digital history project

Elihu Root Secretary of War

2012-12-21T21:18:00.002-06:00

By L. A. Coolidge

Elihu Root

In July, 1899, President McKinley faced a serious problem. The war with Spain had been fought and won. Within the short period of a year the United States had accepted the responsibility for the present control and future development of Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines. The regular army of the United States under emergency legislation was more than double in size what it had been a few months before. Instead of being located at a few coast fortifications and a few frontier posts, it was scattered in active service over half the globe. The War Department had suddenly developed into the most important of all government departments, with tasks before it far transcending any questions of mere military administration. Almost unconsciously and as a matter of administrative convenience, the War Department had become responsible for the government of the islands which had formed the colonial dependencies of Spain—islands inhabited by millions of people of different races, religions, laws and traditions. It had become responsible for the proper inauguration of a new stage of national development—a task demanding great foresight great executive genius and extraordinary political wisdom. At that moment the Secretary of War resigned, and President McKinley found himself confronted with the necessity of choosing a successor.

The selection was one which could not be lightly made. The President recognized that no ordinary man could meet all the requirements of the position. It may be doubted whether he really expected to find a man who would be fully equal to the many exactions that would be made upon a new war secretary.

The best he could hope, after determining which of the functions of the department would be of greatest immediate importance, was to secure one who could be trusted to meet that pressing requirement. The most urgent question was that of the administration of the new possessions, involving as it did the preservation of order and the substitution of an American system of government for the mediaeval systems which had prevailed for centuries under the rule of Spain. For this task he concluded that he needed first of all a lawyer of preeminent ability. He selected Elihu Root.

Wu Ting-fang

2012-12-21T10:03:00.001-06:00

By L. A. Coolidge

His Excellency Wu Ting-Fang and Madame Wu

LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES, PEKIN, Nov. 30, 1896.

THE HONORABLE RICHARD OLNEY,

Secretary of State,

SIR:—

I have the honor to inform you that Mr. Wu Ting-fang has been appointed Chinese Minister to the United States, and will probably reach his post in April next. He was admitted to the bar in London, practiced law in Hongkong, and for several years has been serving the ex-Viceroy, Li Hung-Chang, at Tientsin. He speaks English perfectly.

Lo Feng-lu has been appointed Minister to England, Italy and Belgium. This gentleman was interpreter to Li Hung-Chang for many years and accompanied him on his recent tour.

Yang-yu, present Chinese Minister to the United States, has been appointed Minister to Russia.

Hwang Tsun-hsien has been appointed Minister to Germany.

I have the honor to be, Sir,

Your obedient servant,

CHARLES DENBY.

Thus simply and formally was Wu Ting-fang, the present representative of the Chinese Government in Washington, introduced to the Government of the United States. There had been Chinese ministers before—all of them men of good ability; all of them men of high standing at home; and all of them so little in touch with the affairs of the country to which they were accredited, that they were regarded popularly as objects of curiosity - it is to be feared sometimes as objects of derision by the unthinking.

Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, New York Society Leader

2012-12-20T22:12:00.000-06:00

By Charles Stokes Wayne

Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish

Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, as the acknowledged leader of the spectacular element of New York society, occupies a uniquely conspicuous position. The little realm over which she rules is but a small part of the great social world; but it is set upon a hill. She and her subjects, engaged apparently in a continuous performance, are ever in the public eye. Their comings and goings, their routes and fetes, their loves and their aversions, their marriages and their divorces, the clothes they wear, the wines they drink, the pranks they play, the jests they utter, all are chronicled in the newspapers. The conservative old Knickerbocker and some of the new, but staid people, sneer at Mrs. Fish's followers, who, in return, only laugh and set about some new device of entertainment to excite the envy, even if contemptuous, of their detractors.

By force of her aggressive independence rather than by tact has Mrs. Fish attained to the sovereignty that is hers. Family and money have been efficacious aids in the process of elevation, but there are women of more distinguished ancestry and possessing greater income—women, too, of far superior diplomatic equipment – who have struggled in vain for the eminence that Mrs. Fish has reached without seeming effort; reached, in fact, while flying in the face of all precedent, in that she truckled to none, spoke her mind freely on all occasions, put no check on her incisive wit, was a law unto herself, dinner and made enemies faster than she made friends.

Tall, dark and florid, with a figure calculated to display to advantage the sumptuous adornment with which she provides it, Mrs. is distinguee rather than beautiful. Mrs. Fish's jewels are among the handsomest in New York. She does not affect a tiara, but wears in her hair a magnificent diamond spray. About her neck circles a collar of pearls three inches deep. Suspended from it in front, by a thread of diamonds four inches long, is a diamond cluster that, viewed across the horseshoe at the Metropolitan Opera House, looks like an enormous single stone. Extending diagonally down her corsage she wears a row of buttons of diamonds set around sapphires, each sapphire as large as one's finger nail. A festoon of diamonds from the left shoulder to the front of the corsage completes the display.

Naturalist John Muir

2012-12-20T20:22:00.003-06:00

John Muir

By Adeline Knapp

A King of Outdoors: I know no other phrase that so aptly designates John Muir, naturalist, explorer and writer; nor do I know any man to whom the phrase is so applicable.

