BOOKS.

TRAVELS IN THE EIGHTIES.* THERE are some nominally sporting books which may be read with both pleasure and profit, although as a class the records of sport are repulsive reading and ignorant writing. We no longer, indeed, have such works as Mr. Gordon-Cumming's tales of his revels in slaughter ; but still, the improved sort of "big-game" hunter is, for the most part, a tedious and butcherly person enough, leading us to wonder how it can pay to publish him. Mr. Seton-Karr is a writer of a widely different order, so entertaining and many-sided that we accom- pany him on his adventurous course in many foreign parts with genuine pleasure, comfortably forgetting for a considerable part of the way all about the shooting and maiming, the spearing, hooking, and trapping of luckless creatures of the land and the water. He lays no claim to do more than com- pare the different countries described in his volume "from a sporting point of view ;" but in reality he does more, and his ten years' experience of travel, accomplished in the intervals of a military service which included a campaign, furnishes us with brief but charming sketches of the physical features of many lands. As the author can take some interest in the animal world in those countries, beyond that which finds ex-

• Ten Years' Wild Sports in Foreign Lands ; or, Travels in the Eighties. By R. W. Seton-Karr, F.R.G.S., &c. London : Chapman and Hall.

pression in killing as many as passible of its members, feathered, furred, and finny, he has much to tell us of them,

in addition to the letting them have it, the bagging, the bowling over, the bringing down, and the other operations,

which afford opportunities for naturalising slang in the English language. It is pleasant, although the author would probably account our satisfaction malicious, to note that he occasionally misses some particularly beautiful creature, as, for instance, a magnificent specimen of the Krone yort, upon which he stole with murderous intent as it was browsing, in solitary dignity and unsuspecting security, in an open glade of one of the forests.

of Norway. It is a far cry from thence to Sardinia and Corsica, whither Mr. Karr bids us to assist at his pursuit of the mouffion in the stony land of the ilex, which had a bad name in Cicero's time as the unhealthiest of the Roman colonies, and still, as it appears, deserves it in some measure, although the country is improving by dint of cultivation, drainage, and the planting of eucalypti in the marshes. Cagliari is admirable for its sea- view across the gulf towards the mountains of Pula, for the boldness of its rocky site, for its ancient sepulchres, its museum of antiquities (including a great number of Sard idols), its delightful public gardens, and its ancient Roman amphitheatre, carved out of the solid rock facing the sea.

Mouffions, red-deer, and pigs are the chief animal products of Sardinia, and the first are the principal object of the sports man, who finds them a troublesome folk, and as " sly " as the immortal Joey B. himself, The natives of the islands are not much more accommodating than the "game." On the whole,. Mr. Seton-Karr must have taken his pleasure rather sadly ; but he had compensation in the scenery. He gives a curious account of a spot marked " Peradalina " on the maps, the remarkable natural feature of Sar,linia, after Gennar- gentu, the mountain-home of the mouffion :—

" One of the chief attractions of the landscape is its intense solitude. From the mountain summits not a single human habitation is visible, and the only sign of life is the distant smoke of the charcoal-burners' fires, who threaten soon to annihilate the ancient forests with which the whole island was covered. The mountains are cut and seamed with watercourses, and covered with cistus, myrtle, erica, globularia, and arbutus. Most of the deeper gulleys and all the valleys are filled with dense woods of evergreen oak."

Lead-mining, agriculture, and the great fisheries are the in-

dustries of Sardinia. The old Roman city of Tharsus, within half-a-day's ride of Cabras, is one of the few remaining places where real antiques in the shape of coins and intaglios are still to be found.

Fly-fishing on the Ostra del River, Sweden, and trout- fishing in Swedish Lapland, introduce us to many finny friends and victims,—the latter in particular to one remarkable trout, which was brought to bank after a severe tussle, weighed 5 113,. and had a brass hook firmly fixed in its stomach. As it was in apparently good condition, the author complacently observes :—" How insensible must fishes be to pain !" Mr. Seton-Karr gives us a picture of the Lapps which is, on the whole, repulsive ; their reindeer are more interesting than themselves, for the Lapps are a coarse and abject people ; witness their marriage-feasts of reindeer-meat and cheese, eaten without knives or forks, and diluted by large quantities of strong spirits. In order to prolong the pleasure of " clrinkee for drunk" on these occasions, the guests first drink melted fat, with which they also smear their faces. The author de- scribes very vividly the wolf-hunts which form the great recreation of the Lapps, and adds the following to his account of the serviceableness of the reindeer, that strange animal. which is to the Lapp what the camel is to the Arab :—

" The Lapps assert that a reindeer can cause the tines to appear on its horns at any particular spot by rubbing that spot with its foot. In support of this, they add that a deer which is blind of one eye will have the horns on that side deformed through its inability to rub the required spots, owing to its loss of sight."

