THE CHILDREN AND THE PANTHER.
[To THE EDITOR OF 7'111C " SPECTATOR."1 SIR,—Have you heard the Cowichan Lake panther story? If not, even in these days when courage is so common that only men without it are curiosities, you ought to hear it. If you are interested, copies of the depositions properly drawn are in the hands of the Field and the Shikar Club, and of course they would let you see them. Roughly the story is this. Two gently bred English children, a girl of eleven and a boy of eight, going through the bush to get their ponies walked into a panther, which struck the girl down and stood over her. The boy jumped on it and beat it with his bridle. The girl ran, looked back, and the boy called from under the panther to go on and save herself. She deliberately turned back and went to his rescue, beating and pummelling the beast and putting her arm in its jaws to save Tony's head. Soaked with blood, they staggered past the half-cowed beast and got home, the girl's body scratched and bitten and the boy to have forty-six stitches put into his scalp. Ho was in the hospital still when I saw him. I should not bother you with this story now, but I know the heart of the Spectator, I think, and I want you to realize that this is not a yarn but a true story, vouched for by our Chief Justice and several others. Do you think that any one can lick us when our children do such things? The panther, shot as soon as a man and an Airedale could be obtained, was just seven feet from tip to tip, a well-grown young beast, but it was empty, starving probably, because cataract had blinded one eye and the other was affected. But the children naturally did not know this. It is in this wise that the India' tiger turns man-eater. We here disbelieve panther stories. They won't even fight in self-defence as a rule, and one was killed by a friend of mine just at the back of his farm with dog and a revolver in the same week as Tony's panther, whilst a lady I know well killed two a few winters ago on consecutive nights with her little rifle when they came after the dogs (Aberdeens). There were no men about the place tkat night, and she had to put the rifle against the second panther's head, because in that light she wail not certain of her shooting whilst a free fight was going on between dogs and panther. But Tony's panther appears to have been an
[How sad and envious this story will make our girls and boys of like age.—" Rotten to live in a country where there's no more chance of meeting a panther than of seeing a pirate."—En. Spectator.]
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