“Above sea level!” What does this mean? We shall endeavour to illustrate; we shall therefore ask our reader to be so good as, in the first instance, to place himself, either in imagination or reality, exactly parallel with those at-one-time-considered impregnable fortresses at Albert Gate Knightsbridge, Malta, and Gibraltar, so called, because, for a long time, no one could be found to take them. The ice, however, was broken as regards one of them, Malta, by a monarch of former days—for the most part wrongly accused and unfairly deposed—the Railway King. He sold it to our “natural enemy;” it has, therefore, for many years, been in possession of France, as the residence of the French ambassador, and let us _en passant_ express a fervent hope—long may it continue to be so. Gibraltar, less dignified, has, probably, not been less useful; it fell, however, through the fatal influence of gold; it has long been a tributary or branch of one of our leading joint stock banking establishments. So much for our starting point, and now for the ground to be got over. It has just been stated that the summit of the Mont Cenis Pass is 6,658 feet above sea level.[114] Converted into terms which we can more readily appreciate for such lengths, it means one mile and a quarter with fifty-eight feet over for good measurement. Placing this distance on the flat instead of the perpendicular it represents the whole of the ground that intervenes between the whilom fortresses and the corner of Coventry Street and the Haymarket; that is, a person wanting to walk 6,658 feet on or nearly the level, must go over ground equal to that which we have named as between these two points of measurement. But when we come to ascend a height, be it great or small, only a few feet or a mountain, we know by a universal law that we cannot mount exactly perpendicularly. Even in the nearest approach to the upright straight rise—the ladder—we are obliged to have some slope in it. We therefore, in all ascents by steps must mount gradually, so gradually in fact that the place for placing the human foot is usually greater than the rise made at each step it takes forward. In ordinarily built houses of the usual proportions, the rise of a step in a staircase is seven inches, but what the foot steps on is eleven inches wide; consequently, for every seven inches that we rise we must go forward eleven inches. But this is not all: at every twelve or fourteen feet we must have breaks in the ascent—landings; therefore, for any height above twenty feet or so, the proportion between elevation and step forward is, as near as can be, one to three. Taken by this standard, a person wanting to rise 6,658 feet by means of staircases or steps, must be continually ascending for a length that measures not only from Albert Gate to the Haymarket; but a farther distance represented by Leicester Square, Cranbourne Street, Long Acre, Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields,