As in Old Chaldea, the people of that vast valley of Mesopotamia, and from far up in Assyria, crowded their dead to Erech, their primitive home, and the burial place of all their race; century after century all who could do so sent their dead down the great river ways to repose near the mouth of the Euphrates, to Erech the sacred city of the dead. The dying trusted their kinsfolk to do this last duty. Even to-day the Chinaman will take his coffin and perhaps a small handful of earth with him, when he leaves his country for Australia or California, and looks to some of his kin to send him home when he dies in a foreign land, and they perform the trust, labelling their countryman’s coffin “dry goods” to get him home at the cheapest rate. This worship of ancestors is not only the chief feature of the Chinese religion; it pervades the daily life of millions, and is believed in with a strength of sentiment and in a way which we find it difficult to comprehend. Yet, as we know, ancestor worship is perpetuated with us to this day,—witness “Almanac de Gotha,” and “Debrett’s Peerage.” Oddly enough comes slipping into my memory a reminiscence of a day long past, hearing of an old dame I knew saying to her grandson: “Ah, Willie, my boy, if your father had only married Miss B—— instead of your mother; your life would have been very different; you might have been riding in a carriage.” And she, poor simple old soul, she wondered why the laugh went round. Yes, the “might have been” is a haunting idea from which few altogether escape in life. Would you know my thought? I was thinking that had I lived in antique times—and some would say, how know you that you did not so live?—then verily I should have been irresistibly impelled to the worship of one’s ancestors, and should have comprehended how it entered into the heart and the conscience, and with music and symbolism set up a real and binding obligation not to be gainsaid; instead of which I am drawn to worship the offspring of somebody else’s ancestors, and find that to be the greater mystery. Ah, me! what a queer topsyturveydom civilization brings about. Did you ever ever try to get behind a child’s mind, to see into the inner recesses of its realistic consciousness? Watch the little girl with her favourite inanimate doll, how she holds important serious conversations with her; how the doll has to be good, attentive to her lessons, dressed and undressed, with a most serious belief in its participations in eating and drinking and playing day after day. What if no words come in response; if the food prepared is not eaten? The belief suffers nothing; the little lady will supply the fitting speeches in reply, and will eat up the offerings of sweets herself. Yes, the bewitching creature will go on believing. She lives in a world of lunacy all her own, with which our bigger world has nothing to do; and unless we can become as little children, it passes our understanding. This is the