the quiet village into a fashionable resort for holiday-makers. Indeed, all the railway influences tend the other way. In taking a journey from Somerset to Selborne I changed trains five or six times, and there was then await ing me an hour's drive from Alton. Yet, in spite of this, there are a few, allured by the pages of Gilbert White and catching enthusiasm from him, who visit Selborne, and in the summer many more drive over from adjacent towns. For those who come there is the best at the village hostel, the "White Hart" Inn, where that refreshment awaits the man who, alive to the pleasures of Nature, cannot ignore the practical needs of life. In this charming village, then, in the sweet springtime, amidst the quivering notes of the nightingale and the beautiful liquid warble of the thrush, passing along meadows painted with primroses, cowslips, bluebells, anemones, and "ladysmocks all silver-white," those who wish may "plume their feathers and let grow their wings." Selborne is backed by a steep ground covered with beech-trees, many of considerable age, which raise their handsome forms all up the steep ascent and form a commanding feature in the landscape for many miles round. This long stretch of beech-covered slope is called the Hanger; and certainly it does hang over the village, which nestles, years occupied by Professor Bell, who lies in Selborne churchyard. The other side of White's house faces the Plestor, a piece of land originally given by Adam de Gurdon in the reign of Edward I., and from that day to this the playground of the village. Here, White tells us, once stood "a vast oak, with a short, squat body and huge, horizontal arms extending almost to the extremity of the area." A great tempest overthrew it, and, though the vicar "bestowed several pounds in setting it in its place again, it died." There is, however, a successor, but one by no means remarkable either for size or shapeliness. The houses round the Plestor form almost a quadrangle. It is through the Plestor that we pass into the church, whose "squat tower," as White terms it, is forty feet high only. White informs us that it was stuccoed in his time, and it may be that this stucco, which was slowly placed on the building by masons during a whole summer, is the very stucco we see there to-day. From this tower it was that White watched the movements of "those amusive birds, the swifts," and also the nightly sallyings forth, in search of "mice and such small deer," of a pair of barn-owls. The church itself is carefully described by Gilbert White in his "An separated from it by a few fields, be- tiquities of Selborne," and is, in general neath its shelter. Some of the fields lying between the Hanger and the village are planted with hops, which are largely grown round Selborne. Gilbert White's house faces the Hanger. Most of the old building remains, but it has been much added to. A beautiful and extensive lawn, or, as our ancestors would have termed it, "a fair pleasaunce," with many handsome shrubs, lies in front of the house, while at the end of the garden is the very sun-dial, reposing on a pillar, which the naturalist placed there. Between the lawn and the fruit and vegetable garden is a portion of a wall erected by White and bearing his initials-"G. W." This house, called the Wakes, was for many feature, much as when he cast around it his accurate and observing eye. The Gothic pillars, the font lined with lead, the four stone brackets which once supported images, and the lancet windows are as they were in his day. Even the "oaken balusters" round the space occupied by the Holy Table, and the wainscoting placed by the Rev. Andrew Etty are unchanged. "Nothing," White remarks, "can be more irregular than the pews of this church," and it is a pleasure to find that new ones have been set up, though one or two of the old ones remain to delight the antiquary. The stone coffins alluded to by White, which in his day were employed as pavement, have been taken up and placed in a spot reserved for them in the south aisle. All the alterations in this church have evidently been thoughtfully and reverently made, and probably none would be better pleased than White himself to see them. White's ancestors lie under the chancel, and relations of his outside the chancel. Under the chancel are buried his great-grandfather, his grandfather-vicar of Selborne-and his father. White refers to burials within the walls of churches as indecent, and doubtless for this reason was himself buried outside. Over the Holy Table is a beautiful painting, representing "The Adoration of the Magi," said to be the work of Albert Dürer, and presented to the church by Benjamin White, an eminent London bookseller, brother of Gilbert and publisher of his "History of Selborne." This