Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 422 | Page 9

along the
grass. The victor uttered another sharp cry, that seemed intended as a
call to her young ones, who, emerging from the weeds where they had
concealed themselves, ran nimbly forward to the spot.'
While the father and son are watching the peccary peeling the serpent
as adroitly as a fishmonger would skin an eel, another actor enters upon
the scene. This was the dreaded cougar, an animal of the size of a calf,
and with the head and general appearance of a cat. Creeping stealthily
round his victim, who is busy feasting on the quarry, he at length
attains the proper vantage-ground, and gathering himself up like a cat,
springs with a terrific scream upon the back of the peccary, burying his
claws in her neck, and clasping her all over in his fatal embrace. 'The
frightened animal uttered a shrill cry, and struggled to free itself. Both
rolled over the ground--the peccary all the while gnashing its jaws, and
continuing to send forth its strange sharp cries, until the woods echoed
again. Even the young ones ran around, mixing in the combat--now
flung sprawling upon the earth, now springing up again, snapping their
little jaws, and imitating the cry of their mother. The cougar alone
fought in silence. Since the first wild scream not a sound had escaped
him; but from that moment his claws never relaxed their hold, and we

could see that with his teeth he was silently tearing the throat of his
victim.'
The Robinsons of the desert were now in an awkward predicament; for
although they had been safe from the peccary, the cougar could climb a
tree like a squirrel. A noise, however, disturbs him from his meal, and
swinging the dead animal on his back, he begins to skulk away. But he
is interrupted before he can reach cover; and as the new-comers prove
to be twenty or thirty peccaries, summoned to the field by the dying
screams of their comrade, he has more to do than to think of his dinner.
To fling down his burden, to leap upon the foremost of his enemies, is
but the work of an instant; but the avengers crowd round him with their
gnashing jaws and piercing cries, and the brute darts up the tree like a
flash of red fire, and crouches not twenty feet above the heads of the
horrified spectators! The father, however, after some agonising
moments of deliberation, brings him down with his rifle; and the
cougar, falling among the eager crowd below, is torn to pieces in a
moment. But this does not get rid of the peccaries, who set up their
fiendish screams anew as they discover two other victims in the tree.
The father fires again and again, dropping his peccary each time, till
five lie dead upon the ground; but the rage of the rest only becomes
more and more furious--and the marksman is at his last bullet. Here we
shall leave him; and such of our readers as may be interested in his
fate--who form, we suspect, a very handsome percentage on the
whole--may make inquiries for themselves at his Desert Home.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Or the Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness. By Captain
Mayne Reid. London: Bogue. 1852.

THE VATTEVILLE RUBY.
The clock of the church of Besançon had struck nine, when a woman

about fifty years of age, wrapped in a cotton shawl and carrying a small
basket on her arm, knocked at the door of a house in the Rue St Vincent,
which, however, at the period we refer to, bore the name of Rue de la
Liberté. The door opened. 'It is you, Dame Margaret,' said the porter,
with a very cross look. 'It is high time for you. All my lodgers have
come home long since; you are always the last, and'----
'That is not my fault, I assure you, my dear M. Thiebaut,' said, the old
woman in a deprecatory tone. 'My day's work is only just finished, and
when work is to be done'----
'That's all very fine,' he muttered. 'It might do well enough if I could
even reckon on a Christmas-box at the end of the year; but as it is, I
may count myself well off, if I do but get paid for taking up their
letters.'
The old woman did not hear the last words, for with quick and firm
step she had been making her way up the six flights of stairs, steep
enough to make her head reel had she been ascending them for the first
time. 'Nine o'clock!--nine o'clock! How uneasy she must be!' and as she
spoke, she opened with her latch-key the door of a wretched garret, in
which dimly burned a rushlight,