A city, too, is composed of citizens, argue the councillors; and what is spent for the needs of worthy citizens is, in a sense, spent for the benefit of the city; and what citizens can be worthier than those who toil daily at the administrative council for the benefit of their fellows? So the bridge rent is spent on those worthy objects; and as yet nobody has raised any other objection than that he was himself left out of the sharing of the plunder. What the narrow-minded Western calls corruption will not cease till public opinion condemns it; and what passes for public opinion in Turkish provinces now can imagine no other way of getting anything done. Musing thus on problems of municipal reform we cross the bridge and ride over the mile or so of flat foreshore, that now separates the river from the walls of Nineveh. Once the Tigris washed the base of Koyunjik, the site of Sennacherib's palace, and formed an impregnable barrier against all assaults from that side, but the day dawned at last of which an old prophecy had spoken, when the river joined the besiegers, and betrayed the city to its foes. A great flood swept away the walls, leaving wide breaches all along the frontage; and as the waters subsided, lo the river had cut a new channel, and the whole of the side which it had guarded lay completely open to attack. Wherefore King Sardanapalus (who was not Assurbanipal, but a successor of his named Sinsariskun) gathered together all his treasure and his wives and his children, and died as a king should die, in the flames of his own palace. Nineveh fell in the year 608 B.C., overthrown by Cyaxares, the king of the Medes, and his better known ally, Nabopolassar, the father of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. She had been hard pressed more than once before, but had triumphed eventually over each successive peril. The ultimate explanation of this final overthrow was indeed nothing more or less than the exhaustion caused by generations of conquest. There were no true Assyrians left--only a half-bred race, the fruit of incessant inter-marriages; and when they succumbed, they had no power of recuperation. "Nineveh is laid waste, who shall bemoan her? Her people is scattered upon the mountains, and no man gathereth them."