He has been styled "the Californian Thoreau," and Emerson, who knew and liked him, once went so far as to call him "a more wonderful man than Thoreau." It is doubtful, however, whether Emerson himself knew exactly what he meant by that rather impossible expression. The two men are wholly different in essentials of thought, so that it would be hard to institute any real comparison between them.

For twenty-five years John Muir has made out of doors his realm. For more than half this time he lived and wandered alone over the high Sierras, through the Yosemite Valley, and among the glaciers of California and Alaska, studying, sketching, and climbing. At night he sometimes rested luxuriously, wrapped in a half-blanket beside a camp fire; sometimes, when fuel was wanting, and the way too arduous to admit of carrying his piece of blanket, he hollowed for himself a snug nest in the snow. He is no longer a young man, but when last I saw him he was making plans to go again to the North, to explore the four new glaciers discovered last summer by the Harriman Expedition.

"What do you come here for?" two Alaskan Indians once asked him, when they had accompanied him as far, through perilous ways, as he could hire or coax them to go.

"To get knowledge," was his reply.

The Indians grunted; they had no words to express their opinion of this extraordinary lunatic. They turned back and left him to venture alone across the great glacier which now bears his name. So trifling a matter as their desertion could not deter him from his purpose. He built a cabin at the edge of the glacier and there settled to work, and to live for two long years. He made daily trips over that icy region of deep gorges, rugged descents and vast moraines, taking notes and making sketches, until he had obtained the knowledge, and the understanding of knowledge, that he was after. Muir Glacier is the largest glacier discharging into the wonderful Glacier Bay on the Alaskan coast. Being the most accessible one in that region, tourists are allowed to go ashore to climb upon its sheer, icy cliffs, and watch the many icebergs that go tumbling down from it. This is a thrilling experience to the globe trotter, but to dwell there beside the glacier, to study the phenomena, encounter perils, alone and unaided, is an experience that few besides John Muir would court.

Admiral George Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay

2012-12-16T20:54:00.000-06:00

Admiral Dewey on deck of Olympia at
Battle of Manila Bay

by Nick Vulich.

Other than Theodore Roosevelt, Admiral George Dewey was the biggest hero to come out of the Spanish American War.

His victory at the Battle of Manila completely took the world by surprise. All eyes were focused on the fighting in Cuba, when Dewey sailed into Manila Bay and virtually destroyed the Spanish fleet.

At 5:35 on the morning of May 1, 1898, Dewey let out those famous words, "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley!" The U.S. Asiatic Squadron commenced fire. The squadron first fired their starboard guns, then their port guns, while circling around the Spanish fleet.

Within six hours the entire Spanish Fleet under the command of Admiral Montojo was destroyed or captured. Dewey's losses were one dead, six injured. Spanish losses were 161 dead, 210 injured.

After the battle Dewey controlled all of the waters around Manila, but he did not have enough troops to engage the Spanish in a battle on land. Dewey soon received assistance from Filipino insurgent Emilio Aguinaldo and was able to hold off the Spanish until more American troops were sent to help.

Observatory of the Vatican Padre Denza Padre Lais

2012-12-11T16:35:00.001-06:00

By J. A. Zahm

The Leonine Tower

It was not merely because astronomy was a fascinating science that it was studied with ardor by saints and doctors. Aside from the inspiration afforded by the contemplation of the wonders of the starry vault, there were also practical considerations which moved the authorities at Rome to encourage the study of the heavenly bodies. Chief among these were the demands of chronology, and the necessity of accurately regulating the various festivals of the ecclesiastical year. As far back as the time of St. Polycarp, in the second century, there was a dispute as to the time when Easter should be celebrated. The question was taken up by Pope Leo the Great, and, later on, by Nicholas V, Sixtus IV, and Leo X, but without any satisfactory results. Not until 1582 was the controversy settled, when Gregory III promulgated the reformed calendar and made it obligatory throughout the Catholic world.

The building in which the work of the reformation of the calendar was executed forms a portion of the immense pile of buildings in Rome known as the Vatican. The upper portion of the structure, in honor of its projector, Gregory XIII is called the Gregorian tower. Connected with the Vatican library, and, indeed, forming a part of this wing of the papal palace, it rises considerably above the adjacent portions of the edifice. It is a large and massive structure, containing more than a score of spacious apartments, and is, in every way, well adapted for the purposes of astronomical work.

The room in which the calendar was reformed is preserved in essentially the same condition in which it existed in the time of Gregory XIII. It is remarkable not only for its size, but also for the beautiful frescos which adorn the walls and ceiling. These, although several centuries old, are still in an excellent state of preservation, and fully in keeping with the other admirable works of art, which constitute so conspicuous a feature of the magnificent palace of the Vatican.

Alberto Santos Dumont and His Air Ship - The Santos Dumont VI

2012-12-11T08:53:00.000-06:00

By W. L. McAlpin

Santos Dumont’s Sixth Air Ship

In all the years that men have sought to navigate the air, none has accomplished so much as a young Brazilian, Alberta Santos Dumont, whose feats have been the talk of the civilized world for many months. He has come nearer than anyone else to solving the last great problem that the ingenuity of man has set itself to conquer.

