Haycraft's unsympathetic tone was distinctly audible in Sultan Jan's voice.

"Do I look like a badmash. a betrayer of his salt, a contemner of hospitality, Sultan Jan?"

"Nay, Sahib; but"-in a consoling tone-"it is the fate even of the wisest to fall sometimes."

"Did you rescue me from the battle that you might slay my honor in time of peace, Sultan Jan?"

"No man can slay the Lieutenant Sahib's honor save himself."

"Nay; who has sought to do in my name a deed that would brand me with infamy, and rightly, wherever an Englishman is found?"

"Nay, Sahib; no man can know that we were working for you. We laid aside the uniform of the empress, and became once more like our brethren who call no man master. We placed our heads in jeopardy, but suspicion cannot light upon you."

"Can't you understand, Sultan Jan, that you have done a most shameful and wicked deed, and one deserving of death?" Haycraft's anger was breaking its bounds again, and Miss Graham laid her hand for a moment on his to calm him, while Sultan Jan stood staring at them, utterly taken aback.

"I knew not that the Sahib was blood-brother to the Colonel Sahib," he murmured, after racking his brains to find some possible explanation of Haycraft's wrath.

"All Christians are blood-brothers to one another," interposed Miss Graham, hastily, for the sake of peace.

"I knew it not, Miss Sahib," responded Sultan Jan, with unintentional irony.

"See, Sultan Jan," said Haycraft, moderating his tones with difficulty, "when I heard what you had done I was going out with my whip, intending to deal with you as I dealt with the tribesman who stole my pony-you

remember?-but the Miss Sahib has asked for mercy for you."

"The Miss Sahib feared for the life of the Lieutenant Sahib," was the calm reply, and Haycraft gave up any further attempt to convey instruction to this singularly impracticable mind.

"I have forgiven you, Sultan Jan, because the Miss Sahib desires it, remembering that you are the man who saved my life. And now go, and see that the escort is ready to ride with us to Alibad."

"The Sahib would take the woman back to her father, when I and my kinsmen risked our lives to obtain her for him?" Sheer amazement had bereft Sultan Jan of his good manners for a moment.

"Certainly, and at once. Go, Sultan Jan. Am I to command twice?"

"God made the English," said Sultan Jan with dignity, "and it may be that He undertsands them; but verily it is beyond the power of man to do so."

With this parting shot he left the room, no doubt resolving to make no further attempts to do a good turn to such incomprehensible people. Meanwhile, Miss Graham smoothed her hair by the aid of a ridiculously small looking glass which Haycraft brought out, and drank a cup of tea which Milton brewed for her special benefit by means of a spirit-lamp, and then announced herself as ready, and indeed eager, to start. When the little party had left the fort it was still necessary to give some further directions to Sultan Jan, and Haycraft called him up.

"Understand, Sultan Jan, that nothing is ever to be said of this plot of yours."

"Nay, Sahib," in a sulky voice; "I have already laid that charge upon my kinsmen who helped me. No man cares to be made a laughing-stock to the world."

"The Miss Sahib and I will not betray you. We shall say that she was

since you and yours had forgotten your duty and returned to your old ways for the time and that you brought her into the fort."

"True, Sahib; and I will say that we took her by force from the tribesmen, and that three of them were killed and not one left unwounded when they fled before us."

"That won't do, Sultan Jan. The Colonel Sahib would wish to see the battlefield. You had better stick to the truth."

"And I would have said that the Lieutenant Sahib proved himself a veritable Dilir Jang, and cut down the chief man of the robbers!" murmured Sultan Jan, regretfully, as he fell back to his place.

After less than an hour's riding the party from Shah Nawaz fell in with the rescue expedition from Alibad, and after a narrow escape from being fired upon-for, in the belief that a general invasion of the frontier was in progress, people were inclined to see a tribesman in every rock-succeeded in restoring Miss Graham to her father. Great was the excitement among the Alibad force, and the simple and matter-of-fact statement of the heroine of the occasion could do little to allay it.

"I found myself surrounded by tribesmen, and I was tied and gagged, and then I don't remember very much until I found Mr. Haycraft setting me free," she said.

"God bless you, Haycraft!" said Colonel Graham, wringing the young man's hand. "How can I ever thank you properly?"

"Really, sir, I did nothing but cut the cords and things," was the truthful disclaimer, which was universally attributed to modesty. "I only wish I had come up in time to do some good; but whatever credit there is belongs to the havildar Sultan Jan. He and his cousins and nephews were return

"Could you identify any of the vil lains if they were caught, Miss Graham?" asked Brendon, who had ac companied the force as a volunteer.

