the agricultural laborers, with the lands about them all taken up and so unsalable, and with a poor law to provide for them under all the calamities of life, whether brought about by mishap or by their own wilful vice, have but little motive, even if they had the opportunity, for saving."

REMINISCENCES OF THE ORIENT

"MANY a traveller will remember, no doubt, a sudden thrill on awakening suddenly in the midst of his first night on Eastern soil-waking as it were from dream into dream. For there came a voice, solitary, sweet, sonorous, floating from on high through the moonlight stillness, the voice of the blind Muezzeen, singing the Ulah or first call to prayer. And at the sound, many a white figure would move silently on the low roofs, and not merely, like the palms and cypresses around, bow his head, but prostrate, and bend his knees. And the sounds went and came: 'God is good! God is great! Prayer is better than sleep! There is no God, but God, and Mahomet is his prophet! La elah il Allah! Mahomet raçoul Allah! He giveth life and he dieth not! O thou bountiful! Thy mercy ceaseth not! My sins are great! Greater is thy mercy! I extol thy perfections!' And then the cry would be taken up and prolonged by other Muezzeens, and from the north and the south, the east and the west, came floating on the morning stillness this pious invitation to prayer, this proclamation to all the world of the embodiment of the Moslem creed: "There is no God, but God, and Mahomet is his prophet.""

Who that has ever been in the East can for an instant lose the impression of that first moment, so vividly portrayed in the above sketch? It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of Eastern life, and one that is repeated daily,

again and again, in every Turkish city. A creed so simple and yet so bold in its utterance! Its very strength lies in its simplicity; and the millions who have lived and died in the profession of its faith have carried its tenets triumphantly from the shores of the Atlantic to the great wall of China and the heart of further India.

Reminiscences of the East: of the land of the fig-tree and olive, the vine and the pomegranate, the myrtle and rose, the musk and the ottar of Araby the Blest, and the delicious notes of nightingales warbling as though intoxicated with their own sweet song. What images rise up before me and return to my memory! Out of all this luxuriance, what shall I select as my theme?

Shall I tell you of that wondrous city, "alone of all the cities of the world, standing on two continents," massed on its seven hills, and rising tier on tier of swelling domes and burnished minarets, each one a centre of refulgent light, yet so toned down and softened under the light of a sky known in no other clime than in the East, so circled round by masses of dark verdure which cluster round the sacred edifices, that the eye finds no inharmonious point, but wanders with recurring delight over the whole?

Or shall I tell you of the great war between the crescent and the cross, when, lying almost within sound of the great guns whose iron hail was crashing upon the doomed city of Sevastopol, we watched the transports sailing by, carrying reinforcements to the allied troops or bringing to the city the thousands of unhappy wretches, gashed and maimed, battered out of the semblance of humanity, or who, stricken down by the insidious attack of disease, had been brought there to linger a while and die?

Or, once more, shall I tell you of the land itself, its products and resources, the people and their ways, their lives and occupations, their various methods of gaining their daily bread?

It has seemed to me that perhaps this last was the more appropriate. And yet I almost despair of giving you an adequate idea of a country and a people where everything is done in a manner so exactly opposite to our own. The distinction they make between the religious and the moral character is very singular. With us there can be no religion without morality; but with them the religious has nothing to do with the moral character. The pirate committing murder on the high seas, and taken red-handed, refuses to eat meat on Friday and thus imperil his soul, even while his hands are yet wet with his brother's blood. The robber stripes you to the skin, takes everything you possess, maltreats and threatens you with death, and then calmly ejaculates as he leaves you, 'May God save you, my lamb, if in danger! I give you into His keeping.'

No one is ever supposed to be the less covetous, the less a cheat, a gambler, a liar, a defrauder, a robber, a murderer, because he prays. Nothing is further from his own thoughts or the thoughts of the bystanders, than that his prayers should exert any transforming influence upon his own character. And why should they? For when they have business to transact with their neighbors on temporal matters, they use a language which all can understand, but whenever they have any business with their Maker about their eternal interests, it is always done in a language they do not understand. Outwardly pious and sincere, inwardly they are whited sepulchres and full of dead men's bones. The

traveler in the highway, the artisan in his shop, the merchant in the bazaar, the lounger in the café, when the hour for prayer arrives, hastens to spread his little carpet on the ground and goes through the required formula. But he is keenly alive all the time to whatever is going on about him, and when his pious ejaculations are ended, will be found to have lost not an iota of anything that may have been said during his temporary fit of piety. If a professional storyteller has been amusing the crowd with some entertaining tale while he was praying, he will be found not to have lost the point of the story, or the pith of any joke.

The writer of the article entitled "Baron Hirsch's Railway in Turkey," tells the following story: A peasant one day sent in all haste for an American missionary to come and pray for him. Not a little surprised at the unusual request, the missionary went, and the peasant remarked, "Your prayers are more efficacious than those of our priests." The missionary was somewhat surprised at this, and after modestly murmuring something concerning faith, was preparing to comply with the request, when the man continued, "I have taken a ticket in the Vienna lottery. If I win through your prayers, you shall have one-half."

It was apparently a perfectly natural thing, this copartnership of earth and heaven, and the peasant could see no impropriety in invoking the prayers of those he considered more potent than he. He put up the money, the missionary furnished the prayers, and they went divvys on the result. What harm?

But to turn from the moral side to the customs of everyday life. The barber, for example, pushes the razor from him; ours draws it to him. The carpenter draws the saw