acoustical delusion; but a few steps farther brought me to the bed of a dry lagoon, in which there were flowers and buzzing bees, and again I rejoiced,

"As some lone man who in a desert hears
The music of his home."

Is it not just possible that all these "acoustical delusions," reported from Sahara and other deserts, are delusions indeed, which a little honest examination would have resolved into phenomena as natural as the humming of bees? Certain it is that for a moment I heard the saw-filing and then the tea-bells as distinctly as ever in my life. where in all this hideous desert it was seventy miles to mountains do these feeble bees store their juice, unless, like those of Samson, they make a hive of a carcass? It is said that on the great plains of the central basin of California bees often perish from their long wanderings; how, then, could these wing their way through this dreadful weather and return?

In approaching New River one quits the sand and enters upon a vast sealevel plain of reddish soil, which is absolutely denuded of every green thing, and stretches away to infinity, lying bare and blistering in the sun. What is this? Frost? There are patches and acres of white, which look like the early rime, but, upon close inspection, one discovers it is only the minute shells of periwinkles strewn in myriads. Mile upon mile, league after league, I strode across this naked wild, this old and hungry negative of all things, in the centre of a magic circle, frozen in on every hand by a mystic film of ice. Far out as I could see, till it rounded down below the dim horizon, stretched this arctic sheet, glistening deliciously cool and watery - blue in its delusive brilliance. If I brought down my eyes to the level of the desert, then I was frozen in within ten rods; when I rose and walked on, there hovered before me faint and phantom shapes, palaces, domes, gorgeous tropic islands, enchanted mountains, which seemed to roll up and away, far back, to make room for others constantly rising. A

Whom of all men should I find, away here in this desolate sink of the continent, but genuine Vermont Yankees ? Northern emigration has flowed westward to the Pacific, then down the coast, then far out here on the desert, and even to Arizona City, beating back the Southern. And, what is still more characteristic, here, where the two streams meet and mingle, you find the Yankee keeping the station or owning the little grocery, while the Southerner is the teamster, or the aimless vagabondizing emigrant, coming to California this year, returning to Texas the next. There were three stations on this desert owned by an old gentleman and his sons, and so well had the father at least preserved his characteristics among he large-handed Californians, that his reputation for stinginess met me ninety miles from his station. This structure was of the usual description ; a mud-built quadrangle, of which the house formed one side, while the other three sides were horse - stalls roofed with brushwood. Americans seem to become Mexicanized very soon in regard to mud. In the house part there were whole broadsides of California wine, gorgeous in heraldry of brass and scarlet labels, the fatal sardines, chewing-tobacco, heaps of sacks of barley, and canned fruits blooming in unhealthy colors on their labels. The little old man had a hard, pinched face, which the desert had burned almost black, and he kept all the while insinuating into his

nose pinches of snuff, and inflicting upon that organ most unjust and abusive thrusts with a very hard-wadded silk handkerchief, first upon one nostril, then upon the other. He was serving discharged soldiers with great assiduity. From one of them he received a currency note, which he stretched out straight; then he winked very hard at it with both eyes, examined it with his spectacles, and finally made it a part of a roll nearly as large as his hat, and carefully inserted it into his pocket.

Thirty-six miles now without a drop of water! I slung a canteen full over my shoulder, and started at sunset. All through a long September night, by the soft desert light, in the soft desert coolness, I plodded through the brooding solitude, till moonset, then slept an hour till daybreak, then forward again till three o'clock in the afternoon. Crunch, crunch, crunch forever through the gravel. When the moon went down, it disappeared before it reached the level of the desert; and though I could see nothing, I knew by the ragged outline of that which swept over it in ghostly eclipse that it had found the Sierra Nevada. Could I repress a shudder when I saw my sole companion of the night sink into blackness? Alone, all, all alone, in the darkness of the gaunt and hungry desert! There came to me something of that feeling which breathes through the noble speech of the dying Ajax, when he bids farewell forever to the beautiful light.

But on the cool, hard gravel I soon fell asleep. O, it was a mighty large bed, so big that you could n't kick off the clothes at all! And only one in a bed! I slept well therein, but the rascally coyotes awakened me at last by their yelping. Leaping up suddenly, I came within two or three rods of gripping one by the tail. As they galloped away across the cool gray gravel, in the dim light of the daybreak, it looked precisely as if they were skating away on ice.

Continuing my journey, I presently passed off the gravel, and began to traverse bald yellow or whitish knolls

and steep gulches, where everything was absolutely and hideously naked. I walked among peeled hills, and through gullies rasped and washed and rinsed of every green thing. But all was hard now, and stiff in crusts, the blear stare of the soil, — baked, and skinny, and glistering in the heat with a painful incandescence, the hopeless reign of hardpan. Sallow old hills, lean old hills, sad old hills, forsaken by all fresh and pleasant things, they grin, and leer, and shiver through an eternal sterility.

