to admire the view and in a pleasant doze was conscious of chirruping encouragements addressed to something, when suddenly the something leapt with hard scrabbling feet upon my face. It was another lovely puppy, and its enthusiasm knew nothing but bounds, the first of which lit on me. We went on then after the puppy had been sufficiently praised for its achievement, and soon were in another village which turned out to be the first half of Chazay-Bons. Here was a house of more importance-but sober, but discreet, but fastidious in all the finished beauty of its proportions: the same beauty that the cottages had, but refined and tightened up a little in its application to a larger building. Beyond this manor was a farmyard overlooked by a two-storey building where under the immeasurable eaves was a gallery or balcony of oak: nowhere have I ever seen woodwork and stonework so happily combined. Closing the farmyard was a fine iron gate, and within were fowls innumerable and another hound puppy. He approached the gateway, addressed us affectionately, and finally, squeezing his soft body through the bars, deposited as much farmyard as he could upon us. But there was no denying his charm. We got back now into another big road, but it wound agreeably up through trees, and took us past the Promenoir to M. Pernollet's dominion. The young lady of the bureau in quired with that touch of malice to which fishermen must accustom themselves how my fishing had prospered. I assured her with perfect truth that I had caught as much as I expected, and that I owed to my rod an enchanting afternoon. Next day we got back to our pilgrimage of affectionate gastronomy. At Vieu, high up in the hills, there exists the gentilhommière of Brillat-Savarin, where he had shootingparties and dinner-parties, and prepared his masterpieces of the kitchen; and also, presumably, the stories which it was his habit to read aloud to the company. We have not these contes drôlatiques: by his last instructions they were burnt. I wonder if they were very shocking: the Physiologie du Goût' has wit of many kinds, but none of the esprit gaulois. To reach Vieu, we had to pass through Artemare: it is the next station after Virieu-leGrand, and, lying off the main road, is scarcely to be called a town. Yet it also has been illustrious in gastronomy: one of the chefs whose name is most widely reputed in Bugey was la Mère Prusse, who kept an inn at Artemare. It was almost a duty, since we had to have déjeûner somewhere, to visit the hotel of her kinsman and successor. But we sought no farther than the Hôtel de Commerce, and ordered a Ford car to be ready for us at the end of threequarters of an hour. Then we walked into the dining-room 66 of that little out-of-the-way the expiatory service of 21st hotel, and a menu of seven January-anniversary of Louis courses confronted us. Well, XVI.'s execution. Your atwhat could gastronomists on a tendance will be the more welpilgrimage to the home of come," wrote the President, Brillat-Savarin do but accept as it will be for the first such a meal when it was time." Brillat-Savarin was in offered ? Excellent wine in- bed with a cold, careful of his cluded, it cost five shillings a health as was his custom: but head English money; and it this letter suggested danger to was very good indeed. When the post to which he clung like more than an hour and only a limpet; and he risked pneuhalf of our meal had been con- monia, got it, and died. When sumed, the question of our we went out into the field pilgrimage was raised. We before the old gourmet's house, and looked over the lovely plateau of Valromey to high jagged Jura peaks in the distance, we knew the attraction which had fixed him there. This gastronomist was a keen sportsman, a lover of nature, and a lover of the varied beauty in which his native land was so rich. You can judge him by the place he chose. decided that it would be a poor tribute to Brillat - Savarin's memory that we should scamp our repast yet in the end we gave up our ice. It is to be remarked that most of the guests appeared to be local people probably the staff of a big saw-mill: and probably they eat such a meal every day. They looked as if they did-and throve on it. Our Ford car set us down outside the church which crowns the hill ever so old, ever so simple, its sharply angular planes of roof beautiful against the blue of a rain-washed sky. This also had been Roman: Vieu is vicus. Fifty yards off was Brillat-Savarin's turreted little shooting-lodge. I cannot pretend that the convenience for devotions was a probable attraction for our hero. His death was due to a religious observance, but circumstances qualify the fact. He received, in 1826, an invitation from the President of the Cour de Cassation, in which he held a post, to attend with his colleagues Next day had to be the last. We atoned for some neglect by a visit to the diocesan college where Lamartine made his studies and began to develop his talent for a poetry which I have never enjoyed. A nice old nun showed us round the charmille where the youth is reputed to have meditated and these gloomy drooping trees and the touch of dilapidation about it all was in full harmony with his religious adaptation of the Byronic gloom. It was jolly, as a relief, to see beyond the big bathing-pond a most competent and thriving vegetable garden on the downward slope; and higher up the hill their own clos for their own wine and a field leading up to it, where boys can play in the sun. Opposite the college is a hospital run by a religious order, and a fine stalwart nun kindly took us into the pharmacy, which keeps the furniture of 1760 with adorable faïence jars for drugs all round it-holding nothing nowadays. They get many offers to buy, but they stick to their treasures as well as to a set of cane-seated chairs of that period, a beautiful buffet, and other fine things, and rightly. Their visiting specialist, who comes all the way from Lyons, often brings people to see their pharmacy, and it increases their glory and their self-content. We ate our last meal in Belley on the lavish scalebut I must say no more except that it ended with a pintadon, or guinea-chicken, and that after it we said that we would