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

[Illustration: HEAD OF THE TRAJAN CANAL, NEAR OSTIA.]

SIX MONTHS AMONG CANNIBALS.

[Illustration: A HALT IN THE BRUSH.]

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

It is about three hundred and sixty miles from Sydney to New Caledonia,
a long, narrow island lying just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and
completely surrounded by belts of coral reef crenellated here and there,
and forming channels or passes where ships may enter. Navigation through
these channels is, however, exceedingly hazardous in any but calm
weather; and it was formerly thought t