Highly trained scientific minds long ago declared that the flying machine was in sight. They have laid down certain scientific principles—as, for instance, that the air ship of the future would be a dirigible balloon; but it remained for a youth born in South America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to fly through the air, propelling his machine in what direction he chose, and mounting or descending at will. His experiments have been a prodigious stride in advance, and the end is not yet. What he has done has been achieved at the expense of much study, many trials many failures, and no small personal risk.

It has often been predicted that we who are now living will see air ships flying through space just as ships sail the sea; but those who have studied the problem most thoroughly, and whose judgment is not warped by visions, have no hope of witnessing any such development. The passenger air ship is as yet only a theoretical possibility.

Lost Gold Mines of the American West

2012-12-10T12:30:00.000-06:00

By Charles Michelson

Examining gold from the Pegleg Mine

On a hilltop in southern California, in sight of the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad, there is gold enough to satisfy the most avaricious man that ever loved the yellow god, ready to the hand of any one who will pick it up. It lies there in lumps, uncovered on the ground, much of it pure enough to be exchanged for coin at the mint. No fierce savages bar the way to it; no legal prohibitions make it inaccessible; it is not on any Indian reservation or other preserve whence any man might be prevented from taking it.

To make it easier for a seeker after this gold, I am at liberty to state that it lies between latitude 32:30 and 34, not further east than 115:30, nor further west than 117. In order that the hunter may identify the place, I can further inform him that the scattered nuggets are on the rounding peak of the highest of three hills, none of which is particularly hard to climb. To show the accessibility of the peak and the presence of the gold on its summit, it is sufficient to say that the treasure place has been visited at different times during the last fifty years by at least four people, one of them a woman. Each brought away as many bits of gold as could be conveniently carried, and told of the great quantity that remains. I am informed that specimens of these nuggets are on exhibition in various mining museums in the West.

It is possible to be still more explicit as to the locality. From the gold strewn hilltop the smoke of the railroad trains can be seen as they pass near Salton station. To reach the spot, one can go west from Fort Yuma on the old Los Angeles trail, which approximately follows the Mexican line, to a point near where it turns north. From this point the way lies a little to the eastward of Warner's Pass. If he is on the right road, the three peaks will loom before him; let him climb the highest one, and if he finds beneath his feet pebbles and cobbles of dark gold, then he may know he has found the lost Pegleg mine, the search for which has cost as many lives as most battles, and suffering and disappointment beyond reckoning.

Trade of train Robbery Train Robbers of the West

2012-12-10T10:09:00.001-06:00

By Charles Michelson

Black Jack, a lone train robber

Train robbery has been a recognized branch of criminal industry for nearly forty years, yet the advance in it has been far less than might be expected of a pursuit that has, at one time or another, attracted the shrewdest, as well as the most daring and enterprising of the criminals of America. The gross receipts by train robbery have averaged not far from one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, and, as not more than twenty thieves ordinarily share this booty, it is not difficult to understand why men follow it in spite of its dangers. The large proportion of the best exponents of the craft are dead or in penitentiaries, but the train robber is a lord in the kingdom of crime. In all the penitentiaries of the West he rules the common run of lawbreakers.

The flashest burglar in stripes, even if he has the red device of murder on his coat of arms, is glad to maneuver to become cell mate to the man who is there because he held up a train. For him the caged thieves and thugs fetch and carry and offer their tribute of tobacco and contraband comforts and to him is offered the captaincy of projected jail breaks. But the industry is appallingly conservative.

In forty years there has been only one conspicuous advance. It has not kept pace with the progress of related arts. For this reason, it has become the most hazardous of crimes—not in the commission, that is astonishingly easy; but in the getting away. In a country cobwebbed with telegraph lines and honeycombed with detective agencies, with their disheartening outposts of stool pigeons and informers, escape is yearly getting more difficult.

London Clubs

2012-12-09T22:28:00.000-06:00

By Alfred Kinnear

The Carlton Club, the greatest of English clubs

No city in all the world has so many clubs as London. Nowhere have the social, the political, and the literary elements of national life been so closely associated with Clubland as in the metropolis of Great Britain. The somber, richly upholstered club houses of today are the outgrowth of the taverns and the coffee houses. They are the lineal descendants of the Mitre and of Jack Straw's Castle, of the pock pits and the gambling hells.

Present day Clubland extends in a zigzag course from the bottom of Waterloo Place along Pall Mall, up St. James' Street, to the middle of Piccadilly. It occupies that quarter of fashionable London through which Don Juan drove on his first arrival in the capital city of England.

Over the stones still rattling, up Pall Mall,

Through crowds and carriages—but waxing thinner

As thunder'd knockers broke the long seal'd spell

Of doors 'gainst duns, and to an early dinner

Admitted a small party, as night fell—

Don Juan, our young diplomatic sinner,

Pursued his path, and drove past some hotels,

St. James' Palace and St. James' "Hells."