picture for some years remained in the vestry, but is now in its rightful position. It is a most striking presentment of that scene, so popular with painters, of wisdom pouring forth treasure at the shrine of innocence and purity. Just a little to the right of the north side of the chancel is White's grave, with a headstone and footstone, each with his initials. The stranger has some difficulty in finding the grave, as, save these stones, there is nothing to mark it from others. Here, then, surrounded by many whom he knew and loved, and who loved and venerated him, beneath the shadow of his parish church and within a stone's throw of his house, lies this great man, in nothing greater than in his humility. In the chancel is a mural monument to his memory. The graveyard, which White regarded as overcrowded in his time, has recently received a considerable addition of ground. The ancient yew-tree, supposed by White to have been planted prior to the time of Edward I., was measured by White and found to be twenty-five feet in circumference but to this a century has added several feet. In this April of the year it has been shedding clouds of dust just as it did when the naturalist wrote about it; it looks hale and vigor ous, and will doubtless survive many generations yet unborn. A walk through the churchyard carries one along lines of beeches and by a rippling stream and through pleasant meadows to the Priory. How this Priory was founded by Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of Winchester, how it became rich, how as time passed it grew corrupt and became the prey of vice, debt, and maladministration, how that great and noble prelate. William of Wykeham, strove, by constant visitations, by stern remonstrance, by munificence to avert impending ruin, is told at length by White. Bishop Waynflete, too, in vain tried advice and censure, and at last consented to the petition of Magdalen College, Oxford, that the revenues of the Priory should be taken away and its estates assigned to that seminary of learning which he had founded. This happened many years before the Reformation, when "some who twofold balls and triple sceptres carried" overthrew that monastic system against which, but for its vices, they would have worked in vain. Selborne Priory fell, and not even in White's time could a vestige of it be seen, though its site can be clearly traced. It lay pleasantly seated close to a flowing trout-stream amidst sweet meadows and ample wood, and all that could charm the eye. Its destruction tells the sad tale of men false to a sacred trust; abusing and wasting the pious offerings of the people, and at length bringing on themselves a tardy but terrible punishment. We can walk from the stone bridge opposite the Priory to Selborne by a road which, no doubt, was once the main line of communication between Selborne and the Priory itself, and, whichever way we take, nothing is more striking than the abundance of wild animal life. Partridges. with a rush and a whirr, frequently fly out of cover; the crow of the pheasant is heard; the magpie, with heavy flight, passes in the distance; the cuckoo tunes his merry note, and the weasel, the squirrel, and the hare are often seen. White mentions stone-curlew as heard clamoring nightly from the early spring. Of late, however, they have not been heard; but seagulls, which I do not think he mentions, are sometimes observed flying high overhead. The village of Selborne is remarkable for the comparative opulence of the inhabitants. There is no squalor-there are no decayed hovels in the village. The cottages are nicely built, generally thatched; they are neat and trim, and many of them possess pretty gardens. The casual visitor to Selborne can scarcely fail to be struck by the almost exact correspondence between White's description of it and its present appearance. This is evident in the greatest as in the smallest particulars. White, for example, mentions an immense hog, the age and history of which he narrates with the utmost precision. In the yard of the "White Hart" Inn is an enclosure within which dwells a sow of colossal size, such as would with difficulty be matched elsewhere. This animal is of a friendly disposition and evinces the utmost curiosity when a carriage enters the inn-yard. The Hanger, with its steep ascent and its innumerable beech-trees, is crowded at eventide with the youth of the village, whose shouts re-echo far and near, just as they did in White's time. The Plestor is still the resort of "talking age"-still the playground of the village. The hop-poles and the hop-kilns, the frequent tillings and dressings of the hop-ground, are as noticeable as they were a hundred years ago. The saunterer may hear the hour slowly and reproachfully measured by the church clock, or