NATURAL HISTORY. FEATHERED DANCERS. John Mortimer Murphy PAGE. 334 35 Illustrated by J. Carter Beard and Van Deusen. Engravings by Hoskin and Burnham. AN APACHE DANCE. Nantan Lupan A DAY IN THE GRAND CANON. Mary Wager Fisher HOW WE TOWED OUR WAY BY CANAL THRO' THE EMPIRE STATE. L. J. Sanderson A TUNISIAN JEWISH WEDDING. J. Howard Cowperthwait WALKING. Illustrated by Albert Hencke. Malcolm W. Ford Illustrated by Hy. S. Watson and from photos. THE SAILING YACHT OF TO-DAY. With Diagrams. Charles Ledyard Norton THE RACERS FOR THE AMERICA'S CUP. Capt. A. J. Kenealy * These are numbered at the bottom of the page, distinct from the body of the Magazine. LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY No. 1. HE hot Oriental sun had just sunk from view behind the Kurdish hills, leaving the plains in twilight, when solitary horseman might have been seen riding from the gates of the little city of Mosul, situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. a He proceeded at an easy gait to the summit of a rise in the ground, and paused there to gaze long and earnestly, through the gathering gloom, toward the grave of ancient Nineveh. The miserable inhabitants of the country about him-Arabs for the most part-were driving before them with shrill cries the flocks of gaunt sheep and herds of camels, returning from the pasture-lands at the base of the hills; but to these signs of modern life the watcher paid little heed. He seemed lost in meditation, and might have been carved from the alabaster of the neighboring heights, so motionless did he and his horse remain. Finally he seemed to have reached at decision, for in response to a quietly spoken word, the intelligent creature upon which he was mounted wheeled about and started back toward the city gates from which they had come but a few moments before. He entered without opposition from the indolent and unsoldierly looking guards who lounged there, and rode in a leisurely manner to the British consulate, where, hastily dismounting and tossing his rein to a native servant waiting to receive it, he went at once to a part of the house remote from the noise and bustle of the street below. He paused before the entrance to a room of moderate size evidently used by the Consul as a study, in which an observant person would probably have noted with some surprise several articles of furniture which the patriotic owner had brought out from his native land. Copyright, 1893, by the OUTING Company, Limited. All rights reserved. Seated within this room, beside a reading-table littered with scientific papers and books, was an Englishman of apparently thirty years of age, whose broad forehead and well-developed head hardly required the evidence of his present occupation to have assured one that Henry Eldredge was a scholar of more than ordinary ability. So deeply was his attention fixed upon the open volume before him that he seemed not to observe the entrance of the person first mentioned, who stood in the doorway, gracefully leaning against it. The look which one might have seen in the honest brown eyes of the newcomer evinced an unusual degree of interest in the man before him; indeed, they were more like brothers than friends, and the ties which united them were to be strengthened in the not far distant future by the marriage of Eldredge to the sister of his friend, Frank Hardinge. The silence was broken by the latter, whose voice had a ring of merriment in it as he exclaimed: "Well, by Jove, Harry! You're a lazy book-worm, if ever I allowed my admiring glances to rest upon one!" His friend, startled by the interruption, turned a bewildered countenance toward the speaker, and the air of evident preoccupation seemed but to increase the hilarity of Hardinge, who watched with keen amusement changing expression of the face before him. the "There," he added, with a mock sigh of relief, "I think you are better now, and, to use the language of our brethren of the medical profession, will pull through all right with careful nursing. To be candid, I was rather fearful that the latent spark of intelligence had flitted from you forever, when you looked at me like that! As they stood thus, they represented two very distinct types of their countrymen. Eldredge, sedate and undemonstrative, lived in an atmosphere of books and letters, in which his well-balanced mind expanded; Hardinge, on the other hand, was nervously energetic, but while somewhat less a student, was possessed of talents which would have assured him a conspicuous place in the scientific world, had he chosen to use them. But impatient of restraint, his energies. found a vent in active outdoor life, and his light-hearted and reckless bearing would have given a casual observer the erroneous impression that he was thoroughly heedless, and indifferent to the responsibilities of life. To Eldredge's friendly disapproval of what seemed to him a waste of valuable time Hardinge would answer with a laugh: "My dear boy, I did all the hard studying at college that I was unable to shirk-now I am resting from my arduous labors." The two men were nearly of an age, and had been friends since boyhood, having been graduated from Oxford in the same class with honors, though each had pursued a different course of study; and nothing was more natural than that, having unlimited means at their command, they should have wished to supplement the knowledge thus gained by observation, and they had therefore arranged to travel through the East. Eldredge was something of an archæologist, and had persuaded his matterof-fact chum to visit that portion of the Ottoman Empire in which we meet them, and which was so rich in monuments of the past as to afford a profitable field for the exercise of this bent. To Hardinge these evidences of antiquity were of passing interest only, and he spent many hours each day in the saddle, scouring the plains as far from the city as the uncertain character of Arab honesty warranted. He had been kindly received by such of the tribes as he had fallen in with, and had more than once partaken of their hospitality, not, however, as he remarked to his friend, without a vague longing to know what the contents of the dishes set before him had been when alive; but the season was fast approaching when those who lived in the desert, and subsisted upon what they could steal from their weaker brethren, were to be expected in the immediate neighborhood of the city limits, and these trips on the part of Hardinge were becoming extremely hazardous. This was pointed out to him by the Consul, who had been a warm friend of Eldredge's father, and at whose cordial invitation the young men were spending the time of their sojourn in the East at the consulate, but, with his usual recklessness, Hardinge did not heed the warning. "Well," continued the latter, in the bantering manner which sat so well upon him, "you look as though you |