Bruin seemed inclined to maintain his position, till the tree began to lean, when he slid down to about fifteen feet from the ground, and then clasped his fore-paws over his head and let himself tumble amongst them. Every club was raised, but Bruin was on the alert; he made a charge, upset the man immediately in front, and escaped with two or three thumps on the rump, which he valued not one pin. When once they have killed a pig, if you do not manage to kill the bear, you will never keep one hog; for they will come back till they have taken the last of them;--they will even invade the sacred precincts of the hog-sty. An Irishman in the Newcastle district once caught a bear _flagrante delicto_, dragging a hog over the walls of the pew. Pat, instead of assailing the bear, thought only of securing his property; so he jumped into the sty, and seized the pig by the tail. Bruin having hold of the ears, they had a dead pull for possession, till the whillilooing of Pat, joined to the plaintive notes of his _protegé_, brought a neighbour to his assistance, who decided the contest in Pat’s favour by knocking the assailant on the head.--A worthy friend of mine, of the legal profession, and now high in office in the colony, once, when a young man, lost his way in the woods, and seeing a high stump, clambered up it with the hope of looking around him. While standing on the top of it for this purpose, his foot slipped, and he was precipitated into the hollow of the tree, beyond the power of extricating himself. Whilst bemoaning here his hard fate, and seeing no prospect before him, save that of a lingering death by starvation, the light above his head was suddenly excluded, and his view of the sky, his only prospect, shut out by the intervention of a dense medium, and by and by he felt the hairy posteriors of a bear descend upon him. With the courage of despair he seized fast hold of Bruin behind, and by this means was dragged once more into upper day. Nothing, surely, but the instinct of consanguinity could have induced Bruin thus to extricate his distressed brother. * * * * * THE CHOLERA IN INDIA. Captain Skinner, in one of his Excursions, says arriving at the village of Lugrassa, I thought there was an appearance of desolation about it. I saw no people within the village, and observed merely a few stragglers about the fields. Four or five men had died during the last week, and some before: such mortality would depopulate a mountain city in a month. Nothing can be more melancholy than a pestilence among these fragments of humanity: cut off from their fellow-mountaineers by high ridges, these isolated little communities are left to perish unknown and unmourned.