Assaf uttered a furious cry. "Wretch, neither Absians, nor any whom the sun shines upon, can intimidate me." Saying this, he ran at Hassan like a desperate lion, desiring no one to approach: he wished to glut his rage unaided.

The two heroes attacked each other with equal fury. After a long and obstinate combat, Hassan felt his strength decaying, and wished to fly; but Assaf pressed him vigorously, and was about to deal a mortal stroke, when the Absians came up with the rapidity of the falcon. Prince Malek had accelerated his march; arriving soon after Hassan, he had learnt the disastrous plight of the children of Mazen, and flew to their succour. Antar loosened the bridle of the eager Abjar, who made sparks of fire issue beneath his feet, and at the first shock separated the two combatants.

The sight of these warriors restored hope to the hearts of the Mazenites, who returned to the fight, admiring the valour of Antar, who mowed down the chosen warriors of the enemy like ears of corn. The presence of Assaf alone restrained them from flight, and made them brave death. Antar rushed towards him, and pierced him in the right side with his lance: Assaf fell drowned in his own blood. His friends, eager to avenge his death, pressed like a torrent upon Antar, who stood firm, Sheyboof

behind him dealing death with his arrows. The numbers, however, increased, and Antar broke through the crowd with the impetuosity of the north wind.

The children of Abs and of Mazen, inspired with fresh courage, routed their enemies, who, having lost their chief, dispersed on all sides, and abandoned the field of battle. The Mazenites returned to their homes singing the praises of Prince Malek and the intrepid Antar.

239

REMINISCENCES OF AN OLD INDIAN OFFICER.

I.

Bob. By St. George, I was the first person that entered the breach; and had I not effected it, I had been slain if I had had a million of lives.

Ed. Know. 'Twas pity you had not ten, your own and a cat's. But was it possible?

Bob. I assure you (upon my reputation) 'tis true, and yourself shall confess it. BEN JONSON.

By what absurd prudery is it, that a man who tells his stories with a graphic boldness of description, is sure to be classed with the mere vulgar artificers of fiction;-that adventures, merely because they are sketched with a flowing, gigantic outline, and reflect a few bright hues of imagination, should be considered as no better than modifications of falsehood? For my own part, I agree with Madame de Stael, that real life abounds much more with romance than we are disposed to allow.

There seems to me much narrowness in the scepticism with which such extraordinary facts are received, and worse than narrowness-a Vandalism, a Hunnish barbarism, levelling with its clumsy catapults and battering-rams the towering and aerial architecture, that at once fills the soul of the hearer, disciplines it to lofty conceptions of the vast and sublime, and lifts it above the commonplace regularities of our dull "diurnal sphere," into an orb swarming with new races of inhabitants, where miracles, so far from being exceptions to the humdrum routine of human affairs, themselves constitute the general rule, to which every-day occurrences and common probabilities are the exceptions.

I shall never forget old Colonel T-, of the Honourable Company's service, and with how greedy an ear, with what a delight steeped in horror, a curiosity skirted with affright, I used to follow him through his long, tortuous details of the chances that befell him in his protracted military career. I had then but recently arrived in India, and being young, was naturally more interested in the stirring events and revolving vicissitudes related by that most pleasing of auto-biographers-the long windings of his stories that, now obscure and dubious, now suddenly emerging into sunshine, constituted

the greater part of his adventures. Related, as they never failed to be, with the most picturesque fidelity, they kept me in constant vibration between hope and fear; sometimes making me tremble with a strange inconsistency, lest the tiger, with whom he was in actual conflict for two hours by his watch, one of Barraud's best chronometers, or the gulph of eight hundred feet and a few inches in perpendicular descent, to which he had spurred forwards his horse, in order to get at a detachment of the enemy by a shorter cut, should swallow him up, and snap asunder the yarn of his narrative. I mention this merely to shew the power of the historian; for it is what I actually felt even whilst I saw and heard him.

This extraordinary being had lived a life of sieges. The trenches, the "imminent deadly breach," the scarp and counterscarp, were the cradles that rocked his early love of military achievements:-the smoke of field-pieces, the fumes of bursting stink-pots, and tumbrils taking firethe miasma of ditches dense with alligators, many of whom, dying with affright from the turmoil and uproar of the same, rendered the air still more putrid-all this was the atmosphere to which his organs were most familiar. In every respect, he seemed a man destined to the strange out-of-the-way