splendor.  Small, shaggy buffaloes with ferocious eyes, and sometimes a peasant as wild-looking as they, are the only inhabitants of this wilderness.  The machicolated towers of Castel Fusano among its grand stone-pines stand up from the marshes, and farther seaward another castle with a single pine; but they only enhance the surrounding loneliness.  Ostia, the ancient port, which sea and river have both deserted, is now a city of the dead, a Pompeii above ground, whose avenues of tombs lead to streets of human dwellings more desolate still.  It is no longer by Ostia, nor even by the Tiber, that one can reach the sea:  the way was choked by sand and silt seventeen centuries ago, and Trajan caused the canal to be made which bears his name; and this is still the outlet from Rome to the Mediterranean, while the river expires among the pestilential marshes.

[Illustration:  Head of the trajan canal, near ostia.]

SIX MONTHS AMONG CANNIBALS.

[Illustration:  A Halt in the brush.]

Perhaps as good an illustration of the purely absurd (according to civilized notions) as can be imagined is a congregation of cannibals in a missionary church weeping bitterly over the story of Calvary.  Fresh from their revolting feasts upon the flesh of their conquered enemies, these gentle savages weep over the sufferings of One separated from them by race, by distance, by almost every conceivable lack of the conditions for natural sympathy, and by over eighteen hundred years of time!  Surely there must be hope for people who manifest such sensibility, and we may fairly question whether cannibalism be necessarily the sign of the lowest human degradation.  A good deal of light is thrown upon the subject by the writings of the young engineer, Jules Garnier, who was lately charged by the French minister of the interior with a mission of exploration in New Caledonia, the Pacific island discovered by Captain Cook just one hundred years ago, and ceded to the French in 1853.

It is about three hundred and sixty miles from Sydney to New Caledonia, a long, narrow island lying just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and completely surrounded by belts of coral reef crenellated here and there, and forming channels or passes where ships may enter.  Navigation through these channels is, however, exceedingly hazardous in any but calm weather; and it was formerly thought that the island was on this account practically valueless for colonization.  Once inside them, however, vessels may anchor safely anywhere, for there is in effect a continuous roadstead all around the island.  The passage through the narrow pass of Dumbea, just outside of Noumea, affords a striking spectacle.  On each side of the ship is a wall of foam, and the reverberating thunder of the waves dashing and breaking upon the jagged reefs keeps the mind in breathless suspense.