English; that he held it as an honor that an Englishwoman should drink coffee in his kata. Although the Laplanders were nominally converted to Christianity some 200 years ago, a fair section of them have still a lingering affection for their old beliefs and heathenish practices; while not a few pin great faith to witchcraft. This, however, does not prevent their holding staunchly the which ultra-Evangelical views Lars Læstadius taught them. Every thing that smacks of pleasure, especially dancing, is among them taboo. Never shall I forget the glance of righteous indignation mingled with fierce resentment, which an old Laplander once cast at me. "She told me to come," he cried, when some one inquired what he was doing in a room where dancing was going on. He pointed at me threateningly as spoke, and his voice trembled with wrath. Had he been Bunyan's Christian and I some evil spirit sent to lead him astray, he could not have looked at me with more bitter reproach, more withering scorn. Yet all that I had done was to ask him to come in, when I found him before the Station door, on Midsummer night. he Not only is dancing regarded by the Lapps as sinful, but even singing, unless it be the singing of hymns. The country is rich in folk lore, and has many weird old national songs; but nothing will induce a Lapp to sing them; for, were he to sing even the shortest, he would look on himself as one of the Lost. I once heard a party of tourists trying to persuade an old Lappish woman to sing a Volkslied. She professed to be very poor, and she was known to be very grasping. The mere sight of a little five krone gold piece would at any time make her fingers twitch and her eyes gleam. None the less the offer of a large gold piece, accompanied though it was by much cajolery and flattery, failed to induce her to sing even one verse. The temptation was evidently great, and once I thought she had yielded; for she struck a high shrill note which sounded like a battle-cry. But no; she turned it into a lamentation psalm tune, and went away, leaving the large gold piece behind her. Yet she was a real Tourist Lapp, one who would without scruple palm off as Lappish handiwork machine-made goods imported from Gothenburg. A pious Lapp regards it as a duty to go to church four times a yearat Advent, Christmas, Easter, and some feast in July or August; but as churches are few and far between in Lapland, and roads there are practically none, most Lapps content themselves with going once. Then all the religious rules and ceremonies of the whole year are compressed into one day-the funerals, christenings, marriages, communions, and special thanksgivings. On this day, quite early in the morning, all the Lapps in the district who have the strength to walk, or who have anyone able and willing to carry them, come streaming down the mountains, up the valleys, across the rivers, bringing with them the dead bodies of such of their kinsfolk who have died during the previous year. They make their way in an oddly straggling procession to some Lappish church-there is one at Gellivare, another at Jukkasjarvi-or to some church the pastor of which speaks Lappish; and once there the ceremonies begin. First the funeral service is read; and the dead, who have been lying frozen for months perhaps in the mountains, are solemnly put to rest in the churchyard. The interment is conducted most decorously, but in the simplest fashion, and without any signs of mourning-no Laplander ever wears black. When it is ended, the christenings begin: the whole company betake themselves into the church, where the babies born during the previous year are baptized. Then comes the young couples' turn. In the presence of the whole community, the marriage service is gone through, for the benefit of those who wish to wed and have some one at hand willing to wed them. A little later the ordinary Sunday church service is held, a sermon is preached, and those who have received special blessings render special thanks. Last of all the Sacrament is administered and a solemn benediction is pronounced. Then the Lapps can wend their way homeward with minds at rest and consciences clear: their church-going is done for twelve whole months. At a låger near Kiruna I came across a Lappish woman, one day, who had a pitiable tale to tell of all she had to suffer at the hands of her own people. Every kåta in the läger excepting hers was uninhabited, I noticed. They to whom they belonged were all off in the mountains, she said; but she did not miss them at all, for when they were at home they would not speak to her, or have anything to do with her. For her husband and son were under a ban, and the ban was extended to her. They were as pariahs in the land, outcasts from their own community, their neighbors holding that they had sold themselves for gold; and, what was worse, were selling Lapland. They had only one hundred reindeer, it seems, whereas three hundred at least were needed if enough to eat were to be had; and, not being of the sort to starve willingly, or even to live on half rations, they had gone to work in the mines, where they were earning high wages. And work in the mines is, in the eyes of true Lapps, devil's work, work that is demoralizing, degrading, and most unpatriotic. To take iron from Lapland's mountains to give to foreigners is to rob Lapland, they argue, and that is rank treason, nay, sacrilege. The Apart from all superstitions, however, patriotic Laplanders have good reasons for regarding with horror everything connected with mines; just as they have good reasons for mistrusting and disliking tourists. opening of the mines has brought into their country, it must be remembered, a motley cosmopolitan crew, who have wrought much evil by showing how evil is wrought; while even the advent