Saturday as We reached the shore of the sea, that weird, un- | with stones, which of old supported the terraces that canny beach made up of the skeletons of animals, bore vegetation up to its now dreary summit. We the bare logs brought down by Jordan in flood-time dined and smoked and chatted, and our escort skinned and pickled in the brine, and round pebbles, tried to stalk jackals, and then we went to bed, to a white salty deposit marking where the waves have be devoured by mosquitoes. Better far had we bivlicked the land and receded; and dismounting in ouacked out in the midst of the salty plain than by the blazing heat (it was now nearly eleven o'clock), this murmuring stream, which was evidently the renwe bathed our hands in the brilliant blue water, clear dezvous of the whole insect population. We were as crystal, and brought some of it to our mouths. glad to be up early, -long before daybreak, Our flesh felt immediately like leather where the our encampment took some time to get into marchwater had touched it, and the taste-as of quinine, ing trim, and we set out by starlight on our way vitriol, and sea-water combined - was absolutely in- from Jericho to Jerusalem. describable and quite irremovable. We brought away tin flasks full of the delicious compound, that friends at home might have a chance of the same pleasure. The day was cloudless, and the rocks, perfectly sterile and variously colored, stood up out of the lake, the distance of which was covered by haze, marking the perpetual evaporation by which the superfluities are carried off. - What a thoroughfare this must have been when Herod the Idumaan reigned,-when Priest and Levite and Samaritan,-thief and publican and sinner, - journeyed backwards and forwards from city to city, and He with the Traitor often trod it, staying with Lazarus at Bethany, with Zaccheus at Jericho! Now there is but one characteristic, perhaps, that remains, a reputation for deeds of vio lence. We were not sorry to mount and ride off to the east, to the sacred river, to associations more hal- Our road soon began to ascend, on the right, by lowed and less terrible than those which hang over the stony hills of Quarantania, the scene of the the grave of the five cities; it was a pleasant relief Temptation, from whence the view in those days to come to trees and brushwood growing in park-like must have taken in the great town of Jericho and its luxuriance on either bank so thickly that in many suburbs and villas lying at their feet, and the rich places it was hard to approach the river. We struck plain-country. We struck into a mountain defile of the stream at the spot where the Greek pilgrims the same character as the Valley of Fire, the Wâdy bathe,the spot which is assigned by tradition to Cherith, and as our thoughts the night before had the baptism by the Precursor and of the Lord him- been with Elisha, now they were with his greater self. It is a pleasant and pretty scene this hallowed fellow of Mount Carmel, Ahab-se-Ahab, Jezabel, spot. The river spreads out broader and shallower, and the Priests of Baal. It is almost painful to feel and rushes over a gravel-bed, the forest recedes and how rapidly all these gigantic associations crowd on leaves a grassy plot on the bank, on which a most the mind here, and how easily present circumstances, comfortable bivouac can be made, and here we set-heat, a hard saddle, or the want of breakfast, distled to rest until the great heat had passed away, and we could ride without fear of sun-stroke over the salty flats to our resting-place for the night. We had our midday meal on the bank, and bathed in and drank the sweet muddy water of Jordan; we filled our tin flasks with it to bring back home; and our escort cut us straight sticks from the carob-trees as mementos of our visit; so we passed away two delightful dreamy hours, till the sun began to sink, and we mounted to pursue our course to Jericho. Our ride was singularly unpleasant; the heat, still scorching, seemed to strike up from the parched ground. Swarms of insects had come out for their afternoon exercise, and fed freely upon both ourselves and our horses, and the clumps of vegetation around Jericho seemed never to get nearer. At last we reached the wretched village of Er Riha, which is the sole remains of what, in the time of the Incarnation, was a flourishing city hardly inferior to the capital. There is little evidence of its former greatness; now it consists of a few score of wretched hovels, inhabited by still wretcheder-looking fellahin, who bear an odious reputation. Some slight memory of this Garden of the Lord remains in the groves around the village. Figs and vines still flourish, and there are whole thickets of the Nûbk, or Syrian thorn, with its cruel-looking spikes, the material, according to local tradition, of the crown of thorns. The