on by hunger and despair, had completely | hands, saying simply: "Read it." Speechleft him; he had bought a neat dark suit less with astonishment, she opened the of clothes with his first wages, and had document, and, stumbling through the become so excellent and trustworthy a preamble, saw, to her utter amazement, servant, that his master would not have that the emperor granted permission to parted with him under any consideration. his trusty servant the consul to marry the When the Austrian left Scroda, Achmet lady mentioned in his application. It was came to me; and a more faithful and hard- perhaps the most original situation ever working servant no man was ever blessed imagined. with in the East or elsewhere.

A very little way off lives the consul who watches over the interests of the empire of China in Scodra. He is an amiable, shy little man, whose pasty complexion gives him the appearance of having been parboiled. His official residence is a huge barrack not long erected, about which the poor little consul used to wander like a forlorn ghost. His chief friend and confidant is his dragoman, a worthy native of the town, whose eldest daughter has been educated in Europe. The lonely consul saw this girl, who had returned to her cottage home dressed in European costume, and speaking French with considerable fluency; but for a long while he kept his thoughts to himself. The poor child felt naturally rather like a fish out of water when she returned home, for she had become quite accustomed to European ways; while her mother and two sisters still clung to their loose Turkish trousers and Oriental habits. But the fairy prince was at hand. The little consul saw and loved; but the functionaries of the Chinese empire are not allowed to contract marriages at random, and without the leave of their imperial master; so the lover wisely kept his own counsel, and sent in a formal application to his chiefs for permission to marry a girl with whom he had hardly exchanged two words in his life. In due time an imposing parchment arrived granting the required indulgence, and sealed with an imperial seal of portentous dimensions. The next day the consul placed the precious document and its envelope carefully into an inner pocket, and set off to pay a visit to his dragoman. The object of his affections was not in the room, so he timidly inquired after her. In the East, the head of a house assumes an extremely apologetic attitude towards a guest when speaking of his womankind, and considers a wife rather a thing to be ashamed of; but as his daughter had been educated alla Franca, the dragoman bowed so far to European customs as to summon her. The consul did not waste words—perhaps he could not trust himself to speak; but he pulled the enclosure from his pocket and thrust it into the girl's

The consul broke the silence. "I have my august master's permission: what is your answer?"

Stammering something about consulting her parents, the girl rushed from the room; and her suitor, picking up his precious papers, took his leave.

The rest may be easily imagined. Consuls do not grow on wayside hedges. The family's acceptance was quickly notified to the lover; and he, prompt and decided in action, instantly secured the services of the priest. Every obstacle was overcome; the greatest secrecy was observed; and on the Sunday following this unique proposal, a little procession left the drago man's house soon after sunset. First marched the cavas, gorgeous in his scarlet uniform, carrying a lantern in his hand, and too philosophical to betray any astonishment at the curious customs of the Franks. Then came the consul in his best black broadcloth frock-coat and billy. cock hat, with his bride leaning on his arm. Immediately behind the happy pair came the bride's two sisters, in Albanian dresses, shuffling along in their loose slippers, and with their full silken trousers rustling with aggressive newness, giggling behind their veils at the double impropriety of being out after dark and of seeing their sister leaning on a man's arm just like a Frank. The father and mother of the bride brought up the rear. The priest was waiting for the party; and the consul was married to his dragoman's daughter before more than half-a-dozen people in the city knew that there was ever an engagement between them.

The next day the fact came out; and the gossip and amazement it excited were to be remembered; all the principal Christian merchants deeply regretting that their daughters had not been educated alla Franca, and resolving to rectify the mistake with the least possible delay. These good resolutions soon passed away when the nine days' wonder was over; but my neighbor remains with an amiable wife, and with the satisfaction of having achieved the most unique proposal and wedding that ever entered the mind of man to conceive.

The other consuls are not men of such | courtyard, for fear I should return and startling originality. One of them has a catch him before he could make his skittle alley in his garden; and once a escape. I keep that card as a memorial week throughout the summer, consuls- of the high breeding shown by an official general and pashas, consuls and beys, of the republic of Andorra. vice-consuls and Roman Catholic priests, vie with one another in bowling a heavy ball at the nine skittles at the other end of the alley. It is a capital amusement, as it combines gentle excitement and a certain amount of bodily exercise without the trouble of moving out of the shade of the spreading mulberry-tree. At the other end, an Albanian gardener fags for us, and trundles back the ball with prodigious energy and never-ceasing grins. The representative of Andorra alone does not patronize these gaieties. He is an ill tempered little man, with a hook nose and a heavy moustache, and often profits by the whole European colony being engaged at skittles, to pay one of his unfrequent visits. On returning home one day, I found his visiting-card sticking-out of a crack in my great outer gate. He knew I was out, but would not penetrate into the

For some reason or other, the kingdom of the Morea has a representative here. It is true that there is nothing for him to do; but that is just as well, for all the summer he is a prisoner in his rooms. It is far too hot to go out except just before sunset, and at that hour he dare not stir, for the cattle are then driven in from the pastures outside the city, and he has a mortal terror of cows. His predecessor nearly lost his life by rashly attempting to imitate the English, and take a cold bath directly after leaving his bed. He tried the experiment on one of the hottest days in summer; but the shock was so great that he retired shivering to his bed, and never repeated the attempt. He was quite right; it is a dangerous thing for a man of nearly forty to upset the habits of a lifetime, and use anything to wash in larger than a soap-dish.