"There are one or two that I really think I should know again," she responded.

"It's the most mysterious thing I ever heard of," Brendon went on. "A body of hostile tribesmen appearing out of the very ground, as it were, in this way, and then turning tail after all without making a fight of it." His wonder fell on deaf ears, for Miss Graham was not listening to him.

"May I come and see you to-morrow, sir?" she heard Haycraft saying to her father, and then muttering something about hoping that the fright would do Miss Graham no harm.

"I was intending to ride out to you, Haycraft,' said the colonel; "but if you have business in town, pray come to us."

"Then I must tell papa to-night," thought Miss Graham, and as soon as she reached home she insisted on unfolding her story, regardless alike of her fatigue and the lateness of the hour. The recital awakened alternate disgust and irrepressible amusement in the hearer.

"We must keep the secret, I suppose," he said at last. "We should set the empire in a roar if we confessed that we had built up a full-grown frontier scare on such a foundation."

"Yes, papa, and you must ride over to Shah Nawaz, and call Sultan Jan out before the troop, and compliment him on his bravery, and give him a sword or a robe of honor or something -for saving me, you know."

"I'll be hanged if I do!" broke from

the colonel. His daughter held up a reproachful finger.

"Papa, you really shouldn't. I'm shocked at you. But you can reward Blackwood's Magazine.

Sultan Jan with a clear conscience; for, after all, he has done a good turn to your daughter as well as to his commander, you see."

Sydney C. Grier.

Among such primitive peoples as still exist, not the least curious or notable trait which universally obtains is the manner in which all things uncanny, or which they are unable to comprehend, are by common consent ascribed to the Devil. Not to a devil as one of a host, but the Devil par excellence, as though they understood him to be definable only as the master and originator of whatsoever things are terrifying, incomprehensible or cruel. Many eminent writers have copiously enriched our literature by their researches into this all-prevailing peculiarity, so that the subject has on the whole, been well threshed out, and it is merely alluded to en passant as one of the chief reasons for the epithet which forms the title of this article.

Now it will doubtless be readily admitted that sea-folk retain, even among highly civilized nations, their old-world habits of thought and expression longer than any other branch of the population. This can scarcely be wondered at, since to all of us, even the least imaginative, the eternal mystery of the ocean appeals with thrilling and ever-fresh effect every time that we come into close personal relations with it.

But when those whose daily bread depends upon their constant struggle with the mighty marine forces, who are familiar with so many of its marvels, and saturated with the awe-in

spiring solemnity which is the chief characteristic of the sea, are in the course of their avocations brought suddenly in contact with some seldomseen visitor of horrent aspect arising from the gloomy unknown depths, with one accord they speak of the monster as a "devil-fish," and the name never fails to stick.

So that there is, not one species of devil-fish, but several, each peculiar to some different part of the world, and inspiring its own special terror in the hearts of mariners of many nations. Of the devil-fish that we, in this country, hear about, and that is indelibly portrayed for us by Victor Hugo, the octopus, so much has been written and said that it is not necessary now to do much more than make passing allusion to the family. But the cephalopoda embraces so vast a variety that it seems hardly fair to single out of them all the comparatively harmless octopus for opprobrium, while leaving severely unmentioned the gigantic onychoteuthis of the deep sea, to say nothing of many intermediate cuttle-fish. From the enormous mollusc just mentionedwhich is, not unreasonably, credited by seamen with being the largest fish in the ocean-to the tiny loligo, upon which nearly all deep-water fish feed, hideousness is their prevailing feature, and truly appalling of aspect some of the larger ones are, while their omnivorous voracity makes them verita

ble sea-scavengers, to whom nothing comes amiss, alive or dead. And while having no intention to underrate the claims of the octopus to his diabolical prænomen on account of his slimy ugliness and unquenchable ferocity, I feel constrained to put in a word for that little-known horror of the deep, the ten-armed cuttle-fish, which, like some fearful creation of a diseased brain, broods over the dark and silent profundities of ocean, extending his far-reaching tentacles over an immense area, touching nothing liv. ing to which they do not cling with an embrace that never relaxes until the victim is safely deposited within the crushing clutch of the great parrotlike mandibles guarding the entrance to that vast and never-to-be satisfied stomach. Nothing that the morbid imagination of man has ever pictured can surpass in awful appearance the reality of this dire chimæra, which, notwithstanding, has undoubtedly an important part to play in the mysterious economy of the sea. "He dwelleth in the thick darkness;" for, not content with the natural gloom of his abode, he diffuses around him a cloud of sepia, which bewilders and blinds his victims, rendering them an easy prey to the never-resting tentacles which writhe through the mirk, ready at a touch to hold whatever is there, be it small or great.

