Here about three years ago ten thousand human lives—and some dogs and horses—were suddenly snuffed out because of something which a solar-system physician might diagnose as being merely a mild case of Asiatic colic. Our Mother Earth was indisposed, and she swallowed ten thousand of her children while shaking herself to rights. The death of each one of us, however regularly and decorously it befalls, does exemplify this singular appetite of the great mother, but an Andijan earthquake-feast advertises it, proclaims aloud the universal requiem "to dust returnest," and changes the ever-sorrowful " why " of our yearning race into the groan of one who is stunned to black unconsciousness.
In the general ruin one sees the broken cross that crowned a Christian church, and there the muezzin tower, scattered now into mere fragments, that, falling, crushed the roof of its mosque, consecrated by generations of prayer—cross and crescent alike gone down in helpless confusion. But whate'er betide the dead, we know that the faith of the living faints but for a moment, and the yearning for help never dies. So it is, that now in fallen Andijan, until the mason shall again lift the graceful dome, we hear the prayers of the believers go up from the enclosure of hasty earthen walls, through a roof of thatch, half open to the sky. And I am awakened by the early chant of a Russian priest who, in his chapel—on wheels—blesses the union of two young moujiks. They have come, ere the sun is fairly up, from among the long line of railway carriages which shelter hundreds of their kind. They are wedded ; and leaving the churchly car, while still the
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