drance instead of a help to the master. But one does not need to be faddist in order to admire "The Bible in Spain;" it is the best of Borrow's books for one making his acquaintance to read, although perhaps "Lavengro" has more of the mysterious Borrow flavor which your true Borrovian insists is the distinguishing merit of his favorite author. The best modern champion-and altogether a sane one, too of George Borrow's claim to a princedom of letters is Mr. Augustine Birrell, who has written a charming essay on the semi-Gypsy Englishman-an essay to be found in his volume entitled "Res Judicata." The man who can read this essay and refrain from buying or borrowing a copy of "The Bible in Spain" is a hardened specimen indeed. In recognizing Mr. Augustine Birrell as the most skillful champion of the Borrovian cause we do not mean to forget Professor William I. Knapp, whose life of Borrow was published a year ago by the Messrs. Putnam. Professor Knapp knows more about Borrow, perhaps, than any other living man, but he has made his biography not only exhaustive but almost exhausting; it is choked with a mass of dry details; and it reads like a chronicle of dates and statistics instead of a record of the life of a very active, full-blooded, and unconventional traveler. The crowded condition of his pages is proclaimed by Professor Knapp himself with amusing naïveté. He says in his preface:

The second year (1896) saw the composition of the Life half completed; but, alas! on a scale much too minute and exhaustive, as the publishers were not slow to assure me. Bowing to their cooler judgment, as the thermometers of opinion, against my own enthusiasm, the whole was rewritten in '97 and concluded the present year on a more conservative scale.

The more conservative scale being two large volumes of nearly four hundred pages each! In another paragraph of his preface Professor Knapp continues:

And now for a few figures. Mr. Borrow's correspondence, in so far as it fell to me, numbers 937 letters, including six belonging to his father, dated from 1798 to 1812. The letters I have written and received on the subject of this book number 786. These letters, and the documents, records, certificates, extracts, and other matter designed to sustain my statements, are pasted into large quarto files aggregating 2,578 pages I have read or examined 1,075

distinct books exclusive of those cited in my volumes.

It is not in this arithmetical spirit that good biography is written; certainly it is the farthest possible from the spirit in which Borrow himself thought or wrote. There is nothing of the scrap-book, or card catalogue, or letter-file, or dust-of-the-library about him! He preferred men and women to paper and ink. One of the very best things in Professor Knapp's two volumes, the story of the Irish fiddler, illustrates Borrow's love and knowledge of life and nature as opposed to books and statistics. It is told by Borrow of an incident happening during his famous tramp through wild Wales, and, in the complete and unmutilated form which follows, was rescued by Professor Knapp from the oblivion of manuscript archives:

After walking about a mile (from Cerrig y Drudion) I overtook a man with a game leg, that is, a leg which, either by nature or accident, not being so long as its brother leg, had a patten attached to it about five inches high, to enable it to do duty with the other. He features, and was dressed in ragged coat and was a fellow with red shock hair and very red breeches, and a hat which had lost part of its crown and all of its rim; so that, even without a game leg, he would have looked rather a queer figure. In his hand he carried a fiddle. "Good morning to you," said I.

"A good morning to your hanner, a merry afternoon, and a roaring joyous evening-that is the worst luck I wish to ye."

"Are you a native of these parts?" said I. "Not exactly, your hanner-I am a native of the city of Dublin, or, what's all the same thing, of the village of Donnybrook, which is close by it."

"A celebrated place," said I.

"Your hanner may say that; all the world has heard of Donnybrook, owing to the humors of its fair. Many is the merry tune I have played to the boys at that fair."

"You are a professor of music, I suppose." "And not a very bad one, as your hanner will say if you allow me to play you a tune." "Can you play 'Croppies,' Lie Down'?" "I cannot, your hanner; my fingers never learnt to play such a blackguard tune; but if ye wish to hear Croppies, Get Up,' I can oblige ye."

"No," said I, "it's a tune that doesn't please my ears. If, however, you choose to play Croppies, Lie Down,' I'll give you a shilling."

"Your hanner will give me a shilling?"

“Yes,” said I, "if you play Croppies, Lie Down; but you know you can't play it; your fingers never learned the tune."

1" Croppy" is one who has had his hair cropped short in prison, and refers here to the Irish Catholic rebels of the last century

"They never did, your hanner; but they have heard it played of old by the blackguard Orange fiddlers of Dublin on the first of July, when the Protestant boys used to walk round Willie's statue on College Green-so, if your hanner gives me the shilling, they may perhaps bring out something very like it."

"Very good," said I; "begin."

Thereupon the fiddler, taking his bow and shouldering his fiddle, struck up in first-class style the glorious tune which I had so often heard with rapture in the days of my boyhood in the barrack-yard of Clonmel; whilst I, walking by his side as he stumped along, caused the welkin to resound with the words which were the delight of the young gentlemen of the Protestant academy of that beautiful old

"More blackguard Orange words I never heard," cried the fiddler, on my coming to the conclusion of the third stanza. Devil a bit farther will I play-at any rate, till I get the shilling."

"Here it is for you," said I; "the song is ended, and, of course, the tune."