district is well watered by the stream which flows from Ain-es-Sultan, the well of Elisha, supposed to be peculiarly fertilizing, since the day on which the Prophet cured the waters, and towards this we rode, intending to pass the night there. We had a delightful place for our encampment. The spring bubbles up and forms a clear pool fringed with bushes at the foot of a hill covered place them, for it is only after leaving the Holy Land one fully realizes the privilege of a journey there. Our ride was very sultry, the sun beating cruelly on the bare cliffs, and we stopped at the foot of the Mount of Olives for luncheon, at a ruined well which bears the reputation of being a rendezvous for thieves. We saw none, however; and having refreshed ourselves and our beasts, and escaped the very hottest part of the day, began to ascend the hill. In a short time we reached Bethany, which is now a wretched little hamlet with a squalid fellah population. The road thence is carried round the southern shoulder of the Mount of Olives, and is remarkable for the suddenness with which the view of the city bursts upon one. At first, only the extreme angle of the wall of the Moriah enclosure and the dome of the Mosque of El Aksa are visible; then, on turning a corner, the whole city of David and the graceful group of buildings on Mount Moriah. It has recently been surmised, with much plausibility, that it was along this approach — probably always the more frequented route to the capital from this side, rather than the steep path carried over the summit of the hill, past the scene of the Ascension that the view of the splendid assemblage of buildings prompted our Lord to that affecting lamentation over the irremediable desolation so soon to fall on the city beneath. We could easily picture the varied beauty of the scene as it must then have presented itself: the gardens and villas without the walls, where now there is only stony desolation; the massive walls themselves, and Herod's three great fortresses, one of which, the tower of Hippicus, remains to charm the architect of this age even by its wonderful masonry; the glistening marble of the restored Temple, and its roof of golden pinnacles; and above it, the citadel of Antonia, telling of national privileges lost forever, and of Roman dominion. Nothing can be more graceful than the general effect of the buildings which now cover the Temple area, the platform on which Islam has stamped itself over Judaism; the light arcades and fountains, the broad steps, and the mosques themselves, especially that of Omar, with its marble and jasper adornment like a large jewel casket, with a cypress here and there completing the Mohammedan character of the sanctuary. The whole looks brilliant at a distance, although, like all Oriental splendor, somewhat shabby when examined in detail. | opinions which they had learned to regard as true; and from these men of iron will and indomitable purpose George Peabody has inherited much of that calm and persistent resolution which has enabled him to successfully carry out his intentions. Born at Danvers, in Massachusetts, he commenced his commercial life in the city of Baltimore, where every scope was afforded for the display of his shrewd and discerning powers. From an early period he commenced that career of magnificent liberality which has culminated in the splendid and almost regal gift to the poor of London. He made wealth, not to enrich himself, but to bestow it upon others. In 1837 he left his native country—the land of the stars and stripes-and came to London, where he founded the great American banking firm known throughout the whole civilized world as Peabody and Co., and which for eight-and-thirty years has had a most profitable and flourishing business. We rode down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat, with its mosaic of tombs. Many a Jewish emigrant, from Poland especially, lies here in expectation of a grand rehabilitation of their nation's glory on this very spot, which the followers of Mohammed also assign as the place of the last judgment, and point But, in his adopted country, Mr. Peabody did not out a broken pillar jutting from the wall of the forget the claims of his native land. During a visit Haram over the gorge as the seat he will occupy on to America, in 1852, he gave $100,000 to found in that occasion. We rode past Absalom's (so called) the town wherein he was born an educational insti tomb, and the other handsome sepulchres of Roman tute and library, "the results of which," he stated, time, beneath the wall of Gethsemane and up to St. "have proved most beneficial to the locality, and Stephen's Gate, and thence along the Way of Sor- gratifying to myself." In 1857 he generously derow to our hotel. And so back again to ordinary voted no less than $500,000 to the erection of an