faith in something so far removed from reality as the Bolshevist doctrine?

It is answered: 'No! All the others who believed were not insane.' But it is a question whether in their case personal desire for power has not played a rôle, and whether Lenin did not become greater than they in the eyes of the people because he was free from this, because he believed wholly and fully without egoistic side-motives, just as only an insane person could believe.

In any event there is nothing peculiar in the fact that under the circumstances only an insane man could have won power over the Russian ple and become their symbol.

peo

Much has been said of the mission of Russia-about Holy Russia as the redeemer of mankind. Perhaps Russia now, at this moment, is fulfilling this mission. Europe was a long way on the

road to Bolshevism during the years after the war. No one knows how far it would have gone, had not the Russian example acted as a deterrent. There was an unintentional, but not a less effective, warning in the Russian terror and famine. A new faith and a new God were needed elsewhere quite as badly as in Russia. But, as has happened so often before in history, the new faith revealed itself as a new illusion and the new God as a man-destroying monster. Europe woke up and took warning.

The whirl of death continues. We chase after illusions and follow those who can keep them alive. For the moment the worst illusion is called 'Reparations.' If Lenin's insanity ever becomes proved, will not this fact arouse the masses from their delusion and teach them to choose their leaders according to new principles?

TOWARD noon the resistance of the Turks collapsed. They fled east and north, and the advanced troops of the British force on the road from Jaffa pressed forward with an eagerness which was noteworthy. It may have been due to expectation. We had come far, and now the goal was close at hand. The Syrian monk at Enab had told us that El Kubeibeh- the valley where war's intrusion seemed an outrage, so peaceful was the aspect of its sycamores and cypresses and the

broad sheet of precious water among those barren hills - once had been called Emmaus, and we knew it was only three-score furlongs distant from the City, a Sunday morning's walk.

After crossing the bottom of a deep ravine, the road skirted its southern edge and climbed in zigzags to a rocky plateau. The word passed round that this was the last stage; yet even when that long ascent had been accomplished, no city could be seen, and already the short winter day was drawing in.

At a bend, where the ravine turned north and the road ran in an easterly direction, were two houses; one was in ruins. Beyond them the ground sloped downward to another valley into which we could not see. To our right, in the south, a storm was brewing: the mountain tops were blotted out by leaden clouds, beneath which the landscape seemed convulsed, and from that seething caldron white mists crept along the hidden valley, while wisps of fleecy vapor bore down on the plateau where we stood like riders of the sky.

There were several; no doubt 'the keys of all the creeds' were in that bunch. They had been offered to two private soldiers, who had refused to have anything to do with them; their duties as cooks were far too pressing and began only when camp was reached. Dalliance on the road for such as these would have been criminal; others might traffic with key-bearing Mayors; their business was to serve hungry, exacting comrades, and shout out at the earliest moment possible the glad tidings 'Dinners Up!'

An Artillery Major had also been approached, but with the same result. He was a solicitor in private life, and the effect of artillery training on his legal mind had been to increase its cautiousness. Those keys were not for him, he felt that instinctively; his ambition was a D.S.O.; whereas the keys

'Just over five thousand yards to the left-hand tower,' was the answer.

The hill in question was the Mount of Olives, the enclosure the Garden of Gethsemane, below which the still invisible city lay, not more than one mile off.

'Remember that no one is to go inside the walls. The Bull will be furious if anything of that kind happens.' This last injunction given, the General went back in his car to announce to Headquarters and the world that Jerusalem had fallen.

Meanwhile, a small crowd had assembled in and around the ruined house; it consisted of signalers establishing telephonic communication, a German doctor, two Americans, and three Turks. One of the Turks was the Mayor of the Holy City, and he had brought with him the keys as a token of surrender. They were large keys and quite ordinary, except that they were very clean and shone like silver.

aspire to a K.C.B. or even higher. But when he thought of the local press at home, in Yorkshire, of a whole column devoted to his doughty deeds, headed 'A Tyke Takes Temple,' with a photograph of himself and three heathen Turks inset (one of the Americans had brought a camera), he was sorely tempted.