But the strangest fact connected with this mighty mollusc is, that while from the earliest dawn of literature numberless allusions more or less tinged with imagination have been made to it, modern science has only very recently made up its mind to accept as a fact its existence at all. So many indisputable proofs have, however, been forthcoming of late years, both as to the size and structure of the gigantic cuttle-fish, that it has now taken its place among the verities of natural history as indisputably as the

elephant or the tiger. It has also been firmly established that the sperm whale or cachalot (Physeter macrocephalus) finds his principal, if not his only, food in these huge gelatinous masses while ranging the middle depths of the ocean, and that their appearance on the sea surface is generally due to this whale's aggression.

To pass on, however, to a much lessknown "devil-fish," in the long fish gallery at the splendid Natural History Museum at South Kensington there is a small specimen, some eighteen inches across, of a fish whose habitat is the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

There it attains enormous proportions, and is, not without reason, known to all the frequenters of those waters as the "devil-fish." When a youngster I was homeward bound from Sant' Ana with a cargo of mahogany, and when off Cape Campèche was one calm afternoon leaning over the taffrail, looking down into the blue profound, on the watch for fish. A gloomy shade came over the bright water, and up rose a fearsome monster some eighteen feet across, and in general outline more like a skate or ray than anything else, all except the head. There, what appeared to be two curling horns about three feet apart rose one on each side of the most horrible pair of eyes imaginable. A shark's eyes as he turns sideways under your vessel's counter and looks up to see if any one is coming are ghastly, green and cruel; but this thing's eyes were all these and much more. I felt that the Book of Revelation was incomplete without him, and his gaze haunts me yet. Although quite sick and giddy at the sight of such a bogey, I could not move until the awful thing, suddenly waving what seemed like mighty wings, soared up out of the water soundlessly to a height of about six feet, falling again with a thunderous splash that

might have been heard for miles. I must have fainted with fright, for the next thing I was conscious of was awakening under the rough doctoring of my shipmates. Since then I have never seen one leap upward in the daytime. At night, when there is no wind, the sonorous splash is constantly to be heard, although why they make that bat-like leap out of their proper element is not easy to understand. It does not seem possible to believe such awe-inspiring horrors capable of playful gambolling.

At another time, while mate of a barque loading in the Tonala River, one of the Mexican mahogany ports, I was fishing one evening from the vessel's deck with a very stout line and hook for large fish.

A prowling devil-fish picked up my bait, and feeling the hook, as I suppose, sprang out of water with it. I am almost ashamed to say that I made no attempt to secure the thing, which was a comparatively small specimen, but allowed it to amuse itself, until, to my great relief, the hook broke, and I recovered the use of my line, my evening's sport quite spoiled.

These ugly monsters have as yet no commercial value, although from their vast extent of flat surface they might be found worthy of attention for their skins, which should make very excellent shagreen. A closer acquaintance with them would also most probably divest them of much of the terror in which they are held at present.

Another widely known and feared devil-fish has its headquarters in the Northern Pacific, mostly along the American coast, especially affecting the Gulf of California. This huge creature is a mammal, one of the great whale family, really a rorqual of medium size and moderate yield of oil. Like the rest of this much-detested and feared (among whalers) branch of the cetacea, it carries but a tiny fringe

In these secluded spots the California devil-fish, mussel-digger, grey-back, and several other aliases not fit for publication, but all showing how the object of them is esteemed by his neighbors, may sometimes be taken at a disadvantage, the cows languid just before or after parturition, and the bulls who escort them too intent upon their loves to be as wily as is their wont.

But only the elite of the Yankee whalemen, dexterous and daring as are all the tribe, can hope to get "to windward" of the diabolically cunning giants whom they abuse with such fluent and frequent flow of picturesque profanity. It is a peculiar characteristic of this animal that it seems ever on the alert, scarcely exposing for one moment its broad back above the seasurface when rising to spout, and generally travelling, unlike all its congeners, not upon, but a few feet below, the water. For this reason, and in this fishery alone, the whalers arm themselves with iron-shafted harpoons, in order to strike with greater force and certainty of direction a whale some distance beneath the surface. A standing order, too, among them is never by any chance to injure a calf while the mother lives, since such an act exposes all and sundry near the spot to imminent and violent death.

Neglect of this most necessary precaution, or, more probably, accident, once brought about a calamity that befell a fleet of thirteen American whaleships which had been engaged in the "bowhead" fishery among the ice-filoes