With that form of defence which consists in giving blow for blow, otherwise fighting it out until the stronger wins, I have not concerned myself, though we constantly come upon evidences of severe battle, and Orientals even amuse themselves with the fights of captive fishes kept, like gamecocks, for the purpose.

There is, however, one more trick of self-defence, familiar to naturalists in higher animal groups, though always a subject of dispute among animal psychologists, and that is the ruse of feigning death, and thus deceiving the stronger enemy into leaving the field clear.

Even brute beasts, unless they be carrion-eating hyænas, do not as a rule molest a dead body. This manner of deception has been called "foxing," yet some of those who know the fox best declare that it never practices such methods. The animal which undoubtedly "foxes," according to the testimony of many independent observers, is the opossum of America. With the exact mental operation which induces this behavior I am not here concerned. Some regard it as a mere cataleptic collapse under strong fear, while others accept it as a genuine deception. With some reservations, I must rank myself with the latter; and it is, therefore, particularly interesting to me to have found, as I think, a genuine instance of "foxing" in a fish. I give the following case only for what it may be worth as evidence, but, as I do not remember to have seen any such instance previously recorded, it may be The Cornhill Magazine.

of interest. When fishing for bass in estuaries we use living sand-eels, and these are kept in a floating wooden box tethered to the boat and hauled from the water whenever a fresh bait is required. On three consecutive occasions one morning last summer the bait, which I picked from the rest, lay apparently lifeless, its gill-covers hardly moving on the palm of my hand, and, as a half-dead bait is useless for the work, I pitched the moribund sand-eel overboard. The first had no sooner touched the water than it darted off as in perfect health. The second behaved likewise. This roused my suspicions, and I purposely sacrified the third. If the bait had not been getting scarce, or rather, perhaps, if my angling zeal had not for the moment dominated my devotion to scientific knowledge, I should have tried the fish until all were overboard. Even those three cases, however, are not, I think, quite without interest, and it would be useful to learn whether similar cases have come under the observation of any who are in the habit of live-baiting for pike with dace or gudgeon. The lowest expression of "foxing" is when one village lad lies in the road with his arm shielding his head, and another stands over him and at intervals administers a stimulating kick. Such cowardice one hardly expects to find in fishes, but a fragile sand-eel is surely excused if it declines combat with an ogre in whose palm half a dozen of its kind could lie at full length.

F. G. Aflalo.

AN

The Honorable John Oswald had quite enough money of his own without there being any need for him to spend his time driving cranky marine

engines for such wages as accrue from that somewhat precarious pursuit. His many friends did not understand it; neither did they approve. For months

he would live decorously at his rooms in Piccadilly, and behave as an ordinary mortal of his class. Then he would disappear. Later some acquaintance would remark that he had met Oswald masquerading as engineer on a Norwegian tripper, or patching a donkey boiler on a Highland coasting steamer. This was unnecessary and erratic. Therefore, it was also foolishness.

He had served his time with a Clyde firm, and had extracted various special steam certificates out of the examiners of the Board of Trade. He never boasted, but his knowledge of marine engineering extended from the oscillating type of a penny steamboat to the latest form of turbine. He was reported to have assisted at the tinkering up of the flaw-shattered tail shaft of the liner Ocean Queen with a thousand souls on board in mid-Atlantic in an equinoctial gale; and he was said to have nearly lost his life when the tubes of a patent water-tube boiler blew out on Lord Lysington's craft-half yacht and half gunboat-in the Caribbean Sea. Then he would come home, and duly attend at Ascot and at Henley like a rational person. He could discuss with equal acumen the skirt dancing of the latest lady professional, or the recent eccentricities of a bilge pump. He had patented a new injection valve; he was an authority on the differing qualities of steam coals. He could tell you, if he liked, of a side of sea life known solely to firemen and greasers. Wherefore, it was not to be wondered at if he came to be regarded askance by the cautious old-fashioned parents of a certain most charming maiden.

When Jack Oswald first met Nora Graham at a country house in Berkshire, he decided indifferently that he didn't like her. Nevertheless he outstayed his first invitation at the house, and then coolly-as he did most things

-requested a second from his host. Soon other visitors learnt tacitly to drop away and leave the two alone. He rode with her; they shared the same punt; she sang to him after dinner. He was a slight fair man with hair just tinging gray around the temples, quiet, active, and determined. She was a tall, dark, graceful girl whose appearance attracted attention everywhere. Directly he realized that he loved her, he asked her gravely to marry him, and-she refused.

