about my neck, weeping as I never saw a woman weep. When she was quiet came the sad story. The trouble battled with, and bravely borne. The short, joyous years; then the long days, and nights, and weeks, and months, so full of desolation and bitterness, and life yet at its meridian. How should she meet the long, slow-moving years? That was the question she asked me. "Tell me how! you who know-tell me how!"

And this was the woman I thought frivolous and pleasure-seeking! Wearing beneath that robe the penitential cross, reminding her at every moment, with its sharp. twinge of pain, that, try as she might, she could never fly from herself.

How often, when I have been inclined to judge harshly, have I thought of that Gethsemane cry! It is sorrowful how we misjudge each other in this busy world. How very near we may be to a warm heart, and yet be frozen! How carelessly we pass by the pool of Bethesda, with its waiting crowd, without thinking that we might be the angel to trouble the waters! This thought is often oppressive to me in the crowd of a city hurrying home at nightfall. What burden does this man or that woman carry, known only to their Maker? How many among them may be just at the dividing-line between hope and despair! And how some faces remind you of a dumb animal, who bears its pain meekly and mournfully, yet cringing lest some careless foot should, at any moment, render it unendurable; haunting you as you go to your home as if you were verily guilty in ignoring it.

Have you never felt this? and, although you may have been cheated and imposed upon seventy times seven, can you wholly stifle it? and ought you to try, even though you know how well the devil can wear the livery of heaven?

I think it is this that, to the reflecting and observing, makes soul and body wear out so quickly in the city, -these constantly-recurring, unsolvable problems, which cloud faith and make life terrible, instead of peaceful and sweet; which lead us sometimes to look upon the little child, so dear to us, with such cowardly fear that it would be a relief to lay it, then and there, in the arms of the Good Shepherd, lest it, too, stray away from the fold.

THE RUINS OF UXMAL.

FELIX L. OSWALD.

[The author from whose works we select our present Half-Hour is a naturalist of rising reputation as a close observer and an attractive writer. He is a native of Belgium, where he was born in 1845. His works are "Physical Education," "Summerland Sketches," "Zoological Sketches," etc. From "Summerland Sketches," an enthusiastic narrative of travel in the tropical region of Mexico, Yucatan, etc., we take the following interesting description of a visit to the most striking of the forest-buried cities of the older civilization of America, with a preliminary account of the original discovery of these extraordinary ruins.]

"EVERY tomb is a cradle," says Jean Paul; and his apothegm holds good wherever the organism of Nature exerts its functions in undisturbed harmony. Life is the heir of Death; every mouldering plant fertilizes an after-growth of its kind, and if the races of mankind succeeded each other as the trees of the forest, a superior spirit might view the decay of an oak and of a nation with equal unconcern.

But, while the fading flowers of the old year may console us with the hope of a coming spring, our lament over

the withered empires of the Old World has a deeper significance: the dying nations of the East have involved their fields and forests in an equal fate; the lands that know them no more have themselves withered, and no spring can restore the prime of an exhausted soil. From Eastern Persia to Western Morocco, Earth has thus perished together with her inhabitants: Vishnu has resigned his power to Shiva, and the Buddhistic Nirvan, the final departure of the Genius of Life, has already begun for some of the fairest countries ever brightened by the sun of the Juventus Mundi.

The western shores of the Atlantic, too, have seen the rise and decline of mighty empires: the ruins of Uxmal equal those of Nineveh in grandeur as well as in the hopelessness of their decay, but the soil of Yucatan has survived its tyrants. In the struggle between Chaos and Cosmos the organic powers have here prevailed, and the sylvan deities have resumed their ancient sway.

There is a well-defined ridge of tertiary limestone formation which divides the table-lands of the eastern peninsula from the wooded lowlands of the west, and the ruins of Uxmal, Chichen, Izamal, and Macoba have all been discovered in the western timber-lands, but have nowhere betrayed their existence by the diminished exuberance of the vegetation. Their walls are hedged, interlocked, and covered with trees, and while the Oriental archæologist has to grope in the sand drifts of burning deserts, his transatlantic colleague can thus pursue his studies in the shade of a forest-region whose living wonders may well divide his attention with the marvels of the past. Eighty years ago the district of Macoba and Belonchen was an unexplored wilderness. The Jesuit missionaries of Valladolid had recorded an Indian tradition about the vestiges of a giant city in the neighborhood of Merida, but their

vague descriptions were supposed to refer to the large teocalli near the convent of Sacrificios, and the rediscovery of the Casas Grandes seems to have been as complete a surprise to the citizens of Merida as the exhumation of Pompeii to the burghers of Nola and Castellamare.

The great treasure-trove of 1829 has often been ascribed to the Baron Frédéric de Waldeck, though since the publication of his memoirs in 1837 his countrymen have never claimed that honor. His subsequent explorations made Uxmal the Mecca of American antiquarians, but the amusing account of the original discovery, as given in the "Voyage Pittoresque," proves that in archæology, not less than in other sciences, the better part of our knowledge is what Lessing called a "museum of collected curiosities, discovered by accident and independently of each other." On the evening of the 1st of November, 1828, Don Pancho Yegros, a Yucatan planter, and his guest, Dr. Lewis Mitchel, a Scotch surgeon of Sisal harbor, returned from a hunting expedition in the Sierra Marina, and, seeking shelter from the threatening weather, happened to come across an Indian wood-chopper, who guided them to a sacristia, an old Indian temple in the depths of the forest. They lighted a fire, and, having noticed some curious sculptures in a sort of peristyle, the Scotchman proceeded to inspect the interior of the building. The masonry was covered with dust and spider-webs, but the application of wet rags discovered a triple row of bas-relief decorations running along the walls horizontally and at equal intervals, and between the roof and the upper lintel of the door the limestone slabs were covered with small figures which seemed too irregular for simple ornaments, and might be hieroglyphic symbols. After daybreak the Scotchman. rummaged a pile of débris behind the temple, and unearthed the torso of a little image, which he pocketed

with an enthusiasm that puzzled the Spanish planter as much as his Indian serf. The natives were unable to give any satisfactory account of the building, and, taking his leave, the doctor requested his host to interview the old Indian residents of the neighborhood in regard to the problematic temple, and rode away with the promise to renew his visit in the course of the year.

"Isn't it strange," said Don Yegros when he was alone with his peon, "that we have lived here for a lifetime without suspecting that there was such a curiosity in our neighborhood? Why, that caballero tells me that some of his countrymen would buy those pictured stones for their weight in silver!"

"He gave me half a dollar anyhow," chuckled the Indian. "He ought to take those countrymen of his to the north end of the sierra: in the chaparral of the Rio Macoba there is a square league of ground just covered with such empty old buildings."

The hacendado turned on his heel: "Are you deranged? A square league of such ruins! You do not mean buildings like that we slept in last night?"

"No, señor; very different buildings,-houses as high as yours, and forty times as long. One of them has more rooms in it than there are tiles on your roof, and long galleries with sculptured heads and figures."

"Mil de

Don Yegros stood speechless for a moment. monios!" he burst out when the stolid countenance of his serf told him that the fellow was in sober earnest. "Why, in the name of your five senses, could you not tell us that a minute sooner? Did you not see how delighted the caballero was to find that one old broken statue?"

"He liked it, did he? Well, I didn't know that, señor. I found a much prettier one in that same place a few years ago, and took it to our village priest, but came very