traveller's life in this nineteenth century, guide- institution for the promotion of science and art in books, cicerones, tables-d'hôte, and discomfort, but Baltimore, the eity in which he commenced his comwith much laid up in our minds for future enjoy-mercial life. But his chief munificence was reserved ment and appreciation in those moments when we forget the world. GEORGE PEABODY. for England, — the country in which his fortune had been amassed, and of whose commercial fabric he was one of the principal ornaments. When the extent of his gifts were first made known to the people, they could scarcely resist being incredulous. Such princely presents are somewhat rare in the history of nations; and it is not every man who makes a fortune who thinks of bestowing it upon others. THERE was something exceedingly appropriate and graceful in the idea of inviting Mr. George Peabody to preside over the closing ceremony of the City of London Working Classes' Exhibition, In this respect George Peabody has furnished a for there are few men who have done more to gain brilliant precedent for future millionnaires, - less, the respect and esteem of the artisan classes than however, in the magnificence of his gift than its the man who has no nobly devoted such a princely practical character. If his intentions are faithfully portion of his fortune to the furtherance of a scheme carried out, great and appreciable changes will take having for its object the improvement of the homes place in the condition of the London poor. The of the people. The Peabody Model Buildings will Peabody buildings will form the leaven which will ever remain a monument of the practical benevo- alter the whole mass of house accommodation in the lence of their founder. Unlike many of those who metropolis. Workingmen will no longer be conhave sought to ameliorate the condition of their tent to be slowly poisoned to death in pestilential, poorer brethren, he was enabled to discriminate be-recking abodes, while landlords will find it to their tween real and false charity. He knew that the safest and most serviceable aid he could render to workingmen was, not in treating them as paupers or suppliants for charity, but as men who, against heavy odds, were endeavoring to help themselves. The great difficulty with which the working classes of London have to contend in obtaining proper dwellings is the enormous value of land in the metropolis, a difficulty which, in some instances, is at present beyond the power of working class cooperation to surmount. This obstacle George Peabody determined, so far as in him lay, to remove by providing a fund for the purchase of land and the erection of suitable dwellings thereon for use, at a moderate rental, by the working classes, who otherwise would have to content themselves with far inferior habitations at a much higher rental. This was really practical help, and of a self-supporting character too. But George Peabody came of a practical race. The Pilgrim Fathers were men who dared to become voluntary exiles rather than renounce the interest to provide their tenants with homes more fit for the use of human beings, and less deserving of that censure and reproach which so many of them have incurred. This is the peaceful revolution designed by the people's benefactor, George Peabody. Well did the Queen, with her womanly instinct, gracefully interpret, in her kind-hearted and noble letter to Mr. Peabody, the universal sentiment of the country. It is by such recognition of the really great deeds of large-minded and unselfish men, that royalty manifests its true dignity, and gains for itself that national respect and love, that undying popularity, which is stronger far than fleets and armies, and which never fails a ruler in the hour of need. In America, to which country Mr. Peabody has temporarily returned, the presence of the great benefactor will be hailed as that of one who has done much to cement the feelings of mutual goodwill which ought always to subsist between the two principal branches of the Anglo-Saxon family. Englishmen will always honor America as being the birthplace of one who has shown such devotion to | the claims and interests of the laboring classes, while in America the name of Peabody will be regarded as that of one who has caused the name of his country to be spoken of in tones of esteem and gratitude in the homes of the mother-land. FOREIGN NOTES. THE University of Halle, in Prussia, has just sustained a heavy loss in the death of Dr. Hupfeld, the celebrated Hebrew scholar. In the works going on for levelling the hill of the Trocadero at Paris, four mines are fired at once by means of an electric battery, and a surface of more than two acres is raised by each explosion. THE Brazil and River Plate Mail says that Captain Burton, the African traveller, now British Consul at