and they themselves felt the slow undermining of the sea as it encroached upon the land, until at last one of them fell to the ground about three hundred years ago, and got partially covered over with sand, leaving the other to stand alone.  Then came the French invasion of Egypt, and the victories of Nelson and Abercromby, when Mahomet Ali, the ruler of the land, offered 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.