with the appearance of the conqueror. The cry was taken up by the soldiers, who had already heard of his fame, and pressed closer to get a sight of him. The beautiful animal walked proudly out of the gateway, led by Felipe, the rich ornaments of his saddle clinking gaily as he paced forward. Scarcely had he advanced a few yards when a sudden fury seemed to seize him: rearing up almost upright, he wrenched his bridle from Felipe's hands, plunged forward, and then span rapidly round, striking out wildly with his heels, causing the crowd to fall back in all directions with shouts of laughter and applause. Open-mouthed, with ears thrown back, he appeared on the point of charging the troopers, and then, as if in play, backed close under the window. At this moment a loud yell of triumph caused the bystanders to turn round. Felipe had seized one of the surrendered horses and was galloping away at a furious pace. taneously Courtenay dropped lightly on his horse's back, and, passing through a gap in the ranks of the soldiery, was off before a hand could be raised to stop him. A moment's pause ensued. The vaqueros' firearms were not ready at hand; then the Colonel sharply uttered a hasty order in the tribal language of his men, a dozen of the troopers wheeled round and fired after the fugitive. He turned in his saddle and waved his sombrero in laughing defiance-not a shot had touched him! Those unerring marksmen must have been strangely agitated to miss so large an object at that distance. I covered the flying horseman with my rifle, but I had not the heart to shoot the fearless rascal: indeed, as I saw the tardiness of the pursuit, I caught myself inwardly rejoicing at the certainty of his getting clear off.

Simul

At last twenty of Don Gregorio's men are racing after him; but he gains ground at every stride. The Concep

Blackwood's Magazine.

cion men shout with triumph at the escape of their favorite. "El Inglesito" is going along the road at full stretch; further pursuit is evidently useless: what horse can run down El Alcalde? Even as these words strike my ear, a horseman darts out from behind a tree and bars the passage. It is young Lopez on the Apache. He is returning from his hacienda to take possession of El Alcalde, who has been promised to him as his share of the booty. Wild with disappointment, he discharges his revolver point-blank at Courtenay, who is evidently hit. Still he has strength to guide Alcalde, who, with a sudden sideward rush, brings the full force of his chest to bear upon Apache's shoulder, dashing him violently to the ground. In the very act of falling, Lopez presses the trigger of his revolver: fate directs the bullet, which pierces Alcalde's heart. In the agonies of death the stricken animal rears up madly, and hurls himself backwards upon his master, who, enfeebled by his wound, is unable to disengage himself in time: they lie together on the ground, a motionless bleeding mass. I was amongst the first to move the dead horse. When we raised Courtenay to his feet we could see that one side of his chest was fearfully crushed; at every breath blood gushed from his mouth and nostrils. As I supported him, his hand tightly squeezed my shoulder, and he whispered to me in English

"Brookton and you will forgive," then raising his voice with a terrible effort

"Caballeros!" he said in distinct tones, addressing the Mexican bystanders, "I have had gay times enough, thanks to horses, and it is but just that I should die as I have lived."

The faint color, called up by this last exertion, disappeared from his face, he staggered forward a few paces and fell to the ground before I could catch him, his head resting on his dead favorite's flank. He never spoke another word.

There are always men who are ready to declare that if Bismarck had not altered the Ems despatch there would have been no Franco-Prussian war. To people of that mental type the failure of the Bloemfontein Conference brought about the struggle with the Boers, and the American Civil War was caused by the breakdown of the compromise of 1850. In other words, the fundamental forces that grapple behind the veil of diplomatic detail are lost sight of and attention is engrossed by the incidentals of the moment. The Austro-Hungarian conflict is preeminently a case in point. The discussion of it has been almost swamped in accessories. It has been wrangled over, in and out of the realm of the Hapsburgs, as though it turned solely on the juridical interpretation of a legal document. It has been entangled in the perverse subtleties of lawyers, until the essential elements of the coutroversy have been violently overlaid. Of the two it is unquestionably the Hungarian case that has suffered the most from these devastating polemics. The true position of Hungary in her relations with Austria was realized by but few even before the present crisis had declared itself. It is now, in the popular mind of Europe, more enigmatical than ever. Most people, we imagine, regard a something which they call the Austrian Empire as including Hungary among its constituent parts. They look upon Hungarian independence as a sort of provincial autonomy, conceded to a turbulent province by the central power of the Empire, and revocable at will. They instinctively put Austria before Hungary in the scale of international consideration, and they cannot throw off the belief that the present

turmoil in Hungary is something in the nature of a revolt and comparable to a magnified Irish or Finnish question. Their view, in short, is that in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy it is Austria who is the predominant and controlling partner, and that the compact between the two countries is not an arrangement of equals but a union between a superior Power and a subordinate one.

That, however, is so far from the truth as to be its precise inversion. Hungary is an independent kingdom. For certain purposes and under certain conditions it has allied itself with the equally independent empire of Austria. It has done so by an act of sovereign will and without abdicating the smallest part of its sovereignty as an independent nation. There is no limitation on the freedom of Hungary which does not equally apply to Austria. In all that concerns their local as well as their common affairs the two countries stand in fact, as well as in law, on the same plane. They have agreed to create an identical order of succession to the Austrian and Hungarian thrones, and they have bound themselves to assist each other against foreign aggression. For the better fulfilment of this latter compact, the two great agencies of national defenceforeign affairs and war administration -have been declared to a certain extent to be common affairs. They are accordingly entrusted to common executive agents under the control of select committees elected by both Parliaments. Austria and Hungary, that is, have arranged to transact certain executive business in common, but the nature and conditions of that business are dependent upon the free decisions

