where Mr. Leland once went gipsying. First there is Shepperton, with its little Gothic church and many anglers, on your left; and then Halliford, a quaint old street facing the river, where we found an impudent young man sailing the Shuttlecock, as if the Shuttlecock were not the special property of the lazy minstrel; and next Cowey Stakes, where Cæsar is said to have crossed; and Walton with its relics of scolds and gallants and astrologers. For if there is a picture at every turn of the Thames, there is a story as well; and if you are not too lazy, you read it in your guidebook and are much edified thereby, but you go no further to prove it true. The cut to Sunbury Lock, with its unpollarded willows and deep reflections, is like a bit of a French canal. At the lock there is one of the slides found only in the most crowded parts of the river. On them boats are pulled up an inclined plane over rollers and then let down another into the water above or below, as the case may be, and this in one-fifth of the time it takes to go through a lock, nor is there any long waiting for water to be let out or in. And next came Hampton, where a large barge with red sail furled showed we were nearing London, and close by Garrick's Villa with its Temple of Shakspere, and on the opposite shore Moulsey Hurst, where the costermongers' races are run in the month when gorse is in bloom, and where I was first introduced by the great Rye Leland to Mattie Cooper, the old gipsy whose name is an authority among scholars. And here the river divides into two streams to run round islands, which stretch, one after another, almost to Moulsey, so that as you pass down on either side the river seems no wider than it was many miles away at Oxford. At Moulsey Lock on Saturday afternoon and on Sunday you find everything that goes to make a regatta but the races. It is the headquarters of that carnival on the river which begins with June, is at its height in midsummer, and ends only with October. Not even in the July fêtes on the Grand Canal in Venice is there livelier movement, more graceful grouping, or brighter color. There may be gayer voices and louder laughter, for the English take their pleasure quietly. But I do not believe, the world over, men in their every-day amusements can show a more beautiful pageant. The Venetian fêtes can be seen only once each summer. But though for that of the Thames you must go to Henley regatta, every week Boulter's or Moulsey Lock makes a no less brilliant picture. And, as Mr. Leland has said, "It is very strange to see this tendency of the age to unfold itself in new festival forms, when those who believe that there can never be any poetry or picturing in life but in the past are wailing over the banishing of Maypoles and all English sports." It was still early Saturday afternoon when we reached Moulsey. At once we unloaded our boat and secured a room at the Castle Inn, close to the bridge and opposite that Structure of majestic frame Which from the neighboring Hampton takes its name. The rest of the day and all the next we gave to the river between Hampton and the Court. In the lock the water never rose nor fell without carrying with it as many boats as could find a place upon its surface. At the slide, where there are two rollers for the boats going up and two for those coming down, there were always parties embarking and disembarking, men in flannels pulling and pushing canoes and skiffs. Far along the long cut boats were always waiting for the lock gates to open. And on the gates, and on both banks, and above the slide, sat rows of lookers-on, as if at a play; and the beautiful rich green of the trees, the white and colored dresses, the really pretty women and the strong, athletic men, all with their HAMPTON COURT. reflections in the water, made a picture ever to be remembered. On the road were ragged men and boys, with ropes and horses, offering to "tow you up to Sunbury, Shepperton, Weybridge, Windsor," and still raggeder children. chattering in Romany and turning somersaults for pennies. If we pulled up to Hampton it was to see the broad reach there "overspread with shoals of laboring oars," or with a fleet of sailing boats tacking from side to side-dangerous, it seemed to us, as the much hated steam launches. Below the weir were the anglers' punts. And up the little Mole, which "digs through earth the Thames to win," the luncheon cloth was spread and the tea-kettle sung under the willows. Through the long Sunday afternoon the numbers of boats and people never lessened, though the scene was ever varying. And when the sun sunk below Moulsey Hurst there was still the same crowd in the lock, there were still the rows of figures sitting on the banks, the men and horses on the road, the stray cycler riding towards Thames Ditton - all now, however, but so many silhouettes cut out against the strong light. Close by Moulsey Lock is Hampton Court, with its park and gardens, its galleries and courts, its bad pictures TWICKENHAM FERRY. and fine tapestries, its fountains and terraces. What good American who has been in England does not love this most beautiful of English palaces? But of all those who come to it Sunday after Sunday, there is scarcely one who knows that within a ten-minutes' walk is another sight no less beautiful in its way - very different, but far more characteristic of the England of to-day. At Moulsey we felt that our journey had really come to an end; but everybody who does the Thames is sure to go as far as the last lock at Teddington, and so for Teddington we set out early on Monday morning. There is no very fine view of Hampton Court from the river. One little corner crowned with many twisted and fluted chimney pots rises almost from the banks, and the wall of the park follows the towpath for a mile or more. On our left we