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From The Saturday Review.
HEIR HUNTING.

sufficient numbers to enable a careful observer to watch their habits in every stage of their THE sufferings which people who have any troubled existence. The change that comes thing that can be dunned out of them by im- over them in the course of it is both striking portunity are condemned to undergo at the and melancholy. The length of time during hands of those who are impudent enough to which any one of them has been the object dun them, have long been the subject of gen- for which some dowager has spread her toils eral commiseration. The system of Com- may in general be inferred from the extent of petitive Examination is believed to owe its timidity and caution he displays. On his first origin chiefly to the anxiety of statesmen to entrance into society, the elder son is cheerrid themselves of the intolerable throng of ful, conversable, and trustful in his manner. applicants who were gathered round them by He betrays no consciousness that his every the hopes of patronage. The Mendicity So- gesture is watched, or that every phrase that ciety owes its existence to the absolute neces- falls from him is carefully analyzed, to find sity of providing some protection against the whether a latent or embryo proposal can be swarm of beggars whom the merest rumor detected in its composition. He does not even will draw round any man who has had the know his enemies as yet. He will talk and weakness to be guilty of an act of benevo- laugh with a dowager, and listen to her comlence. It is said that a distinguished phi- pliments, and accept her invitations, and will lanthropist, who has had the misfortune to speak of her to his friends as though she make his name famous by an act of singular were nothing else to him but a rather ugly munificence, has been fairly driven into a for- old woman, with a large development of skirt eign country by the levée of piteous cases and head-dress. But the great sign that an that has taken to assembling round his street clder son is still enjoying the bliss of youthful door. There are better-dressed beggars also, ignorance is the ease and composure with who do not beg less valiantly, though it is for which he practises the manly accomplishment other things. The great people who have the of flirting. He will plunge into a family of reputation of giving agreeable or splendid maiden daughters, if pheasants should lead parties are severe sufferers from the imper- him there, without a tinge of fear. He will sit turbable assurance with which those who are by a young lady at dinner, if chance should laboring up the lower rounds of the fashion-thrust him into such a position, and his appeable ladder petition for a card. But of all the sufferers of this kind, there is no set of people so deserving of pity as elder sons. The mendicants by whom they are beset are not of the outcast class, who can be got rid of by an ⚫ appeal to a police magistrate or a mendicity officer; nor is the favor for which they are importuned a very small matter. Turbaned dowagers, of awful presence and remorseless tongues, laden with unmarketable daughters, and with the word "Intentions" trembling on their lips, are the lazzaroni by whom their footseps are dogged; and, like their Neapolitan prototypes, these persecutors are always ready to turn to and abuse their victim if he refuses them the trifling dole of title and estates for which they are asking.

Happily for themselves, the hunted animals in question are comparatively rare. London ball-rooms and country-houses are the spots in which their persecutors generally find them; but, like the Alpine chamois, excessive hunting has made them scarce in their ancient haunts. They survive, however, in

tite will never be blunted by a thought upon the dangers that surround him. Nay, he will devote himself to her all the evening, will bank with her at the round game, and turn over her leaves at the pianoforte; and at the end of it all, he will hand a candle to her mother, without a suspicion that those maternal eyes are already glancing at him that question about " Intentions" which in a few days will send him a scared and breathless fugitive from the hall-door. Very different is the bearing of the elder son who has learnt wisdom in the bitter school of experience. He no longer ventures willingly into danger. After a score of hairbreadth escapes, like the partridges in November, he is decidedly wild. He is mentally scarred all over with the wounds he has received. Good-natured friends have confided to him more than once that Lady So-and-So is saying all over Lɔndon that "he has behaved infamously; " and his manner shows that he is no longer insensible to the constructions which may be placed on the ordinary politenesses which are only

fast or luncheon table you may be quite sure there is a young lady at the other.

After a time, this phase, too, in the elder son's career passes away. The dowagers whose toils he has constantly eluded give him up in despair at last. He is beyond the age when he can be expected to believe in the fracture of a young lady's peace of mind; and it is of no use asking for intentions when there are no intentions forthcoming. Nothing remains of his many hazards and narrow deliverances, but a quarrel with two or three families to whom he is supposed to have behaved infamously. He has not resumed, however, the unsuspecting gaiety of youth. He has acquired a precautionary habit of sheering off at the approach of a young lady, to which he probably adheres. He has also contracted a practice of keeping his hands in his pockets, which has attracted the observation of the naturalists by whom the species has been studied. The reason is supposed by many to be analogous to that which induces the Persians who live in disturbed districts to cut their beards short, in order that their adversaries may have nothing to take hold of. This explanation, however, requires to be verified. It is needless to say that, in this advanced stage of elder-sonship, he does not dream of marriage. To propose it to him would be like proposing amalgamation to Federals and Confederates, or to Poles and Russians. A long course of social hardships and privations has made such an idea abhorrent to him. The results-at least those results which we can examine without lifting up the veil of our decorous social system