of tourists bas not made for edification. Before there was a foreign miner or a foreign tourist in the land, hardly a Lapp knew the taste of spirit; now the mining Lapps and the tourist Lapps will many of them sell their very souls for whisky. And when they have it, it drives them mad for the time being. I once came across a drunken Lapp, and a curious sight he was: he looked for all the world like an old hen with much bedraggled feathers, as he hopped about, first on one leg, then on the other. A few hours before he had been quite wild, I was told; eager for a fight no matter with whom. He was, however, when I arrived on the scene, already in the semi-penitent stage; and a very trying stage he was evidently finding it. Tears were streaming from his eyes; he raised his voice in piteous wails; and clasped his head from time to time, as if he had more to bear than he could bear, and saw nothing about him but woe, desolation, and misery. How this Lapp came to be drunk no one seemed to know, and everyone agreed that it was quite disgraceful that he should be drunk, after all the trouble that had been taken to keep him sober, all the laws that had been passed, all the decrees that had been issued. The four governments sponsible for the Laplanders are re keenly alive to the fact that their now nomad. Many of them, es protégés must not be allowed to drink; and everything that can be done they do, to guard against the temptation to drink being brought in their way. Throughout Lapland it is forbidden by law to sell, or even to give, to a Lapp alcohol in any shape or form; and it would be practically impossible for a Lapp to obtain alcohol, were it not for the heedlessness or perversity of foreigners. Everywhere the Lapps are under the special protection of their respective governments; and as some little recompense, perhaps, for the land of which they have been deprived, they enjoy many privileges that are denied to other folk. For instance, no matter how wealthy they may be—and there are Laplanders who own thousands of reindeer-they pay no taxes, and as a rule no rates, even in communes where they spend the winter. They are never called upon to render military service or any other service to the State; yet, if misfortune befalls them, the State comes at once to their aid. In former days the Scandinavian kings sometimes forced their subjects to give a helping hand to their Lappish subjects. In 1747 a royal decree was issued ordering all the men and women in the Gellivare district each to give a krone towards defraying the cost of materials for building a church for the Lapps. And they actually did what they were ordered to do, although they had a good excuse for leaving it undone, as not very long before the Lapps bad deliberately burnt down a church which Lulia had built for them. One section of the Gellivare people, the Ranea farmers, did even more than they were told to do; for, when they found that the Lapps could not build the church, although the materials were provided, they set to work and built it for them. By no means all the Laplanders are pecially those living in Finnish Lapland, have two fixed residences, one in the lowlands, the other in the highlands, and they go direct from the one to the other. Wherever this is the case, there is something in the way of local self-government. Throughout Finnish Lapland, indeed, a regularly organized system of local self-government is in force. Every year the Lapps elect a Communal Council to manage their affairs for them, and also a Communal Director, to act as the Council's executive. The Director is a sort of general manager, and he does his work in a patriarchal fashion, paying no heed to cavillers. If members of the community become, through the loss of their reindeer, so poor that they cannot support themselves, he takes charge of them, and either sends them to live with richer members, or boards them out. In Swedish Lapland, too, the natives have a Communal Director for each district; and he, although a Lapp, represents there the Swedish Government. It is his business to keep the authorities informed as to how things are going in his district; and it is through him that help is sent, if things are going badly. Three out of the four governments which have Lappish subjects are now hard at work trying to educate the children of these subjects, in the hope of rendering them capable of taking their place side by side with their fellows, as faithful serviceable citizens. Not only do they provide stationary schools for them in the lowlands, where they spend the winter, but they fit out for them ambulant schools, which follow them about from station to station when up in the mountains in summer. In Gellivare there is a State boarding-school for little Lapps; and a very well-organized, well-managed school it is. There was only one little girl there when I paid the place a visit, the rest of the children having gone with their kinsfolk up the mountains for a holiday. She, poor little thing, had been left behind sorely against her will, not because she had no kinsfolk, but because her kinsfolk The Cornhill Magazine. could not forgive her for having had a Swedish father while her mother was a Lapp. For a Lapp to marry a non-Lapp is held to be a sin for which punishment must be meted out not only to the sinner, but to her children and children's children. Edith Sellers. THE WORLD'S TEMPLE OF PEACE. "They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." An event not only of high European importance but of vast interest to all civilized nations is the opening of the Palace of Peace at The Hague, which has become famous as one of the meeting-places of the world's greatest and noblest idealists. It is in the Dutch capital where those great Peace Conferences of recent years have