Today those broad streets are flanked by stately buildings, mixed with curious, unpretending edifices—the shops of hatters and of wine merchants, of saddlers and silversmiths, of dealers in ancient sporting prints and of one lonely pawnbroker. Even the tawdry, draggle tailed tavern pushes its beery head out between the most exclusive clubs of modern existence—the bait house of the gentleman's gentleman, elbowing its way into line with the jealously guarded home of the aristocracy of England. Tankards of ale at six cents a pint can be bought by the lounger from the street corner beneath the very windows of the Reform Club. The prime minister of England, the most noble the Marquis of Salisbury, as he looks out from the drawing room of his town house in Arlington Street, gazes over into the bleary eye of a common public house. St. James', with all of its aristocratic exclusiveness, has more of the curious anomalies of a true democracy than has Fifth Avenue.

Dynamite Factory at Ardeer Scotland Making Dynamite Nitroglycerin

2012-12-08T20:23:00.000-06:00

By H. J. W. Dam

A Nitroglycerin Hill at Ardeer

The great dynamite factory at Ardeer in Scotland, the largest of its kind, is one of the most picturesque places in the world. Considering the unique and dramatic conditions that prevail among its workers, the neglect of Ardeer hitherto by novelists and dramatists is surprising. This may be due, however, to the fact that it is exceedingly difficult for a stranger to obtain access to the factory, while, once inside, the surroundings are rather trying to sensitive nerves. For six hours a day and two days in succession your life depends, at every moment, upon a thermometer.

Great is the thermometer at Ardeer! Nitroglycerin, a teaspoonful of which would blow you to fragments, surrounds you in hundreds and thousands of gallons. It is making itself in huge tanks, gurgling merrily along open leaden gutters, falling ten feet in brown waterfalls, so to speak, into tanks of soda solution, and bubbling so furiously in other cylinders, through the in-rush of cold air from below, that it seems to be boiling. It is being drawn off from large porcelain taps like ale, poured into boxes, and rattled along tramways. In the form of dynamite, it is being rubbed with great force through brass sieves, jammed into cartridges, and flung into boxes; and in the form of blasting gelatin, it is being torn by metal rods, forced through sausage machines, and cut, wrapped, and tossed into hoppers—all these processes proceeding as rapidly as if it were ordinary olive-oil instead of the deadliest explosive known to man.

English War Correspondents in South Africa Boer War

2012-12-08T00:29:00.004-06:00

By Fred A. McKenzie

Winston Spencer Churchill

Pessimists sometimes tell us that life has become a uniform drab, and that all romance has passed away in the dull routine of modern existence. When they say this, they forget the profession of war-correspondent. Here we have a calling, unknown sixty years ago, that is as full of excitement, uncertainty, and romance as the most greedy adventure seeker could desire. The "special" of a great journal has the world as his field of operations. One month he is witnessing the triumph of modern artillery in a battle between a Chinese and a Japanese fleet; the next, he is tracing the ways of Russian diplomacy in Peking. Soon afterwards, he may be hurrying off to a minor rebellion in South America, or picturing a phase of the struggle between East and West in the Balkans.

He wakes up each morning conscious that before night he may be off on a journey of ten thousand miles. His preparations for long travel are always made. One special artist, Mr. Melton Prior, has two outfits ready at home, which he calls his "hot" and his "cold" outfits. If his editor asks him to take the afternoon boat express to St. Petersburg, and go from there to Nova Zembla, he has only to send a brief wire home, "Please bring cold bag Charing Cross, twelve mid-day," and he is ready. If Timbuktu is his destination, he needs only substitute "hot" for "cold." In the office of one London daily paper a bag is kept always ready for any man who has instantly to go off to the ends of the earth. Such preparations are necessary. Take one instance alone. Last autumn, Mr. H. S. Pearse, the well-known correspondent of the London Daily News, strolled late one evening into his office. "Things are looking more serious in South Africa. You had better get out as soon as possible." "I'll just have time to catch the train for the South-African mail," he replied. He caught his train, and within three weeks was in the battlefields of Natal.

Bluejay Visits the Ghosts

2012-12-07T19:15:00.000-06:00

By George Bird Grinnell.

In a certain village there lived Ioi and her younger brother, Bluejay. One night the ghosts went out to buy a wife. They bought Ioi. The presents that they gave for her were not sent back; they were kept. So at night she was married, and when day came, Ioi was gone from her father's house. For a long time Bluejay did nothing; but at length he felt lonely, and after a year had passed he said, "I am going to look for my elder sister." He started for the country of the ghosts, and on his way he began to ask every one whom he saw, "Where does a person go when he dies?" He asked all the trees, but they could not tell him He asked all the birds, but they could not tell him. At last he asked a Wedge, and the Wedge said, "If you will pay me, I will carry you there." He paid, and the Wedge carried him to the country of the ghosts.

They came to a large village, but no smoke rose from the houses; only from the last house — a big one — they saw smoke rising. Bluejay went into this house, and there he saw his elder sister. She said to him, "Ah, my younger brother, where do you come from? Are you dead?" He answered, "No, I am not dead; the Wedge brought me here on its back."

Skirting the Balkans Stamboul, The City of Mosques

2012-12-01T23:14:00.000-06:00

by Robert Hichens.