of the two national legislatures. The Joint Delegations that meet to discharge these functions are under the control of, and their resolutions to take effect have to be ratified by, both the Austrian and the Hungarian Parliaments. Mutually dependent in the political sense, each nation retains intact its own independent juridical individuality-in other words, its sovereignty. There is nothing, legally speaking, to prevent either Austria or Hungary from altering or abolishing the Ausgleich of 1867 at a stroke. That famous arrangement, which is totally destitute of the binding force of a treaty, established no system or authority that included Austria and Hungary and was superior to either. It did nothing to merge the two nations in a higher identity. It delimited for instance, no Austro-Hungarian territory; it laid down no basis for Austro-Hungarian citizenship; it called into being no AustroHungarian legislative power or judiciary; it vested no supreme and Imperial authority, operative throughout the realm, either in the King of Hungary or in the Emperor of Austria or in any third personality evolved from them. All that it did was to provide for the co-operation and the scope of certain agents of the Austrian and Hungarian nations. Although the physical person of the ruler is the same in both countries, his juridicial personality is one thing in Vienna and quite another in Budapesth. Hungary is the oldest constitutional country on the European continent. The royal prerogative in her case is an emanation of the Constitution, and consists in such rights as the nation has thought fit to vest in her King. In Austria, on the other hand, the existing constitution is a free gift of the Emperor, and has conferred on the people of Austria such rights as the Emperor has thought fit to grant to them. The Emperor of Austria as such has no more power in Hungary than

the King of Hungary has in Austria; that is to say, none at all.

not

Austria-Hungary, then, does mean one empire, but the permanent union of two nations for certain international purposes. In all the attributes of sovereignty neither of these two nations can claim an advantage over the other. And that is not a legal fact of merely academic interest. It is a fact vividly present in the proud and passionate consciousness of the Magyars, who, through a thousand years of stormy history, have preserved an indomitable racial entity. It is not, however, a fact that is acknowledged except theoretically in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy. The German-speaking Austrians have never reconciled themselves to the decline of an authority once paramount not only throughout what is now Austria-Hungary but throughout the major part of Europe. They are still of Joseph II.'s mind. They would still, that is, force the polyglot races that surround them into a German mould and impose upon them the German language, German law, German institutions and a highly centralized uniformity of gov ernment. They cannot, of course, do it. Every year that passes raises against them a more formidable intensity of national patriotism. But the ideal still works within them; the Hapsburgs are still Germans; the memories of all that the House once was have not died out; and wherever a Hapsburg rules it is intolerable to their secret instincts that aliens should claim a parity of rights. In Bohemia and Tyrol they are still battling for the remnants of a once absolute ascendancy, and a call from a Hapsburg ruler might marshall them once more against the Hungarians, whose equality and independence they have never more than formally admitted. On the one hand, there is a race clinging to the relics of an outworn supremacy,

Circum

and on the other a race asserting with impetuous enthusiasm its right to an uncontrolled sovereignty. stances have thrown these races together and multiplied the chances of a collision that was inherent in the natures and ambitions of both. The Hungarians, vibrating with nationality, are determined to have an army corresponding to their collective individuality, commanded in their own language and serving under their own flags and emblems. The Hapsburgs in giving up German as the language of military command feel that they are giving up everything, imperilling the unity of the monarchy, and surrendering the keys of the last stronghold of The Outlook.

pan-Austrian imperialism. But the actual point of collision is of secondary moment. If it had not been the army it would have been the tariff or perhaps, as in the Norwegian case, the diplomatic service; and the result would have been just the same. That result we take to be the dissolution not necessarily of the Dual Monarchy but of Dualism. The Magyars who have hitherto been its bulwark are now constrained to demolish it, and their action, even if it does not prove the signal for a racial convulsion, can only mean that the AustroHungarian monarchy, as it has existed for four decades, will not survive a fifth.

Punch.

R. C. Lehmann.

Mr. Andrew Lang's study of Sir Walter Scott is just ready in the "Literary Lives" series.

In the Dictionary of National Biography, the date of Mrs. Browning's birth is given as March 6, 1809. This is an error. The true date is March 6, 1806. Mrs. Browning's centenary has been celebrated by the publication of a new memoir of her, by Mr. Percy Lubbock, with a portrait by Mrs. Bridell Fox.

Mr. Stopford A. Brooke is about to publish another book on the same lines as "The Gospel of Joy" and "The Kingship of Love." This is a volume of extracts from his unpublished sermons and addresses, entitled "The Life Superlative," and deals largely with social and civic religion. A new photogravure portrait of the author will form the frontispiece.

The authorship of the series of papers "From a College Window," which readers of The Living Age have enjoyed in common with those of the Cornhill Magazine, has been disclosed. The papers are the work of Mr. A. C. Benson, and their publication in a volume, with some additions, is announced by Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. Mr. Benson has also in the press a "Life of Walter Pater" in the new series of "English Men of Letters."

The Athenaeum announces the death of "Carl Joubert" who wrote a number of sensational volumes on Russian subjects, including "The Fall of Tsardom," "Russia as It Really Is," and "The Truth about the Tsar and the Present State of Russia." "The White Hand," a Russian story, was only published the other day. The knowledge of Russia displayed in these volumes was severely questioned by experts. Little is known of the author, except that his real name was not, as generally supposed, Carl Joubert.

The interesting announcement is made that Mr. Henry Holt, the wellknown publisher, is the author of the two novels "Calmire" and "Sturmsee" which were published anonymously by Macmillan & Co., and are now being reissued by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In the new edition Mr. Holt's authorship is acknowledged. novels have had a good measure of success, one having reached its third edition and the other its sixth. In both, social and economic problems are discussed, with touches of keen satire.

Both

Burns's house at Dumfries is now held on lease by the Town Council, and is under the charge of Mrs. and Miss Brown, granddaughter and great granddaughter of the poet. To the relics preserved in the house a number