The Hon. Jack Oswald forthwith made a voyage to the Black Sea as chief on a grain boat, whose owner was a friend of his, and had no objection to the services of a highly competent engineer at lowest scale wages. Then he quietly returned to his suit as if he had never been rejected, and found that Miss Nora had meantime discovered that she liked him very much indeed. But this was where the parents unexpectedly intervened. There was the stormiest of scenes with old Colonel Graham, and there was a long lovers' walk in Kensington Gardens. This I know, because both of them told me about it afterwards on two consecutive days. Then the business seemed to drop. Jack said she was far too precious to be worried more than possible, and he must wait till something should turn up to help them. Such waiting, however, is wearisome.

In June the Grahams departed to the Mediterranean for a two months' holiday on the Queen of England-one of those pleasure steamers with a mixed company of tourists, a brass band, and an itinerary which enticed the unwary by the allurements of Carthage, Athens, and Constantinople. I went in her too, and I thought Miss Nora looked a little tired with life when I met her on the tender at Tilbury. She seemed quite pleased to see me, and asked rather shyly if I knew where Jack was. I didn't; all trace of him

had been lost for six weeks, until a bearded, grimy individual emerged from the engine-room hatchway one evening after dinner off Cadiz, and requested me to give him a pipeful of English tobacco.

I nanded over a spare tin of my best. That second engineer was Oswald. He warned me against the spreading of scandal, and I undertook the conveyance of a certain message for him to the saloon. He knew I should hold my tongue, and he was really in love, and sutering seriously.

Mrs. Graham is my aunt; I don't think I have mentioned that before. A week later sue counded to me that Nora was a good girl, and seemed really getting over that unfortunate attachment to the Oswald man very well indeed. In fact, sue would have been certain it was all forgotten had not her daughter betrayed rather more interest in the ship's engines than was quite seemly in a lady passenger. However, these engineers, as far as Mrs. Graham could see, were a harmless hairy lot. (I afterwards heard that Nora had spoken in the strongest disparagement of Jack's pseudo-beard so that he had nearly cast it from him furnacewards.) Colonel Graham lived in the smoking-room, where he told the same stories with regularity, and Mrs. Graham slumbered for an undue portion of each day. Consequently, when I found that Miss Nora had sufficiently overcome that feminine fastidiousness on the subject of oil to pay surreptitious visits to the regions of crank and cylinder, I was not surprised. Though it was all undoubtedly very wrong and deceitful.

Oswald always avowed that the weeks of that cruise were the hardest in his life. When he was off duty he would see Miss Graham playing deck games with fascinating men who were only too anxious to flirt with her. When he was on duty it was worse, because

imagination pictured her encouraging them artlessly. There were the usual concerts and a dance, when he was even driven to stuff up his ears with cotton waste, which no engineer, who feels the pulse of his engines by sound as much as by any other sense, should do. He says no one can appreciate the peculiarities of a passenger vessel properly till he has experienced them from the point of view of a second engineer. The moments of compensation when he was actually able to speak to his adored one were few and far between.

I

One night, towards the end of the voyage, the crisis came; sometimes it does. The weather was fearfully hot, and the Balearic Islands lay abeam mistily. When you moved on the deck you panted with the exhaustion of the effort, and down in the engine-room the heat must have been terrific. felt that something was going to happen, because everybody lay about on chairs so complainingly, and gasped. Thunder clouds rolled up from the southward, and fierce lightning streaks glinted through the distant blackness. We were steaming sluggishly into a storm.

The clack-clacking of the engines worried me unreasonably, and I knew that Oswald was down below on watch, sitting and talking to that machinery in lonely solitude. Sudden from the depths came a muffled crash, followed by the hiss of escaping steam which surged through the engine-room skylight in a manner no steam should do. A hoarse shout rang startled through the smother. Then the heavy vibration of the whirring propeller ceased abruptly, and there was a moment of nervetrying silence.

An engineer raced along the deck in his shirt sleeves with visible perturbation. This in itself was unusual. The skipper betook himself to the bridge with speed, and without apology for his abrupt departure from a circle of ad

miring ladies whom he was entertaining at the time. Next the electric light went out, and amid the confusion and the darkness Nora Graham was clutching my arm, and I heard her voice saying to me quite quietly:

"Take me to him, please, at once!" Never was an occasion when a girl had less business in an engine-room. Yet she got there, no one seeming to heed her in the turmoil. She swung herself lightly down the slippery iron ladders, deftly clinging to the shining handrails between the narrow platforms. A steady clattering clang floated up through the stokehold gratings.

