ffered the prostrate obelisk to the British nation as a token of
gratitude. The offer, however, was not taken advantage of, for various
reasons. At last the patriotism and enterprise of a private
individual, the late Sir Erasmus Wilson, came to the rescue, when the
stone was about to be broken up into building material by the
proprietor of the ground on which it lay. An iron water-tight cylinder
was constructed for its transport, in which, with much toil, the
obelisk was encased and floated. It was taken in tow by a steam-tug,
which encountered a fearful storm in the Bay of Biscay. This led to
the abandonment of the pontoon cylinder, which floated about for three
days, and was at last picked up by a passing steamer, and towed to the
coast of Spain; from whence it was brought to England, and set up
where it now stands on the Thames Embankment. Its transport cost
altogether about L13,000, and was a work of great anxiety and
difficulty. Standing seventy feet high on its present site, it forms
one of the noblest and most appropriate monuments of the greatest city
in the world; awakening the curiosity of every passer-by regarding the
mysteries revealed in its enigmatical sculptures.

The companion obelisk which had been left standing at Alexandria,
after having suffered much from neglect, in the midst of its mean and
filthy surroundings, was presented to the American Government by the
Khedive of Egypt. But that Government acted in the same supine spirit
in which our own had acted; and it was left to the ability of Captain
Corringe as engineer, and to the liberality of the millionaire
Vanderbilt, who paid the expenses incurred, amounting to L20,000, to
bring the obelisk in the hold of a chartered steamer across the
Atlantic, and set it up in the midst of New York city. And if the one
obelisk is a remarkable sight in London, the other is a still more
remarkable sight in New York. There, amid the latest inventions of the
West, surrounded by the most recent civilisation of the world, rises
up serenely, unchanged to heaven, the earliest monument of the East,
surrounded by the most ancient civilisation of the world. "Westward
the course of empire takes its way;" and as the old obelisk of
Heliopolis witnessed the ending of the four first dramas of human
history, so shall it close the fifth and last. The sun in the East
rose over its birth; the sun in the West shall set over its death.

It is possible that when all the stores of co