America, recalling New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, whose very life blood flows through arteries of steel rails and bridges so strangely out of place here; and in a flash it came to me-right here is the gateway of the old wide, wide world-Bagdad.

Down the narrow streets of the old city we rode, the people stopping to look at us with as much interest as an American boy watches a circus parade-not gladly or sadly-a stolid ox-like stare in return to my salaams. Nor did they acknowledge my hailing signal or genial "Hello Bill."

Every city has its own peculiar atmosphere: London has its fog; Paris its mists from the Seine; New York its scent of the garbage fleet and Fulton Market; Chicago, its packing house flavor. Bagdad, however, has each of these in succession and then a pet preparation all its own. The fuel used in preparing the evening meal, as we arrived, was a combination of mud and cow manure and it certainly registered a new experience for our olfactory organs.

And now over a pontoon bridge across the Tigris, separating the older from the newer city, the motor honk-honked as it charged into the crowds. How Jeff ever avoided making a "hit" was a puzzle to me.

"If you try to dodge 'em, you hit 'em. They think backwards," he explained.

They certainly were entitled to consider themselves fixtures, for had not their people been there for fifty centuries?

Bagdad, becoming a strategical point during the war, had experienced a real estate boom. It had been occupied by the British Army, and later visited by numerous rich oil prospectors. These people seemed to be expecting showers of gold-judging from the

fifty thousand tons of Pittsburg pipe delivered on the oil fields—and yet I had not seen a gold coin in eight thousand miles! Some of the shops appeared neglected, decayed-like a mining town in the West "gone broke." Galvanized iron roofing-anything to provide protection against the sun and rain-had been improvised into buildings and shops.

To me the Bagdad of the long ago compared with the present desolate, drab shambles now called Bagdad, where bats and goats, donkeys and Arabs share and dispute the shelter of the ruins of the palaces whose pristine grandeur had no rival in all history, and where it is recorded once took place a state funeral in which marched eight hundred thousand men and sixty-five thousand women, to say nothing of the millions of spectators-this according to the authentic source of Gibbons' Rome-was a sad reminder of what time's changes had accomplished. And right here, to help you visualize the "change and decay" of which the hymnist wrote, even in our metropolis of New York on Armistice Day, the parade on Fifth Avenue did not approach in size that throng which marched past the imperial palaces, gorgeous and glorious beyond our imagination, to say nothing of the hanging gardens and parks, before which the sky scrapers of New York and Central Park would pale into insignificance.

It is a stupendous tragedy, comparable with one we all must have seen on a tiny scale at some timean abandoned, deserted crumbling old farm homestead, once the pride of the community, the home of happy mortals, but now a refuge for stray tramps and curious denizens of the wilderness.

View of Bagdad from Bab-al-muadhdham. Fifty centuries look down upon us from the domes and minarets of this old, old town, whose desolate drab shambles and bat-infested ruins are all that now remain of what, when history was young, were imperial palacesgorgeous and glorious beyond the wildest dreams of modern imagination

Inside the tiny shops Jewish merchants sat, their legs crossed, placidly awaiting customers, just as they were wont to do in the age-old times. Everywhere I looked the people appeared grim and silent, but not unhappy. The beggar women, with mutilated faces, clasping in their arms babes whose sore eyes were covered with flies, was a gruesome sight and a reminder of the prevailing poverty of the Orient.

It was all so different from my conception of the land of Ur.