Shall we be crushed in the collision of these superior races? Every
intelligence-office will soon be ringing with the cries of combat, and all
our kitchens strewn with pig-tails and bark chignons. As yet we have gay
hopes of our Buddhistic brethren; but how will it be when they begin to
quarter the Dragon upon the Stars and Stripes, and buy up all the best
sites for temples, and burn their joss-sticks, as it were, under our very
noses? Our grasp upon the great problem grows a little lax, perhaps? Is it
true that, when we look so anxiously for help from others, the virtue has
gone out of ourselves? I should hope not.

As I leave Dublin, the houses grow larger and handsomer; and as I draw
near the Avenue, the Mansard-roofs look down upon me with their dormer-
windows, and welcome me back to the American community. There are fences
about all the houses, inclosing ampler and ampler dooryards; the children,
which had swarmed in the thriftless and unenlightened purlieus of Dublin,
diminish in number and finally disappear; the chickens have vanished; and
I hear--I hear the pensive music of the horse-car bells, which in some
alien land, I am sure, would be as pathetic to me as the Ranz des Vaches
to the Swiss or the bagpipes to the Highlander: in the desert, where the
traveller seems to hear the familiar bells of his far-off church, this
tinkle would haunt the absolute silence, and recall the exile's fancy to
Charlesbridge; and perhaps in the mocking mirage he would behold an airy
horse-car track, and a phantasmagoric horse-car moving slowly along the
edge of the horizon, with spectral passengers closely packed inside and
overflowing either platform.

But before I reach the Avenue, Dublin calls to me yet again, in the figure
of an old, old man, wearing the clothes of other times, and a sort of
ancestral round hat. In the act of striking a match he asks me the time of
day, and, applying the fire to his pipe, he returns me his thanks in a