Eyes accustomed to the sight of still and running waters framed in green find something peculiarly desolate in the lakes and rivers of the Holy Land, and marvel that such saddening overflow from Hermon and Lebanon can have inspired the Psalmist with his raptures. Even the "bowery Jordan," as Disraeli called it, whose verdant banks are, to the very threshold of its bitter grave, in startling contrast with the arid barrenness of the smitten plain of Jericho, rushes in muddy frenzy through a parched land that cries in vain for some alleviation of its thirst. The glacial Abana, which comes tumbling from the mountain snows to be swallowed up in the streets of fanatical Damascus, flows, like some other rivers of Syria, through smiling scenes amid which grumbling camels pasture in their thousands; but Syria is a happier land than Palestine, and its face wears a less repulsive expression even in the time of drought.

The two lakes in all that region which irresistibly call for contrast are obviously Galilee and the Dead Sea. Their appearance to-day bears out their story in the past. Galilee owes little of its witching beauty to its setting. True, there is forbidding grandeur in the clear-cut purple and ochre mountains that tower around in an atmosphere peculiarly conductive to the predominance of the middle distance. There is picturesqueness in the white domes of the religious houses at Tiberias, and there is welcome interruption of the oval coastline in the little splashes of ruin at Capernaum and elsewhere. Nor can the frequent presence of half-naked Bedouin, whose smooth black buffaloes wallow luxuriously in the shallows while their masters ply the cast-net or sit on their haunches among the reeds, smoking the kief pipe and dreaming of

me

Paradise, fail to provide a touch of life in the picture. Yet the haunting glory of Galilee is in its story. Shorn of its wondrous legend, it would be no more than any other gleam of water resting the eye in the midst of the desert. There is something joyous about its image from end to end. In no light, neither in sun nor moon nor the thousand effects between, does it breathe the silent tragedy of the Dead Sea, the most sinister sheet of water I ever looked upon. Long before I had stood upon its pebbly brink it had seemed to that Lake Pontchartrain--Pontchartrain which lies outside New Orleans, brooding with memories of the vanished glories of loyal Frenchmen and the ruined gentlemen of the Confederate States who came after themwas the saddest water of my travels east and west. Yet as I drew rein beside the Dead Sea, having ridden over from Jericho before the sun was up, the memory of Pontchartrain, which came all unbidden to my mind, seemed hilarious by comparison with the deathly stillness that lay before me, this most unnatural of lakes wherein no fish can live, no ephemeral insect come to being. Nor was a bathe in its water, though welcome after so hot a ride over the plain, unattended by abnormal experiences in harmony with this morbid mere. The swimmer loses control of his limbs. His head and body float at angles impossible in ordinary waters, fresh or salt The brine is so dense that it must at all costs be kept from the eyes, and is even said to be injurious to the ears. The body, on emerging from this strange brew, dries rapidly, but retains a coating of salt crystals that sparkle like frost. About this dreadful sea there is none of the sense of holy calm and infinite peace which invests the dancing waters of

Gennesareth, with its bird-life, its shoals of fishes splashing in every shallow, and its merry fishermen, who in calm or storm navigate its surface in craft stout enough to live through even those sudden squalls, one of which inspired surely the most majestic mandate ever uttered to the raging elements: "Peace, be still!"

There is no village like Tiberias to relieve the monotony of the Dead Sea shore, and that fruitless lake, with its surface a thousand feet or more below the Mediterranean, and its bed another thousand, touches the lowest depths, a very slough of despond. It is undeniable that Tiberias as we know it to-day, is but a sorry hamlet, from which all its former glory is departed, a dirty agglomeration of hovels, with inhabitants in keeping, and with the sweet Casa Nova of the Franciscans as the one sympathetic spot amid all its squalor. Yet, though its palaces and synagogues be no more, Tiberias lends a character to the sacred lake which is wholly missing from the other and final goal of the Jordan, which runs between them in a turgid torrent, beset with shoals, disappointing to the fisherman, yet ever the lodestar of a million pilgrims of a dozen Eastern churches.

The Jordan and Abana may be famed in history, but there is a smaller stream running into the plain of Jericho, between that place and Jerusalem, which is more lovable than either. It is by common consent regarded as Eli

jah's brook Cherith, "which is before Jordan," but better known locally by the Syrian name of Wady Kelt. By its crystal pools, which gleam under overhanging rocks hidden in blossom that scents the homes of songbirds, happy schoolboys from Jerusalem camp out in their holidays; and there also I have gone to bathe and fish and rest after the glare and dust of riding in the plain. It carves its winding way, this pretty stream, through towering mountains, and can be reached only by a bridle track, which no doubt accounts for the otherwise surprising fact that its beauties are unknown to the majority of American tourists, who rarely leave Jerusalem for Jericho save in ve hicles, and are therefore debarred from enjoying a glimpse of what seemed to me the most attractive water in all that thirsty land. There is the glamor of legend about the Jordan, and there is strength and beauty of a kind in the Abana; while even the Dog River, where it debouches, north of Beyrout, into the Mediterranean, rushing through the shadow of the rocks that bear the cuneiform inscriptions of dead dynasties, is not without a picturesqueness of its own. Yet not one of these greater streams has the quiet beauty of Cherith, which moreover has fonder memories than any other for the angler, since alone among them all it gives him sport with the fly-his highest test of water all the world over. F. G. Aflalo.