"Thank your hanner," said the fiddler, taking the money; “your hanner has kept his word with me, which is more than I thought your hanner would do. And now, your han

And long after I had left him I could hear him playing on his fiddle, in first-rate style, the beautiful tune of "Down, Down, Croppies, Lie Down."

This passage is an epitome of George Borrow-it shows his charm of style, his keenness of wit, his appreciation of humor, his skill in sketching a picturesque character in a few bold strokes, his love of the life of the road, and his unexplained, and to some people very mysterious, hatred of the Roman Catholic Church. The great defect in Borrow was his almost lawless egotism. He had a spark of true genius; if he had been less insistent on having his own way and his own rights, if he had been more open to the advice and criticism of friends, he might have been a star of steady shining instead of a flashing but unsteady and often headlong comet in the literary firmament.

The reader of Borrow now has the choice of two recently published editions, one of volumes convenient to the hand but rather small of type (John Lane), the other, edited by Professor Knapp, of larger volume and type and in every way an admirable library edition (Putnams).

A

LITTLE piece of the restive, ambitious Western World transplanted into the heart of the languid Orient is the American Woman's College at Constantinople. The influence of its presence in the hitherto undisturbed atmosphere of Eastern indolent ease has produced some striking contrasts which particularly impress the visitor for the first time entering its gates. Her mind is left with only half a grasp of all she has seen when she emerges. High walls encompass this house of learning where the American system of education is practiced; dusky, turbaned natives stand like bronze pillars at either side of the portico through which the stranger is permitted to pass; within, lying in characteristic impassivity beneath a widespreading umbrella-tree, fondling a book or deep in study, is a young girl whose features tell of Greece, Turkey, Albania, Roumania, or Russia. A moment's contemplation of this picture, and a delicious haze steals over the beholder; it is in the air, it is infectious, and even the wanderer from the prosaic Occident is not immune to its subtle somnolence.

Dreamily you stroll up the sinuous path which discloses something novel or interesting at every turn, and this continuous unfolding is all that stimulates you to move. The atmosphere is redolent of strange odors which you try vainly to analyze to liken to others that you know; but they only allure and intoxicate; and thinking has become such an effort! Unexpectedly, a group of white buildings,

the tall ones linked together by low covered passageways, is upon you, and an upward glance quickens thought and heartbeat, and routs the reverie. There are the Stars and Stripes waving a welcome!

With step more alert, you ascend the broad white stairs and pass the portals. Once inside, the sound of your native tongue and a glimpse of the portraits of Washington and Lincoln further assure you that you are almost as at home, and every experience seems to confirm this impression. Now you can reconcile what appeared at first to be contradictions. The college is no longer out of place; it is the people. There are greetings from the American president, with none of the formality that conventionality dictates as fitting between strangers-both are Americans. Ecstatically you question and listen by turns as room after room in the main building is inspected. Next you are taken to the roof, where a magnificent view of the setting of the College is outspread.

To the south lies Chalcedon, once the residence of the blind Belisarius of Byzantium, where sat the famous Ecumenical Council that condemned the Monophysites. Giant's Mountain, on the north, affords some compensation in its beauty of color and outline for shutting off the Black Sea, a dozen miles away, where Joshua sat to bathe his feet. Nearer by is the Bosphorus, its winding wooded shores lined with the stately palaces of the pashas, and rising from their midst is Robert College, the American school for boys. Westward lies the harbor of the Golden Horn,

one of the finest in the world, teeming with the craft of many countries. Picturesque and peaceful, at one side stands the old city of Stambul, crowned with the domes and minarets of myriad mosques, still partly surrounded by its Byzantine walls. A majestic sweep of the Asiatic Olympus incloses the rest of the horizon, at its feet the shining, golden-hued waters of the Marmora, glittering here and there with the even more resplendent luster of the gem-like Princess Isles. Here, amid scenes intimately connected with the life of the past, a colony from the New World is settled to teach modern thought.

The American Woman's College is not in Constantinople proper, but in Scutari, the old Chrysopolis of Byzantine times, "Golden City" in the Greek, so called because the caravans from the East unloaded their treasures there. Scutari is an hour from Constantinople. Half of this brief journey is made by cab to the Bosphorus, the rest by ferry over the straits. The country everywhere is beautiful, and, despite the fact that no attention is paid to forestry, magnificent trees of many centuries' growth sometimes being ruthlessly chopped down for fuel, it is still well wooded. The scenery and the balmy

air conduce to much outdoor existence, and sports are popular when not accompanied by too much physical exertion. The maiden of the Levant generally does not take kindly to athletic exercise, and if it were asked in what departments in the College most pressure must be brought to bear to enforce obedience to rules, those embracing gymnastics and arithmetic would unhesitatingly be cited.

A day spent with the students gives the best possible insight into their nature, tastes, ambitions, the life they lead. The polyglot character of the College is unique for its size. The one hundred and sixty students now there, including those in the Preparatory Department, are drawn from the upper and middle classes of society in Armenia, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, Russia, Hungary, and Roumania, with a sprinkling of Hebrews, French, Germans, Italians, and proportionately a good many American and English girls from the English-American colony of about a thousand souls in Constantinople.

Asked what was the greatest difference between Oriental and Occidental college girls, the American president answered, "In their politeness ;" and one familiar with college life and manners in this