United States or Armenia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Lionardo da Vinci's epitaph by Platino Piatto. Into the holy enclosure which had received the precious shiploads of earth from Calvary, the Pisans of the thirteenth century carried the fragments of ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from Greece; and in the Gothic cloister enclosing the green sward and dark cypresses of the graveyard of Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first time face to face with the art of Antiquity.

There can, however, be little doubt that if a few shiploads of Chinese labourers were emptied into the wharves of East London, whatever Government chanced to be in power would be compelled to adopt immediate measures of restraint on immigration, so terrible would the effect be upon the low class European labourers in our midst.

Shiploads of granite had been brought from Norway, and stone fleets had been sunk in the channel, but the insatiable quicksands had swallowed them as fast as they could be deposited, the tide rolled as freely as before, and the bold pirates sailed forth as gaily as ever to prey upon the defenceless trading vessels and herring-smacks of the States.

The most we could do for the grief-stricken survivors was to mitigate in some degree their bodily distress. The world knows how generously the whole country responded to the call how contributions came pouring in by trainloads and shiploads, consigned to the Red Cross. To distribute all this bounty judiciously was a herculean task and our working force was very small.

After the loss of the Holy Land the Pisans caused some fifty shiploads of soil to be brought hither from Mt. Calvary, in order that the dead might rest in what was conceived to be holy ground. It was in this Campo Santo that the earliest Tuscan artists were taught to emulate each other, and here the walls are covered with remarkable representations of Scriptural and historical subjects.

In 1901 the Italian immigrants numbered 138,608, and as I write shiploads with thousands upon thousands are afloat, bound for our shores. Yet there is a gleam of promise in the showing of last year, for of the 138,608, those who came to stay in New York numbered only 67,231. Enough surely, but they were after all only one-half of the whole against two-thirds in 1898.

Up to this point the operations described have taken place in the lands where cacao is produced. To watch the further processes in its development as an article of food, let us in imagination follow one of the shiploads of cacao on its sea journey from the far tropics to one of the countries of the old world, until the sacks of beans are finally deposited at a cocoa factory.

And nations to nations send good news: a race of slaves is set free; a war has ended; shiploads of grain have been sent to the starving; a good man has been made ruler; these are good tidings gospels."

That much rain does not fall is very certain, for the houses are covered only with flat roofs made of hardened mud; and on the mole shiploads of wheat were piled up, being thus left for weeks together without any shelter. I cannot say I liked the very little I saw of Peru: in summer, however, it is said that the climate is much pleasanter.

So there was now no more means of purchasing foreign goods and small wares; merchants sent no shiploads into Laconian ports; no rhetoric-master, no itinerant fortune-teller, no harlot-monger or gold or silversmith, engraver, or jeweler, set foot in a country which had no money; so that luxury, deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, wasted to nothing, and died away of itself.