south latitude there exists no such thing as labour, is found on the morning of the fifth enpleasant sailing. gaged in smearing the paint-denuded place of rest with a vilely glutinous compound peculiar to ship-board. He never looks directly at you as you approach, with book and rug, the desired spot, but you can tell by the leer in his eye and the roll of the quid in his immense mouth that the old villain knows all about the discomfort he is causing you, and you fancy you can detect a chuckle as you turn away in a vain quest for a quiet cosy spot. Then there is the captain himself, that most mighty despot. What king ever wielded such power, what czar or kaiser had ever such obedience yielded to their decrees? This man, who on shore is nothing, is here on his deck a very pope; he is infallible. Canute could not stay the tide, but our sea-king regulates the sun. Charles V. could not make half a dozen clocks go in unison, but Captain Smith can make it twelve o'clock any time he pleases; nay, more, when the sun has made it twelve o'clock no tongue of bell or sound of clock can proclaim time's decree until it has been ratified by the fiat of the captain; and even in his misfortunes what grandeur, what absence of excuse or crimination of others in the hour of his disaster! But the usual run of weather, time, and tide outside the ship is not more alike in its characteristics than the usual run of passenger one meets inside. There is the man who has never been sea-sick in his life, and there is the man who has never felt well upon board ship, but who, nevertheless, both manage to consume about fifty meals of solid food in ten days. There is the nautical landsman who tells you that he has been eighteen times across the Atlantic and four times round the Cape of Good Hope, and who is generally such a bore upon marine questions that it is a subject of infinite regret that he should not be performing a fifth voyage round that distant and interesting promontory. Early in the voyage, owing to his superior sailing qualities, he has been able to cultivate a close intimacy with the captain of the ship; but this intimacy has been on the decline for some days, and, as he has committed the unpardonable error of differing in opinion with the captain upon a subject connected with the general direction and termination of the Gulf Stream, he begins to fall quickly in the estimation of that potentate. Then there is the relict of the late Major Fusby, of the Fusiliers, going to or returning from England. Mrs. Fusby has a predilection for port-negus and the first Burmese war, in which campaign her late husband FIRST SIGHT OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. received a wound of such a vital description (he died just twenty-two years later), that it has enabled her to provide, at the expense of a grateful nation, for three youthful Fusbies, who now serve their country in various parts of the world. She does not suffer from seasickness, but occasionally undergoes periods of nervous depression which require the administration of the stimulant already referred to. It is a singular fact that the present voyage is strangely illustrative of remarkable events in the life of the late Fusby; there has not been a sail or a porpoise in sight that has not called up some reminiscence of the early career of the major; indeed, even the somewhat unusual appearance of an iceberg has been turned to account as suggestive of the intense suffering undergone by the major during the period of his wound, owing to the scarcity of the article ice in tropical countries. Then on deck we have the inevitable old sailor who is perpetually engaged in scraping the vestiges of paint from your favourite seat, and who, having arrived at the completion of his monotonous task after four days' incessant (FROM THE GREAT LONE LAND.") It was near sunset when we rode by the lonely shores of the Gull Lake, whose frozen surface stretched beyond the horizon to the north. Before us, at a distance of some ten miles, lay the abrupt line of the Three Medicine Hills, from whose gorges the first view of the great range of the Rocky Mountains was destined to burst upon my sight. But not on this day was I to behold that longlooked-for vision. Night came quickly down upon the silent wilderness; and it was long after dark when we made our camps by the bank of the Pas-co-pee, or Blindman's River, and turned adrift the weary horses to graze in a well-grassed meadow lying in one of the curves of the river. We had ridden more than sixty miles that day. About midnight a heavy storm of snow burst upon us, and daybreak revealed the whole camp buried deep in snow. As I threw back the blankets from my head (one always lies covered up completely), the wet, cold mass struck chillily upon my face. The snow was wet and sticky, and therefore things were much more wretched than if the temperature had been lower; but the hot tea made matters seem brighter, and about breakfast-time the snow ceased to fall, and the clouds began to clear away. Packing our wet blankets together, we set out for the Three Medicine Hills, through whose defiles our course lay; the snow was deep in the narrow valleys, making travelling slower and more laborious than before. It was mid-day when, having rounded the highest of the