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a mile above my camp. The stag was not worth shooting, but I thought I would try and photograph the herd. I knew that over the other side of the slope it was very rocky, and as the deer saw me trying to get near them, and ran up to the ridge on the top of the slope where they were feeding, I thought that if I followed them up they would probably have to come down past me within a hundred yards or so. When I got near the top, and did not see any more of them, I naturally concluded they had got away down the other side.

But on reaching the rocky ridge I found their tracks going over it, and then some way below, through a narrow peep-hole past some projecting rooks, I saw a dead hind lying. The ground was frozen, and she must have slipped and gone over a precipice. In all probability the whole herd shared the same fate, since they had all gone the same way. I did not dare to follow them and make sure of the fact, but none of them came back again to feed on the slope where I had first seen them, and my impression is that they must have been killed.

The deerstalking season lasts from April 1st to May 31st in the mountains of Otago, and the height of the rutting season is from March 20th to April 10th. After that date the big stags gradually roar less, and by the end of April have left the hinds and retired into the thick bush, though several small stags remain with each band of hinds. The

stags' horns being all clean by the first week in March, which corresponds to September in Scotland, there is no particular reason why the stalking season should begin so late. For although the roaring, of course, helps the hunter to locate the stags, on the other hand camping out in March, when the climate is quite perfect in those glorious mountains, must be most enjoyable, and it would appeal to any good sportsman who understands the use of a telescope to have to locate his deer amongst the rough and high rocky corries where they are to be found in the warm sunny weather. Moreover, if the season extended from March 1st to the end of April, he would be sure of getting his full number of stags in April, if he had not got them before. May, which corresponds to November in Scotland, is a cold and stormy month, and not pleasant for camping out, even if the big stags were to be got, which is not the case, as they keep to the bush and do not show themselves at all, so that from a sporting point of view it is useless to camp out later than the end of April. Also gillies, cooks, owners of pack-horses, and other natives who under the present conditions only profit by the sportsman's money-a welcome addition to rather precarious earnings-for three or at the most four weeks, would gladly welcome the extension of the

season.

The Britisher must take out one licence to shoot four stags before he begins shooting,

which costs £3; and then may take out a second licence, costing £5, entitling him to shoot four more stags. No one wants to bring away more than eight good heads in one season, although deer are getting so numerous now that sport would be materially improved if some philanthropio hunters devoted a season to the killing off of stags with small and poor heads. Of these there are too many, especially in the region where the deer were originally turned down. I have consulted several old deer-stalkers in Scotland as to the cause of there being so many deformed horns in the neighbourhood where the deer were turned out, and the unanimous opinion is that this is not caused by in-and-in breed ing, but by some kind of accident, either in the form of falls in the very rough rugged ground when the stags are young, or, horresco referens, of wounds inflicted in former years by bad shooting.

Although I have not seen them myself, not having been in that particular district, I have been told that there are many single-horned stags. This is certainly suggestive of bygone wounds, but the only way of verifying the fact lies in skinning each stag after it is shot. For an old wound always shows in the skin. No doubt some beginners, or otherwise poor sportsmen, are fond of trying long shots, when owing to their ignorance in the art of stalking they are not able to get near the stags. They little think what damage they may

do by wounding. In fact, I have heard of one guide who has actually bragged of killing many stags at 600 or 700 yards, and I have little doubt that he and men like him are the real cause of so many malformed heads being seen.

Deer in Otago do not wander nearly so much as they do in Scotland. I have recognised the same stag with a band of hinds for three successive years at the head of one of the side valleys, and I am sure that the deer stick very much to their own localities, although of course young stags roam in the rutting season. For this reason the deer do not spread rapidly, and I found many lovely valleys for deer with no deer in them. The walking is hard, as the hillsides are so steep that it is not possible to get pack-horses up them, with the result that the camps have generally to be pitched on the flat river-beds, and every morning the hunter has to climb up 3000 feet in order to reach the grassy slopes where the deer are to be found in fine weather. But the climate is so bracing that the work which in England or Scotland would seem terrific is comparatively easy.

Some valleys have had tracks out into them, which of course makes them very accessible, with the result that they are too much shot, and the sportsman must make up his mind that the more difficult a place is to get to, the more chance he has of getting good heads. Although no doubt there are still some good stags in places

much frequented by hunters, they know how to take care of themselves by not leaving the bush in the daytime.

The favourite tree for deer to clean their horns on is the celery pine, called "Tanika" in Maori; and by noticing where the celery pines were most rubbed, I came to the conclusion that the favourite place for stags to spend the warm days of February in the shade was nearly at the top of the timber line.