practised with impunity by younger sons. Something of his former self still remains to him as long as only married women are in the room. He speaks and laughs at his case, sits down wherever inclined, and does not shrink even from a tête-à-tête. But the moment the form of a marriageable female darkens the doorway, a cloud comes over him. If he can, he flees from the open plain by the fire, and hides himself in distant corners or behind impregnable writing tables. If he cannot make his escape to a place of security, he throws himself upon the defensive by making hard love to the nearest married lady, or by taking a sudden but absorbing interest in the agricultural prospects of a country neighbor. Sometimes hard fate forces him to sit through a whole meal next to the object of his terrors, and then it is very pretty to watch his coy and maidenly embarrassment. He is evidently puzzling himself the whole time how to draw the narrow imperceptible line which, in the case of elder sons, separates rudeness from love-making. He is calculating how many observations upon the weather it will be safe to make, and whether he can dare to desert that innocent subject of criticism without exposing himself to the risk of being supposed to have "behaved infamously" six months hence. His manner becomes very like that of a witness who has been put forward to prove an alibi, and is undergoing a severe cross-examination. At last, of course, he attains to a wonderful dexterity in the use of a glacial politeness, in which nothing matrimonial can be scented even by the keenest dowager nose. It is not all elder sons, however, who attain to this are curious enough, not only with respect conversational agility. Many are taken in to the elder sons, strictly so called, but with the process of learning how to elude their respect to all who are in any degree worth pursuers. In spite of all his care, many a being hunted down. Refined female society one finds himself at last undergoing that they will, as a rule, have, though they candreaded interview in which the dexterous not have it in the conversation of young dowager drives in her last harpoon, by telling ladies, the greater number of whom are him in a broken voice, from behind her brought up to look on them with a purely pocket-handkerchief, that she fears her dear commercial eye. The demand from such a daughter's peace of mind is gone forever. quarter is pretty sure to create a supply; and Conscious of their weakness, the elder sons as the young unmarried ladies are shut out seldom run too close to danger. They prefer by the manoeuvres of their mothers, it must to flock together out of its reach. Just as a be furnished by those who have removed that shoal of herrings indicates the neighborhood disqualification. Snake-charming is a perilof a dog-fish, and as the terror among the small birds betrays the presence of a hawk in the air above, so if you see a number of elder sons congregated at one end of a break

ous amusement except with snakes whose fangs are drawn. The arrangement is, no doubt, a very pleasant one for the young men. Married women are in themselves more prac

tised, and, therefore, more agrecable talkers | whom it exists. For the present the game than young ladies: and even if they were appears to go on merrily. Skating on thin ice not, a friendship which does not lead up to is a delightful amusement until the ice breaks a question about intentions is necessarily a very much pleasanter and more comfortable kind of intimacy than one that does. But it is not to be expected that the prevalence of such a state of things should be free from consequences of a more serious kind upon the morality and the repute of the classes among

and, perhaps, for some time after. But if the pastime should result in extensive scandal, no small share of the blame will belong to the dowager-system, and especially to the vigorous practitioners who have pushed it to such a length in our day.

old correspondents, the Brothers D'Abbadie. At length, the mystery is solved; and the source of the Nile is found, by a couple of Englishmen, to be a lake about four degrees south of the Equator, very near the position which Dr. Beke, so long ago as 1846, assigned to it theoretically. It is curious that the fact has been discovered not by following the waters of the river upwards from its mouth, the natural course of discovery, but by descending upon it from above.-Athenæum.

MESSRS. BACON AND Co. have published some interesting engravings of the Northern and Southern American statesmen and generals. Of who, like the British king here, is an immortal course, the series contains General Washington, institution in America, but whether as being a