three hills, we entered a narrow gorge fringed with a fireravaged forest. This gorge wound through the hills, preventing a far-reaching view ahead; but at length its western termination was reached, and there lay before me a sight to be long remembered. The great chain of the Rocky Mountains rose their snow-clad sierras in endless succession. Climbing one of the eminences, I gained a vantage-point on the summit from which some bygone fire had swept the trees. Then, looking west, I beheld the great range in unclouded glory. The snow had cleared the atmosphere, the sky was coldly bright. An immense plain stretched from my feet to the mountain-a plain so vast that every object of hill and wood and lake lay dwarfed into one continuous level, and at the back of this level, beyond the pines and the lakes and the river-courses, rose the giant range, solid, impassable, silent-a mighty barrier rising midst an immense land, standing sentinel over the plains and prairies of America, over the measureless solitudes of this Great Lone Land. Here at last lay the Rocky Moun tains. Leaving behind the Medicine Hills, we descended into the plain and held our way until sunset towards the west. It was a calm and beautiful evening; far-away objects stood out sharp and distinct in the pure atmosphere of these elevated regions. For some hours we had lost sight of the mountains, but shortly before sunset the summit of a long ridge was gained, and they burst suddenly into view in greater magnificence than at mid-day. Telling my men to go on and make the camp at the Medicine River, I rode through some firewasted forest to a lofty grass-covered height which the declining sun was bathing in floods of glory. I cannot hope to put into the compass of words the scene which lay rolled beneath from this sunset-lighted eminence; for, as I looked over the immense plain and watched the slow descent of the evening sun upon the frosted crest of these lone moun tains, it seemed as if the varied scenes of my long journey had woven themselves into the landscape, filling with the music of memory the earth, the sky, and the mighty panorama of mountains. Here at length lay the barrier to my onward wanderings, here lay the boundary to that 4000 miles of unceasing travel which had carried me by so many varied scenes so far into the lone land; and other thoughts were not wanting. The peaks on which I gazed were no pigmies; they stood the culminating monarchs of the mighty range of the Rocky Mountains. From the estuary of the Mackenzie to the Lake of Mexico no point of the American continent reaches nigher to the skies. That eternal crust of snow seeks in summer widely-severed oceans. The Mackenzie, the Columbia, and the Saskatchewan spring from the peaks whose teeth-like summits lie grouped from this spot into the compass of a single glance. The clouds that cast their moisture upon this long line of upheaven rocks seek again the ocean which gave them birth in its far-separated divisions of Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic. The sun sank slowly behind the range, and darkness began to fall on the immense plain, but aloft on the topmost edge the pure white of the jagged crest-line glowed for an instant in many-coloured silver, and then the lonely peaks grew dark and dim. As thus I watched from the silent hill-top this great mountain-chain, whose summits slept in the glory of the sunset, it seemed no stretch of fancy which made the red man place his paradise beyond their golden peaks. The "Mountains of the Setting Sun," the "Bridge of the World," thus he has named them, and beyond them the soul first catches a glimpse of that mystical land where the tents are pitched midst everlasting verdure and countless herds and the music of ceaseless streams. AN AFRICAN QUEEN. (FROM "AKIM-FOO.") On the day following my arrival, Queen Amaquon came to visit me. She brought with her a large bevy of the ugliest women I had ever seen. The dress of the queen and the court at Swaidroo was peculiar. Queen Amaquon wore a necklace of beads, a stick, and a scant silk cloth; her ladies were attired in a costume which, for simplicity and economy, I can safely recommend to the talented authoress of that charming book, "How to Dress on Fifteen Pounds a Year," since it might almost be achieved on as many pence. Nearly all the ladies had babies on their backs; there were no men. Here and there in the crowd one occasionally saw a woman with the peculiar eye and eyelash of the better-looking Akims an eye which I have nowhere else noted on the coast or in the interior. I was introduced in turn to the queen's daughters, to her "fetish woman," a large wild-eyed lassie, and to several other ladies of rank and quality. As the ceremony was gone through, the lady presented stepped up into the hut, and shook hands with me as I lay on my couch; and it not unfrequently happened that the baby on the bustle at her back, looking out under her elbow and beholding a white man in such close proximity, would howl in terror at the sight. At first but a limited number of women came into the inner yard of my hut, and the queen alone entered the hut itself; but as the interview went on the outsiders grew bolder, and at last the yard and opposite hut were filled to overflowing. But the event of the day was the