back, and I always obey orders.”  The baroness, being informed of the good fellow’s blunder, carried out the joke by despatching a splendid repast.  The officer, too amused to make any explanation to his servant, merely sent him back at once to buy a bouquet to carry with his compliments to the baroness.  Successfully accomplishing this feat, the brilliant Auguste was handed a five-franc piece from the lady.  “That won’t do,” says the honest fellow:  “I paid thirty francs for the flowers.”  The difference was made up to him, and he returned to the fort, quite proud at having so ably discharged his duty.  We think this incident will fairly match some of the experiences which our own officers are fond of narrating, regarding the way in which their servants have interpreted and executed their orders.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Sub-Tropical Rambles in the Land of the Aphanapteryx.  By Nicholas Pike.  New York:  Harper & Brothers.

The story of a bright and educated traveler is always a capital one, and Mr. Pike has done wonders for Mauritius, which would seem in itself to be one of the most deplorably dull and fatiguing prominences on the face of the sea.  An enthusiastic botanist and naturalist, as well as an interested ethnologist, this lively observer relieves the monotony of a seemingly easy consulate and repulsive population by watching all the secrets of animated nature around him.  It is a very bloodthirsty island that his fates have guided him to:  everything bites or stings or poisons.  When wading out into the sea for shells, Mr. Pike is attacked by “a tazarre, a fish something like a fresh-water pike,” which comes right at him repeatedly, “like a bulldog,” and is only subdued by being speared in the head with a harpoon.  Creatures elsewhere the most evasive and timid are here found fighting like gladiators:  the eels bite everybody within their reach—­one of these combative eels caught by our author measured twelve feet three inches; the fresh-water prawns “strike so sharply with their tails as to draw blood if not carefully handled.”  The exquisite polyps and anemones, whose painted beauty our author is never weary of relating, have mostly poisoned weapons concealed under their flounces, and treat the naturalist who would coquet with them to a swelled arm or a lamed hand.  Centipedes, scorpions and virulently poisonous snakes animate the land, while the shoals, where the natives declare there are “more fish than water,” teem with every sort of man-eating shark, and with the cuttle-fish watching for his prey from each interstice of the coral-reef.  The latter, often of immense size, are caught and eaten, both fresh and salt, some fishermen collecting nothing else:  they dexterously turn the ugly stomach inside out and thread it on a string slung round the neck.  The horror of the lobster for these cuttle-fish is something curious; and it affords a gauge for the sensitiveness of crustaceae