h
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