of the spies that lingered behind every door. Now I sit in the same rooms, and we discuss whether fathers who wish to give their sons every advantage should send them to Paris or to London or to Berlin; we develop projects of reform, and we weigh the merits of the candidates at the coming election. But do not think that we conduct our elections here as you conduct them in England. We have not, in two years and a half, attained to a full and comprehensive understanding of the Parliamentary system. Firstly, our candidates have no programme, nor is a public expression of their political opinions expected of them. In a recent election in the Syrian vilayet one man only published what might be regarded as an election address, and he received for his pains two votes out of a hundred and fifty. Secondly, they do not represent, nor are they selected by, any political party, except always by him who is understood to be designated by the Committee at Salonica. 'And herein, be it said, lies the strength of the Committee, its views are more or less current, and it has a definite organization. And thirdly (though far be it from me to urge this as an objection in Turkey), the deputies are elected by a method which approaches but distantly to popular suffrage. The body of secondary electors is very small; it is composed of members of the municipal and administrative councils of the vilayet, who have in the first instance been apBlackwood's Magazine.

pointed by primary electors, also limited in number. The real weakness of the system is the inordinate number of candidates who see fit to present themselves: the man chosen can rarely, if ever, command an actual majority. To take, again, a Syrian example: in an election which has just occurred here, nineteen candidates offered themselves, the secondary lectors number 150, the successful candidates received 28 votes, and the other 122 votes were divided between his opponents. The difficult arts of a Western scheme of government are not to be mastered in a day.

Would that they could be wisely combined with methods more suited to the present condition of the Ottoman Empire! Would that the old and the new could merge together, each rectifying the faults of the other, fortifying the virtues! If the Turk with his administrative capacity, the Arab with his sharp wit, the Greek with his commercial ability, the Kurd with his martial qualities, would work harmoniously with one another, what a State they might bring into existence!

But I have wandered far from the Seleucid and the Roman,-scarcely less far from the aged Persian and the Christian recruit. He who speaks of Damascus touches a many-sided theme. The life of the desert and the life of the city are combined in her heritage: she has played her part bravely through all the ages of recorded history, and her voice is not yet silenced.

Gertrude Lothian Bell.

On the face of it, the proposed Daylight Saving Bill is distinctly good. For a certain season in the year the clerks in the City of London will get one more hour to spare before the sun goes down. As a result of this they will

have more time for the enjoyment of fresh air, more time for outdoor amusements, more time to learn rifle shooting, gain more health, become happier men, and enjoy other benefits. If this is really the case, then the clerks in

the west..of England, who have for years and years enjoyed 33 per cent. more evening sun than those in the eastern counties, ought to exhibit at least some trace of the benefits which accrue from an extra dose of daylight. Possibly the inhabitants of Cornwall are really more happy and bright, vigorous and enterprising, than the inhabitants of Kent; but is this really a fact?

Next, where does happiness come in if on a cold spring morning you have to get up one hour earlier? What will the wife and children say to the arrangement? Turning out too soon on frosty mornings, groping about at 4 A.M., to find a box of matches to light the fire, may give rise to domestic irritation, bronchial catarrhs, and other illnesses. Thousands upon thousands of workmen in the north of England to be at work at 6 A.M., when it is really 5 A.M., will have to disturb their households at the time specified. At the commencement of April a man will get up in the dark, walk to his factory in the dark, and commence work by artificial light. Whatever light and fuel has been saved on the previous evening in the house or workshop will be spent in the dark hours of the early morning. For about six months, or 182 days, which I believe is the period over which the new-fangled time is to extend, men will frequently have to rise before the sun; nature will be asleep, but he must be awake and run counter to Divine intentions. As matters now stand during this period workmen get up on 127 days after sunrise. The new Bill will reduce the number of these occasions to 52. will have been robbed of his morning daylight, and have 75 extra days of morning darkness.

He

There is not so much daylight saving in the Bill as may popularly be supposed. It gives an hour in the evening, but cuts off an hour in the morn

ing. Will a darkness creating Bill please the British workman?

When to give pleasant afternoons to the few who always go to work in daylight, the workmen in this country, in their trains and trams, and on their "bikes" or on their feet, take to blundering about in the morning dark, it suggests an increase in the number of accidents, more litigation, more illnesses, and more funerals. Doctors and lawyers will have more employment, and insurance companies may raise their rates.

