Right on the city gate in Tangier we find, in this town of an old civilization, the convenience of most modern time—a letter-box. Before the natives were used to them they were considered as wonderful machines into which a missive once being put was mysteriously conveyed to its destination, and they were generally feared. To-day the smallest boy uses them. The style of course varies with the power that puts it up.
Here we can notice with what expression of wonderment the native posts a letter. He is only certain the letter will go, but how, he does not know.
The German post-box is painted blue, and has only German directions written on it. The directions giving time of delivery and collection are written in many languages.
The final photograph shows a letter-box on a Moorish gateway in Tangier, Morocco. And here this convenience of modern days looks strange in its surroundings of Arabic fresco and characters. No attempt has been made to harmonize with the Moorish architecture. The letters are collected from an opening on the other side of the wall.
LOST RHEIMS
BY LOUISE EUGÉNIE PRICKITT
"Rheims, which has been on fire for a week, is now nothing but a great pile of smoking ruins," I read in the paper of the man who sat next to me in the subway. With a sick heart I read on: "There are no traces of streets and thoroughfares, which have disappeared from view under the accumulation of debris. Ancient buildings in the Place Royal and the market-place and the Musicians' House, which dates from the sixteenth century, have been reduced to dust and ashes." With a doubly sad heart I read it, for to me it is more than an old French city that lies in ruins, since with it goes the picturesque and historic background of my early youth. It is the tragic passing of my city of dreams, for there I dreamed away eight happy years of girlhood.
It is an enviable thing to live in an ancient city like Rheims till its history becomes a part of the texture of one's mind, till the background of that history, hangs like a series of distinct pictures in one's thought, not to be effaced by anything that shall come afterward. The streets of Rheims as they then stood are photographed clearly on the retina of my mind's eye, and, dominating all, as it did at my first sight of it, is the majestic shape of the cathedral. I enter again, in imagination, those beautiful portals, and feel myself a tiny figure, and young in the midst of hoary antiquity. The organ music surges through the building, the choir-boys' voices soar above it. I see again the slanting fall of colored light across the wide gray floors, the soft blue smoke of the rising incense, the towering pillars, the vaulted roof, the dim vistas ending in the splendor of painted windows. Years and years of patient labor it took to rear this marvel. It represented the ideality of an age; it was, in fact, that ideality incarnate, left standing for all posterity to see and take inspiration from.
It was at sunset one December day that I first entered Rheims. It was to be my home for the next eight years, for my father had been appointed by the American Government to be consul there. How eagerly, I remember, we looked out of the train window as we approached the city. Long before the town itself became distinct to our eyes, we could plainly see the cathedral, a superb silhouette, imposing and not to be forgotten. It was like one's first view of the ocean or the mountains or the desert.