see it traced on the sun-dial in the garden of the Wakes. The cuckoo, the swallow, the nightingale, combine still to form, as it were, the Easter festival of Nature; the anemone, the spurge-laurel, the lungwort, the cuckoo-flower, rise from their long slumber to a glorious resurrection of beauty and joy. den the road to the Priory or toiled up the Hanger. And yet, we ask ourselves, not so much what remains of the past as what substantial change is here. Our country has changed; old institutions have passed away; the railway and electric telegraph have transformed society. Yet in Selborne, whatever change there may be, is almost imperceptible. We are told that White preached a favorite sermon of his no less than fifty times, and that his text bore on the duty of love to man. Were he with us again he would be gratified to find that the passage of time had left unchanged the natural objects he so dearly loved; that the general aspect of his beloved village, as affected by the hand of man, was as he knew it; and that any changes in social and domestic life were such as are based on the duty of loving others and trying to improve the condition of mankind. H. P. PALMER. From Macmillan's Magazine. THE BEST SNAKE STORY IN THE WORLD. The beauty of the best snake story in the world is that there was really no snake in it, which is more than can be said even of the Garden of Eden. It had been very hot that summer on the ranche. Men work in the fields in California with the thermometer at 110°, while they fall down of heat apoplexy in the streets of New York and Chicago at 90°. That is the maxim they preach to the stranger in the West, and it has truth in it; but it is a mistake to suppose that even in California men work in the fields in comfort in such a temperature; and that summer the thermometer had gone very near 115° So we were grateful enough to get away into the hills for a spell, with a wagon and a tent and the usual outfit of pots and pans, three of us, white men, with Louie, the Mexican (whom More than a hundred years have flown since White was laid to rest in the quiet village churchyard; four generations of word-speaking men have trod- we called, in the vernacular, the Greaser), to mind the horses and make himself generally useful. Our programme was to fish the rivers, shoot deer, and possibly a grizzly-bear, discover a gold mine, and go back to the ranche with a prospective fortune. We had just pitched our tent. Down on the plain for weeks before we had been sleeping out on our verandahs, but the air of the hills had a nip in it by contrast. It was late in the afternoon, but there was still plenty of sunshine. I followed Louie round a shoulder of the hill, going to fetch water at a little stream tumbling from somewhere among the snowy peaks that capped the zone of firs on the great mountains above us. These mountains had, at some time or other, sent down a little avalanche of small rocks that lay heaped on our left as we walked. The scene was the most peaceful imaginable. In an instant a succession of small incidents sent the peace to limbo. Louie dropped his pannikin with a tinkling clatter, crying "Sancta Maria!" in a voice of terror. At the same moment I heard the dread rattle of a snake, and saw its length gleam under Louie's feet and vanish among the rocks. "Sancta Maria!" he tottered back into my arms, his dark face livid with fear, "What is it, Louie? Did the snake strike you?" "In the foot," he said, "yes." "Let us get back to camp. Quick, lean on me." "What's the good, boss?" he asked. "I'm a dead man." Nevertheless he came with me, leaning on my shoulder, and making a lame walk of it. Down in the plain we had no rattlesnakes. For miles about the ranche there were no rocks for them, and though there were plenty of groundsquirrel holes, we never saw snakes about them. The thought of such things did not enter our heads, and Louie, weary of his boots, had kicked them off, with the long spurs, and come with me in his stocking-feet on this quest for water. A word explained to the boys what had happened. "Strychnine's the best," said Jock Peters, who was our authority on the question of snake-bites, which he had studied in Australia; "but we haven't got it; so we must do what we can with this. But it's a poor chance," he added in a whisper, as, to save time, he knocked the neck off a bottle of brandy. "Drink it, Louie," he said; "never mind cutting your lip; get it down, that's the chief thing." The Mexican's teeth chattered as we forced in the neck of the bottle; but he drank a great gulp without winking. The liquor, or pickle either, to scorch the throat of a Mexican has yet to be found. Jim Kelly, the Irishman, was saddling the freshest of our horses, to ride at best speed into Lindsay, eleven miles away