upon arriving at the appointed place, to see some sixty or seventy Bedouins, mostly mounted, and and armed with lances, guns, and an assortment of knives and blunderbusses, awaiting our arrival. When they saw us coming a significant hoot was given, and we felt that trouble was brewing. Our dragoman called out to us: "Don't be afraid, gentlemen, but mount your camels and proceed with your journey. It was the custom," he said, "for these people to attend the departing stranger half a day's journey out of their city."

RUINS OF BOZRAH.

Immediately we mounted our camels, they were seized by the brigands, and made to kneel. We were surrounded by the lancers, Sheikh Salim among them. The hooting became louder, and had an element of dissatisfaction and contempt about it which was not calculated to allay our anxiety.

"Keep cool, gentlemen," said the brave Hedayah, who thereupon fell into the most violent of Arabic demonstrations. The gauntlet had been thrown, the fight began. An Arab who had carried my camera, drawing his sword, made a thrust at our good dragoman. It fell short

of its mark, but cut an ugly slit in his legging without wounding him. Hedayah leaped from his camel, and with uplifted sword attacked the Arab. The melee became general, the noise infernal, and we prepared ourselves for the worst.

While sundry battles of words were going on, each man with sword drawn, I settled with the chief for various "things which had been forgotten," including $15 for a "change of raiment," beside $30 previously paid for permission to photograph the rascals. Claim after claim was adjusted as we slowly proceeded, until, after an hour of horror, I held my empty purse bottom up in the air and declared that they now had all. Thereupon the greater number dropped behind, only a few remaining to bluster at Hedayah. They, too, departed at last, after satisfying themselves that there was no more money to be gotten from us.

Dr. Rigaway who visited Petra in 1875, thus records his impressions: What a comment on human greatness! The stronghold of Esau; Edom, the muchcoveted prize of of King David, the entrepot of Solomon's gold of Ophir, the gateway through which rolled Oriental commerce for ages, the munition of rocks in which heroism grew, and whence it sallied out to dictate law to semibarbarous hordes, the city of palaces and temples, whose inhabitants dwelt in luxury while they lived, and at death made their burial with the great, had so perished out of man's knowledge that its very existence had been forgotten until discovered and made known by Burkhardt in 1811. And now of all its monuments those which alone remain, with possibly a few exceptions, totell the fate of the past, are records

of death. Tombs everywhere, and in the midst a theatre. "I said of laughter, it is mad; and of mirth, what doeth it?"

But all this-this ruined greatness, this sunken, brutalized humanitywhat is it save the fulfilment of God's Word?

As I rode away, and from the last height of the south looked back upon the scene which lay beneath and around me, that language of Scripture was on my lips: "O

thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, that holdest the height of the hill though thou shouldst make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord. Also Edom shall be a desolation: : every one that goeth by it shall be astonished." Jer. xlix. 16.

John Greenleaf Whittier's fine poem brings vividly before us the memories of Petra and the neighbouring Mount Hor, the tomb of Aaron :

Dead Petra in her hill-tomb sleeps,

Her stones of emptiness remain ;
Around her sculptured mystery sweeps
The lonely waste of Edom's plain.
From the doomed dwellers in the cleft
The bow of vengeance turns not back;
Of all her myriads none are left
Along the Wady Mousa's track.
Clear in the hot Arabian day

Her arches spring, her statues climb;
Unchanged, the graven wonders pay
No tribute to the spoiler, Time!
Unchanged the awful lithograph

Of power and glory undertrod,-
Of nations scattered like the chaff
Blown from the threshing-floor of God.

Yet shall the thoughtful stranger turn
From Petra's gates, with deeper awe
To mark afar the burial urn

Of Aaron on the cliffs of Hor;

And where upon its ancient guard

Thy Rock, El Ghor, is standing yet,-
Looks from its turrets desertward,

And keeps the watch that God has set,
The same as when in thunders loud

It heard the voice of God to man,-
As when it saw in fire and cloud
The angels walk in Israel's van!
Or when from Ezion-Geber's way
It saw the long procession file,

And heard the Hebrew timbrels play The music of the lordly Nile;

Or saw the tabernacle pause,

Cloud-bound, by Kadesh Barnea's wells,
While Moses graved the sacred laws,
And Aaron swung his golden bells.
Rock of the desert, prophet-sung!
How grew its shadowing pile at length,
A symbol, in the Hebrew tongue,
Of God's eternal love and strength.

On lip of bard and scroll of seer,
From age to age went down the name,
Until the Shiloh's promised year,
And Christ the Rock of Ages, came!
The path of life we walk to-day

Is strange as that the Hebrews trod; We need the shadowing rock, as they,We need, like them, the guides of God.

God send His angels, Cloud and Fire, To lead us o'er the desert sand! God give our hearts their long desire, His shadow in a weary land!

There is another Bosrah or Bostra in the Hauran or region beyond Jordan, the ruins of which still tower grandly above the plain. It was once a stronghold of the Moabites, and under the Emperor Trajan was made the chief city of the Arabian province. It owed its importance, like many a modern railway junction, to being the meetingplace of several roads. It was on the great highway from Damascus to the Persian Gulf. It thus became a great emporium of trade. Successive emperors strengthened it as a military position, and when Christianity became the religion of the Empire it was made the seat of a bishopric. Mohammed himself, as a youth, travelled to its markets, and it was here that he met the monk Sergius, who had so much influence on his career. It was captured by the Mohammedan General Kalid, after a brilliant siege, and became one of the most important Moslem fortresses. The Crusaders vainly endeavoured to take it in the twelfth century, but in subsequent ages it fell into decay and melancholy ruins, although with imposing remains of its former splendour.