THE NILE.-Deeper in human interest than the reported discovery of the source of the White Nile, the geographical secret of many ages, by Messrs. Speke and Grant, is the intelligence from Egypt that Mr. Petherick is not dead, as late news from that country represented him to be. He is alive and well, at Gondocoro. We now know that all the gallant men whom we have sent out into the great African desert, to extend the bounds of knowledge-Baker, Petherick, Grant, and Speke-have, so far, escaped the fate which has followed so many of our noblest explorers in every part of the world-Franklin, Leichardt, Burke, and many others-over whose graves we have had to write the glories of discovery. In gratitude for their safety, we can tell the story of their trials, and reckon up the gains of science. Our conjecture, made on the 9th of May, that Mr. Baker must have fallen in with Virginian he is to be considered Southern, or as Messrs. Grant and Speke on the upper waters of the White Nile, and rendered them important know. The most striking head by far is that of being eager for the Union, Northern, we do not aid, turns out to have been correct. This adven- the Confederate President Jefferson Davis, whose turous traveller was the first European whom they met on their descent from the tropics; and perfectly calm and commanding face expresses from him they obtained aid in money, stores, and more power of self-denial, more rest in its own boats. To him they communicated their discov-strength, though not a more clear-cut purpose ery that the Bahr el Abiad, the main stream of the White Nile, has its source in the VictoriaNyanza lake; information which induced him to turn his face in another direction, towards the south-east, in search of another inland lake, which is supposed to feed a second branch of the White Nile. He will be lost to us for a year; though the public need not doubt that he will, in due time, turn up again. Lower down the stream they fell in with Consul Petherick and his gallant wife. The news which Captains Speke and Grant bring to London will excite attention in every city of the civilized globe. The source of the Nile was a puzzle in the time of Moses, and long before the time of Moses. The enigma is suggested on the most ancient monuments of Egypt; it excited the curiosity of Rameses and Sesostris; confounded the wisdom of the Ptolemies; won attention during the Roman occupation; amused the leisure of the Schoolmen ; tantalized the Portuguese Jesuits in the sixteenth century; engaged the adventurous spirit of Bruce; aroused the wonder, and baffled the researches of Mohammed Ali ; and defied the zeal, the ability, and endurance of our

than even his public acts would enable us to expect. There is power of intrigue in it rather than the love of intrigue, but endless and unscrupulous ambition. General Jackson's face is disappointing; it is rather young, fat, and encumbered with padding in the lower part, and altogether gives the idea of a character that has not burnt cral Lee's is, probably, not a good likeness, as it itself clear, the fuel smothering the fire. Genis a common-form military face. Of the Northern Generals' likenesses, General Hooker's has far side's forehead has run to seed, and General the most character and ability; General BurnScott's head looks simply thick. The head of General Banks has power and honesty; General M'Clellan's is that of an earnest youth anxious to learn.-Spectator.

AN artificial slate, for use in schools, etc., is spoken of as invented by a Mr. J. N. Pierce. Almost any material may be coated with this slate, as with a wash, and then written or drawn on. The wash may be put on paper or linen, which may be rolled up.

From The Reader. | French or English husbands; and the reply to the question "Do such matches answer?"

MISS POWER'S "ARABIAN DAYS AND

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Arabian Days and Nights; or, Rays from the "Cela dépend: if the man wants a doll to East. By Marguerite A. Power. (Samp-play with; a child who can barely read or son Low & Co.)

write, and never does either if she can help it; who talks nonsense in three or four languages; who is not without a talent for cookery, and who dotes upon dress-for which she with her. Unfortunately, in a very few years has not a talent-he may get on well enough there comes to be so very much of her!"

FROM Lulu, the monkey-who ate the greater part of a composition-candle, a pot of pomatum, a quantity of tooth-powder, and the remains of an unfinished dose of rhubarb, all without the slightest inconvenience-up to the coarse, easy-going pasha who lets his favorites supply him with sham kid gloves at At Cairo Miss Power and her friends are £5 a dozen, and £700 mirrors at £10,000 asked to a Turkish wedding, that is, betrotheach, all Miss Power's characters are sketched ment. The bridegroom is a boy of fourteen, with a firm clear hand that does great credit son of the late Selim Pacha Titurigi; and his to the artist. There the hot-headed little tutor gives him a week's holiday to get marhorses, dirty lazy fellahs, fat prize-pig-like ried in. The bride is sixteen, a woman in matrons, udder-guarded goats, sore-eyed chil- body though not in mind, and her chief duty dren, etc., etc., clearly struggle, crouch, seems to be to sit on a table and be looked at. squat, browse, and beg under the glorious The visitors are received by a set of ladies— Egyptian sun and sky, or in the mysterious of all colors, from black to fair, few young, hareem, as scene after scene passes before the reader's eye, with unwearying interest to him though he may have read dozens of books of Eastern travel before. And yet, though the picture glows with the warm light of that Eastern sun, and the memories of those old Arabian Nights that rejoiced our youth, the impression left by Miss Power's book is a sad one. For, with the instinct of her race, she has tried to get at the facts of the daily life of the people among whom she sojourned; and these facts prove not cheering ones, specially those concerning the women, as well Levantine and Turk as Arab. Leaving the many other topics of interest in the book, we propose to extract an account of the feminine inhabitants of the land. Introduced by her friend Mrs. Ross, who has settled at Alex

andria, our authoress goes to a fête at this
town, where she sees the fat Levantine belles
and their fatter once-belle chaperones. One

of the latter she sketches thus :-
:-

and fewer still good-looking, a few handsomely attired, others mere bundles of old clothes-of whom one quietly takes off Mrs. Ross's pretty bracelet and asks her to make her a present of it. Pipes and chat go on from five till twilight, and then they are led into the presence of—

what appeared to me at the first glance some glittering image or idol, seated in the corner of the room on a high triangular divan of state, covered with crimson satin embroidered in gold. This was the bride. Round her neck was a gorgeous necklace of pearls, emeralds, and diamonds, and, strange to say, on her chin, and on either check, diamonds were stuck in little clusters-I suppose with some paste or gum."