eat no more that day; yet when dinner came it found us, as the French say, frais et dispos. M. Pernollet does not produce repletion. That dinner was at Culoz, whither an autobus had taken us, passing through little hamlets and picking up their letters, and making it very clear that we had only tapped the charm of that countryside. From the hill above Culoz we had a glimpse of the Lac de Bourget, which inspired what passes for Lamartine's masterpiece. Frankly, I would not give Brillat-Savarin's book for a wilderness of Lamartines. Looking back on it all now, I have only one regret that we experimented so often with Rhone wines. Côte Rôtie and the rest are good to drink when you cannot get Bordeaux or Burgundy; but Burgundy is at home there, and the Corton and Vosnes - Romanée which we did try at M. Pernollet's house, though not very old, shook for the first time my conviction that there is nothing so good as the best Bordeaux. Yet for a light wine to drink in hot weather, the local Virieu or Manicle, or, perhaps best of all, Maretel, are impossible to beat. They have sharpness without acidity, and a bouquet like some wild fruit-as if it were a blonde strawberry. MAINLY ABOUT TIGERS. BY AL KHANZIR. THE tale which follows does not purport to be a serious treatise on the art of tigershooting. Have not the giants of the past recounted their tiger exploits, and their worthy successors completed our store of knowledge? When Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands, who am I to prate of my beggarly score? No; the tale I have to tell is nothing better than an everyday tale of trivial happenings, seeking at best but to reproduce, however faintly, the intimate flavour of the jungle. On two heads, however, I shall venture to generalise, as a very brief preliminary. The first is this people will tell you nowadays that-unless you have friends among the Great -you will never see a tiger outside the Zoo; and that, besides, the cost of a shoot is prohibitive. Do not believe them. Was it not Sydney Smith who claimed that he "did once know a lord, but he's dead"? That, alas! is about the extent of my own acquaintance with the Great. Yet I have had the luck to meet a number of tigers. The truth is that in many districts there are far more tigers now than there were before the war, while the expenses incurred in the shooting of them have risen extraordinarily little. To what, then, you may ask, are we to attribute this increase in tigers ? Primarily, of course, to the war, when almost all shooting ceased; thereafter, to that blessed word "Indianisation." Already in jungly districts the white official is all but extinct. White officials and tigers were antipathetic. On the other hand, we all know the Jo'burg Jew's reply when asked if he went lion-hunting: he hadn't lost any, he said. The Indian official has seldom lost any tigers to speak of. Secondly, it has become quite the fashion of late to impugn the moral character of the tiger because he kills cattle, and to disparage him as a beast of the chase, all to the greater glorification of the lion. Even 'Maga' has subscribed to this campaign. Well, as to the first charge, if the tiger takes to a cattle diet in districts where the balance of Nature has been upset and game is scarce, after all one must live; but the tiger generally is a somewhat larger and more powerful beast than the lion, and needs none to teach him how to hunt and kill the heaviest game. Further, the methods by which the tiger is normally hunted are the direct result of his environment. Exclude the artificial battues of the Great-who are, in time no doubt will be adindeed, helpless in the matter, and you will find that most people who hunt tigers are ready, and anxious, to take a shot on the ground when opportunity offers. But in miles of continuous forest choked with grass how are you to find your tiger on foot? Usually it can't be done. Hence the beat to produce your tiger; and the machan in a tree, or the elephant's howdah-to increase the field of fire. But remember, there may be wounded tigers to be followed up on foot now, belike alone, and hating every moment of it, if you are a sportsman of the obscurer sort. Here I cannot do better than to quote from Mr Dunbar Brander's recent and charming book he has been in at the death of two hundred tigers. After discussing the claims of the elephant, the buffalo, and the lion, he comes to the conclusion that "the most dangerous performance in the world which a sportsman is called upon to do is to follow up the trail of a wounded tiger." So there need be no lack of excitement. With this apologia for the tiger and his hunter, let us resume the story. The land that I would tell you of is the Gondwana, the land of the Gond. The Gond nowadays is becoming civilised and Hinduised. He is begin ning to wear more clothes, and has changed his totems for anthropomorphic godlings, who mitted to the Hindu Pantheon. But in the back blocks the Gond is still a primitive person; is still the stunted flat-nosed Dravidian who came up from the South into the hills and forests of Central India to possess them before the Aryan came. To the staid and selfrespecting Hindu, in fact, the Gond is still something not quite canny; so the Hindu calls him Rāwanvānsi, which, being interpreted, means Child of Ravana, the Demon King the same whose theft of the hero Rama's wife forms the theme of the great Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. But there is nothing really demoniac about the Gond. He is a simple soul, living apart in his forests. There he dances; he sings; I regret to say, he drinks; he makes love. Any time left over from these pastimes he devotes to the ploughing of his little patchwork fields, and to the pursuit of live things great and small-he is particularly fond of a nice dish of mice. A vote he believes to be something edible-else why should all men want it. Yet, strange to relate, he belongs to one of the most contented communities in the world. My last visit to the Gondwana was timed for winter. I arrived just before Christmas, with six whole weeks of leave before me. The jungle has its fascination at all seasons. But to appreciate its full charm 1 'Wild Animals in Central India.' |