Santos, is determined, as soon as the season A CATALOGUE of some 3,000 Armenian MSS. opens, to continue his interesting investigation on contained in the library of Edcimiadzin, near Mount the Rio Iguipe, where he some time since made the Ararat, the seat of the Patriarch, has just been discovery of a dormant volcano, known in the localprinted. Amongst the MSS. are some unpublished ity by a name signifying the "exploding hill." It works of the Fathers, and also some unpublished has long been believed that Brazil was altogether fragments of Aristotle and Diodorus Siculus. Copy-devoid of volcanic formations; but if Captain Burists are employed in the library, and these treas-ton's impressions are confirmed by a closer scrutiny, ures, hitherto inaccessible, are now thrown open to he will have added another to the many important scholars. services he has rendered as an active and practical geographer. APROPOS of the attempt on the Czar's life the St. Petersburg journals say that the investigation has shown that it was not the act of a wild and single enthusiast, but the result of a conspiracy, which includes numerous accomplices belonging to different classes; consequently many arrests have been made. In St Petersburg twenty students have been seized, sixty Poles, and four high officials; and in Moscow thirty students have been lodged in jail. THE director of one of the public gardens in Paris has adopted an ingenious means of attracting people to his establishment. In the dancing-saloon there is a cupboard, containing three gold and three silver watches, with six silk dresses; over the cupboard is a placard announcing in large red letters that the watches and dresses will be distributed among those of the dancers who shall have attracted most attention between the months of May and July. tion at London, Sir Henry James, of the Royal EnDURING a recent meeting of the Royal Institugineers, gave an account of the Ordnance Survey kind of topographical work in our own country; of Jerusalem. We are familiar enough with this but to hear of an Ordnance Survey of the Holy Land, to find modern science mixing itself up with traditions of the earliest times, with our Scriptural associations, and with the Crusaders and Saracens, inspires a notion of incongruity. It is true, nevertheless, that a party of redcoated English Sappers have taken an accurate plan of the City of David, and carried a line of levelling all across the country from the Mediterranean at Jaffa to the Dead Sea, the object being to settle a long-debated question, the difference of level between the two seas; and we now learn from Sir H. James that it is settled. The differ ence is great; for the level of the Dead Sea is 1,292 feet below that of the Mediterranean; and the high(Mount Scopus) is 2,724 feet above the level of the est ground passed over in the line of the survey Mediterranean. The Mount of Olives is 2,665 feet, Mount Zion 2,550 feet, and Mount Moriah 2,440 feet by cutting marks in the solid rock on the route, to above the same level. Due precautions were taken, THE marine vivary at Boulogne, erecting under the superintendence of M. Edouard Betencourt, is intended for the exhibition of adult living fish. The altitude of the rocks will be about seventy feet, and the caverns underneath will have some twelve to fourteen feet headway, wherein will be a series of reservoirs, into which sun and air are admitted through fissures. This vivarium opens up a new and interesting page for the study of marine zo-preserve a means of testing the survey at some fu ology and botany. ture time, and of rendering it meanwhile useful to travellers, or to the party now engaged in the exploration of Palestine. On the occasion of the recent Dante festival, the Gonfalonier of Florence forwarded to M. Victor In describing Jerusalem, Sir H. James states that Hugo the Dante medal. It was accompanied by a the city "occupies a space exactly equal to the area letter written in that highflown style common to included between Oxford Street and Piccadilly, Italian public correspondence. The great French and between Bond Street and Park Lane": about novelist was "requested to accept the medal in Ita- three quarters of a mile in length, and half a mile in ly's name." To this M. Hugo replied: "M. Gon-width; from which description ordinary readers falonier. To receive from the Gonfalonier of Florence the jubilee medal of Dante, in Italy's name, is an immense honor, and I am profoundly touched by it. My name is in your eyes synonymous with France, and so you tell me in magnificent language. Ay, there is in me, as there is in every Frenchman, some part of the soul of France; and this soul of France yearns for light, for progress, for peace, for may form a familiar notion of the size of a city which figures so largely in the world's history. One other