passed Thames Ditton, where, in the Swan Inn, Theodore Hook, who to an abler bard singing of sweet Eden's blissful bowers would "Ditto say for Ditton," is as often quoted as is Shenstone at the Lion at Henley; and Kingston, with its pretty church tower, where the great coal barges of the lower Thames lay by the banks and a back-water we explored degenerated into a sewer; and then we were at Teddington with its group of tall poplars, where there is a large lock for the barges and steam tugs, and a smaller one and a slide as well for pleasure boats, and where the familiar smoky smell that always lingers over the Thames at Westminster or London Bridge greeted us. The tide was going out or coming in,- it was so low we hardly knew which,-and on each side the river now were mud banks. But it was still early, and we decided to pull down and leave our boat at Richmond. After Teddington it was ho! for Twickenham Ferry, and the village of eighteenth-century memories. From the river we saw the villa where Pope patched up his constitution and his grotto, and the mansion where the princes of the house of Orleans lived in banishment. And in front of us from Richmond Hill, where Turner painted and many poets have sung, The Star and Garter, a certain dignity lent to it by the beautiful height upon which it stands and the knowledge that you will be bankrupt if you stop there, overlooked the Thames's "silver winding way." In places the shores were as pastoral as in the upper narrow reaches, but again we came LANDING AT RICHMOND. to the mud banks. From every landing-place men cried, "Keep your boat, sir?"-for Salter has agents on the river whose business it is to take care of boats left by river travelers until his van calls to carry them back to Oxford. Everybody expected us to stop; something of that great noise of London which has been likened to the roaring of the loom of Time seemed to reach us. We had left the Stream of Pleasure and were now on the river that runs through the world of work, as the big barges and the steam tugs told us. At Richmond we pulled up to shore for the last time, and intrusted the Rover, now with a good deal of its paint scratched off and bearing marks of long travels and good service, to the waiting boatman. Elizabeth Robins Pennell. AFTERNOON AT A RANCH. PICTURES OF THE FAR WEST.—IX. OUSES in the West, in accordance with their owners' tendencies, are showy, imaginative, practical, reminiscent, or shiftless; though there is a sort of building, in transitu, which may indicate economy and good judgment. Such a dwelling stood in the midst of the sage-brush common, on the outskirts of a frontier town where we once lived, facing the foothills which were the seat of a military post. It was first a wall tent, set up a few feet from the ground on a foundation of boards. Here, in the course of the summer, a child was born. It occurred to us that some of the comforts needed at such a time might be wanting in this Ishmaelitish household, as we supposed it to be. But we were told by the daughter of a neighbor, who knew, through her mother's good offices, more of the family than we, that they were people of meansstock-raisers looking about them, like the tribe of Reuben in the land of Jazer and of Gilead, in search of good grazing valleys where the winters were not severe. A few months later we saw the mother, bearing her babe in her arms, walking, after sunset, bareheaded, along the paths of the common. She looked a woman to be the mother of pioneers the gipsy-like tan of her long journeys showing on her cheeks through the paleness of recent maternity. To have thought of her as an object of charity seemed ridiculous. They continued to look about them all the rest of the summer, driving their stock up into the hills in the morning, and down to the ditches to water at evening. In the autumn a cabin was added to the tent, the rear of the one opening into the door of the other; wagon-sheets drawn over the wagon-body, close by, enlarged their winter accommodations. All these arrangements had a thoroughly competent and experienced look. In the spring we went away ourselves and saw no more of our nomadic neighbors on the common. In every Western town which has known a period of prosperity there will be a few houses built by persons who have had the means to proclaim their taste. "Oh that mine enemy would build him a house!" one might reflect looking upon some of these monuments. But with regard to our neighbor's house, as well as his management in most other respects, the point of view is personal, and where one lightly scoffs in passing another may pause and respectfully admire. "He jests at scars that never felt a wound." He that has never disappointed himself with results of his own planning may laugh at his neighbor's follies in bricks, or boards, or stone. If there lives a man that, having had the license money gives to clothe his caprice, finds himself entirely satisfied, let him not obtrude the fact. There is something offensive in our neighbor's complacency with the fine shell of his own making. We will grant him whatever God gave him as his portion in other particulars, but he must be modest about his house. We forgive him if his chimney smokes we love him as a brother if he is generous enough to confess to one fundamental regret concerning the whole! Besides the houses that celebrated their owners' success, there are the modest homes built in this far land in fond remembrance of the cherished ideals of home, wherever home may be. The white paint; the neat door-yard fence; the little fruit trees close to the house; the old-fashioned flowers, tended in beds and borders and fed by foreign irrigation instead of the pleasant showers of home- all have a wistful look. Yet this may be the fancy of some homesick passer-by; another may see only the look