The situation was serious-you could read this in the strained white faces streaked with oil and coal dust that were wrestling with that maze of bright machinery. Having all a passenger's sublime ignorance of the details of the engines on which their lives may depend, I cannot explain exactly what had happened. Something connected with the high-pressure engine had blown away suddenly, and they carried the first engineer, who had been there at the time, a limp, senseless burden, which was not good to look at, into his cabin, where the doctor shut himself up with resolution. Something else had promptly flung itself about wildly, and the next thing had jammed, and bits of flying steel had smitten other pieces of adjacent steel in a manner that cracked and embarrassed delicate cranks and levers. The result appeared-even I could see this a state of chaos that was unsettling. And meanwhile, since the skipper-with a view to giving his passengers something to look at through their binoculars and amuse themselves by talking about-had laid his course that afternoon as close to the islands .as he dared, the Queen of England was now drifting helplessly towards an evil :shore in a six-knot current and a ris

ing sea. Abeam an ominous flash came and went at regular intervals, growing staringly brighter through the darkness. This was the glare of the lighthouse perched above certain vindictive rocks, which in the finest of weather are disliked by the mariner, and for which it is difficult to see any use in the economy of Nature.

"In forty minutes we shall be ashore if you cannot get some way on her," said the captain's voice, and the laboring coal-begrimed men in dilapidated clothes set their teeth hard to their task. A figure, face and hands black with oil and sweat, crawled giddily from some curious depth on to an upper platform, and his breathing quickened. It was Oswald. His eyes were very tired, but into them there came a sudden gleam as he saw the girl he loved.

Nora Graham was in the evening dress she had worn at dinner. Her throat was bare, and her white arms shone strangely in the light of a flickering oil lamp that smoked evilly. Her hair was badly rumpled, and a coil of it had loosened and strayed over her small shoulder. She made a winsome picture standing there in the dimness against the dull background of machinery. On deck they were hoisting out the boats with speed.

"I was coming to find you," said Jack Oswald swiftly.

The girl looked at him quietly. "Oughtn't you to stay there below?" "Yes."

"Isn't there any chance of mending it all in time?"

"Not much; a little perhaps." Her eyes dilated. "Then why are you leaving your post?"

"To take care of you. matters."

Nothing else

"Yes."

"Then what are you doing here?" She stamped her small foot and spoke as if he were a naughty child. "Go back at once!"

"Will you go up to the boats then?" he demanded. Something he read in her face seemed to steady him.

"No. I shall wait here-for you." "Then I shall take you on deck," said Jack Oswald determinedly.

There was a moment's pause. Then the girl spoke, so low her voice was almost a whisper:

"Do you really love me-still?" "I have loved you always." "Then show it," she said fearlessly. "And go back below-for me."

The tense lines of the man's mouth relaxed. His arms went round her roughly, and for a second he held her close, her head nestling against his coat collar. Then he kissed her, and the color leapt to her face like a flame. Next minute he swung himself down the ladder again, only calling to mehitherto unheeded-as he went.

"You must look after her if I can't. And unlace those boots of yours, old fellow-now!"

My nerves were a little out of order, and I suggested to my companion a prompt return on deck. She remarked with serene unconcern that I might go if I liked, but that she should stay where she was. I remember some slight annoyance over this at the time. She followed up her expressed intention by seating herself calmly on the grating, where the grease spoilt her frock. Of course, it was folly pure and simple, but she declined to heed me at all.

So she remained on that upper engine-room platform waiting stilly for whatever fate should send her, to be met together with her lover below. Some women are made like that-the best of them. I also stayed there, because I had been given charge of the first girl who had ever made me realize

that love was a real thing. Also Jack Oswald was my friend.

It was uncommonly dull sitting there halfway up the engine-room by the side of the main steam-pipe with one's thoughts of what was about to happen for company. My predominant desire was for a smoke, and I had left my matches in the cabin. The steamgauge by the starting-gear, with its stupid staring dial, irritated me senselessly. Thirty of the forty minutes allowed by the captain had passed, and I seemed to hear a dull roar above the noise on deck; probably it was fancyit might have been breakers. Nora Graham's face was white and drawn. I remember reflecting that women never look their best at sea. In fact, I came to the conclusion that they ought not to go there at all.

Suddenly without warning, just as the strain of waiting was becoming very bad, the electric light sprang out again, and blessed rays of wholesome brightness flashed over the polished surfaces of crossheads and levers. There followed a hearty shout up the speaking-tube, and the sharp welcome ting of the indicator from the bridge. Huge shafts gradually revolved, and again the longed-for whirr of the propeller vibrated through the big ship. Above the slow clank of the moving machinery a faint cheer from on deck penetrated to the engine-room depths below. The Queen of England was saved.

A tattered figure ran triumphantly up a ladder, and Nora Graham rose quickly to her feet. A very dirty hand went recklessly round the thin white dress, and left an oily stain there. A grubby pair of lips smudged a soft cheek as Oswald kissed his girl for the second time that night.

"Don't, Jack!" she cried in alarm. "Someone will see us."

He kissed her again, and I withdrew. It was only what other men are al