particular will interest those who are taking pains to improve the water-supply, and who regard civil engineering as a modern art. Jerusalem was supplied even in ancient days from two sources, high-level and low-level: the water flowed through tunnels, and crossed a deep valley by means of a siphon made of stone in lengths of about five feet, these inventions for teaching the blind to read is an connected by collar and socket joints. THE foreign journals are rich in dramatic accounts of the recent attempt to assassinate Count Bismark, who does not appear to have the slightest desire to be assassinated, as is shown in the following report of the affair: interesting one. At one period large pin-cushions were used, on which the characters were figured with inverted needles. A notary of Paris, Pierre Moreau, proposed movable leaden characters, and their adoption was only prevented by the expense. In our own day, about forty years ago, David Macbeath, a blind teacher in the Edinburgh School, constructed "As Count Bismark was returning on foot along an ingenious string-alphabet, which consisted of a the Unter den Linden from an audience of the King, eord knotted in various ways, so that the protuberupon reaching the Schadow street, a man discharged ances represented certain characters, and in this at him from behind two barrels of a revolver. Both extraordinary manner the greater part of the Gosshots having missed, Count Bismark turned and grap- pel of St. Mark, the 119th Psalm, and other passages pled with his antagonist, who fired three more shots of Scripture and history, were executed. The knotted during the struggle, still leaving him unwounded, string was wound round a vertical frame, which rethough his clothes were burnt by the nearness of the volved as the reader drew the cord towards him. three last discharges. The police took charge of the The mode now generally adopted is a system of would-be assassin, a youth twenty-two years of age, printing in relief, first invented by M. Hauy of who had come from Hohenheim in Wurtemberg to Paris in 1784, and since modified and improved. do what he thus failed to do. In the mean time his Braille of France, Abbé Carton of Belgium, Lucas, papers and luggage were seized at the hotel where Frere, Gall, and Moon of England, all used arbihe had put up. The police report then continues: trary characters, in the form of dots, stenographic 'He was left sitting upon a bench under the guard figures, &c.; Moon's method approaches most nearly of a police-officer in an anteroom, while the author- to the alphabetical form. All these systems are ities investigated his papers. The prisoner availed very costly in production. At Glasgow an alphahimself of this short delay to take out a handker-betical system in Roman capitals, the invention of chief, in which a pocket-knife must have been con- Mr. Alston, has been adopted, and is now used cealed. While he apparently wiped the perspiration pretty extensively throughout this kingdom. In from his face with one hand, he stabbed himself sev- the United States the alphebetical system in one eral times with the knife in the neck. Medical as- form or other is universally used. At the Pennsistance was immediately procured, but proved una-sylvania Institution for the Blind, Roman capitals vailing. Although the wounds were at once ban- similar to Alston's; and at the Perkins Institution daged by several surgeons, and the prisoner was and Massachusetts Asylum, the Virginia Institution confined in a strait-waistcoat to prevent his inflict- and the New York Institution, modified or angular ing further injury upon himself, he gradually sank, lower-case letters, the invention of Dr. Howe, are and died shortly after four in the morning.' He is a used." stepson of Karl Blind, son of Mrs. Blind by a previous marriage, and had taken his stepfather's name. He left England four years ago, but visited this country two years since, when he was a volunteer and won a prize at Wimbledon. For the last two years he has been studying political economy at Hohenheim, a part of Germany where Bismark is intensely hated." AMERICA has done much to alleviate the sufferings of the blind, by a supply of useful and instructive books, so printed that the sense of touch is made to do vicarious duty for the loss of vision. When it is borne in mind that in Europe it is considered that one person in every 1,300 is thus afflicted, and in America one person in every 2,500, we shall be better able to estimate the boon thus conferred. "If any one," says the London Reader, "wishes to judge for himself of the facility with which the blind can read these books, there is daily to be seen in one of the recessed seats of Waterloo Bridge a poor blind man thus occupied, who for a slight alms will explain the method. The history of A LANDSCAPE. LONG lines of leafless