of contented achievement. No more than this was expected or desired. Here ambition ceases, and the householder would not exchange the new home of his own making for the soundest inheritance, of equal value, at home. The imaginative builder in the West, as in the East, frequently "slips up" in practice; but it will be he that first catches the spirit of the landscape and makes its poetry of suggestion his own. The people of certain races build with an unconscious truth to the nature around them which is like an instinct; or perhaps it is part of that providence which is said to attend upon the lame and the lazy. They are crippled by their poverty; they have the temperament that can wait. They cannot afford to "haul" expensive lumber or pay for carpenters to aid them in their experiment; so they scrape up the mud around them, make it into adobes and wait for them to dry, and pile them up in the simplest way, which proves to be the best. They build long and low because it is less trouble than to build high; for the same reason, perhaps, they do not cut up their wall space into windows. The result is the architecture of simplicity and rest; and it goes very well with a country that pauses, for miles, in a trance of sky and mountain and plain, and forgets to put in the details. The practical builders are as successful as the lazy builders, for they build with the same directness. The ranch buildings of the West, like the old Eastern farm-houses, are good in this way. There is no nonsense about them. If the buildings belong to a show ranch there will be ample opportunity for the exercise of a trained intelligence in the adaptation of historic styles that were inspired by similar sites and conditions. The houses of these great desert landscapes should convey the idea of monotonous and con centrated living. Sun and wind beleaguered fortresses, they should never look as if they cared in the least what an outsider thought of their appearance. They should wrap themselves in silence and blind-walled indifference, as a bathless, breakfastless Mexican smokes his cigarette against a sunny wall of a morning, wrapped to the ears in his dingy serape. It is not presumed to offer this somewhat squalid suggestion to the ranch gentry, but to their humble neighbors of the railroad outpost, the cattle-feeding station, and the engineers' camp, who have winters as well as summers to provide for. It may be added that the best houses in the West, those best worth describing, like the best people, are not the ones that are typical. M THE POISON OF SERPENTS. Y first encounter with a venomous serpent occurred when I was but a lad and had been wading the waters of the Clarion, in McKean County, Pennsylvania. Heavily laden with a noble string of trout, I set foot on a slippery bank to leave the stream on my homeward way when my guide suddenly caught me by the shoulder and jerked me back so violently that I fell in the shallow water. As I struggled to my feet in alarm, the old lumberman pointed quietly to a "hurrah's nest "1 half-way up the slope on it was coiled a large rattlesnake. But for the man's quickness I should have been struck in the face or the throat. We soon killed the snake, and as I sat on the bank, thoughtfully examining the fangs of this skillful apothecary that knew the use of hypodermatic injections so long before we took the hint, I felt the awakening of an interest in the strange poison I had so nearly tested on my own person. Few men of my age and occupation have been more in the woods than I, yet only once since this adventure have I seen a crotalus in my many wanderings in the Eastern States. I found a small "rattler" dead on the road near Cape May Court House, New Jersey: a cynical friend settled my doubts as to what had killed it by suggesting that it might have bitten a Jerseyman. This heroic animal, which never flees, which warns of danger all who come too near, has nearly gone from our woods and plains. As a cause of death it hardly figures in the census; and even in Florida its mortal foe, the hog, is 1 A mass of leaves left by a freshet in the crotch of the divergent branches of a bush. making such ruthless war upon it that before long a snake is likely to become as rare as the viper is to-day in English forests. In the West, on the sage deserts, I have seen the ground-rattlesnake in large numbers. No one dreads it much, and bites are rare. Deaths from our Eastern or our North-western snakes are also very infrequent, nor were fatal accidents of this nature ever very common anywhere in North America. For this there were several reasons: our poisonous snakes are not excessively numerous, their poison is much less active than that of the cobra and the Bungarus of India or the vipers of Guadeloupe, and during a large part of the year they bury themselves to escape cold. Our troops must in war have trampled heedlessly through countless miles of swamp and woods, and yet there is no return among our war statistics of a single case of death from snake bite. Compare this with the terrible account Fayrer gives us of the loss of human life from snake poison in India, where dislike of the hog and superstitious reverence for the cobra combine to make the management of this question difficult. Very imperfect returns, excluding Central India, gave in 1869 the deaths from snake bite as 11,416 for a population of 120,972,263, and subsequent and fuller statistics place this vast mortality still higher. Little has been done by the Indian Government to lessen the constantly recurrent annual loss of life. Rewards for cobra heads proved of slight use, and no continuous or systematic means have been used to enable the able staff of army or civil surgeons to study the subject of snake bites as it should long since have been studied. Some years went by before I was able to |