The keys were still undisposed of when the senior General called up on the telephone. He wanted further details before sending off a telegram; but on being told of what had transpired since he left, his voice became eager, anxious, and imperative.

"The Mayor with the keys? Has he still got them? . . . Keep him till I come; on no account let him go away or give them to anybody else. I will receive them!'

Preparations for the ceremony were made at once: a few women and children had by this time assembled, bringing flowers, and a camera was got into position.

If Robert the Bruce had achieved his heart's desire and been able to fulfill his vow, he might have ridden by that road after lying overnight at Enab. But he would not have stopped one moment by the wayside in his impatience; the keys would have been received by Douglas, the faithful servant of his King. Godfrey of Bouillon, too, — ‘a quiet, pious, hard-fighting knight, who was chosen to rule in Jerusalem because he had no dangerous qualities and no obvious defects,'

would have left either to Bohemund or Baldwin what to him would have seemed an empty show.

But he, of course, was not successful, only the hero of a legend and some songs. The man who actually received the keys was neither King nor Pilgrim, though in some ways a Crusader; his satisfaction was unbounded as he stood, the observed of all observers, - and there were at least a dozen present, by the roadside with the ruin as a background. Ruins and conquerors go well together.

Click went the camera, and the General smiled approval; at least there was a record of this historical event with himself the central figure.

In regard to publicity the Solicitor and the General had much in common; but naturally the latter's outlook on affairs was wider. No local press for him; he aimed at nothing less than the front page of a Sunday illustrated paper some weekly compendium of sport, vulgarity, follies, crimes, and lies, with an occasional contribution from a Cabinet Minister. This is an age of doubt; people believe little of what they read, but still retain a touching faith in photographs. His niche in the temple of fame and limelight would be secure if a million so-called Sunday readers knew him by sight. And how opportune it was! With any luck the negative would be in London by Christ

mas week. Thus, suddenly, is a garish glory gained.

A whole series of photographs had in fact been taken; his was the last. The first was of two British Tommies, in shorts, conferring with a Turkish Mayor and two City Councilors, accepting cigarettes and flowers, smiling their gratitude for these gifts. The second was of their backs as they plodded stolidly eastward, keyless and careless, while three disconsolate City Fathers stared after them, baffled and charmed by their simplicity.

The third showed a big, strong man seated squarely on a horse; and looking up at him, appealingly, a frail old Turk holding a bunch of keys. The horseman's face was twitching under the stress of inner conflict between caution and desire. He was neither buying nor selling, but, metaphorically, was looking a gift horse in the mouth. A strange position for a Yorkshireman. 'Château qui parle; femme qui écoute.' The proverb is incomplete. In all probability, if he, who had neither spoken nor listened to Jerusalem's first Magistrate, had looked at those keys a moment longer he would have yielded. But caution triumphed.

The fourth photograph showed a wistful figure, standing apart, watching; the solicitor had lingered, held by some instinct, until the General's car arrived. If to suffer in silence were a military virtue, that solitary spectator earned a D.S.O. during the next five minutes. A Major, of course, should always give way to a General; but this man was only one-third Major; he had two other sides which did not wear khaki. Another man, because he was a General, was getting what he, a Yorkshire solicitor, might have got, for nothing. It was enough to make anyone a Bolshevik. He wondered if the smiling recipient of those keys was Irish quite a quarter of the Generals

A few hundred yards farther on were the first houses of the western suburb. Neither pomp nor circumstance attended our arrival; we were not entering the walled city, only surrounding it, and marched through squalid streets from a corner near the Jaffa Gate to the main road leading to Damascus.

While we passed the storm broke; an icy wind swept up the valley of the Kedron, rain fell in torrents and drenched the tired troops.

We had imagined something very different. In the camp west of Beersheba, life had been strenuous and inevitably ascetic; the soul had been swept and garnished, the vision cleared. Waiting while summer mellowed into autumn, marking the changes of the moon, searching for water in a sandy waste, we had learned the desert's loneliness, tasted the tang of its hot breath, marched through cool, splendid Eastern nights over its trackless surface, watched the sun rise and dissipate the cloudy shimmer of its robe of dew. To some those weeks had been a vigil, the fitting preparation for a high adventure. Even the callous had moments of exaltation, mystical imaginings, mirages of the mind.