Two spurs of the Sierra Nevada straddle far out into the desert, like a pair of tongs, and between them flows feebly down the Carrizo. I had hoped to find some shade or fertility generated by this mountain stream, but the valley is nothing but a broad vacuous sheet of sand. Some distance below the point where the waters of this creek sink, I met some Mexicans with enormous ox-teams, just venturing out into the great desert, going toward Fort Yuma. One of them had with his hands scooped a little pit in the sand, and was waiting for the water to rise. I sat down opposite him, and informed him that it was a good day, whereupon he imparted to me a like piece of intelligence, without once looking in my direction. Then he doubled his hands together, and dipped up water, which he drank. Let a man used to the springs of New England approach one, and he will bow down upon his knees to drink, but a Mexican dips it in his hands. Is it that he fears the insects which live in his warmer climate?

"How long will it take you to reach Fort Yuma?" I asked him.

"Quien sabe, señor? Mucho tiempo." He said this with that exquisite mellifluous languor, which makes the veriest trifles of a peon's talk sweeter than all the eloquence of Everett.

as they pass, for whom mere existence is a guaranty of enjoyment, answers, "Much time."

As one advances up the valley, the mountains draw nearer together, with fringes of foot-hills, frozen-looking and stark in their ghostly pallor. Here, as everywhere in these regions, the mountain ranges gather all the moisture from the clouds, and on their yellow knobs there are a few stunted shrubs, which quiver in the heat, like green-tinged tongues of flame. Occasionally there stands up one among the foot-hills whose heart of fire seems cooled with hidden waters, and on it there are a few shrubs, in singular contrast with this polar nakedness, these grim tropical icebergs.

A little above the Carrizo Station I was rewarded for my early rising with an almost goblin spectacle, worthy of the "golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid." The tips of the mountains were just reddened by the dawn. Before me lay the immaculately white sand-floor of the valley, sprinkled over with the cheriondia, in its bright sea

green; dead greenwoods, in a foliage of a crisp, cool, watery gray; and sagebushes, in a dusty yellowish-green. All the valley and the mountains around stood dim in the violet-white haze of the desert, than which

"Never a flake

That the vapor can make

With the moon-tints of purple and pearl" could be more tenderly tinted. As soon as the blood-red sun was well above the mountains, all the haze forsook the western horizon and gathered thick about it, shrouding its beams into a cold, pallid stare. This sickly light, falling full down into this white graveyard and among its occupants, the weird, spectral, arctic foot-hills, wrought a wonderful transformation. The cheriondia, in this mildew of sunshine, blanched its green brightness, and the whole valley seemed blighted, as if at the approach of the haggard King of Terrors in his pale vestments. Not on the final morning of time shall the sun fling his wan glare so cold through the sickening air upon the last man, freezing his thin blood.

Stephen Powers.

IN

N no part of Europe has the student of the religious or political condition of peoples more difficulty in making sure of his observations than in Germany. This is due in part to the want of uniformity among the people of the different sections, requiring the observer to adopt a different standard when he passes from Bavaria to Austria, or from Saxony to Prussia or the Rhineland; but more perhaps to the extreme individuality of thought which prevails throughout Germany. In no country is the influence of public or class opinion less evident than here. The right to hold peculiar religious, philosophical, or political opinions is more generally acknowledged in all

classes of society and among all reli gious sects than in any other country of the world.

In their waning interest in sermonizing the Germans are not much ahead of the cultivated peoples of other lands, though their manifestation of it may be a little more evident. In the cities of Germany, as in the cities elsewhere, the priest counts for little in a social way. Parochial visitation unquestionably loses its power in a dense population, where there are many more exciting matters than the visit of the minister is apt to be; but in the rural districts of Germany the Pfarrer has still all the power that it is desirable he should have, and far more than is held

by clerical official in any other Protestant country.

I

In 1866 I had the pleasure of visiting an old tutor of mine, he from whom I had learned my first German lesson, - now returned to his fatherland, and Pfarrer in the hamlet of Sitzbirg, two thousand feet above the sea, on the western boundary of the canton of Zurich. I left the railway near Wyl, and went some four or five miles across the country on foot, without other guidance than my map; for the people whom I questioned, with the perverse spirit so common among the Catholic parts of the country, did not or would not know even the names of villages just across the borders of their canton. found my friend in charge of a small but thrifty congregation of Protestants, who tilled the summit of the arid hills separating the basin of Lake Zurich from that of Lake Constance. The relation between the Pfarrer E— and his flock seemed to be of the happiest description: he was their guide in matters temporal as well as spiritual, -not their preacher alone. He seemed to have the authority possessed by the Catholic priest, with the additional power given by his having a family which could serve as an elevated example for his parishioners, and make them feel that he was a fellow-citizen. A man of profound learning and extensive experience in the world, he had already seen that the time when the sermon could be trusted as the main agent of religious guidance had passed, and sought to replace it by the influence of example and that continual incitation which the rural clergyman can still bring to bear on his flock. By many it would perhaps have been thought that the flock of the good Pfarrer got far too little of doctrinal theology; but if we may judge the work by its fruits, the pure lives, leading through contentment and cheerfulness to a hopeful end, surely warranted the omission. In no community which I have ever visited were the happy effects of the guidance of a spiritual teacher so clearly visible. I could wish no rural parish a happier

fate than to be led in the way of life by such a Christian and philosopher, who gives his valuable life to the work of shaping the humble careers of a few hundred mountaineers.