Many medical men are supporting this proposed alteration, and have emphasized the benefits that may accrue from the greater amount of sunlight that people will enjoy if these changes are adopted. Obviously, of course, those requiring more sunlight can, if they will, get up earlier in the morning without any dislocation or changes in standard time. But to compel all workers to get up an hour earlier some months of the year may have effects upon the health quite other than seems to be supposed. Man is largely the creature of habit, and the habits acquired by long usage cannot be broken through suddenly without ill results. When early in April the time is suddenly altered, the result will be that for some days, possibly weeks, workers, clerks, and all others compelled willynilly to accommodate themselves to this incompletely considered scheme will find themselves at work, still half asleep, with serious results to their own efficiency, to their own health, and their employers' pockets.

In addition to all this, as I have before said, England, by destroying the time standard of the world, will have gone back on her bargain with other nations, and her steamship and other communications with other countries will have been disturbed.

The defenders of the Bill admit that it has its defects, but they do not point

out how these are to be remedied.

To say that different parts of the United States keep different times, and that Cape Colony has found the adoption of the 30th meridian a boon, has nothing whatever to do with the question at issue. These and other countries have adopted a fixed time and adjusted their clocks to the Greenwich standard and not to a time that is altered at least twice a year. In these circumstances why references to the United States and Cape Colony have been brought forward I do not understand. The unthinking public might infer that because certain countries have altered their clocks there can be no great harm in altering ours. If this was seriously intended, these arguments are a reflection upon their authors, and indicate that certain reasons for the adoption of the Daylight Saving Bill rest upon curious foundations.

Some years ago, with the assistance of the Foreign, Colonial, and India Offices, I had occasion to inquire into the varieties of time kept by all accessible communities of the world. The only people I remember that have a shifty

Nature.

time are Mahomedans and savages, and it is now suggested that we should take a step downwards and join their ranks.

Astronomers and navigators are, however, to be left in peace. I imagine that those who desire to save daylight recognize that a movable time system might lead to shipwreck and to difficulties in the construction of nautical almanacs, and other astronomical work. If these departments are to be freed from the new arrangements, why should not the same freedom be given to meterology and all other sciences in which it is necessary to have time observations comparable with those of other countries?

The simplest solution to the whole question would be to commence work one hour earlier in the morning and not confuse ourselves and others by altering the clock. In Japan thousands of schools open in the summer time at 7 A.M., Government offices open at eight and close at two; and what is done in Japan is done in other countries. Surely it is possible for business houses in this country to do something similar.

John Milne.

It seemed to him that he was in very cold muddy water full of little waves, and that by treading water and putting forth all his strength he was able to keep himself above them. But the wind blew them higher; they slapped him in the mouth, and he had much trouble in getting his breath between. All of a sudden it occurred to him that it would be much easier to abandon this painful striving and to lie back amid the waves. He took a long deep breath, the water slipped down into his lungs, and he lay quite natural and comfortable until a dinning sound began over

his head. He tried to sink deeper into the stream, but the noise grew louder and he could not but think that he was rising to the surface. At last he opened his eyes.

"It's this infernal rain on the roof that makes me dream," he said.

A bed had been made up for him in the kitchen on three chairs, and when he awoke he found himself sitting bolt upright with his arms bent as if he were treading water, his legs stiff and numbed with cold. The hearth was full of ashes with a last spark fading in the dawn light, and catching

to where the day was breaking; a thin pale light soaked slowly through the clouds, and he could just distinguish the top of the willows above the water.

The staircase behind him creaked, and turning hurriedly he saw old Daddy Lupton awful in his night-shirt, like Death himself coming to bid him good morning.

"Well," said Daddy, "what do 'ee think about the jade now? She makes one feel young again. The biggest flood we've had these fifty years."

The old man's levity inspired hope in Tom that the river would not rise any higher, and that the house was not in danger. Tom asked him if this were so, but Daddy continued to babble of a great flood of sixty years ago in which he had nearly lost his life. A big flood it was, but nothing to the great flood of nearly eighty years ago. had carried a village quite away, and the old man followed Tom to the window, telling him how the water had come down the valley faster than a horse could gallop.

It

"All my brothers and sisters were drowned, father and mother too; but the cradle floated right away as far as Harebridge, where it was picked up by a party in a boat. There h'ant been no flood to speak of since then. A fine jade she once was, and when it rained like this we used to lie quaking

in our beds. Now we sleep sound enough."

