When the strong, sweet ale warms his heart, the poacher boasts of dreadful adventures in the night, of leaping broad mill-dams when chased, of giving fight in the dark, and discomfiting gamekeepers by clever tricks. He paints his exploits in such heroical glory, that the seat next the fire in the ale-house is given him by admiring and fearing rustics. Honesty he ascribes to practicedness in the world’s ways, and he looks upon keeping out of jail as the greatest victory that man can achieve. He is the type of man that makes our best soldiers, or, as he phrases it, is paid to stop the gun-shots. He requires no almanac to tell him when the moon is to rise to-morrow, and he could give the gamekeepers lessons. He is to be envied for his quick feeling of life and his sympathy for field and forest sport, and that wild exuberance of spirits which he seems to catch with his hares. It is this rural vagabond—and not Mr. Commonplace Respectability—who rivets young folks’ attention; his energy anywhere would achieve success; and he is free from that unpardonable fault, dulness. In the rustic drama of life he is the character that takes hold of us in our best impulses—and is not that the best world of the ideal? He disdains to shoot starlings or black-birds; he is too much a sportsman to pay attention to such small game. He can put his hands to various ways of living; he can collect bird’s eggs, shoot wild rock-pigeons for a farmers’ club, gather blackberries, or, as they say in Scotland, “brambles,” pull young ash-saplings in plantations, and sell them to grooms in the livery stables in town.—_The Contemporary Review._ EIGHT CENTURIES WITH WALTER SCOTT. By WALLACE BRUCE. “The burning sun of Syria had not yet attained its highest point in the horizon, when a knight of the Red Cross, who had left his distant northern home, and joined the host of the Crusaders in Palestine, was pacing slowly along the sandy deserts which lie in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, or as it is called, the Lake Asphalites, where the waves of the Jordan pour themselves into an inland sea, from which there is no discharge of waters.”