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Mangu Khan was the last of the Mongol rulers whose authority was recognized in both the east and the west, and his successor, Kublai, seeing that its old significance had departed, was fain to establish his on a new basis in the fertile, ancient and wide-stretching dominions of China.

Around on every hand stretched a brilliant, sun-kissed picture of rugged mountain slopes, scored deeply by the storms of ages; deep kloofs, precipitous of side, shaggy with their vesture of dense bush, and mysterious with their broad masses of dark shadow; rolling uplands, dotted here and there with clumps of timber and bush or with our grazing flocks of sheep and herds of cattle and horses, sweeping gently down toward the wide-stretching, bush-clad plains, through which wound tiny spruits, like threads of silver, hurrying to lose themselves in the broader waters of the Great Fish River.

The wind had dropped to the faintest breeze, which presently, too, died away, succeeded by a dead stillness of the atmosphere, while the sea became like glass, except where an occasional heave of the unbroken surface betrayed the restless force beneath that seeming calm; and, instead of the clear sky and wide-stretching horizon melting into the azure distance, which had previously struck me with admiration, a thick haze had crept up over the heavens from the westwards, which, extending right up to the zenith, had soon shut out the bright sunlight, making it darker than night the air becoming at the same time chill and cold.

Now looking around me I stood mute in wonder, for from this height I might behold a vast stretch of country, towering mountains, deep, shady valleys, impenetrable woods, rushing rivers, wide-stretching plains and far beyond a vague haze that I knew was the sea.

Stephen's Church, in Vienna more than forty years ago, to find that what I sought most eagerly in the superb landscape was not the steep Kahlenberg, not the plumy woods of Schönbrunn, not the Danube pouring grandly eastward, nor the picturesque city at my feet; but the little hamlets just outside the suburbs, and the wide-stretching grain-field close by, turning yellow under the July sun, where Napoleon fought the battles of Aspern and Wagram.

From its wide-stretching mouth a bit of half-burnt vine hung, trembling in the heated air, and this element of motion produced the impression on several of the party that the creature was about to open its lips. Mrs. Cliff gave a little scream, she could not help it, and Maka sank down on his knees, his back to the rock, and covered his face with his hands. Ralph was the first to speak.

The conception of those boulevards discloses a tremendous audacity and faith. And as you roll along the macadam, threading at intervals a wide-stretching park, you are overwhelmed at least I was by the completeness of the scheme's execution and the lavishness with which the system is in every detail maintained and kept up.

To-day the province of Victoria numbers 550,000. Seven millions of vines produce annually 121, 000 gallons of wine. There are 103,000 horses spreading over the plains, and 675,272 horned cattle graze in her wide-stretching pastures." "Is there not also a certain number of pigs?" inquired McNabbs. "Yes, Major, 79,625." "And how many sheep?" "7,115,943, McNabbs."

As concerns my school-days, I feel that all that will interest the reader is this: as I rode through mile upon mile of the flat, wide-stretching country, I made to myself a vow in connection with Winifred, a vow that when I left school I would do a certain thing in relation to her, though Fate itself should say, 'This thing shall not be done. I did not know then, as I know now, how weak is human will enmeshed in that web of Circumstance that has been a-weaving since the beginning of the world.

There are no longer Cimmerians and Ethiopians, in wide-stretching lands, awaiting them. On either hand they confront the naked poles, and they recoil from unnavigable space to an intenser struggle among themselves. And all the while the planet shrinks beneath their grasp. Of this struggle one thing may be safely predicated; a commercial power must be a sea power.