feet longer than the two great East River bridges. Its enormous dimensions, the perfection of its design, and the rapidity, simplicity, and economy of its construction will make it, when completed, one of the great monuments of the world. It will carry two railroad-tracks, two electric-car tracks, and two carriageways, and may cost about $4,000,000, of which probably $1,300,000 will be for the piers and foundations. The weight of steel will be about 60,000,000 pounds. The huge trusses will be about 300 feet high above the tops of the main piers, and will not look unlike, or be very much smaller than, pairs of Eiffel towers, set horizontally, base to base, on each pier, and supporting between their ap

bridges, but one of no importance whatever as an engineering structure, is the Atbara Bridge, which, a year or two ago, gained much notoriety and caused no little British

THE NEW EAST RIVER BRIDGE FROM THE
BROOKLYN END, SUMMER OF 1901.

proaching extremities a 600-foot suspended span, which latter, alone, will be among the dozen longest and largest spans in the world. One of the most interesting of recent

VOL. LXIV.-28.

vexation. The English government needed a military bridge in the Sudan; English builders required several months to deliver it, but an American firm, offering to ship it in forty-two days and for a very much smaller price, secured the contract. The calculations and numerous accurate drawings were made; the steel was rolled; the members were riveted, forged, machined, painted, and loaded on shipboard in New York on time. The 1,500,000 pounds of steel were unloaded and reshipped at Alexandria by a foreman and seven men sent from the shops. They went over a thousand miles up the Nile, diverged toward the Red Sea to a small native town in the Nubian Desert,

where, in forty-eight days, they built the bridge, which was more than 1000 feet long.

Number two of the seven 150-foot spans was first temporarily erected on blocking on shore beyond one end of the bridge, and being loaded with 100,000 pounds of rails, served as an anchor arm from which span number one was built out as a cantaliver, overhanging the abutment until it was landed on the first pier. Then the second span was taken down and rebuilt in the same way, without supporting falsework, as a cantaliver anchored to the end of the first span. Number three was erected from number two, and so on, until all the spans had been put in place by from two hundred to four hundred Sudanese

bridges conform very closely to them, and are built by thousands from material always ready in the market, and manufactured by special machines and skilled labor devoted entirely to such work. Besides this, the bridge was adapted for the easiest and quickest erection.

Few great bridges have been built without a baptism of blood, but fatalities are wonderfully few in view of the perils to which the builders are exposed. In ancient times a human victim was immolated by the priests on the corner-stone of the bridge, and even in the nineteenth century an infant was entombed in a pier of the Kerventhal Bridge, Saxony. The lives now sacrificed in this country in the erection of bridges are generally lost by individual carelessness or in the rare great

on top of a derrick-mast, guyed a hundred feet above a lofty bridge. They will keep at work when exposed to the fiercest sun, or when every beam and plank is rounded over with ice, or when the wind is so violent that they actually have to lean far out against it in walking a narrow plank. Woe to the man when the gust suddenly abates before he can recover himself!

Coming down from a high bridge is often more difficult and tedious than going up, and no bridge-builder will climb down if he can find a tackle suspended near by, with the great pulley-blocks drawn up close together. Mounting the lower one, he grasps the fixed part of the rope, and spins merrily down, actually falling, with the velocity retarded to a safe but exhilarating degree by the friction of

the stiff rope as it overhauls with a rattle and rush, and the steel pulleys whirl faster and faster with the increasing weight. If a tackle is not at hand, he will not disdain a thin pendent line used to pull up the water-pail or rivet-box. Grasping it in his bare hands, he winds it twice around one leg, and holding it between the hollows in the soles of his boots, can descend safely at moderate speed, and stop at any time without danger of lacerating his hands. This is a method which should be generally known, if only for its value as a ready fire-escape.

