not sauce for the goose sauce for the gander as well?

music - a ceaseless repetition of the same nasal droning, in which there was nevertheless something insistent and plaintive. One of the ladies of the harem was affected almost to tears by the performance, which, to tell the truth, I had taken for the tuning-up in the first instance. But it seemed that the words were very pathetic, and that the piece had been com

I humbly confessed my ignorance of the personality of the gilman; and, the prayer being over, we ascended to the upper regions, where the pasha's daughter treated me to a specimen of Turkish, or rather Arabic, music. Seated cross-legged on the ground she "twanged the light guitar," only instead of a guitar it was an instru-posed as a kind of funeral wail in honor of ment called, I think, the oude, which very much resembled a banjo. There was neither beginning nor end to the air. It entered without any preliminary into a monotonous variation, more like that of weak bagpipes or the trumpeting of a band of expectant mosquitoes than anything I can think of. By and by she sang an accompaniment; but the song was of a piece with the

a girl-bride (a cousin of the pasha's) who had died the preceding year.

And here I will bring my description of the Turkish harem to a close. The dirge that echoed in my ears as I took my departure is a fitting emblem of the present condition of Turkey, where all things seem to tend to dissolution and decay.

draught. The riverine craft waited at the head of the estuary, and the merchantman that had come from England waited at its mouth, each leaving to the other the disagreeable duty of traversing the estuary. The result was that they never met. But this difficulty has been removed by fuller knowledge. The estuary proves to be navigable for ships of any draught right up to Karaoul, the port which serves as the terminus for the river steamers. Thus British merchant vessels sailed nearly two hundred miles up the mouth of a Siberian river, exchanged cargoes with a flotilla from the upper reaches of the river, and sailed home again. The expedition took thirty-nine days to reach Karaoul, remained there nineteen, and took twenty-six to return. It was absent from the London docks for only eighty-four days.

THROUGH THE ARCTIC SEAS TO SIBERIA. - The correspondent of the Times, who last year described the efforts that were being made to open up commercial communications by way of the Arctic Seas between this country and the heart of Siberia, is able to announce that those efforts have at length been crowned with success. Even while he wrote, valuable cargoes which were in London at the end of July were being landed and warehoused at Yeniseisk, fifteen hundred miles up the Yenisei. Towards the end of October cargoes which left Yeniseisk three months before were safe in the London docks. Hitherto Siberia has been sealed against the chief products of Western industry. All at once they are delivered straight from the port of London, with only one transhipment on the way, to the quays of an emporium in central Siberia. This will not astonish those who have followed the courageous and persistent explorations conducted by Captain Wiggins during a series of years by means of his own resources and the resources of men who believed in him. Of course, the Kara Sea is not passable at all seasons of the year. Siberia-bound vessels must sail from British ports not later than the end of the first week in August in order to reach the mouth of the Yenisei in time to make the homeward voyage the same season. The next difficulty was not so easily sur-extent arranged by Count von Moltke himmounted. The estuary of the Yenisei is one hundred and sixty miles in length. It is so broad that the small craft of the upper reaches of the river dare not brave the north-easterly gales by which it is swept; yet so studded is it with small islands, so imperfectly is its channel laid down in the charts, and so scanty was the explorers' knowledge as to its depth, that they, on their side, did not venture to navigate it with vessels of considerable

MOLTKE'S MEMOIRS. The literary exeo utors of Moltke have not lost much time. His memoirs are already being prepared for publication, and we are promised the first instalment in October next. As yet, we be lieve, no arrangements have been made for the issue of an English edition. The materials for the memoirs, which were to some

self, consist of letters-including his early
love-letters and other private correspondence
of interest, despatches, and essays on various
subjects-the whole covering the period from
1838 to the time of the marshal's death. Al-
though the memoirs are not likely to contain
anything of a startling nature, we are informed
by those who have had an opportunity of see-
ing the MSS. that there is very interesting
matter in them.
Daily Chronicle.

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Whose sweetest lips Love, kissing, made to BROWNING? yes, in a general way

From The Fortnightly Review. STRAY THOUGHTS ON SOUTH AFRICA. I.

THERE are artists who, loving their work, when they have finished it put it aside for years, that, after the lapse of time, returning to it, and reviewing it from the standpoint of distance, they may judge of it in a manner which was not possible while the passion of creation and the link of unbroken emotion bound them to it. What the artist does intentionally, life often does for us fortuitously.

of his docks and small public buildings; he has not the emotional detachment necessary to the forming of a large critical judgment. A certain distance is necessary to the seeing clearly of large wholes. It is not by any chance that the most scientific exposition of American democracy is the work of a Frenchman, that the best history of the French Revolution is by an Englishman, and that the finest history of English literature is the work of a Frenchman. Distance is essential for a keen, salient survey, which shall take in large outlines and mark prominent char

It is customary to ridicule a traveller who passes rapidly through a country, and then writes his impression of it.

