in the New World which have fallen so unexpectedly upon the ear of Europe. Out Queen has reflected with an excellent fidelity the feelings of her people. After the first surprise was over, and when the "God less me! you don't say so?" had b een said, we think we never heard of a battle in which 75,000 men seem to have been engaged on each side, and which fell so blank up the public ear and engaged so little European interest. The fact is that we do not like to laugh and the sense of the ridiculous comes too strong over us when we would be serious. It is a great battle without the dignity of danger or the painful interest of great carnage. There are all the ridiculous indicents of stark fear and rabid terror without much real peril and with very little actual suffering. We being to feel that we have been cheated out of our sympathies.

When this war broke out we English all pictured to ourselves two earnest sections of the same population interlaced in mortal combat, warring to the knife and to the death. We received by every mail little samples of an atmosphere of bood and thunder and war and wounds. All America appeared to us, poor dupes, like and fresh exploded mine- all smoke and fragments and torn limbs. We fancied our kinsmen reckless, furious, flying at each other's throats and careless of their own safety. At the same time that they were shaking knives at each other they were shaking their fists at us. We trembled for what we were fated to see. We held our breath for the first shock of battle between these two young giants. We shut our eyes against the deadly struggle.

We are clamer now. We are all clamer. We are satisfied that these warlike athletes who were issuing such dire threats against any one who should dare to offer to separate them are not so very reckless. Since their dissensions have assumed "the character of open war" they have been carried on upon strictly himanitarian principles. If we are to believe the American press an American battle has never yet been so dangerous as an American passenger boat, and not much more so than an American railway. The hostile forces shell each other out of strong forteresses without losing a single life. They fight a battle in Western Virginia which determines the fate of a district at the expense of less than a score of casulaties, and a great stand-up battle is fought between 150,000 men, ending in a panic and a twenty-mile run, and when the "Grand Army of the Potomac" reaches Alexandria the New York Herald reports that "the killed on our side will be between 300 and 500".

It is very difficult to gague the solidity of anything American, even of a great battle. We know that there was a great rout in from of that gap which runs up into the hills, for we were represented in the ruck and may sau that we saw it with our own eyes and heard the cannonade with our own ears. There is a probablity also that the number of men present at the battle mounts to the high figure of 150,000, for both accounts seem to agree upon this. Beyond these facts, however, everything seems vague and uncertain. The advance of the "Grand Army of the Potomac" reads in the American papers like a brulesque of the progress of Xerxes to the Hellespont. The great Federal victory of Bull Run which was flashed over the Northern States and recorded in the Northern papers was a thing hovering for hours while yet in print upon the confines of fancy and possiblity. The abject rout, the ultimate realiy, was what we could have least believed. Perhaps we ought to have anticipated that the same ferocious men who