For an hour and a half the poor bride sits to be stared at, taking no notice of any one. Afterwards, leaving the bride, they adjourn to dinner; a slave tears off strips from a Turkey's breast for them, and numerous nondescript dishes are tasted. A determined-look"She can hardly be forty, and her smooth ing dame takes possession of Miss Power's face yet bears traces of considerable comeli- locket-bracelet, and asks her for a lock of her But the bright dark eyes are im- hair to put in it and keep for a keepsake bedded, the nose is sunk, the smiling mouth is buried in swelling flesh; of neck there is and tender souvenir of her! At last comes no symptom; the head rests behind on a hump a message from Mr. Ross that it is time to of fat, in front on a proturberance like the go, and the ladies depart. Setting aside the crop of a pouter pigeon. Yet she does Turkish woman's fancy for their visitors' bracelets, Miss Power says::

ness.

not seem to mind it; there she sits, smiling benignly, the picture of serene contentment.

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"The manners of these women are preThese fatties have a special preference for cisely those of children; children who lived

a life of perpetual idleness, who were for the most part considerably bored thereby, and who were pleased and amused to get hold of anything in the way of novelty, and disposed to be kind and courteous to the strangers who brought them a new sensation."

Of course the blame for their present position is laid on their shoulders-as here, too, the weak are always blamed for the faults of the strong; and—

"Halim Pacha, brother to the Viceroy,

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women in the East, and the dread "indolence, indifference, immutability fatalism— those great curses that lie on the heads of all, and never, never will be shaken off”—are fully brought out in Miss Power's book, yet the variety of beings and topics treated in it, and its admirable style, render it one of the most interesting books we have seen for a long time. We have Cairo with "the sense it gives of a new phase of life, of totally new sensations, of vastness, of immutableness, of

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the past and present blended into one, of the said to a friend of mine, Some of our women complain that we care little for them individ- 'thousand years as one day, the one day as ually, and ask why European husbands are a thousand years; Buckle, the most brilcontent with one wife, to whom they can be liant, inexhaustible, and versatile of talkers; fond and faithful. But how is it possible whirling dervishes in their maddened rockfor us to attach ourselves seriously to one of ing; the English travelling-snobs, Brown and our women? They have nothing to win re-Browness; the hero Outram; the Italian spect and regard; they know nothing, they assassins in Alexandria; Turkish dealers; do nothing, they understand nothing, they think of nothing; they are mere children, utterly foolish, ignorant, and uncompanionable; we cannot love them in your sense of the word.' True, O Pasha! but whose fault

is it?"

flame-winged flamingoes; gorgeous pointsetias; trees of roses; convolvuli vast in size, divine in color; camels, dromedaries, lions, Jews, and giraffes; a princess always smoking; her adopted daughter in a pink satin tunic and a cage; the Prince of Wales; lovely-eyed Maltese girls, etc., etc., etc.; and, at last, the hurry of Paris, and the cold, plashy streets of London. Certainly our fogs and mud are not a pleasant change from a scene like this :

"The brilliancy and clearness of the atmosphere are beyond all description, particularly of an evening, just before the brief twilight veils the world. Often as we returned from our drive, about half-past five.or six o'clock, I used to gaze in rapture on the sight presented to us. Unspeakably clear

Of the Arab women our authoress sees only the outward ways: they are only fellah-ahs, fellahs' or working men's wives, and "about as ugly a set of women, looking only at their faces, as I was ever among." But their general bearing is highly graceful, their make slender, and they are seen to perfection when carrying their large water-pots, or goullas, on their heads. They seem, however, to be greatly in want of that famous tract of the Ladies' Sanitary Association, "How to Manage Baby," for " the children are generally very ugly and dirty, with lean limbs and great stomachs, and they seldom escape oph-ridges, dark against a daffodil sky,' varying thalmia, which not unfrequently causes the into rose, blue, and pale lilac; black, and loss of at least one eye. You may often see still, and sharp, as though cut in metal, stand them wrapped in a few rags lying on the wet up the bare stems and plumed summits of the ground outside the mud hut, while the woman is engaged in washing, cooking, or winnowing beans or barley, all of which operations she performs squatted on the earth. She never either sits or stands at any employment." But though the sad condition of

and distinct lies the outline of the low sand

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palms on a background of burning gold, like the heads of saints in the old Byzantine p.. tures; and presently, out of the dark blue above, grows into brilliance a glittering crescent, with one large diamond of a star. All the East is in that picture (p. 86).

F.

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