hegdes brown,- Down towards the sunken sun. VOL. I.] A Journal of Choice Reading, SELECTED FROM FOREIGN CURRENT LITERATURE. SATURDAY, JUNE 16, 1866. LITTLE PEG O'SHAUGHNESSY. PART I. WHEN I promised, Tom, to write you an account of Castle Shaughnessy and Peg, remember you gave me your word in return that you would not look at what I had written till you had gone back to your ship for good, and the ocean lay between you and the persons who figure in my story. Be charitable, if you can, to some of those last, when you have repocketed the manuscript. But don't ask me to practise as I preach. Gorman Tracey and I are so much akin that we had once a common relative. "Gorman," said I one day, "that old lady at Ballyhuckamore is dead at last, and has left her estate to -" "To you!" he said, with a grimace. "Like the luck of you rich chaps. Lord! To think of how that old lady used to pet me when I was a boy, and never saw you in her life. I wish you joy, old fellow, from the bottom of my heart! Ugh! How I envy you! Ballyhuckamore!" (musingly). [No. 24. together; you shall introduce me to all the Ballyhuckamores, and we'll have such a house-warming as never was there before." If we had not been walking down Fleet Street, I believe Gorman would have thrown up his hat and given three cheers. It was in July that we talked thus; and when December drew near, we had not forgotten our plan. I need not describe Ballyhuckamore to you who know it. I never was so agreeably disappointed in any place. A snow-storm had just cleared away as we drove to the Hall by a short cut through the wood, with the dry branches crackling like fireworks under our wheels. A sulky red sun was dropping behind a copse, seeming to kindle sparks in the underwood, glowering on the boles of the oaks, throwing crimson splashes on the whitened knolls, and wisping a mazy murky light about the deepening gloom of the brown stripped trees on before us. Gorman was in a state of wild exhilaration, and I myself was in unexpected delight with my new possession. "Let us alight," I said, "and send this machine back to the village whence it came. We shall enjoy better to walk through this very jolly wilderness." And so it was that we arrived on foot, and with "A beggarly old place, I'll be bound!" said I. "A house like a barn, a potato-field, and a pigsty." "Not a bit of it. But I won't tell you. Pearls to swine, ugh! Ballyhuckamore! I wonder wheth-out fuss, at Ballyhuckamore Hall. er little Peg O'Shaughnessy ought to be 'grown up' yet." "Little Peg O'Shaughnessy?" said I. "Yes, O'Shaughnessy of Castle Shaughnessy. But you don't know, and never will, you beastly bigot of a Saxon!" "Little Peg?" said I again, as we walked on. "A mop-headed little flirt who used to drop frogs down my back. Tip-top family, but awfully poor. Father ruining himself with fox-hunting even when I was there. Mother died of care. Peg's toes came through her shoes." I felt curious to see the house, and quickened my steps, as we came up a by-path in the shrubbery which brought us out upon the gravel sweep under the front windows. I remember doing so, and how the next moment my attention was fixed, not upon the old house frowning before me, but upon a lady, who was standing on the top of my flight of Ballyhuckamore steps, with my Ballyhuckamore hall-door lying open behind her. And such a lady! She held up her green velvet riding-habit with both hands, and her little boots were almost lost in the snow, which lay thick upon the steps. She had a handsome brunette face, and bands of magnificent hair under her riding-hat. She looked about thirty Any more pretty girls at Ballyhuckamore?" years of age, had a perfect figure and a jewelled "Bless your heart! there never was a place so whip, and seemed in the act of taking counsel with overrun with them. When I think of the crowd herself upon the weather. These were the items that poor old lady used to have about her in Bally-regarding her that I summed up during the space of huckamore Hall of a Christmas eve! I was always in love with half a dozen of them at a time. But you don't know. I believe I was to have married Peg and settled down at the Hall whenever I succeeded to the estate. What a gathering there should have been there this next Christmas if I had had your luck!" "Grown up now, you were saying?" "Should think so. Lost count of the years." 66 "Then I'll tell you what," said I, "we'll have the gathering there in spite of fate. You and I will go some half-dozen seconds. "Tracey," said I, "is there any mistake about the place; or did you ask any friends to meet us here? Can this be little Peg?" "Stuff and nonsense!" he said, "there is no mistake, and I know nothing about it. Peg's hair was as white as flax. Shabby Peg got up in that extravagant style! I have no idea who this may be. Some wonderful bird of passage." |