Mrs. Carlyle declared that when Robert Browning's poem of _Sordello_ appeared she read it through twice with the deepest attention, but that at the conclusion of the second reading she was utterly unable to determine as to whether "Sordello" was a tree, an island, or a man. Somewhat of the same bewilderment has beset many people of late years in regard to any mention of Prince Rupert, the young seaport of the great North-West. One citizen of the United States to whom a rather unusual degree of cosmopolitan travel had been allotted by the Fates that appointed his not undistinguished destiny, and who enjoyed the well-earned admiration of a host of friends as being pre-eminently entitled to speak with authority on many abstract matters for which those less erudite cared little and, alas! knew less, assured his votaries, on inquiry, that Prince Rupert was a town somewhere in the "Dolomites" and that its title should be spelled with a final "z"; while another cheerfully relegated Prince Rupert to the maritime provinces of Canada. Still another, who was nothing if not historical, connected the name only with that of the son of Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine, who was created Duke of Cumberland in 1644 and who so distinguished himself in scientific pursuits that he {190} was rewarded with a tomb in Westminster Abbey (somewhere about 1682). His portrait, painted by Sir Peter Lely, is in the National Portrait Gallery at London. Not to prolong mere pleasantries, however, the Prince Rupert whose citizens forecast for it the future of the "Liverpool of America" is really the terminal of that vast and splendid new transcontinental highway, the Grand Trunk System. Prince Rupert was really created in Boston (U.S.A.), for before the dense forest covering the rocky island with an almost impenetrable growth was felled, the town was laid out by Messrs. Brett and Hall, one of the most distinguished firms of landscape architects in the United States. As a result it is one of the most charmingly designed cities of the entire northern continent. The scenic setting of Prince Rupert is one of incomparable beauty, with its ineffable glory of sea and sky, its hills and cliffs, with terrace above terrace, a scenic setting that suggests, and even rivals, that of Algiers, or Naples, or Genoa, in that unique order of picturesque loveliness investing the cities that rise from terraces above blue seas, with architectural splendours silhouetted against the sapphire sky.