In "Days with the Land-Locked Salmon," in the Province. of Quebec—so called, it would appear, because the fish are usually found where they have free access to the sea—we have records of tremendous takes, and are introduced to the pike- perch, a villainous-looking and ferocious fish, with a mouth like a shark ; also to a grampus, blowing and snorting in the Gull of St. Lawrence,—a rare spectacle. The author alludes to his having been puzzled for some time by the appearance in the Gulf waters of objects looking like small animated icebergs ; at length he found the explanation. "Imagine,' he says, "a lump of white opaque glacier-ice rising slowly partly above the surface of the sea, and quietly sinking out of sight again, and you have a picture of that curious fish, the snow-white porpoise." His story of sport in "Western Cattle-Land" is not agreeable reading. It is to be 'hoped that few of his readers will find entertainment in his account of the vitality of an antelope ; for ourselves, it spoils the book. But we are bound to admit it is the only instance of brutality in these pages. He has not mach to tell about the Rocky Mountains that is interesting ; we follow him with greater pleasure to Mount Athos and its monasteries— where we learn with surprise that the monks submitted to be photographed, albeit with much crossing of themselves during the ordeal—and to the Great Ice Land, Alaska, which he visited with intent to make the ascent of Mount St. Elias, the loftiest peak in North America. In a larger work, Mr. Seton-Karr has told us all about the Great Ice Land; but this brief summary is full of interest. He anticipated that the great mountain, rising direct from the ocean at its feet to an elevation of 20,000 ft., would present one of the grandest sights in the world, and he was not disappointed. The story is very exciting, from the moment when the expedi- tion begins to trust to the tracks of the brown bear—" for Bruin is the road-maker in those regions "—always with an uneasy expectation of encountering Bruin himself. Mount Elias was not actually ascended, but the expedition reached a height of 7,200 ft., on a spur of the great mountain, whence a wonderful spectacle was beheld, no less than 17,000 square miles of glaciers stretching over the face of the country. Excepting Greenland, these glaciers are the most extensive in the world outside the Arctic or Antarctic regions.

The great rivers of Finland, Kashmir, and the Himalayas in midwinter, Bikancer and the Great Desert (with a charming description of the birds and beasts to be found there), are among the topics treated by the author, who also narrates the incidents of a ride to Teheran in 1888, and tells us some anec- dotes of the Shah that do not tend to increase our respect for that potentate. According to the record of him in these pages, he is as foolish as he is cowardly and cnieL Not very long ago, says Mr. Seton-Karr, before the construction of the railway, his Majesty was driving out to Enzeli from Teheran, and the following incident took place :—

"A General prevented some soldiers handing his Majesty a petition for their pay. Thus thwarted of their rights, they threw some stones, intended for this officer, who told the Shah that the missiles were aimed at him. Whereat all soldiers within sight and all found upon the road were promptly arrested, for his Majesty was thoroughly alarmed. They were then conveyed to the citadel, and ordered to be summarily executed. After the sentence had been carried out upon eight of the prisoners, the Prime Minister or some other official got wind of these proceed- ings, and came flying down in time to stop any more of such vindictive measures."

So much for the Shah's cowardice and cruelty—it is rather consoling to think of the perpetual terror in which such persons live—now for his foolishness :—

"He takes queer fancies," says the writer. "Some time ago the object was a white cat. It had a special horse of its own, with a cage, of which the wires were padded with velvet, lest its fur should be injured. It got lost, and 'then the trouble began.' All the good-looking cats in Persia were brought, but none of them was the right one. Now the object of his Majesty's regard is the son of one of his officers ; a child whom he has made Field- Marshal over the heads of all his veterans."

Of all the animals described by Mr. Seton-Karr, the wild white goats of the Cascades in British Columbia are the most interesting. These wonderful creatures, he says, "can never suffer extermination, like the buffalo, or the dodo, in the past, or as, in the near future, the sea-otter, beaver, wapiti, Kashmir red-deer, or African elephant." Man, the wanton destroyer, cannot get at them. Six thousand feet above the sea, on the sides of "an appallingly impossible ravine," from whose top, if a stone were dislodged, it would fall 5,000 ft. without touching more than twice, these beautiful, free animals dwell.

Here is the last picture for which we have space—and praise :

"On this awful spot, where no human foot may ever tread, whence a bear or wolf would be hurled, a mangled carcase on the torrent below, if it attempted to pass, on this cliff, where all the ospreys on the coast might have separate eyries, a wonderful sight was to be seen. Broken masses of mist from the main body of cloud upon the peaks were drifting across the face of it. My stand- point was on a level with the upper portion which rose immediately opposite. Upon the wild front of this rock's face, scattered in various places, I could count nine goats, pure white, faintly dashed with red, as of tawny snow, each one followed by a little snow- white kid, gambolling and frisking round her, like white flies upon a wall. The comparison that forced itself upon me, was that of large white larvEe upon the side of a stone wall, clinging to the interstices in the mortar. Mothers and young, owing to climbing powers which exceed those of the chamois or the ibex, were safe from all creatures of prey, except perhaps the eagle, which might have snatched a kid while sweeping by."