e the western half of the Main Building.
Combined with the annex erected for a like purpose by the Bureau of
Agriculture, which covers three acres, it would seem to afford room
for specimens of every construction ever placed on wheels since
Pharaoh's war-chariots limbered up for the Red Sea campaign. These
collections have no trifling significance as a sign of progress.
They are the product of good roads, one of the surest traces of
civilization. A century ago, a really good road was almost an unknown
thing. So recently as half so long since one of the light equipages
now so familiar to us would have been a simple impossibility. What
words of ecstasy Dr. Johnson, who pronounced the height of bliss to be
a drive over a turnpike of his day in a cranky post-chaise, would have
applied to a "spin" in one of these wagons, no imagination can guess.

Let us not boast ourselves over the sages who had the misfortune of
living too soon. It would be falling into the same blunder Macaulay
ascribed to Johnson in alleging that the philosopher thought the
Athenian populace the inferiors of Black Frank his valet, because they
could not read and Frank could. Our heads are apt to be turned by
our success in throwing together iron, timber, stone and other dead
matter. Let us remember that we are still at school, with no near
prospect of graduating. Many of our contemporary nations, to say
nothing of those who are to come after us, claim the ability to teach
us, as their being here proves. The assumption speaks from the stiff
British chimneys, the pert gables of the Swedes and the laboriously
wrought porticoes of the Japanese. This is well. It would be a bad
thing for its own future and for that of general progress could any
one people pronounce itself satisfied with what it had accomplished
and ready to set the seal to its labors.

GLIMPSES OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

TWO PAPERS.--I.

We sailed from Trieste in the Venus, one of the Austrian Lloyds, with
a very agreeable captain, who had been all over the world and spoke
English perfectly. There were very few passengers--only one lady
besides myself, and she was a bride on her way to her new home in
Constantinople. She was a very pretty young Austrian, only seventeen,
but such an old "Turk of a husband" as she had! Her mother was a
Viennese, and her father a wealthy Englishman: what could have induced
them to marry their pretty young daughter to such a man? He was a
Greek by descent, b