"Provost," said my uncle to the jovial and rubicund magistrate who sat on his left hand, now that he had taken Cora's place at the head of the table, "try the Johannisberg. It is some given to me by Prince Metternich when I was at Vienna, and is from grapes raised in his own vineyards. Rare stuff it is for those who like such light wines."
"Thank you, Sir Nigel; but Binns, I see, has brought the three elements, so I'll e'en brew some whisky-toddy," replied the magistrate.
The conversation now became more noisy and animated. The approaching war, the treaty of neutrality between the Scandinavian and the Western Powers, whether our fleet had yet entered the Euxine, or whether Luders had yet burst into the Dobrudscha, became the prevailing topics, and in interest seemed fully to rival that never-failing subject at a country table, fox-hunting.
The county pack, the meet of the Fifeshire hounds at the kennels, or on the green slopes of Largo; of the Buccleuch pack at Blacklaw, Ancrum, and so forth; their runs by wood and wold, loch and lee, rock and river, with many a perilous leap and wild adventure in the field, over a rough and hilly country, were narrated with animation, and descanted on with interest, though all such sank into insignificance beside the history of a hunt in Bengal, where General Rammerscales had figured in pursuit of a tiger (long the terror of the district), seated in a lofty howdah of basket-work, strapped on the back of an elephant, twelve feet high to the shoulder, accompanied by the major of his regiment, each armed with two double-barrelled guns.
The tiger, which measured nine feet from his nose to the tip of his tail, and five in height, had been roused from among the jungle grass, and was a brute of the most ferocious kind, yellow in hide, and striped with beautiful transverse bars of black and brown. He was well-known in that district. With his tremendous jaws he had carried off many a foal and buffalo; by a single stroke of his claws he had disembowelled and rent open the body of more than one tall dark sowar of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry; and as for sheep and goats, he made no more account of them than if they had been so many shrimps.
With a shrill, short scream of rage, on finding that he was brought to bay at last, he threw himself in cat-fashion on his back, belly upwards, his small and quivering ears close on the back of his head, his dreadful claws thrust out, his eyes glaring like two gigantic carbuncles, his wide, red mouth distended, and every wiry whisker bristling with rage and fury.
The general fired both barrels of his first gun. One shot failed; but the other wounded the tiger in the shoulder, and only served to make him more savage; though, instead of springing upwards, he lay thus on the defensive, gathered up in a round ball.
The major, an enormously fat man, weighing more than twenty stone, now leant over the howdah to take a cool and deliberate aim; but the elephant in the same moment happened to bend his fore-knees, for the claws of the tiger were inserted in his trunk.
Losing all balance by this unlucky motion, the poor major toppled headlong over the howdah, just as both barrels of his gun exploded harmlessly, amid a yell from the Indian hunters as they thought of his fate.
But, "with a mighty squelch," as the general phrased it, the major, with his twenty-two stone weight of flesh and bone, fell prone upon the fair, white, upturned belly of the tiger!