The Outlook.

is a professor of American history in the University of Michigan, the latter rather than the former is naturally expected, but when the bristling dates and careful statistics do not appear, one soon discovers that the apparent carelessness is the ease of intimacy. By his title Professor Paxson means the last dividing line between the white man and the red, the last wave mark of the rising tide of civilization, and his happy mastery of his subject enables his readers to grasp it far more effectually than by the method of supplying them with dates and incidents and leaving them to shape their own vision of the progress of settlement as whole. His use of the geographical factor is very skilful, and the elementary school-teacher who seizes on the hints afforded in this work will enliven his classes and may even hope to rouse his pupils to that ceaseless movement in human affairs, the perception of which so vivifies history. To the general reader, this compact, easily comprehensible account of the changes by which the West and the East have been made one will be welcome. Macmillan Company.

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The

Mrs. Anna Chapin Ray's "Over the Quicksands," is her first essay in a new field far larger than the pleasant pastures into which she has hitherto led her readers. The book traces

the story of a deliberate and prolonged sin, concealed from the world and from the two children whom it most concerned. until it tem

porarily blighted their lives. It is hardly possible to speak more definitely without diminishing the reader's interest, but Mrs. Ray has managed this more serious plot quite as well as her gay comedies of maidens choosing and lovers wooing and in her studies of slightly warped but sound characters. Also she has done her work quite without the queer self-consciousness sometimes exhibited by a writer attempting a new style and in a manner equally remote from timidity and from awkwardness. The two sinners are intentionally made the most striking figures of the tale, and the strong contrast between their behavior is a daring experiment on the reader's credulity, but the author's success justi

fies her choice of it. If she should work only for older readers in future they will gain an entertainer well skilled in her art and holding her pen and her mind in perfect control. She has far surpassed the model which she herself set up in early days. Her Teddy is a trifling ghost beside the successful author of many tales from whom many more ought to come. Little, Brown & Co.

"Religion in the Making," by Professor Samuel G. Smith of the Uni

versity of Minnesota, had a quaint origin, being the result of his teaching sociology to upper classmen in the University, and teaching the Bible to special classes in the People's Church, St. Paul. After some years of this work. it struck him that sociology might be an excellent instrument for the interpretation of the Bible, and that the Bible might be a rich source of sociological material. Having pursued the conjoined study of the two subjects for some two years with select companies of students, he offered work in Biblical sociology to his university classes, and after four years of testing it, has shaped part of his work into this

volume, which will be followed by a second on the domestic, political and industrial life of the Hebrews. The first six chapters of the present work exhibit some of the aspects of the religious problem, define sociology, and the social value of religion, rehearse the current scientific views of the Bible, describe the scenes of its chief incidents and the more important of the races figuring in it. Then, after explaining how the idea of God has developed, Professor Smith writes on the sacred persons, places, services, and objects connected with the religion of the Hebrews, their sacred days and their conception of sanctity and draws a few conclusions. The assistance which a reader of the Bible, be his aim what it will, may draw from the work is incalculable. Even if he be fairly well read in Spencer, Miller and Renan. Barth, and Lotze, Professor Smith's swift review of the subject and his comments will renew interest in it, and if he bring an untaught mind to the reading he will feel that he has found a new Bible. The Macmillan Company.

The day is long past when one could accuse of a desire for notoriety the woman whose books revealed a wide acquaintance with the possibilities of human depravity, and when one encounters a story in which a clever writer bends all her talent and knowledge of the world to showing that honor, pride, ambition, gratitude, good feeling, duty and personal fastidiousness are equally impotent to protect a man from an evil woman, provided only that she be the embodiment of some "art," one finds the story commonplace. No elaboration will give novelty to the old sophistries-the only opportunity for originality lies in devising the steps by which a man of even moderate shrewdness may be led to accepting them. In her "Tower of Ivory," Mrs. Gertrude Atherton dis

plays much ingenuity in such devices. Her hero, the younger brother of an impoverished peer, is represented as a man of ability, though giving no proof of it except the nice conduct of a wardrobe including 284 neckties, some capacity for courteous insolence, and that well-worn trait, scorn of his creditors. But he has no safeguards whatever against a wonderful singer of Wagner's music, and her frank and detailed acknowledgment of thirteen years of life of deepest shame does not hinder him from sacrificing every human being belonging to him to his passion for her. Mrs. Atherton is skilful enough, and her description of a Wagnerian performance clever enough, to produce a temporary aberration during which the reader finds him less contemptible than he really is. She herself has no delusions about him though she seems persuaded that the great singer, had she not committed the unpardonable sin of disloyalty to art, would have been an ideal woman. The Macmillan Company.

Professor James L. Kellogg of Williams College opens his valuable "Shell Fish Industries," the new volume in the American Nature Series, with a vigorous exposition of the wanton wastefulness of the American, but it is extremely doubtful if he expected it to produce the slightest effect upon any guilty reader. The colonial American wasted as much of every thing as his tools and facilities for carriage permitted, and the nineteenth century immigrants took advantage of new inventions, the formation of the country and increased ease of transportation to make the proceedings of their predecessors seem tame and spiritless. The destruction of a continent in a few centuries is a possibility with such citizens. After enumerating such gleams of hope as he perceives in the prospect, Professor Kellogg addresses himself to