Realities are always disappointing; they issue from a gate of horn, not from the ivory gate of dreams.

In our visions we saw a City Beautiful, where once a temple with a golden dome had roused the envy of Samaritans and the cupidity of Vespasian's legions; we found drab, melancholy walls hemmed in on the north and west

by a hideous modern suburb. We had surveyed with the mind's eye a green hill without a city wall; but Judgment Place, Calvary, and Sepulchre were huddled within the walls, and almost beneath one roof. We had pictured the 'Via Dolorosa' as portrayed on stainedglass windows; it was a narrow lane, where ignorance and superstition had been so exploited that there might have been turnstiles at the Stations of the Cross.

We had heard of Russian pilgrims paying huge sums to be the first to light their lamps at what was called the 'Sacred Fire'; we saw the filament with which the trick was worked. We had conceived an atmosphere compact of memories of an imperishable story, and breathing peace; we entered an arena for all the jarring creeds. Being British, the latest crusaders tried to hide their disappointment, became more taciturn than ever, and registered another lost illusion.

There was no need. We still possessed our dreams, and of their stuff could create cities far more fair than any structure built with hands. Those bright, intangible, dissolving cities, how peaceful and serene, how different from Jerusalem on that day of storm and rain! no mud, no smells, no noise, no hustling crowds, no simple soldiers hungering for a meal, no envious schemers, no conquerors taking keys, no walls, no secrets, nothing to conceal. They are not rooted to one spot, but come to us wherever we may be, assuming shapes as various as our moods. We are their architects, masters of all, without, within, kings in the kingdoms of our inner selves, whose revelations come and go.

THE French have allowed it to be said, and some of them have naïvely repeated it, that they are not colonizers, although proofs to the contrary abound both in the past and in the present. They have not known how to keep their colonies, that is very true. They have been neither prompt nor brutal enough when a rival nation sent a fleet on a visit to our colonial establishments, where, under diverse pretexts, it seized a stronghold, captured a company of fishing boats, or destroyed any crops which it considered impudent for anybody except the English to raise. But there can be no doubt that our sailor folk had a genius for discovery, a talent for choosing routes, and a happy way of being the first to come upon an island or a continent, which they and their wives hastened to settle; and that they adapted themselves to thirty-six varieties of climate, making out of some savage country a miniature France, peasantlike, joyous and free-hearted. The English, who are connoisseurs in such matters, have acknowledged and proved this in many ways that were hardly commendable, especially as applied to Acadia and the Acadians.

I fear you may not remember just where Acadia is situated. You have read Evangeline, but perhaps you would not know what steamer to take if you wanted to visit your sister at Grand Pré. Well, if you will conjure up a picture of the great St. Lawrence River, which spreads out in a vast curve, enveloping with its mighty waters the isle of Anticosti and, farther

VOL. 317- NO. 4116

away, Newfoundland, you will realize that this horn of plenty is very solidly constructed. The right side for some distance and the extremity of this region belong to Canada, the rest being American. Roughly, this right side is made up of the Canadian Maritime Provinces, consisting of Prince Edward's Island, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, to which the name 'Acadia' was applied, a word probably of Algonquin origin, meaning 'fertile place.'

About the middle of the sixteenth century the Bretons and the Basques wanted to found a priory there after their own fashion. They felt themselves quite at home there, since they discovered the country-so much so, indeed, that, toward the end of the century, they dislodged from the island of Ramée an English Commodore, Charles Leigh, which they had a perfect right to do. Later, on April 7, 1604, having obtained a charter from Henry IV, the Sieur de Monts, Champlain, geographer to the King, and the Sieur de Pontrincourt, together with one hundred and twenty others, set sail from Havre-de-Grâce in two ships and two smaller craft, to colonize the land of Acadia, 'all desiring to participate in the glory of so good and great an enterprise.'

At first our compatriots established themselves too far to the north, so that, as the winter which followed proved uncommonly severe, they found themselves reduced by sickness and death to forty-five souls by the time

463