Mosque of Suleiman at Constantinople

Stamboul is wonderfully various. Compressed between two seas, it contains sharp, even brutal, contrasts of beauty and ugliness, grandeur and squalor, purity and filth, silence and uproar, the most delicate fascination and a fierceness that is barbaric. It can give you peace or a sword. The sword is sharp and cruel; the peace is profound and exquisite.

Every day early I escaped from the uproar of Pera and sought in Stamboul a place of forgetfulness. There are many such places in the city and on its outskirts: the mosques, the little courts and gardens of historic tombs; the strange and forgotten Byzantine churches, lost in the maze of wooden houses; the cemeteries, vast and melancholy, where the dead sleep in the midst of dust and confusion, guarded by giant cypresses; the lonely and shadowed ways by the walls and the towers ; the poetic glades and the sun-kissed terraces of Seraglio Point.

Santa Sophia stands apart from all other buildings, unique in beauty, with the faint face of the Christ still visible on its wall, Christian in soul, though now for long dedicated to the glory of Allah and of his prophet. I shall not easily forget my disappointment when I stood for the first time in its shadow. I had been on Seraglio Point, and, strolling by the famous royal gate to look at the lovely fountain of Sultan Achmet, I saw an enormous and ugly building, decorated with huge stripes of red paint, towering above me as if fain to obscure the sun. The immensity of it was startling. I asked its name.

"Santa Sophia."

I looked away to the fountain, letting my eyes dwell on its projecting roof and its fretwork of gold, its lustrous blue and green tiles, splendid ironwork, and plaques of gray and brown marble.

Skirting the Balkans In Constantinople Turkey

2012-12-01T19:30:00.000-06:00

by Robert Hichens.

The Grand Bazaar in Constantinople

Constantinople is beautiful and hateful. It fascinates and it repels. And it bewilders—how it bewilders! No other city that I have seen has so confused and distressed me. For days I could not release myself from the obsession of its angry tumult. Much of it seems to be in a perpetual rage, pushing, struggling, fighting, full of ugly determination to do—what? One does not know, one cannot even surmise what it desires, what is its aim, if, indeed, it has any aim. These masses of dark-eyed, suspicious, glittering people thronging its streets, rushing down its alleys, darting out of its houses, calling from its windows, muttering in its dark and noisome corners, gathering in compact, astonishing crowds in its great squares before its mosques, blackening even its waters, amid fierce noises of sirens from its innumerable steamers and yells from its violent boatmen, what is it that they want? Whither are they going in this brutal haste, these Greeks, Corsicans, Corfiotes, Montenegrins, Armenians, Jews, Albanians, Syrians, Egyptians, Arabs, Turks? They have no time or desire to be courteous, to heed anyone but themselves. They push you from the pavement. They elbow you in the road. Upon the two bridges they crush past you, careless if they tread upon you or force you into the mud. If you are in a caique, traveling over the waters of the Golden Horn, they run into you. Caique bangs into caique. The boatmen howl at one another, and somehow pull their craft free. If you are in a carriage, the horses slither round the sharp corners, and you come abruptly face to face with another carriage, dashing on as yours is dashing, carelessly, scornfully, reckless apparently of traffic and of human lives. There seems to be no plan in the tumult, no conception of anything wanted quietly, toward which any one is moving with a definite, simple purpose. The noise is beyond all description. London, even New York, seems to me almost peaceful in comparison with Constantinople. There is no sound of dogs. They are all dead. But even their sickly howling, of which one has heard much, must surely have been overpowered by the uproar one hears to-day,except perhaps in the dead of night.

Skirting the Balkans Athens and Olympia

2012-12-01T17:02:00.001-06:00

by Robert Hichens.

Temple of Zeus at Olympia

There are two ways of going from Athens to Delphi: by sea from the Piraeus to Itea and thence by carriage or by motor. Despite the rough surfaces of the roads and the terrors of dust, I chose the latter; and I was well rewarded. For the drive is a glorious one, though very long and fatiguing, and it enabled me to see a grand monument which many travelers miss—the Lion of Chaeronea, which gazes across a vast plain in a solitary place between Thebes and Delphi.

Leaving Athens early one morning, I followed the Via Sacra, left Eleusis behind me, traversed the Thriasian plain, the heights of Mount Geraneia, and the rich cultivated plain of Boeotia, passed through the village of Kriekouki, and arrived at Thebes. There I halted for an hour. After leaving Thebes, the journey became continually more and more interesting as I drew near to Parnassus: over the plain of Livadia, through the village and khan of Gravia, where one hundred and eighty Greeks fought heroically against three thousand Turks in 1821, over the magnificent Pass of Amblema, across the delightful olive-covered plain of Krissa, and up the mountain to Delphi.

Throughout this wonderful journey, during which I saw country alternately intimate and wild, genial and majestic, and at one point almost savage, I had only one deception: that was on the Pass of Amblema, which rises to more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. Delphi, I felt, ought to be there. Delphi, I believed, must be there, hidden somewhere among the rocks and the fir-woods, where wolves lurk, and where the eagle circles and swoops above peaks which are cold and austere. Only when we began to descend in serpentine curves, when I saw far below me great masses of olive-trees, and, beyond, the shining of the sea, did I realize that I was mistaken, and that Delphi lay far beyond, in a region less tragically wild, more rustic, even more tender.