AT a recent meeting of the Asiatic Society of Japan (reported in the Japan Weekly Mail of November 19), Mr. Batchelor read a paper on the kamui, or gods of the Ainos of Yezo. He enumerated under thirteen heads these deities as they appear to be arranged in the Aino mind. These are: (1) the chief of all the deities, the possessor of heaven and the maker of worlds and places; (2) the progenitor of the Aino race, and presider over the affairs of men, who is the only human being worshipped by the people; (3) the sun and moon (the stars are not worshipped); (4) the fire-god, worshipped because of its general usefulness in cooking, healing, purifying, etc., -sometimes spoken of as the "messenger or mediator between gods and men; (5) the goddesses who preside over springs, lakes, rivers, and waterfalls, they are worshipped as benefactors of mankind, particularly in alluring fish to ascend and descend the rivers; (6) the sea-gods, two in number, one being good and one evil, the latter is the originator of all storms, and the direct cause of ship wrecks and death from drowning at sea; (7) bears, the most powerful animals known to the Ainos, as well as the most useful, supplying them at once with food and clothing; (8)

the autumn salmon, the largest fish ascending the rivers, it is not worshipped, but the term kamui or deity is applied to it; (9) many birds, some of good, others of El, omen, though not worshipped, are called deities. The same term is applied to beautiful localities, to high mountains, to regions full of bears or rivers full of fish, to large trees, to cool breezes on a warm day, to men of official rank, to devils, evil spirits, and reptiles. When applied to anything good, the term kamui expresses the quality of usefulness, beneficence, divinity; when applied to anything evil, it implies dread, hatefulness, and such like. Applied to animals, it represents the greatest, fiercest, or most useful; to men, it is a mere title of respect. Subsequently, in the course of the discussion, Mr. Batchelor said that the facts of the Aino religion were very simply stated. They had one chief god, and all the others were officers or messengers of this supreme being; there was no lightning or thunder god. These were the facts, but he could not explain them. The Ainos, he said, regarded the sun as a body in which a deity resides, "distinguishing, so to speak, between a body and a soul."

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From The Contemporary Review.
A GLIMPSE OF NORTH AFRICA.

NORTH Africa is an outlying fragment of Europe, which Mohammedan usurpation cut off for a while from its natural surroundings, but which the expansion of the time is now bringing back once more with marvellous rapidity into full communion with its own proper and original continent. Civilization is reclaiming the coast, always European, from a temporary flood of Islam and barbarism. Marocco alone yet bars the way, and Marocco's days are practically numbered.

Tunis, as at Cannes or Hyères, at San Remo or Monte Carlo. They never ripen their rich fruit north of the demarcating Atlas range; only the perpetual care of man has ever enabled them to hold their own precariously against the chilly winds of the Mediterranean seaboard.

deposited seaward by the endless river fed from the lakes and snowy mountains of the far interior. But Marocco, Algeria, Tunis, and in fact Tripoli, consist of a single long subsiding sierra of the Spanish system, artificially divided from the remainder of its mass by the accidental intrusion of the sea at Tangier and Carthage.

The truth is, north Africa is not even by origin a part of the continent to which it has handed on its own much-abused name. The old Africa of the Mauritanian Afri has nothing at all to do with the new Africa of the barbarous negroes. It is, and has always been from the very beginFrom the first moment that a stranger ning, an integral part of Europe, separated lands upon the smiling shore of the Bar- from Spain and Sicily only by the narrow bary States, this sense of familiarity, of seas at Gibraltar and Cape Bon, but dibeing still everywhere in touch with Eu- vided from the great solid block of Negrorope, comes home to him strongly with a land by the wide intervening expanse of shock of surprise, physically and biologi- the sandy desert. Egypt, in spite of its cally, as well as historically and politically; Mediterranean front, is a true portion of indeed, north Africa has always been the dark continent, a mass of Nile mud united to Europe by the Mediterranean, and divided from Africa by the trackless expanse of the great Sahara. The Englishman who treads for the first time an American woodland feels himself at every step in a new world in the presence of an unfamiliar fauna and flora. In spite of the close similarity of climate and conditions, fresh types of life surround him on every side. In north Africa, on the contrary, the case is exactly reversed. In spite of the profound difference in latitude and in temperature, the world of Europe is still with him. Birds and beasts are old friends of childhood. The vegetation is the vegetation of Italy and the Riviera. Olive and lentisk scrub cover the arid hillsides. Vineyards disfigure the sunny slopes of the lesser ranges. Oranges and lemons gleam in every garden. Cane-reeds whisper in the deep-cut ravines of mountain torrents. The clematis that hangs drooping from the trees and hedgerows is the great white clematis of Nice and Men tone. The orchids that grow thick under the shade of the pine woods are the orchids of Provence, of the Apennines, of Sicily. Nothing in nature tells us for a moment we are in Africa, except, perhaps, the fallacious date-palms; and the date-palms (like the Arabs who planted them), are as much intruders at Algiers or

Whether the bed of Sahara was once an immense southern Mediterranean or not, it is at any rate certain that all the existing fauna and flora of the Atlas region — in which I will venture to include also the human inhabitants — entered the country from northward, from the European land area.

The plants and animals are simply the plants and animals of Spain, Sicily, Italy, and Sardinia. The birds are just the larks and thrushes, the ortolans and plovers, that range over the greater part of Europe. The reptiles and insects are equally familiar in form and character. It is only in the extreme south, on the borders of the desert, that true African types, like the panther and ostrich, begin to appear as mere northward stragglers. A few freshwater fish alone link the fauna of the Atlas to the African world; for the most part, Africa in the modern sense begins south of Sahara.

Nevertheless, while in every physical