Cities have been made as the marquis of Bute made Cardiff, by constructing a dock, and ship canal, and converting the ancient castle into a modern palace. Many towns have been started as railway stations, but few of them attained importance. Steamboat landings have been more fortunate. Some cities owe their origin to war, some to commerce, and not a few to manufactures. Fanaticism has played a part, as in India and parts of Africa, where are nestings of half-savage humanity with a touch of the heavenly in the air. Less disciplined are these than zion--towns, but nearer the happiness of insensibility--the white--marbled and jeweled Taj Mahal, Agra on the Jumna, and Delhi, making immortal Jehan the builder, with his pearl mosque and palace housing the thirty-million-dollar peacock throne; Benares, on the Ganges, a series of terraces and long stone steps extending upward from the holy water, while rising yet higher in the background are temples, towers, mosques, and palaces, all in oriental splendor. Algiers, likewise, an amphitheatre in form, might give San Francisco lessons in terrace construction, having hillsides covered with them, the scene made yet more striking by the dazzling white of the houses. After the place became French, the streets were widened and arcades established in the lower part. In fact, the French believe in the utility of beauty, and in Paris at least they make it pay. The entire expenses of the municipal government, including police and public works, are met by the spendings of visitors. To their dissolute monarchs were due such creations as the Tuileries, the Louvre, and Versailles. Have we not dissolute millionaires enough to give us at least one fine city? London and Paris stand out in bold contrast, the one for utility, the other for beauty. Both are adepts in their respective arts. The city proper of London has better buildings and cleaner streets than when St. Paul was erected; otherwise it is much the same. Elsewhere in London, however, are spacious parks and imposing palaces, with now and then a fine bit of something to look out upon, as the bridges of the murky Thames, the Parliament houses, the Abbey, Somerset house, and Piccadilly, perhaps. Children may play at the Zoo, while grown-ups sit in hired chairs under the trees. Three times London was destroyed by the plague, and five times by fire, that of 1666 lasting four days, and covering thrice the area of the San Francisco conflagration; yet it was rebuilt better than before in three and a half years. Always the city is improved in the rebuilding; how much, depends upon the intelligence and enterprise of the people.