"I must wake 'em," said Tom.

He rushed upstairs, called out, and in a few minutes the pointsman and his family were standing in the kitchen: John Lupton, a tall man with a long neck and thin square shoulders, a red beard and small queer eyes and hands freckled and hairy, and Margaret Lupton, his wife, a pleasant portly woman of forty, with soft blue eyes and regular features. Her daughter, Liz, took after her father-a thin-shouldered, thin-featured girl with small ardent eyes and dark reddish crinkly hair. But Billy, Liz's brother, took after his mother. He was very like her, the same soft oval face with blue eyes and no distinctive feature; the same sweet retiring nature, more of a girl than a boy; but the boy in him expressed a certain curiosity for Tom's boat.

"Shall we go in the boat, father?"
"What boat, sonny?"
"Tom's boat."

"Tom's boat wouldn't hold us all."
"We needn't all go together."

"My boat is far enough from 'ere by this time," said Tom, "or most like she's at the bottom of the river. I tied her last night to the old willow."

Tom was a fair-complexioned, broadshouldered young fellow, an apple grower that lived on the other side of the river. He and Liz were to be married at the end of the week, and yesterday being Sunday he had rowed himself across at sundown, and they had gone for their wonted walk. When they came home supper was on the table, and the hours after had gone by pleasantly, his arm being round Liz's waist, till the time came for him to bid her good night, but on seeing the swollen river she had turned her pretty freckled face to his and dissuaded him, and they had returned to the cottage.

"I never seed the river rise SO quickly afore," said Lupton.

"I did. I did."

It was Daddy that had answered. He was still in his nightshirt, and his last tooth shook in his white beard.

"Go and dress 'eeself, father. And why, mother, don't 'ee light the fire? The morning is that rare cold we'll all be the better for a cup of tea."

"Yes, father, I don't be long now," and she began breaking sticks.

While the kettle was boiling Tom told them that the pigs had broken out of their styes; they lamented the loss of their winter food, and Billy burst into tears on hearing that Peter -his friend, Peter, the house doghad gone away, swimming after his kennel.

"Come, let us sit down to breakfast," Lupton said.

But they had hardly tasted their tea when Billy cried out:

Take me on promise to But if I

"Father, father, the water be coming in under the door yonder. 'ee knee, father. 'Ee did take me to Harebridge. drown I shall never see the circus." Lupton took the little chap on his knee.

"There will be no danger of that. Grandfather will tell 'ee that this be nothing to the floods he knew when he was a little boy."

The water continued to come under the door, collecting where the asphalted floor had been worn, and they watched it rising out of these slight holes and coming towards the table. It came at first very slowly, and then suddenly it rose over their knees, and while Mrs. Lupton took the baby out of the cot the others searched for tea, sugar, bacon, eggs, coal, and candles.

"We shall be wanting all these things," Lupton said, "for the water may keep us upstairs for hours to come."

And they were very wet when they

assembled in Lupton's bedroom. Lupton emptied his big boots out of the window and called on Tom to do the same. Liz wrung out her petticoats, and standing round the table they supped their tea and ate some slices of bread and butter. The baby had been laid asleep on the bed, and Daddy sat by the baby softening his bread in his mug of tea, and mumbling to himself, his fading brain full of incoherent recollections.

"The folk in them fine houses will be surprised to see the water at the bottom of their parks," said Lupton, to break an oppressive silence.

"They be like to live so high up the water will never reach them," Mrs. Lupton answered.

"It h'aint like them to think for to send us 'elp."

"They 'aven't no boats up yonder," said Tom. "They be a good mile up from the river."

"Tom, dear, it's a pity your boat be gone, for you might have row'd me right into Harebridge.”

"Yes, Liz, if you'd set still I might have taken 'ee through them currents, or as likely we might have gotten sucked under by an eddy, or a hole be knocked in the boat by some floating baulk."

"I be lighter than Liz; would 'ee take me, Tom?" said Billy.

As the tops of the apple trees were still visible they judged the depth of the water to be about ten feet. Cattle passed the window, some swimming strong and well, others nearly exhausted. A dead horse whirled past, its poor neck stretched out lamentably, and they all laughed at the fox that floated so peacefully in the middle of a drowned hen-roost. The apples came by in great numbers; Billy forgot his fears in his desire to clutch some, and a little later they saw two great trees rolling towards the pointsman's box. "There she goes!" cried Lupton.