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fields, eternally young and life-giving amid the rise and fall of civilizations. On every side are seen moss-grown tombs and monuments, overgrown gardens, and forsaken homes. Fields of grain rise where once was a populous city; and here, amid the tangle of verdure, springs that astonishing shaft, the Kutub Minar. Graceful and slender as a reed, mysterious as the Sphinx, it rises two hundred and forty feet high, banded with five balus traded balconies, and almost covered with intricate carved inscriptions and designs. To say that it is forty-seven feet in diameter at its fluted base and nine feet at its broken top, that it glows with the soft hues of red sandstone, can give no idea of its beauty. No one knows why it was built, no one knows for what it was used. Here it stands, a spire of surpassing grace, preserved to us from unknown times. Near it is the Mosque of Kutub al Islam, within whose sacred and cloistered courtyard many of its twelve hundred pillars still stand, Hindu in architecture and of infinitely varied design. Upon them all the patterns known to the workers in silk and enamel were chiseled in marble, and they are relics of days when Delhi was only Hindu, and before the architecture and the scimitar of the Mohammedans had swept over the land and brought strange ideas, buildings, and religious rites into this peaceful plain of the Jumna. The Mohammedan Mogul wrought great havoc here among Hindu monuments. With sledge and ax he destroyed the wonderful designs of peacocks and birds

and elephants, he disfigured the idols of native gods, and constructed his mosques with the débris and columns of demolished temples; and in this courtyard, it is said, he built his colonnades with the sculptured columns from nearly twenty Hindu sanctuaries!

In a court by itself, among the weeds, rises a single column fashioned out of solid wrought iron. solid wrought iron. It is forty feet high, and its diameter is sixteen inches. It is believed to belong to the third Christian century, and Hindu tradition ascribes to it the origin of Delhi. The tradition says that when one of the early princes ordered it to be removed, its base was found to be still wet with the blood of some former ruler who had been slain beside it. Aghast, he tried to replace it, but the iron pillar, once uprooted, remained forever loose-"dhila." And so sprang the name Delhi, of the spot. To-day, when native women pray for a happy marriage, or for the blessing of offspring, they make pilgrimage to this Sanscrit-in scriptured iron pillar of prehistoric times, and press their lips against its cool sides. So tradition, history, and superstition are forever intertwined about the place, and the briers, blooming with fragrant blossoms, twine about and shield the crumbling ruins of the ancient city. Across the plain the river still gleams and murmurs, and the men and women to-day pass to and from their work among these mounds and monuments of old Delhi, and the past is only vaguely recalled amid the interests and occupations of to-day.

Circumstances

By Charles W. Stevenson

The endless road has many a sudden turn; Its landscape changes ever and is gone; Yet must the myriad thousands journey on ; And many haply meet there who would learn The pitfalls waiting and the dangers stern.

But while they palter, lo, the happy dawn Is noonday, and a hopeful life is pawn Unto the voiceless mystery of an urn! The men and things that round us congregate Are sent there by the will and wish of fate.

We cannot say them nay, nor from the deep Of nothingness call them to good or ill

A preappointed way we take and keep. O'er self alone maintain supreme a will.

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The Editor of "The Spectator"

Few English journals are more widely known and more thoughtfully read in this country than the London "Spectator ;" and Mr. John St. Loe Strachey, the editor and proprietor, during his visit in this country has doubtless been made aware of the cordial feeling of a large body of the most intelligent Americans towards the journal with which Mr. R. H. Hutton was so long connected. Mr. Strachey, who is the second son of Sir Edward Strachey, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, is a barrister by profession, and has been a journalist by occupation for nearly twenty years. He was for a time the editor of the "Cornhill Magazine," but of late years has given his time and thought to the "Spectator," which under his direction has greatly enlarged its constituency, and, without sacrificing its high intellectual and critical quality, has become much more widely influential. The "Spectator" has combined in rare degree some of the characteristics of the highest journalism; wide interest in all that relates to the higher life of society, broad intelligence, generous sympathies, special knowledge in many departments, and the habit of appealing to the intelligence of its readers by its reasonableness and by the interest of its style. There are a good many American readers who have come to regard it, not only as the best of the English journals, but as one of the foremost journals in the English-speaking world; its restraint, its candor, its admirable taste, its sense of form, and its interest in all departments of the intellectual life have appealed especially to men of academic training, and probably no journal of the day is more widely read in American colleges and universities; nor have Amer icans forgotten its friendship for this country in a time when influential friends in England were few.

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A

BY WILLIAM E. DAVENPORT

Of the Brooklyn Italian Settlement

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARTHUR HEWITT

IN MULBERRY STREET

MONG the great movements of population which mark our time there are two quite unrivaled in their present proportions and prospective results. Of these the first is the settle ment of northern Asia by Russian emigrants at the rate of 200,000 a year, and the second is the expansion of Italy in our Western world by an annual exodus hither of a quarter of a million souls. Certainly the rapid growth of our Italianspeaking population through this everincreasing emigration from southern Italy, amounting to 178,000 in the past year, has awakened wide discussion.

Some look with strong disfavor upon the whole movement, feeling that our country is bound to suffer in its moral and intellectual interests by so great an incursion of the illiterate and untrained peasantry of Sicily and the extreme south. A ques

tion is also raised as to the proportion of Italian immigrants remaining permanently within our country, and the wide dispersion of those not remaining. It is said, too, that the greater part of those who come here seek only to secure a greater or lesser sum for themselves, and then hastily return with their gains to spend their later years in idleness under the romantic skies of their native land. There is, at all events, occasion for more exact knowledge on these matters, the importance of which every one admits.

In respect to the causes for this immigration, three general reasons may be distinguished: first, the already crowded condition of the Italian peninsula, containing a population of 113 to the square mile, as against 73 to the same area in Francealthough vast tracts in Italy remain practically uninhabitable, consisting of inaccessible mountain ranges or pestiferous swamps; second, the extraordinary fecundity of the Italian race of recent years, so that in a single year the births outnumber the deaths by 400,000, the increase being nearly one-third larger in the already crowded sections than in the north; third, the excessive taxation, which, all agree, falls most heavily upon the agricultural classes, who are least able to sustain its weight, especially since the widespread destruction of groves and vineyards by insect pests has reduced unnumbered families to the last extremity.

A certain proportion of Italian emigration, more especially that from the north, is directed to Montevideo, Brazil, and the Argentine Republic, the latter country especially proving most attractive to the agriculturists of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Liguria. Everywhere they have proved themselves thrifty and enterprising, leaving the Spaniards, after sharp competition, quite in the rear. Almost a million of them have come to Buenos Ayres since 1876-an annual average of three times the immigration from Spain. In Santa Fé

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