“Madam,—­With this you will receive seventeen fall-grown tigers, which I have had the honour of shooting for you.

“Marmaduke Travers.”

“That was a choice bijou for a lady,” said Jack.

[Illustration]

“Yes,” added Fritz; “and if the ladies of Coromandel have stands in their drawing-rooms, to display the tributes to their charms, Sir Marmaduke’s present afforded abundant material for adorning those of the widow.”

“Well, the consequence was, that Sir Marmaduke’s name rung from one end of India to the other.  The feat of killing, single-handed, seventeen tigers, converted him into a hero of the first magnitude.  No festival was complete without him, he was courted by the fashionables and worshipped by the mob; some enthusiasts even proposed to erect a tomb for him, that being the way they honor their great men in eastern nations.”

“Every country,” remarked Fritz, “has its own peculiarities in this respect.  The memory of the illustrious men of Greece and Rome was perpetuated in the intrinsic merit of the works of art erected in their names.  In England quantity takes the place of quality; there is said to be in London a statue of a hero disguised as Achilles, six yards in height, and perched upon a pedestal twelve yards high.”

“Making in all,” remarked Jack, “exactly eighteen yards of fame.”

“The handsome Hindoo,” continued Willis, “was proud of the feat her charms had inspired.  She gloried in showing off the redoubtable tiger-slayer at her reunions, and ended in being completely fascinated herself with her former slave.  The match that she had formerly sneezed at she now earnestly desired, and, as Sir Marmaduke did not declare himself so speedily as she desired, she determined to give him a little encouragement by sending one of the most inviting and most odoriferous of notes.”

“Sir Marmaduke must then have considered himself one of the happiest of men,” said Fritz.

“Well,” continued Willis, “neither man nor woman can, in affairs of this kind, depend upon themselves for two consecutive hours.  The aspirations of a whole life-time may be dispelled in five minutes, and the wishes of to-day may become the detestations of to-morrow.  The new sensations awakened in Sir Marmaduke by the affair of the cage—­his recollection of the ferocious brutes as they clung with expiring energy to the bars of the cage, their streaked skins streaming with blood, the fearful howling and terrific death yells, the formidable claws that were often within an inch of his face—­had, somehow or other, chased the passion he had felt for the widow completely out of his breast.”

“Oh, the scamp of a Travers!” said Jack, energetically.

“He began to ask himself coolly what a lady, who had made such extraordinary demands upon him before marriage, might not require him to do after; and the result of his cogitations is expressed in the following reply that he sent to the now smiling widow:—­