The

It may be questionable whether a man has ever been able to form an adequate con-acteristics. ception of his mother's face in its relation to others, till after long years of absence he has returned to it; and whether he will or no, there flashes on him the conscious-truth is he sees much that is hidden forness of its beauty, nobility, weariness, or age as compared with that of others; a thing which was not possible to him when it rose for him every morning as the

sun.

ever from the eyes of the inhabitants. Habit and custom have blinded them to many things. They are indignant when it is said that their land is arid, that it has few running streams, that its population is scanty, and that vegetables are scarce; and they are amused and surprised when one descants for three pages on the glorious rarity of their air and the scientific interest of their mingled peoples; yet these are the prominent external features which differentiate their land from all others.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the people of a country are justified in their contempt of the bird's-eye view of the stranger. There is a knowledge of a land which is only to be gained by one born in it, or brought into long-continued, close, personal contact with it, and which in its perfection is perhaps never obtained

What is true of the personal mother is yet more true of a man's native land. It has shaped all his experiences; it has lain as the background to all his consciousness; and has modified his sensations and emotions. He can no more pass a calm, relative judgment on it, than an artist upon the work he is creating, or a child at the breast upon the face above it. The incapacity of peoples to pass judgments on the surroundings from which they have never been separated is familiar to every traveller. The mayor of the little German town does not take you to see the costumes of the peasants, nor the old church, nor the Dürer over the altar; but drags you away to see the new row of gas-lamps | by any one of a country which he has not in the village street. The costumes, the church, the picture are unique in Europe and the world; better gas-lamps flame before every butcher shop in London and Paris; but the lamps are new and have cost him much; he cannot view them objectively. The inhabitant of one of the rarest and fairest towns in the colonies or on earth does not boast to you of his oaks and grapes, or ask you what you think of his mountain, or explain to you the marvellous mixture of races in his streets; but he is anxious to know what you think

inhabited before he was thirty. It is the subjective, emotional sympathy with its nature; and the comprehension not merely of the vices and virtues of its people, but of the how and why of their existence, which is possible to a man only with regard to a country that is his own. The stranger sees the barren scene, but of the emotion which that barren mountain is capable of awakening in the man who lives under its shadow he knows nothing. He marks the curious custom, but of the social condition which originated it, and the

passion concerned in its maintenance, he | African people and their problem, the first understands nothing. requisite is a clear comprehension of their land.

This subtle, sympathetic subjective knowledge of a land and people is that which is essential to the artist, and to the great leader of men. It is found as a rule only by a man with regard to his own land. To Balzac nothing was easier than to paint that Paris boarding-house. All the united intellect and genius of Europe could not have painted it if the grimy respectability of those chairs and tables, the sordid narrowness of the faded human lives, had not eaten emotionally into the substance of the painter. To Gladstone nothing is easier than to make a speech which shall move five thousand Scotchmen to madness. A foreigner might lay out the arguments more logically. He could not put out his hand and touch chord after chord of emotion and passion, producing what sound he would. The knowledge of these chords is possible only to a man within whom they exist.

Taking the term South Africa to include all the country southward from the Zambesi and Lake N'gami to Cape Agulhas, it may be said that few territories possess more varied natural features; and that yet, nevertheless, through it all, from Walfisch Bay to Algoa, from the Zambesi to Cape Town, there is a certain unity. No South African set down in any part of it could fail to recognize it as his native land; and he could hardly mistake any other for it.

The most noticeable feature on first looking at it is the strip of lowland country running along the entire south and east coast, and bordered inland everywhere by high mountain ranges.

In the Western Province the coast-belt consists of huge mountain ranges forming a network over a tract of country some hundreds of miles in extent, the mountains having at their feet level valleys or small Both forms of knowledge, the intellec- plains. They are composed of igneous tual and abstract, the emotional and though stratified rock, covered by little sympathetic, are essential to the true un- soil, and showing signs of titanic subterderstanding of a country. If it may be ranean action; many of them seem to have said that no man understands a thing till been hurled up by one convulsive act; he has coldly criticised it from a distance, bare strata of rock thousands of feet in it may also be said, that no man knows a extent being raised on end, their jagged thing till he has loved it. edges forming the summits of vast mounIf the fragmentary views in the follow-tain ranges. In the still, peaceful valleys ing pages possess a claim to interest or attention, it rises in no degree from any special aptitude in the writer for discussing the questions dealt with - for none such exists; but from the chance coincidence of fortunate circumstances, which give to a man born and growing up in a land which he loves, and who returns to it after many years' absence in other lands, as it were a twofold position. Half he is outsider; half he is lover. It is only the thought that this position may possibly yield in itself a certain slight interest which overcomes the natural diffidence which one feels in dealing with subjects so vital, complex, and large that the opinion of any individual upon them must of necessity be tentative, and of very limited value.

at the feet of these mountains are streams; in the spring the African heath covers them, the red, pink, and white bells are everywhere; and the small wine farms dot the sides of the valley, their white houses and green fields dwarfed under the high, bare mountains. Here and there are little towns and villages, built as only the old Dutch-Huguenots knew how to build, the long, straight streets lined with trees on either hand, the streams of water passing down them; and the old thatch-roofed, front-gabled, whitewashed, green-shuttered houses standing back, with the stone steps before the door, under the deep shade of the trees; their vineyards or orchards behind them. No one can build such towns now. They have the repose and dreary stillness of the Dutch farm. They are as unique as their mountains. PerFor the right understanding of the South haps one sees the Western Province