Often the men climb to the top of a bridgetruss by running up the steeply inclined end post on all fours. A fellow stupidly essaying to descend in the same way, immediately fell, but instead of dropping straight down, curled up and rolled along the almost vertical surface until near the ground, when he dropped clear, and struck with great violence on a tightly stretched rope. He bounded up several feet, was tossed over the side of the pier, and fell much farther to the dry river-bottom, where he landed without broken bones on a pile of stones.

Bridge-builders, as a class, are men of strong character, standing high in the ranks of skilled labor. They bring a large measure

usually good mechanics, and after a few years' service become foremen and superintendents; but the life is a hard one, and few gray-haired bridge-builders are seen.

of courage, fidelity, and resourcefulness to their dangerous calling, are quick and cool in emergencies, brave in peril, enduring in hardship, and vigorous in difficult tasks which require strength and hardihood. They are

Scarcely a large bridge is now erected but has men on it who can tell of their experiences on almost all of the greatest bridges which have been built on this continent; so short is the history of modern bridge-building.

T is a common idea, not only in England, but in all parts of the British empire, and indeed among all English-speaking people, that the sovereign of England reigns, but does not govern, and some might go so far as to say that the government of England is a monarchy in form, but a republic in fact. This is an exaggeration of the truth. No change, indeed, could be more momentous, if such a revolution were conceivable, than that from a monarchical to a republican constitution in England. For nearly a thousand years the monarchy has been bound up intimately with every department of the national life. The king appoints his ministers, his bishops, his judges, and is, unlike the President of the United States, an integral part of Parliament. He declares war and concludes peace. All communications with foreign courts run in his name. The difficulty of dispensing with the monarchy in England is shown by the example of the only occasion in which it was attempted. After the execution of Charles I a commonwealth was established in these islands; but, besides the difficulty of getting the new order of things recognized in Scotland and in Ireland, Cromwell soon found that it was almost impossible to carry on the machinery of administration without the authority of the crown. The desire of the Protector to make himself king was based, not upon personal ambition or hypocrisy, but upon the necessity of reviving the only basis upon which acts could legally be done or obedience readily secured. Not only is the crown the only tie which binds together the motley complex of dependencies, differing in language, religion, laws, and history, indeed, in everything which makes a nation, which compose the British empire, but the sovereign is aware of this every day, is intimately acquainted with everything that happens throughout the extent of his dominions, and feels a personal interest in everything which may affect the happiness of his subjects.

The writer of the present article has had

unusual opportunities of observing the conduct of the court, as the first forty years of his life were spent at Windsor or in its immediate neighborhood. His first recollection as a child is that of the fireworks which were let off at the end of the Long Walk on the evening of the Queen's marriage, February 10, 1840. He saw, day by day, the gay cavalcade pass from the central gates of the castle down the fourfold avenues of elms to the "statue," or "copper horse," as it was vulgarly called, an equestrian statue of George III, which terminated the vista. In early days, the young sovereign rode with her court and councilors about her, like "Susanna and the elders," as it was said, with Lord Melbourne on her right hand and Sir Robert Peel on her left. The Duke of Wellington, the Queen's most honored subject, was often of the company, and Lord Brougham exhibited his Scotch countenance in his Scotch dress.

From the first days of her marriage the Queen lunched at two and dined at eight, in those days the fashionable dining-hour being six. Every evening the castle windows gleamed like a beacon over the country, dominated, for miles about, by the royal cliff on which it stands. The Prince was never absent from the earlier meal. When hunting with the Queen's stag-hounds or his own harriers, he would turn aside in the heat of the chase, and ride back to keep his tryst. Not that he was a good horseman, or perhaps a keen sportsman. We have seen him dismounted by his horse leaping a low hedge, and dragged ignominiously over a heap of stones. "So unfortunate-before the ladies, too," he remarked.

Another notable sight was the promenade on the East Terrace on Sunday afternoon. George III and William IV used to walk all round the terrace, talking to those whom they knew, and taking special notice of Eton boys. The Queen confined herself to the broad asphalted passage which ran north and south beneath the windows of the castle. Two bands, of the horse- and foot-guards,