AT TARIFA.

GOD has in a marvellous manner placed the keys of empire in the keeping of Great Britain. She guards the gates of the most important strategic positions throughout the world-Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Aden, Trincomalee, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thursday Island, Sydney, Victoria, Tasmania, New Zealand, King George's Sound, Mauritius, the Cape, St. Helena, Falkland Islands, St. Lucia, Jamaica, the Bermudas, Halifax, Quebec, Vancouver. She possesses great coal supplies on the shores of all the seas. She con

*A distinguished American, the Rev. Dr. Ellinwood, of New York, at the Missionary Conference in London, 18SS, said: "Wherever the English have once raised their flag,

trols one-sixth of the area of the habitable globe, and rules the destiny of onefourth of its inhabitants. Her consuls are in every port, her flag is carried on all the seas. About three-fourths of the shipping of the world is under her protection and is also freighted with the wealth of her great empire.

Despite the abatement which must be made for unprincipled tradesmen, who send rum and ruin to the heart of Africa, she is a power that makes for righteousness in every land. Her missionaries go everywhere proclaiming liberty to the captive and the opening of the prison doors to them that are bound. She is the refuge for the oppressed from every clime. No slave can breathe her air. "No sooner does he touch her soil than he is emancipated by the irresistible genius of British liberty."

She is destined, we believe, to be the great world-power which shall stand for law, for order, and for liberty in every zone.* The union of the mother country and her forty daughter colonies, and the alliance of all English-speaking lands will be, we trust, a guarantee of perpetual

they have come to stay. They have brought good laws and good roads, and vigorous enterprises. They have brought the Bible, and the church, and school, and medical

the day

66

When the war-drum throbs no longer,
And the battle flags are furled,

In the parliament of man,

The federation of the world." We propose giving a series of illustrated papers on this Greater Britain which we hope will give a wider outlook at the noble empire of which we form a part, which will

science, and the press, and the electric wire. I do not condone the sins which you, in common with ourselves, have committed, and are committing, against feebler races-nevertheless I bless God for the ubiquity of the

every reader to a more faithful discharge of civic and religious duties.

"Civis Romanus sum" was the proud boast of the Roman citizen. It is a prouder boast to be a citizen of the British Empire-an empire which holds the gorgeous East in fee" where the foot of an Alexander has faltered, which covers continental areas unknown to the Cæsars.

Briton. He is the true colonist. It is his instinct, on the whole, to bless, and not to curse. He is among the pluckiest in the grand and glorious work of missions as well as in war.

For this world-wide survey we shall draw from all possible resources, and illustrate with the best available help by pen and pencil. We shall go round the world with the Union Jack and trace its victories by land and sea-and, most of all, the moral conquests of which the brave old flag is the symbol in every land.

Our first paper will be devoted to the rock fortress of Gibraltar which holds the key of the Mediterranean, the ancient Gates of Gades or Pillars of Hercules. For the graphic description of this "Key of Empire," we are indebted chiefly to the acaccomplished writer, H. D. Traill; the American editor, Rev. Dr. Henry Field, and to various other standard authorities.

The Pillars of Hercules!" portals of the ancient world!

The

As our gallant vessel steams onward through the rapidly narrowing Straits, the eye falls upon a picturesque irregular cluster of buildings on the Spanish shore, wherefrom. juts forth a rocky tongue of land surmounted by a tower. It is the Pharos of Tarifa, and in another half-hour we are close enough to distinguish the exact outlines of the ancient and famous city named after Tarif Ibn Malek, the first Berber Sheikh who landed in Spain, and itself, it is said—though some etymologists look askance at the derivation -the name mother of a word which is little less terrible to the modern trader than was this pirates' nest to his predecessor of old times. The arms of Tarifa are a castle on waves, with a key at the window, and the device is not unaptly symbolical of her mediæval history, when her possessors played janitors of the Strait, and merrily levied blackmail-the irregular tariff of those days-upon any vessel which desired to pass. There "dawns Gibraltar grand and gay." It dawns upon us in all its Titanic majesty of outline; grand, of course, with the grandeur of nature, and yet with a certain strange

air of human menace as of some piece of Atlantean ordnance planted and pointed by the hand of man. This "armamental" appearance of the rock-a look visible, or at any rate imaginable in it, long before we have approached it closely enough to discern its actual fortifications, still less its artillery — is much enhanced by the dead flatness of the land from which its western wall arises sheer, and with which by consequence it seems to have no closer physical connection than has a gun-carriage with. the parade ground on which it stands.

effect

As we draw nearer this increases in intensity. The surrounding country seems to sink and recede around it, and the rock appears to tower ever higher and higher, and to survey the strait and the two continents divided by it with a more and more formidable frown.

As we approach the port, however, this impression gives place to another, and the rock, losing somewhat of its "natural-fortress" air, begins to assume that resemblance to a couchant lion which has been so often noticed in it. His head is distinctly turned towards Spain, and what is more, he has a foot stretched out towards the mainland, as though in token of his mighty grasp upon the soil.

At last, however, we are in the harbour, and are about to land. To land! How little does that phrase convey to the inexperienced in sea travel, or to those whose voyages have begun and ended in stepping from a landing-stage on to a gangway, and from a gangway on to a deck, and vice versa ? how much does it mean for him to whom it comes fraught with recollections of steep descents, of heaving seas, of tossing cock-boats, perhaps of dripping garments, certainly of swindling boatmen?

And

Perhaps, however, no Englishman ought to grudge a high payment