been held and where many treaties and conventions have been signed, and it is of historical significance that the opening of the Palace of International Justice synchronizes with the celebration by the people of Holland of the centenary of their independence and the establishment of a monarchy which followed the collapse of the Napoleonic régime. In the hundred years that have elapsed since 1813, when the House of Orange was restored to preside over a people whose trade had been ruined, whose commercial integrity had been destroyed, and whose resources had been squandered, Holland has regained her place among the nations, she has recovered her solidity, prosperity and efficiency, and in science, in international law-of which the Dutch are the real founders-in art, in horticulture, and in the new agriculture, she has achieved what any more highly-favored nation might be proud of. The importance of The Hague in the European system is merely an historical truth; but the inauguration of the Palace of Peace may be held by future generations to have been of happier augury than the beginning of a new epoch in the life of a nation. It has been founded through the need of every civilized community to substitute the rule of right for the rule of force. In that Palace no other blade will be placed in the balance than the sword of justice! It was Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the Scots-American steel-king and millionaire, who, inspired by a great humanitarian idea, conceived the project of setting up a shrine for Peace, of which the palace at The Hague is now the symbol of embodiment. Its monumental tower like a beacon light points to the nations the road of right and justice and truth. It was in October, 1903, that Mr. Carnegie handed over to the Netherlands Government the sum of £300,000 to create a "stichting" (foundation in the Netherlands law) for the purpose of erecting and maintaining at The Hague in perpetuity a Court House and library (Temple of Peace) for the Permanent Court of Arbitration established by treaty of July 20, 1899, "believing that the establishment of such a tribunal is the most important step forward of a world-wide humani tarian character which has ever been taken by the joint Powers, as it must ultimately banish war." The Netherlands Government then undertook the management of the foundation and appointed a Board of Directors, four members being nominated by the Queen of Holland and a fifth by the Administrative Council of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Moreover, the Dutch Government placed at the disposal of the Foundation the sum of £60,000 to purchase a site for the Palace of Peace which now stands between the two small Houses of Parliament as a gentle reminder of the Brotherhood of Man, while the prison of Gevangenpoort across the way, with its torture chambers and reminiscences of the martyrdom of the brothers De Witt and other political prisoners, shudderingly recalls the horrors of men's past ignorance, when they believed in exactly the opposite of what is represented by the Temple of Peace. The inscription on the foundation stone of the palace is a lasting and permanent testimony to the fact that it was dedicated through the munificence of Andrew Carnegie "to the securing of a just peace." ("Pact Justitia Firmandæ Hanc Aedem Andreæ Carnegii Munificentia Dedicavit.") Constructed on a design by the French architect, M. L. M. Cordonnier, partly Dutch and partly Flemish in character, the building has the noble proportions of some of the old town halls of Belgium. M. Cordonnier's plan was selected out of 216 designs from all countries by a jury composed of six leading architects of Great Britain, Holland, France, Germany and the United States, and it is generally admitted that the best choice was made. In the Palace there are two Justice Halls-the Grand Hall of Justice and a smaller one-while two suites of rooms for the service of the Court connected with each of the Halls are disposed on either side. The Great Court, which is, of course, the inner shrine of the Temple of Peace, is a hall about 70 feet long, 40 feet wide and 33 feet high. On one side are three large windows, on the other three galleries. At one end there is a fourth large window; at the other is the dais for the Tribunal. At the end of a corridor lined with beautiful Greek and Italian marble, and behind the base of the tower above-mentioned, is the Small Court, almost exactly half the size of the Great, and having also three galleries. The ceiling of the Great Court has a barrel-vaulting; that of the Small is flat and heavily moulded. The remainder of this floor is occupied by reading rooms, a map room, consultation rooms, and other appropriate accommodation for the parties to a case. On the upper floor, approached by a magnificent staircase projecting into the central courtyard, are the rooms of the Administrative Council and other officials of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and a library capable of containing 200,000 volumes, with a book-lift to the reading rooms below. The centre of the building is occupied by a courtyard 144 feet long and 111 feet wide, with a fountain in the centre where the air to be breathed in the building will be washed before being filtered and otherwise dealt with by the ventilating apparatus. Provision has also been made for Press rooms, telegraph and other offices, and a spacious restaurant. The importance of having ample restaurant accommodation for those who will take part in the deliberations within the Palace is significant, for it has been credibly asserted that "the more tangible success of the first Peace Conference as compared with that of the second was largely due to the facilities afforded the plenipotentiaries of getting to |