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never picture her as she was in life. She was more lovely than any flower or any vision of the saints, and when she spoke to me it was with the voice of all my own music gathered into one body. Our parents died years ago, and we scarcely remembered even their faces; for all my life my sister and I were one soul. That is why you see me now-only half a man.

"We lived in the city and worked for our own breadshe at her stitching and I with any orchestra that cared to have me. We were very poor but not in want, and we were happier than ever man and woman in this world. Until one day - my sister seemed often tired and pale; she must have suffered much, but never told me more than a little of it, until one day, I say, when I called a doctor to her and he told me the truth. She could not live, . . . cancer, he said, . . . she could not last six months. She the purest and loveliest of all women, she who had never sinned! God! I have cursed God often as I did then." Louis Boermer's voice dropped, and the good Mayseder, half-consciously, put out a hand to help him.

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"Do not touch me!" the tired voice in the dark began again. "I shall tell you my story to the very end. Margaret, my sister, said not one word at the news. She lay white and tired; she smiled and held me with her hands. Even then the fiends were trying her with pains too great for strong men to bear.

"I would not have her in the dark city where there are crowds who seemed to stare and mock us both. I would let no one look on her but myself alone. So in the spring we moved into the mountains where we had run together years before. We had a little hut deep in the trees-for she loved our pines like living children—and hid ourselves away from all strange faces. She could work no longer-I would never let her work again-and I had no need, for we had saved a little.

"All the spring and summer she lived on, rallied and weakened before my eyes. With the autumn the darkest days closed on us. My little savings were almost gone! I had to give up our only comfortmine because hers; I sold my violin. And with it I sold a part of my soul. I lost it all at last in a night of horror unnameable; I went into our village and drank it out like a mad beast. Then I came back to her in the morning, and she only smiled and held my hands. Christ! I have believed she never knew.

"The winter came and the snow muffled us up. White as the snow my sister Margaret lay in our hut, still and soft and pure as the snow. In all her suffering she never gave me a hard answer, though I deserved it every hour of the day. Sometimes in the night when she lay there so still I could not bear it. I fled away into the dark woods and fought alone, and drank always more deeply to forget.

"At the close of the year the end was on her. She was speechless and senseless for days in agony. At last I broke away and made for the city once more, racing and shouting down the mountain side. I carried all the money I could find to buy I knew not what-opium, perhaps, to give her sleep at last. And the rest?-you know it in part already. I wandered about the streets of Vienna, forgetting why I had come. I was mad, mad at last.

"A bill in some window struck me. Beethoven, the great master of us all, was to play that very night. I forced my way into the hall, I gave all my money at the door to hear music once again. You know the rest of that nighthow I supped with you and drank, how I played afterwards. It was not for you I played. In the beginning I played for the master alone, for I saw him, as close as I see you now, beating the great symphony. And then I lost him and saw only my sister. She stood fresh and young as the morning; her hands were full of flowers, her eyes burn

She smiled and

ing into mine. held out the flowers towards me. And then they turned to dust between her fingers. Her face was shot with suffering, ... she stumbled towards me, smiled once more, and vanished out of my brain.

"How you found me I shall never ask to know. I remember nothing till the cold rain woke me on the mountain side. I was racing home over rock and river, through rain and drifted snow. My head was surging; there was blood upon my hands. Our pines at last! 'Margaret!' I shouted, and all the echoes mocked me back. I burst the door, I saw my own sister again. She lay as she had lain all the dark night through- with no lamp, no hand, no star to guide. Her hands were stretched towards the door, her face turned upon the pillow, her eyes were on me wide but they never saw me again-the smile of another world was on her parted lips.

While I played among you I had seen her die."

The musician stepped forward in the darkness, his arms out eagerly, but Louis Boermer was gone.

CRANES AND CRACKSMEN: A TALE OF TWO HUNTS.

BY A. J. O'BRIEN AND R. C. BOLSTER.

"MIAN JAMAL is outside, your Honour," said Qadir Baksh, my quaint old bearer, "and wants to know if you will take breakfast with you or not."

Vernon, my assistant in the administration of Hazratabad, and I sat at dinner discussing a plan of campaign for the

morrow.

If there is one thing above others that renders the district inhabitable, it is the shooting. Those who love to dwell in cantonments and soft places always speak of us with sympathy. But although, officially, we may refer sadly to the days we spend in our jungle, and hint at the claim we are setting up for a special billet in a good spot, we need have no hesitation in saying privately that there are great joys in administering an area larger than Wales, of mixed desert and riverain, barren hills and fertile gardens. The desert contains the sandgrouse, lesser bustard, stone plover, and a few ravine deer. The riverain supplies black and grey partridges, with ducks of all kinds, and geese. In the hills are the mountain goats called urial and two more kinds of partridges, sissi and chikor. Yet it must not be thought that game is to be had for the asking. As Mian Jamal has said, "If all shikar ended successfully, there