statement of the queen's illness. I had tried to turn her mind to war. I had spoken of the warlike deeds of a former queen of Akim-of how, sword in hand, she had led her soldiers against the Ashantis at Dodowa, saying, "Osay has driven me from my kingdom because he thinks I am weak; but though I am a woman he shall see I have the heart of a man;" but the effort was useless. "That was all true," she said; but the point which grieved her most was this illness under which she suffered, and on which she wanted my opinion. Now I was sufficiently ill myself to make the diagnosis of an old lady's ailment by no means an attractive pastime. I doubt if at any time I should have entered into such a question with the slightest interest. Nevertheless, the situation was not without novelty, and African fever was not so totally depressing as to shut out the ridiculous aspect of finding myself Physician Extraordinary to Her Majesty Queen Amaquon of Akim. Seated on a low stool she began the statement of her There is no necessity to enter now into the symptoms. They consisted of the usual number of pains, in the usual number of places, at the usual number of hours; but their cause and cure?-ah, that was the question. case. "Did I consider," asked the queen, "these symptoms could have had their origin in poison? She had visited Cape Coast Castle four years before this time, and ever since her return had suffered from this ailment. Perhaps she had been poisoned by the people of the Coast?" I inquired "if she had consumed much rum during that visit to the coast? Rum was a subtle poison." The soft impeachment of having tippled freely was as freely admitted; but it was a mistake to suppose that rum could harm anybody. "Surely, among the medicines which I carried, I must have some drug which would restore her to health.” Now my stock of drugs was not a large one. The specifics in use against fever were precious, they could not be spared. Had I any more? Yes-a bottle of spirit of sal volatile. Her majesty bent her nose to the bottle, and the tent shook with her oftrepeated sneezes. The whole court was in a commotion. The fetish woman demanded a smell; the royal daughters grew bolder; the ladies pressed in from without, and the queen declared, when sneezing left her at liberty to articulate, that she felt immensely relieved. It was some time before order could be fully restored. The heat meantime became stifling, and the press of women seemed to threaten suffocation. "Tell Queen Amaquon," I said to the interpreter, "that to-morrow I will see her again. Meanwhile I have to cure myself." With difficulty I got rid of the lot. A FOREST SCENE IN AFRICA. (FROM "AKIM-FOO.") Morning. A dense white steam fills the forest; the eye cannot follow the great gray tree-trunks more than half-way to their summits; there is the ceaseless drip of rain-drops on the broad-leaved undergrowth, and a clammy cold clings to the air; there is, the natives say, “a bad smoke" out to-day, and yet, long before mid-forenoon this smoke has vanished, and the fiery sun has come out-the clammy chill has changed to suffocating damp heat. Mid-day. The great sun blazes in sullen fury down upon the silent forest, but the fierce rays fall only in nets of gold on the great gray stems which raise their buttressed trunks 100 feet without a branch, and then fork in massive limbs whose every length would make a forest tree. One hundred feet | a gray monkey, and a few serpents. How higher still the waving surface of this ocean little we knew in England of the true nature of foliage lies outspread before the glare of of this forest! "It will burn," wrote one day-a vast sea of tree-tops whose waves ripple wise man to a daily paper. "Take plenty of in a middle region seemingly set between petroleum oil, pour it over the forest, and then earth and heaven. set fire to it." Evening. There is the splash of water upon the topmost trees; the rain hisses down in ceaseless dreariness, and the roll of the thunder crashes loud and long over the reverberating forest. But, though the hours may pass as they will, and sunlight, fog, and lightning ring their changes over this sea, still all unchanged, set in an eternity of sombre gloom, rests this huge equatorial forest. The day and the night are the same to it; noiseless rivers steal | along under dense layers of tangled foliage; huge poisonous fruits fall down from lofty close-set trees, and lie beneath the undergrowth, emitting noisome odours; great orchids hang over the pathway, spiral creepers, hundreds of feet in length, twisted like huge serpents, cling from tree to tree; and far down below the mass of foliage, amidst these tangled and twisted evergreens, beneath the shadow of the great gray tree-trunks, man moves as though he slowly picked his way at the bottom of some mighty ocean. This forest of Akim and Ashanti is the only forest I have ever seen which defies man; you could not clear it, for the reason that long before you could cut it down a new forest would have arisen. During six months there is continuous rain; during four months more, heavy tropical storms occur almost daily; for five or six weeks the weather is dry: but all the twelve months through the heat is very great, hence there is produced on the Gold Coast a vegetation such as one sees