Skirting the Balkans Environs of Athens

2012-12-01T14:35:00.001-06:00

By Robert Hichens

Temple of Athene, Island of Aegina

Upon the southern slope of the Acropolis, beneath the limestone precipices and the great golden-brown walls above which the Parthenon shows its white summit, are many ruins; among them the Theater of Dionysus and the Odeum of Herodes Atticus, the rich Marathonian who spent much of his money in the beautification of Athens, and who taught rhetoric to two men who eventually became Roman emperors. The Theater of Dionysus, in which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their dramas, is of stone and silver-white marble. Many of the seats are arm-chairs, and are so comfortable that it is no uncommon thing to see weary travelers, who have just come down from the Acropolis, resting in them with almost unsuitable airs of unbridled satisfaction.

It is evident to anyone who examines this great theater carefully that the Greeks considered it important for the body to be at ease while the mind was at work; for not only are the seats perfectly adapted to their purpose, but ample room is given for the feet of the spectators, the distance between each tier, and the tier above it being wide enough to do away with all fear of crowding and inconvenience. The marble arm-chairs were assigned to priests, whose names are carved upon them. In the theater I saw one high arm-chair, like a throne, with lion's feet. This is Roman, and was the seat of a Roman general. The fronts of the seats are pierced with small holes, which allow the rain-water to escape. Below the stage there are some sculptured figures, most of them headless. One which is not is a very striking and powerful, though almost sinister, old man, in a crouching posture. His rather round forehead resembles the very characteristic foreheads of the Montenegrins.

Herodes Atticus restored this theater. Before his time it had been embellished by Lycurgus of Athens, the orator, and disciple of Plato. It is not one of the gloriously placed theaters of the Greeks, but from the upper tiers of seats there is a view across part of the Attic plain to the isolated grove of cypresses where the famous Schliemann is buried, and beyond to gray Hymettus.

Skirting the Balkan Peninsula In and Near Athens Greece

2012-12-01T10:43:00.001-06:00

by Robert Hichens.

Parthenon at Athens

What Greece is like in spring, I do not know, when rains have fallen round Athens and the country is green, when the white dust perhaps does not whirl through Constitution Square and over the garden about the Zappeion, when the intensity of the sun is not fierce on the road to the bare Acropolis, and the guardians of the Parthenon, in their long coats the color of a dervish's hat, do not fall asleep in the patches of shade cast on the hot ground by Doric columns. I was there at the end of the summer, and many said to me, "You should come in spring, when it is green."

Greece must be very different then, but can it be much more beautiful?

Disembark at the Piraeus at dawn, take a carriage, and drive by Phalerum, the bathing-place of the Athenians, to Athens at the end of the summer, and though for just six months no rain has fallen, you will enter a bath of dew. The road is dry and dusty, but there is no wind, and the dust lies still. The atmosphere is marvelously clear, as it is, say, at Ismailia in the early morning. The Hellenes, when they are talking quite naturally, if they speak of Europe, always speak of it as a continent in which Greece is not included. They talk of "going to Europe." They say to the English stranger, "You come to us fresh from Europe." And as you drive toward Athens you understand.

Skirting the Balkan Peninsula Picturesque Dalmatia

2012-11-30T22:02:00.002-06:00

By Robert Hichens

Roman Amphitheater at Pola

Miramar faded across the pale waters of the Adriatic, which lay like a dream at the foot of the hills when Triest seemed sleeping, all its activities stilled at the summons of peace. Beneath its tower the orange-colored sail of a fishing-boat caught the sunlight, and gleamed like some precious fabric, then faded, too, as the ship moved onward to the forgotten region of rocks and islands, of long, gray mountains, of little cities and ancient fortresses, of dim old churches, from whose campanile the medieval voices of bells ring out the angelus to a people still happily primitive, still unashamed to be picturesque. By the way of the sea we journeyed to a capital where no carriages roll through the narrow streets, where there is not a railway-station, where the citizens are content to go on foot about their business, and where three quarters of the blessings of civilization are blessedly unknown. We had still to touch at Pola, in whose great harbor the dull-green war-ships of Austria lay almost in the shadow of the vast Roman amphitheater which has lifted its white walls, touched here and there with gold, above the sea for some sixteen hundred years, curiously graceful despite its gigantic bulk, the home now of grasses and thistles, where twenty thousand spectators used to assemble to take their pleasure.

But when Pola was left behind, the ship soon entered the watery paradise. Miramar, Triest, were forgotten. Dalmatia is a land of forgetting, seems happily far away, cut off by the sea from many banalities, many active annoyances of modern life.

Places that are, or that seem to be, remote often hold a certain melancholy, a tristesse of "old, unhappy, far-off things." But Dalmatia has a serene atmosphere, a cheerful purity, a clean and a cozy gaiety which reach out hands to the traveler, and take him at once into intimacy and the breast of a home. Before entering it the ship coasts along a naked region, in which pale, almost flesh-colored hills are backed by mountains of a ghastly grayness. Flesh-color and steel are almost cruelly blended. No habitations were visible. The sea, protected on our right by lines of islands, was waveless. No birds flew above it; no boats moved on it. We seemed to be creeping down into the ultimate desolation.