in the haze of the plains, for the doctor. In a minute he was pounding away among the hills. "Fix up a light as high as you can put it if it's dark before we get back," he shouted as he went. We pulled the sock off the Mexican's foot. Already it was swelling fast, with a purplish tinge round a tiny blue spot, from which the smallest imaginable drop of blood had welled. "Any good cauterizing it?" I suggested. "Not a mag," Jock said shortly. Go on with the brandy and keep him moving; that's his only chance." The Mexican's face was dreadful to see; he called, in his terror, on every saint in the Church; but he declared he suffered no pain. Jock, improving the occasion, began relating in a low voice to me anecdotes of all the snake-bites he had known. "One boy I've seen that did recover," he said; "and that was from the bite of a brown snake, and a brown snake's as bad, they say, as a rattler, an Australian brown snake, that is; a rattler can't be worse. But this boy was stupid all his life after; not as quick-witted as the average, which is not much to say. And at times, just at the time of year at which he'd been bitten, the wound got red again and swelled, and he was stupider than ever. Louie had on a sock; the rattler'd have had to go through that; he might have spent a bit of his poison there; that gives Louie a sort of a chance. Louie?" Does it hurt you now, "No, boss, no, not hurt." The swelling was spreading; going up the ankle and right up the leg, and the man began to talk slowly and painfully. "I remember," said Jock, "going along a ridge of a terrace on a steep river-bank. The river was full of sharks, and I met a brown snake coming along the ridge towards me. There wasn't room to turn, and I couldn't take to the river for the sharks, and 1 hadn't a gun. But my pal coming behind had a gun, and he poked the barrel in between my legs and blew the brute to bits." "Is that true, Jock?" I asked. "My heaven, d'you think I'd lie at such a time as this?" with a glance at Louie's face. "Are you getting sleepy, man?" he said; then, as Louie did not answer, he took him under the arm, and signalling me to do the same on the other side, we kept him moving between us up and down and round the tent. From time to time we made him drink more brandy. He had taken half a bottle, but it seemed to have no effect on him. "It stimulates the heart's action, you know," Jock explained, "just as the poison goes to stop it; but strychnine's the best; acts as a nerve-tonic. Ideal to do with the nerves, this snakebite business." It's a We heard the little ground-owls begin whistling to each other from the, mouths of the squirrel-holes away down in the plain, and the bats and moths began to come out as the sun sank out of sight. They brushed our faces as we continued to march the Mexican to and fro. Presently I left the work to Jock, and rigged up a pinetorch for a signal-light on the pole which I took from the wagon. The job took some while, but at length I got the light fairly flaring. "Look at his face," Jock whispered to me as I came back to him. It was a shocking sight under the flickering rays, swollen, distorted, livid. The man's arm was swollen, too, as I felt when I took my place to support him. His movements were lethargic and heavy, so that I wondered that Jock, unaided, could have kept him moving so long. "Give him more brandy," Jock directed, "more; that's it,-he's had nearly all the bottle. There's a chance," he went on presently; "I really believe there is. I thought he'd have been dead before now, Maybe he don't mean dying after all. A white man'd have been dead half an hour ago." "I wish the doctor'd come." The weary tramp went on. Twice I had to replenish the beacon-torch, and once more we gave the Mexican a gulp of the brandy, which finished the bottle. As I was fixing the torch for the third time I heard a shout down the cañon. I answered with all my might, and in a few minutes Jim Kelly and the doctor rode into the circle of the flaring light. "Alive?" the doctor asked. "Alive, yes," said Jock; "alive and that's about all. He can't speak." "What have you given him,-brandy? -that's right. How much?" "A bottleful." "Right, and you've kept him awake? That's it. He won't die now. Wonderful fellows, these Greasers. He'd have died before this, if he meant dying. Let's see the wound." The candle burned as quietly in the still air as in a room. The Mexican's foot was swollen, so that it scarcely looked like a human member; but in the midst of the purple swelling was a white circle with the little blue mark, plainly evident, for its centre. The Mexican seemed to feel no pain, even when the doctor handled the wound and pressed it upward with his fingers. "Hold the candle close," he said. "It's blamed strange," he added, "blamed |