nowhere else on the globe. So vast is this vegetable kingdom that the animal world sickens and dies out before itthis immense forest holds scarcely a living creature. For months I have trodden its labyrinths, and seen only a diminutive deer, "I know tropical forests well," wrote another," the underbush will burn when the dry weather comes, as it does in Burmah and Tenasserim. Then you will be able to march through it with ease." But, alas! the African forest is always green, always wet, always fire-proof. There is a lighter opening in the forest gloom ahead-all at once the trees end abruptly, and low, mud-walled houses, thatched with reeds, appear before us. The forest treads upon the very skirts of the croom-there is no cleared space, save where the houses stand, these houses form little clusters of huts, each cluster having a tiny square yard in the centre, upon which all the huts open; by-paths lead out at the corners into the street, which is usually broad, clean, and adorned with a fetish tree, beneath which the gossip of the place is carried on. The women are nearly always engaged in household work; the men are always idle, sometimes gambling with sticks, sometimes with old cards, seldom doing any useful labour. "Why do you not clear the forest for some distance all around your croom!" I have asked the people of a village, "and plant the open space with corn and plantains?" "It would be no use," they have answered, "other people would come and take our grain and fruit. We could not refuse them, so we go three or four miles off, and make our gardens there, and then it is too far for people to go to look for food." So closely does this forest hem in the crooms, that if it were possible to walk along the tops of the trees, one would look right down into the huts from the edge of the clearing; but often the croom stands upon a knoll, or sloping hill, and the surrounding forest looks somewhat less impending. TIMOTHY DANIEL SULLIVAN, [Timothy D. Sullivan was born in May, 1827, | the then unknown contributor. In 1855 he in Bantry, co. Cork. At an early age he gave indications of a strong tendency towards literature; and the Nation gladly accepted the poetic contributions which were sent to it from entered on a permanent engagement; and from that day till the present, when he is its proprietor and editor, he has maintained his association with that journal. For many years Mr. Sullivan, with a modesty not too common, was content to publish his poems without any further indication of their origin than his initials; and the outside public had no means of knowing that many of the finest and most effective articles in the Nation also came from his pen. Mr. Sullivan has written a historical poem of some length entitled "Dunboy," in which the memorable siege of Dunboy is told with great spirit. He is best known, however, by his songs, some of which have received that truest stamp of such poetry-they have been caught up by the popular ear, and have become familiar as household words in the many countries in which the Irish race has settled down. In 1876 he became editor of the Nation on the retirement of his brother, Mr. A. M. Sullivan, M.P. Mr. Sullivan's poems are comprised in two volumes, one entitled Poems, by T. D. Sullivan, the other Green Leaves, a Volume of Irish Verses. The most popular perhaps among his lyrical compositions are "Thiggin Thu?" "God save Ireland," "The Little Wife," and "Our own Green Isle." Many of his poems are of a serious character; but another class of Mr. Sullivan's numerous admirers will perhaps be disposed to turn to those verses in which he gives free play to the high powers of genuine humour which he possesses.] O'NEILL IN ROME. Where yellow Tiber's waters flow, Moves sadly o'er the storied ground: Looks out upon the matchless dome, The ruins grand, the glorious fanes, That stud the soil of holy Rome. But, oh! for Ireland, far away— For Ireland in the western sea! The chieftain's heart is there to-day; And there, in truth, he fain would be. On every side the sweet bells ring, And faithful people bend in pray'r; For Ireland, dear, with all her ills For mass in fair Tyrone, to-day, For him has blessings, honours, gold; His fellow-exiles-men who bore, A glorious day in Ireland yet. And, oh! for Ireland o'er the main- He sits, abstracted, by the board; He fights and wins them o'er again. Sees craven Essex basely yield; Meets armoured Segrave, gaunt and tall, And leaves him lifeless on the field. But, oh! for Ireland-there once more To rouse the true men of the land; And proudly bear, from shore to shore, The banner of the "Blood-red Hand!" And, when the wine within him plays, Bold, hopeful words the chief will speak; He draws his shining sword, and says"The King of England deems me weak! Ah, would the Englishman were nigh That hates me most-my deadliest foeTo cross his sword with mine, and try If this right arm be weak or no!" But, oh! for Ireland, where good swords And valiant arms are needed most, To fall on England's cruel hordes, And sweep them from the Irish coast! Years come and go; but, while they roll, His limbs grow weak, his eyes grow dim; The hopes die out that buoyed his soul; War's mighty game is closed for him. Before him, from the earth have passed Friends, kinsmen, comrades true and brave; |