There are two troublesome things in camp. Imprimis, the blue-bottle flies, or blow-flies, which blow their eggs on one's blankets, or anything woollen, At night sometimes the camperout is compelled to use lanterns, for the blue-bottles keep flying

into an open candle, extinguishing the light. Then again

there is a little sand-fly, in shape like a minute bee, which bites so viciously as to render a camp pitched anywhere near water untenable in the daytime.

Let me say in conclusion that the pleasures of deer-stalking in New Zealand are not sufficiently appreciated by British sportsmen. Furthermore, I feel sure that when the New Zealand Government realises the benefit it would be to the Colony to attract many more British stalkers, most of whom are men of means, the latter will be encouraged in every possible way, especially in that of fixing the deer-stalking season a month earlier.

FROM SEPOY TO SUBAHDAR.

reprint was made in 1880, also by a local firm in Lahore. It attracted Lord Kitchener's attention a few years ago, as full of useful lessons which still held good for those who would see below the surface, and who have to deal with the Indian soldier of to-day.

IN 1873 there appeared, from the hands of a local printer at Lahore, a book of the above name, being the translation of an autobiography in the vernacular of one Seetaram, a pensioned subahdar in the service of the Honourable East India Company. To be & subahdar, let alone & pen- It has just been republished

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in Calcutta, edited by Lieut.Colonel Phillot of the Board of Examiners, and also translated into Urdu (it originally was written in Hindi) under his supervision. It has also been made part of the official textbooks for the examination in Urdu by the Higher Standard. The wisdom that it contains will not, therefore, be lost on the rising generation, while its very allusions should stimulate interest in the history of the British in India in the eventful first half of the nineteenth century.

The fascination which first moved Colonel Norgate to translate the book does not fade as time rolls on; and its simple reflections and ingenuous deductions, as well as the sidelights that it throws on events of which we now only read in official histories, have a peculiar charm. In sending his work to the first translator, Colonel Norgate, Seetaram says that he has received seven wounds and six war medals; and if half of what he tells be true, he certainly deserved these latter.

Seetaram, a Brahmin of

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Oude of a fighting clan, was born near the one-time Rajput centre of Adjudya, the son of Ganga-ram Pandy. Men of the Pandy clan served largely in the old army of the Bengal Line; and it will be remembered how Mangal Pandy, the first mutineer, was responsible for the bestowal of the generic name of "Pandy" on the mutineers.

When seventeen years of age, after a careful and orthodox upbringing in the house of the family priest, the young Brahmin's love of adventure was stirred by the return from the wars of his maternal uncle, a jemadar in a line battalion of the Company. The lad at once caught the scarlet fever badly, and longed, to the horror of his mother and the family priest, to shoulder a pike also. The father having a pending lawsuit, and mindful of the interest at the court of Oude which service with the British conferred, rather encouraged the boy's martial ardour, and a few months saw him returning with his uncle to his cantonment at Agra. Seetaram had never seen a sahib, and had the wildest ideas concerning them. His first introduction to one was seeing the adjutant measuring recruits in the verandah of his bungalow, and his surprise at hearing the adjutant address his uncle in the vernacular was great. His next adventure is the interview with the small red-faced old man with the eye of a hawk, who he finds is the colonel of a thousand men. In every case he is struck with the con

sideration with which his uncle the jemadar is received. In a parenthesis he here bewails the fact that the new sahibs are not like the old sahibs, and can't talk the language as well as they could. It is always the same story in the East, the same now as a hundred years ago, when Seetaram took the shilling-the new sahibs are not like the old sahibs. You hear the same in the clubs,— the new soldier is not like the old soldier-the new rank and file are not like the old rank and file, and yet every one knows that for activity and physique the old regiments were not in it with the new ones. We need not follow the young Brahmin through his recruit stages, save to note the delight with which he left the recruit squad to don his red coat, - boys are much like another whether the skin be white or brown; but it is interesting to note that then as now, and then as ever, some sahib stood out in the regiment as a wonder and a power and a demigod. In Seetaram's regiment this wonderful Englishman was "Burampeel Sahib (he cannot be traced, but it may have been Bloomfield), and he at once became an object of intense veneration to the lad, and remained so all his life. These wonderful Burampeel Sahibs are the men who enable the English to lead alien races to victory, from the banks of the Nile to the Great Wall of China, from burning desert to perpetual snow, come rain come shine, and the secret is the gift of the gods. It is

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