The Great Wall of China.—An American engineer engaged in the construction of a railway in China, gives the following account of this wonderful work. The wall is 1728 miles long, 18 feet high, and 15 feet thick at the top. The foundation throughout is of solid granite, the remainder of compact masonry. At intervals of between two hundred and three hundred yards towers rise up, twenty-five to thirty feet high, and twenty-four feet in diameter. On the top of the wall and on both sides of it are masonry parapets to enable the defenders to pass unseen from one tower to another. The wall is carried from point to point in a straight line, across valleys, plains, and hills, sometimes plunging down into deep abysses. Rivers are bridged over by the wall, while on both banks of large streams strong flanking towers are placed.
MARGOTTE'S STORY.
"I will tell you the story," said Margotte, pausing in her knitting, as we leaned together over the white palings of her little garden. "Yes, there is a story, madame—a story of a wolf; but you have got it wrong, madame, and I must set you right."
Picture a sunset in the Pyrenees, a glorious crimson sky tipping the distant peaks with pale pink, and deepening the purple shadows on the nearer mountains—the mountains that inclose and overtop Margotte Nevaire's pretty home. I had come for a quiet month to this picturesque, secluded village, and though my month was over, I was tempted to linger day after day, for the sake of the sunshine and the mountains, and not least, perhaps, for the sake of these two peasant girls, with whom I lodged.
Margotte was the youngest of the two by fifteen years—the three boys who came between had died—and though it is very long since we leaned side by side over the white palings, I can always call her to mind as she stood knitting there.
She was tall and strong, and finely made, with a clear white skin, and brown hair waving in heavy masses under her white starched caps. She had beautiful eyes, heavy-lidded and dark-lashed, and a firm, sweet mouth—such a woman as you see sometimes amongst the desolate mountains, as if God had given to them a grander soul, to compensate for the blessings He denied.
Léontine was different; tall too, and active, but with heavier movements, and more of firmness than of sweetness in her scarred face. She had no girlish vanity in her glossy hair, or the cap starched to such absolute perfection, for so much of her youth and beauty had vanished with that scar—a deep blue line from brow to chin—that no loving arrangement of the hair by Margotte's deft fingers could hide.
So Margotte said to me that evening, dropping her knitting into her apron pocket: "I will tell you the story of the wolf, madame. Léontine is out, and it is a grand story—a story I should like you to hear."