Crossing the St Bernard Pass Swiss Alps

2012-11-30T15:05:00.002-06:00

By Ernst Von Hesse-Wartegg

Pictures by Andre Castaigne

Band of gypsies crossing the St. Bernard

In a popular guide-book to Switzerland, it is stated that of all Alpine passes the Great St. Bernard is the least interesting. With this view the traveling public does not seem to agree, for the St. Bernard is crossed every year by more people than any other pass. On an average, twenty thousand annually arrive at the hospice on the summit, and nine tenths of them during the short summer season, from the beginning of July to the end of August, which means over three hundred daily.

Now, the whole district of the St. Bernard for many miles around possesses not one of the vast caravansaries characteristic of the picturesque mountain-tops in Switzerland, indeed, not even a modest inn,—where tourists may find shelter for a few days. Why, then, should these armies of tourists invade the pass every summer, if it really offers little of interest?

To me, who have seen almost all the passes from one end of the Alps to the other, the trip over the Great St. Bernard was most enjoyable. Though the scenery may not be so beautiful as that of the St. Gotthard, for instance, it surpasses by far even that and most of the others in wild grandeur; for nowhere else in the Alps can be found mountains of bolder aspect and greater height. On the west near the French boundary, I need only mention Mont Blanc and Mont Dolent; on the east, the glacier-covered peaks of Mont Velan, and the towering masses of the Grand Combin.

The valley of the river Dranse, which is followed by the traveler from Martigny, in the Rhone valley, to very near the summit, more than eight thousand feet above the sea, is full of romantic beauty and wildness, closed in by snow-covered mountains of fantastic shapes, their steep slopes partly covered with dark pine forests. Nestling on the rocks or sleeping in the valleys there are a few straggling settlements, with heavy-visaged natives, apparently of a different race from the Swiss, and entirely untouched by modern life. They live in tottering, wooden houses of the quaintest shapes, dark brown with age, and with wooden barns on stilts attached to them. Only a few villages, as Orsieres, Liddes, and Bourg St. Pierre on the Swiss side, and St. Remy on the Italian side, have stone houses along their narrow main thoroughfares.

Murray Bay Canada Malbaie Pointe-au-Pic

2012-11-29T20:31:00.000-06:00

By Henry Dwight Sedgwick

Pictures by W. T. Benda

View of Malbaie (Murray Bay) from the bridge

The way to go to Murray Bay is down the St. Lawrence by boat from Quebec. There is, indeed, another way, which most people take, but it should be taken only by impatient travelers who prefer a speedy to a picturesque arrival.

The "bateau" is one of the three paddlewheel boats that ply between Quebec and the Saguenay River. Each bateau has its own character, its own history, its own aliases. A bateau regards shipwreck as a baptism, and thereupon takes a new name and a new coat of paint. The dean of the fleet, at least according to the Murray Bay tradition, is a sort of Methuselah. The story goes that before our Civil War, in the days when the Mississippi ran un-vexed to the gulf, when young Sam Clemens was crying out "Mark Twain," a paddle-wheeler plied between New Orleans and Vicksburg—but this gossip is beneath the dignity of history. The bateau, whatever its dubious past may have been, leaves the wharf at Quebec at eight o'clock in the morning and arrives at Murray Bay at half-past one. This legend, which I take from the Richelieu and Ontario time-table, is less trustworthy than the other. Let us come to facts. At some time or other the bateau leaves Quebec; it passes the Ile d'Orleans, the Falls of Montmorency, and about sixty miles of beautiful shore; and after what, if the day be fine, is a most delightful sail, draws near to Bay St. Paul. This arrival is the prologue to Murray Bay. The bateau gyrates, heaves, trembles, and sidles toward the dock. Shouts from the bateau, answering shouts from the dock; the bateau hesitates, shivers, and like a tired cow comes diffidently up alongside. The passengers crowd to the landward rail; the population of Bay St. Paul crowds to the edge of the quay. A small coil of rope is hurled through the air from the bateau; it is caught by the population of Bay St. Paul; attached to the rope is the boat's hawser, which is made fast to a pile. Friends exchange joyous greetings; the charretiers, whose carriages and carts in long sequence stretch the length of the causeway from the dock to the shore, wait politely for customers.

New York Newsboy Newspaper Boys in the 1800's

2012-11-29T16:52:00.001-06:00

By Jacob A. Riis

Newsboys eyeing a newsgirl

The newsboys of New York were having their Christmas dinner, and I was bidden to the feast. I stood at the door and saw them file in, seven hundred strong, to take their places at the long tables. Last of all came the little shavers, brimful of mischief waiting to break out. The superintendent pulled my sleeve when he set eyes upon them.

"Watch out now," he said; "they’ll be up to something."