would be an end to shikar." In Hazratabad, although the game book may show forty species killed during the year, and one may be shooting, as work allows, fifteen days in every month from September to April, there are no large bags except when all the sandgrouse of the desert can be found watering at one spot. This happens occasionally, though they have the whole of a mighty river to choose from. But it also does not follow that any sharp eye will be about to locate them. Cases like these excepted, shooting depends on craft more than on the skill of the gunner, and one is entitled to slay when one has come within reaching distance of the quarry. The old joke of the Frenchman and the runner, "I shall vait till he stop," has no great point to the man who is entitled to an Houbara bustard if he can approach in narrowing circles and cannot all can see him as he lies mingled in the drabness of the dust. When duck fly up and down swamp, the sportsman can stand bravely out conspicuous, and bring his bird, if he can, out of the sky. But in Hazratabad the river dominates the situation, and one must ensure a successful shot by the preliminary of a tedious grovel on one's stomach,

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for at the first alarm every duck in the neighbourhood will leave for the river.

Sandgrouse, too, are to be shot in the desert as well as on water, but the shikari may get weary showing to the new chum birds within shot which the unpractised eye cannot separate from the clods.

"It will not be worth while taking food with us," I said to Vernon with reference to the bearer's question.

"I thought you always preached the importance of looking to the commissariat," he replied.

"Yes, I always do. There is nothing so foolish as attempting to go long hours without food in this climate. But in this case we can have a large chota haziri, and, as the cranes climb aloft by 9.30, we can shuffle back on the camels by 10.30. It is not as if we could be led away to prolong the sport as in other cases. A 'bloody orange' as the Gujranwala salesmen have it, and an apple in the pocket will keep us alive."

"All right," said Vernon; "both of us, fortunately, can eat at any hour, and have not the queasy stomach in the early morning that is more the product of small drinks in the club than the much blamed heat."

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and the enormous area of a huge district must be covered as far as possible, if a district officer is to keep affairs under reasonable control. This is not, however, incompatible with a good deal of shooting. Other stations have their clubs, tennis, bridge, and other amusements, but in Hazratabad one must shoot or die of ennui. And shooting, scientifically arranged, need not clash with work. It would be unwise to inspect the partridge country when the reeds are high and the birds disinclined to rise. Why should the neighbourhood of a swamp obtain official importance except when the snipe and duck abound? An overworked official cannot spare much time for any one locality, and it would be foolish to provide that time when the marsh was dry or the weather hot. The uriàl have their seasons, and the sandgrouse are only in the desert between November and early February. The time to inspect the areas adjoining the river coincides with a journey down in boats, as all the geese and duck are travelling northwards.

People may have an idea that the Indian hot weather is a time for languor, but the wise official uses it as a period of enforced life between walls, and therefore a time to be spent in clearing off as much extra work of inspections and extraneous labour as possible. The traditions of the Punjab as regards work are bad, and the words "Punjab head" applied to those who have brought

themselves to a standstill, the cranes are travelling north

evinced by aphasia and kindred symptoms, are testimony to the bad effects of the policy of Lord Lawrence. He is reported to have said, "We always gave our men too much to do to ensure their doing something." And this tradition dies hard. Still, it is possible to make the strenuous life harmonise with a certain amount of enjoyment.

"Present our compliments to Mian Jamal," I said, and in he came, a tall grave-looking handsome man of about forty. He comes of a priestly family, and, as he derives a considerable income from the offerings of his "parishioners," is comfortably off and able to devote a good deal of time to sport. He knows every inch of the country for miles in and around Hazratabad and the precise habitat of each flock of bustard or herd of ravine

deer.

"What about the cranes?" we asked.

"The cranes," replied the Mian, with the quiet smile of one who knows-"the cranes are all right; we will salute them in the morning."

It so happens that the system of annual accounts is such that towards the end of the official year an officer ought to be in headquarters to see that full use has been made of the sums allotted. This obligation is not, in Hazratabad, coupled with any regret, because the period from the middle of March to the thirty-first, when the financial year closes, happens to be just the time when

to escape the heat. Both the Great Grey Crane (Grus cinerea) and their smaller grey and black congeners, the Demoiselles (Anthropoides virgo), join in their migration and travel up the river together, spending the nights in the safety of the mud-flats and sandy wastes lying between the various branches. The early morn sees them flying out to get their breakfast.

To the south of Hazratabad lies an area which in the summer vies with the desert proper in its desolation of sandy waste. Our sand, however, contains some admixture of soil, and, in years of good autumn rainfall, the whole area is sown with the pulse called gram. Nothing more than a sharp shower at Christmas and another in February is needed to bring this crop to maturity, and, in years of well-distributed and not too heavy rainfall, the growth is so great that every plant attains the dignity of a bush, and the crop is such as to defy comparison anywhere. This fact has not been lost on

the cranes, and year after year, despite the constant war against them by gunners and even slingsmen, there are always wise old birds to guide the flights aright. Thus the twenty days of the season for marching northwards see a daily encampment on the mud-flats where a large tributary joins the great river, and in the early morning out comes flight after flight to guzzle to their full on the ripening green pods. After the meal is over, and as

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