That the spirit of the enthusiastic and blind religious devotion of this people during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is not dead I am fully convinced. Its demonstrativeness is gone, for that always disappears with intellectual culture; and in Germany intellectual culture has affected a larger part of the social mass than in any other region. A chance experience which befell me in Suabia may give the reader a clearer idea of the religious fervor which lies dormant beneath the stolid exterior of this people than all the assertion which can be made. "I once had occasion to visit Boll, in Southern Würtemburg, a watering-place of much note in times gone by, but its springs have since dried up and all memory of their peculiar virtues is forgotten. My friend, Dr. F— of Stuttgart, in answer to my inquiry about an inn, wrote the name of Pfarrer Blumhardt in my note-book, and his own beneath it, - a simple form of introduction in vogue in Germany, -telling me at the same time that I would find the place of the good parson as interesting, perhaps, as the rocks which I went to study, but that he would tell me nothing about it, leaving me to form my own impression. My experience showed that he acted wisely in allowing me to see what I afterward saw without the prejudice which would have been given by previous description. The conveyance from Geislingen, where we left the railway, brought us, after a drive of a couple of hours, to the door of an ancient and stately edifice of great size, which was evidently the hotel of the old watering-place. We were warmly welcomed, not only by the usual throng which greets the wanderer as he descends at the gate of a German country inn, but by the motherly wife of the pastor whose name I had brought, and many of the pleasant faces of the guests of the place bade

us a welcome by their looks. There was a touch of affection in these greetings which showed at once that there was something peculiar about the place, and made me half suspect that I was mistaken for some long-expected brother. We were led into the receptionroom, a pleasant apartment, where there were on every side evidences of refined taste, though everything showed that simple comfort was the end in view. We were met at the door by the good Blumhardt himself, who welcomed us with the cordial grasp of both hands and a genial earnestness which characterizes the greeting of an old German friend. My attention was so engrossed with the personal appearance of this remarkable-looking man, that I for a while forgot to show him my brief introduction. Though years have passed since that meeting, I recollect his whole appearance with marvellous distinctness a body rather below the average in height, but much beyond it in every other dimension, and which seemed almost absurdly round and fat in his cumbrous dressing-gown, supported a head which was also round and fat and disproportionately large. Although excessive flesh had done all it could to make its bearer appear gross and animal, there shone through it all one of the cheeriest expressions I have ever seen. The features were noble, forehead and top-head high and broad, eyes of that friendly hazel which is so often seen in Germany, traces of a fine Roman were visible in the nose, and the mouth had lost nothing of its pliant, sympathetic expression from the excess of fat. One felt that there was a handsome, vigorous fellow under the load of flesh, and longed to put him in training to bring out the buried man. The most remarkable feature was the commanding look, which the affable smile and bland musical tone did not hide. It was evident that here was a good, strong nature, a determined will, long accustomed to rule; any doubts on this point would have been at once solved by the behavior of those about him. When he spoke,

all others cut short their remarks and listened.

The reader may correct this picture by that of the leader of the German Reformation. To me the good father has always been Martin Luther, quite filling my perhaps imperfect conception of the physique of that giant. When I had, in the course of five minutes, got a satisfactory impression of my host, I recollected my introduction. I thought I detected a shade of doubt on his face when he read it, but it quickly disappeared. When I answered his question as to my profession, our welcome was reiterated, and we were escorted to our rooms in a remote part of the edifice and bidden prepare for the noonday dinner.

The fourscore or more present, assembled at the long tables of the dining-room, were on all accounts the most remarkable-looking collection of people I had seen in Germany. It was evident at first sight that a considerable part of the throng were invalids, which led me to suppose that the old springs had broken out afresh, and that after all the good father was only the keeper of a bathing-place; this hypothesis fell through, when on inquiry I found that there was no chance to bathe, not even enough water from the springs to drink. It also seemed so well accepted that I was one of them, and in earnest sympathy with their object, whatever that might be, that I could not with propriety ask any pointblank questions. When the whole company had assembled and stood in waiting behind their chairs, Father Blumhardt appeared, and, after greeting the whole company, seated himself at his place at the table and read a chapter of the Bible; he then gave out a hymn, which was sung by the whole company, each being provided with a book, and afterwards made a long, earnest, and well-worded prayer, which closed this rather formidable preamble to the meal. The dinner took less time than the introduction to it, as it consisted of a single course of meat and potatoes, -an abundant but rather simple repast. For