I saw them eye the lay-out as they went down the line, where turkey and mince-pie stood waiting, and make quick, stealthy passes with their hands, but nothing happened until they had taken their seats. Then up went eight grimy fists, and eight aggrieved voices piped out:

"Mister, I ain't got no pie!"

The superintendent chuckled.

"How is that?" he said. "No pie? There was one; I put it there myself, at every plate. Why, what is that?" And he patted each of the little rascals in the region of the bread-basket, where something stuck out in a lump inside the shirt.

"Me pie," was the unabashed reply. "I was afeard it 'u'd get stole on me." There was just the ghost of a wink.

"Well," laughed the superintendent, "we’ll forget it. It is Christmas. Go ahead, boys, with your dinner." And they fell to.

Mount Vernon Ladies Association Restoration of Mount Vernon

2012-11-25T14:32:00.000-06:00

By Abby G. Baker

Mount Vernon, from the lawn behind the mansion

Fifty-two years ago a Southern woman—a young woman of little wealth or influence, and so averse to publicity that she shielded herself under an assumed name—took in hand the task of saving the home of the Father of His Country, the immortal Washington, from the wreck and ruin into which it was rapidly falling. Five years later, through her efforts, an organization representing all the women of the Union succeeded in purchasing Mount Vernon. The restoration of the estate to its present sightly condition has been a work of almost half a century—a work which is still going on. The achievement of this endeavor is an interesting chapter of history.

Standing among the Virginia hills, sixteen miles south of the national capital, Mount Vernon commands a scene of unsurpassed loveliness. At its foot flows the silver Potomac, beyond lie the sun-dyed shores of Maryland, while to the west extends the picturesque old farming country of Fairfax County. A wide, sloping lawn stretches east of the mansion; at its termination, neatly enclosed by a low stone wall and picket fence, begins the wooded deer-park. The trees of the park have been trimmed so, as to disclose a magnificent river vista, with the ivy-covered walls of, that weather-beaten Colonial bulwark, Fort Washington, in the distance.

Lambs Club of New York City

2012-11-24T22:37:00.000-06:00

By Clay Meredith Greene

Lambs Club quarters at 848 Broadway

During the Christmas week of 1874 a little coterie of souls congenial and temperaments analogous foregathered at the Delmonico's of the time, to dispatch a midnight repast at the bidding of George H. McLean. Long after the streets had grown silent under the mantle of an incipient dawn, the feasters tarried, and thought not of sleep.

There is an indefinable something, almost akin to magic, which breeds rebellion against the edicts of the hours in such a gathering. The host eloquently voiced a deep regret that the night and its entertainment must have their ending; that such a company, where actor and author, manager and banker, painter and poet, could sit in complete social harmony, must soon tread its several' pathways in directions that had no common trend, to vanish among the shadows of the unknown future.

But before he had finished, fruitful suggestion deferred the dissolution of the gathering. It was pointed out that future regrets of the same nature might be permanently avoided by organization. This was at once affected, and Henry J. Montague—at that time leading man of Wallack's Theater—was chosen as presiding officer. Being asked to name the new organization, Mr. Montague called it "The Lambs" after a dining-club in London of which he was a member; and it was decided that the bantling should preserve the same customs and purposes as its parent.

At a subsequent meeting, held early in the January of 1876, the following officers were elected: Shepherd, Henry J. Montague; Boy, Harry Beckett; Corresponding Secretary, George H. McLean; Treasurer, John E. I. Granger; Recording Secretary, Arthur Wallack.

Mrs. Clarence Mackay (Miss Katherine Duer)

2012-11-24T21:59:00.000-06:00

By R. H. Titherington

Mrs. Clarence Mackay

An interesting chapter of the modern history of New York society is that which records the development of a district of fine country estates on Long Island, a few miles beyond the eastern boundary of the metropolis. Here, on the great sandy plain that forms the center of the island, and among the wooded hills that fringe its northern shore, a colony —or, rather, several more or less distinct colonies—of rich New Yorkers have made their summer homes. Indeed, the social life of the region may be said to last all the year round. Its calendar of amusements includes Christmas festivities, spring and autumn riding with the Meadowbrook hounds, and the great automobile road race in October, as well as the summer round of polo, tennis, and golf tournaments ashore and yachting on the Sound.

A very few years ago the Meadowbrook Club was the social headquarters of these Long Island colonists. To-day the drift is further afield. The wide Hempstead plain, with its delectable possibilities of subdivision into choice suburban building lots, is being invaded by the trolley-car and the real estate speculator. Fashion is being driven northward and eastward, into the hills that overlook the Sound, where it is excluding all vulgar intruders by entrenching itself in the ownership of great tracts of land. Here, within a few miles' radius, are a series of estates of ducal proportions—great parks surrounding Colonial mansions or French châteaux, elaborately equipped farms for blooded stock, and ample game preserves. They recall the mansions of the Lord of Burleigh and his neighbors "ancient homes of lord and lady, built for pleasure and for state." On the list of land-owners are the names of Vanderbilt, Gould, Morgan, Whitney, and many others almost equally synonymous with millions. The whole region seems likely to grow into a suburban playground for the wealthiest class of New Yorkers—a district of "parks and ordered gardens great" that might be compared to the so-called Dukeries in England.