-door of Mr. George Spiers, thereby endangering the lives of himself and the members of his family ; notice is hereby given, that any one who will give information that will lead to the detection of the offender will be handsomely rewarded.' Thinking no person could give better information than myself, though without any sanguine expectation of being handsomely rewarded,' I confessed the delinquency, and was not a little alarmed when I found that my bullets had not only pierced the garden-door, but had gone through the door of a summer- house into which it opened, and then swept down the garden walk ! The owner, a very worthy man, with great good nature, accepted my sincere expression of regret, but I dare say he was somewhat relieved when, not long after, the little gun was packed into a box, and it and I were packed off to India, to prosecute the science of projectiles in a wider and more interesting field."

The young cadet went through all the usual experiences of a " griffin " in India, and adapted himself, perhaps with more than usual quickness, to the new life that surrounded him. Sport, from first to last, was his one great pleasure, and sport in India, then as now, or still more so, had the element of danger and excitement added to it in a very high degree. Some of Colonel Davidson's tiger-hunting stories are un- equalled, especially those which concern the feats of Sir James Outran, his favourite hero. Lions, bears, and pigs have also a large part in these records of the chase, each form of sport being marked by its peculiar joys, and needing as much courage and skill as another. But the man-eating tiger is by far the most terrible enemy, and the most thrilling stories belong to him. Elephants, too, have a conspicuous place, especially the wonderful Hyder, distinguished in the tiger- hunts of those days. It is a little difficult to realise that climbing is one of the talents of an elephant. Colonel David- son says :— " I am very much mistaken if old Hyder could not have con-

veyed me comfortably to the top of the Great Pyramid Slowly but surely the elephant clambers up the rocky sides of hills one would hardly think accessible to such a clumsy looking creature. More quickly, but as safely, he descends the steepest banks of jungly ravines."

Hyder was an animal of real genius, and one story of him, at least, is well worth quoting :— " Hyder's cakes were baked in a very simple oven ; the oven, in fact, so often alluded to in Scripture. In consisted of a large earthenware Ali Baba sort of jar, in the bottom of which a fire of dried grass and twigs was kindled; and when the embers were still red, the cakes were stuck all round the inside of the jar to bake. One day Hyder's mahout had gone through this process, which he completed by covering the jar with a lid on which he heaped some stones, and then went into the bazaar, leaving Ryder in comfortable anticipation of his dinner. The time arrived for taking out the cakes, but not so the mahout. At length Hyder's patience was exhausted, and the cakes were running considerable risk of being burnt; when, tugging at his pickets, he managed to get rid of his front fastenings, and wheeling round, he found he could just reach the oven with his trunk. He cautiously lifted off the stones, removed the lid, and ate the cakes ! He then put on the lid, and replacing the stones one by one most carefully, returned to his place ; and if he had not been watched in this manceuvre by Mr. Boyd, the mahout might have wondered to his life's end how the cakes had disappeared."

Colonel Davidson gained great knowledge of India and its peoples by being employed in the Revenue Survey of the Deccan, begun in 1837 under Mr. Henry Goldsmid. He was engaged in this survey for ten years, and that part of his book which describes it is well worth the study of any one interested in Indian politics—any one, at least, who thinks that the views of practical men are more valuable than those of theorists. Colonel Davidson was also occupied, in the intervals of sport and business, with the improvement of the rifle, and other inventions connected with the science of gunnery. Though, like most inventors, he did not at first meet with much encouragement, it seems that his favourite instrument, the " collimator," an invention for securing extreme accuracy of aim, has been adopted into the service.

To many readers—ourselves, we must confess, among the number—the most interesting part of Colonel Davidson's book will be the 13th chapter, where he gives an account of the renewal of his early friendship with Mrs. Carlyle, and publishes nine of her letters to him, as well as two of Carlyle's after her death. No letters of hers can be uninteresting ; but these are given an extra charm by the tender, affectionate playfulness with which she writes to the man she had known in Scotland as a boy, with many of whose strongest characteristics she can yet have had no sympathy. There is a tinge of melancholy in the letters, too, and a gentleness which seems now and then to have surprised herself. For instance :—

" In the first place, thanks for your letter from the bottom of my heart ! Reading it was like hearing music from one's far-off home in a strange land ! I paid it the compliment of crying over it ; what more could I do ? It is curious that beside you 1 always feel like to cry, even when I am laughing ! Is it a good influence that, or a bad ? I should say good at the present date, anyhow; for softness is not the quality a woman of my years is apt to carry too far; there is more tendency to become hard as the nether millstone."

The weariness caused her by "young gentlemen and young ladies of Genius," who were constantly sending her volumes of poems, or MSS. to be criticised, breaks out amusingly in

one or two of the letters. In 1859, however, she meets with a different experience, though she does not introduce it very hopefully : -

" (What a mercy you were married a few years ago ! You could hardly have succeeded in finding a wife now who had not pub- lished a book or contributed to a Journal, or at least had a manuscript in progress !) And there is an unknown Entity, who is pleased to pass by the name of George Eliot, to whom I have owed acknowledgment a week back for the present of her new novel, Adam Bede, a really charming book, which, novel though it be, I advise you to read, and engage that you will not think the time misspent, under penalty of reading the dreariest book of sermons you like to impose on me if you do ! "

It is impossible not to feel that the religious soldier to whom Mrs. Carlyle, and, later, Carlyle himself, wrote with such real

friendship and respect. deserves the fullest reverence, both for his opinions and his character, even from those who do not entirely agree with him. His book, though not of the highest in literary merit, certainly is so in tone, and stands in the front rank of lately published memoirs. No one, we may

safely venture to say, can read Memories of a Long Life with- out being the better for it.