divine, and came to be the leading attraction of the affair, next to the Koh-i-noor.  On this barbaric contribution of the gorgeous East the French observers, a little jealous perhaps, were severe.  One of them says:  “They rely on the sun to make it sparkle,” and, when the fog is too thick, on gas.  The curiosity about it, in the eyes of this incisive Gaul, was “not the divinity, but the worshipers.”  All day long a crowd filed solemnly by it under the supervision of a detachment of police, each pilgrim bestowing upon the fetish, “an egg-shaped lump of glass,” half a second’s adoration, and then moving reluctantly on.  Thousands of far more beautiful things were around it, but none embodying in so small a space so many dollars and cents, and none therefore so brilliant in the light of the nineteenth century.  As this light, nevertheless, is that in which we live, move and have our being, we must accept it, and turn to substantials, wrought and unwrought.

On our way to this feast of solids we must step for a moment into St. Paul’s and listen to the great commemorative concert of sixty-five hundred voices that swept all cavilers, foreign and domestic, off their feet, brought tears to the most sternly critical eye, and caused the composer, Cramer, to exclaim, as he looked up into the great dome, filled with the volume of harmony, “Cosa stupenda! stupenda!  La gloria d’Inghilterra!”

A transition, indeed, from this to coal and iron—­from a concord of sweet sounds to the rumble into hold, car and cart of thirty-five millions of tons of coal and two and a half millions of iron, the yearly product at that time of England!  She has since doubled that of iron, and nearly trebled her extract of coal, whatever her progress in the harvest of good music and good pictures.  Forced by economical necessity and assisted by chemistry, she makes her fuel, too, go a great deal farther than it did in 1851, when the estimate was that eighty-one per cent. of that consumed in iron-smelting was lost, and when the “duty” of a bushel of coal burnt in a steam-engine was less than half what it now is.  The United States have the benefit of these improvements, at the same time that their yield of coal has swelled from four millions of tons at that time to more than fifty now, and of iron in a large though not equal ratio.  The Lake Superior region, which rested its claims on a sample of its then annual product of one hundred tons of copper, now exports seven hundred thousand tons of iron ore.

Steel, now replacing iron in some of its heaviest uses, appeared as almost an article of luxury in the shape of knives, scissors and the like.  The success of the Hindus in its production was quite envied and admired, though they had probably advanced little since Porus deemed thirty pounds a present fit for Alexander; their rude appliances beating Sheffield an hour and a half in the four hours demanded by the most adroit forgers of the city of whittles for its elimination