that undertaking would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.

But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide for ever by the way. Although I have Whitaker's Almanack

before me all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up under Cleopatra's Needle.

I turn over the last page of "British India' in my Almanack. We are not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed "Other British Possessions in the East." Here, if one wants incitement towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is matter to his hand. The places one may read of are-Aden, Socotra, Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my book comes "The Dominion of Canada," with its territory "about as large as Europe"! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered

and once held India. After Canada come "Other American Possessions," including British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the "island of Demerara," there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.

After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern hemisphere," British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow " British Possessions in the West Indies," small in mileage, great in fertility and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern Roumelia. The "British Possessions in Africa" are considerably larger than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The territories owned in

the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.

By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures! How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest realm over

which man ever ruled. Civis Romanus sum! I will sleep. I will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities, and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting consciousness-Civis Romanus sum!