own hands out of a pit near by. The young "bucks" of the tribe were out squirrel-hunting, and three squaws were engaged in preparing flour from acorns. One was shelling them with her teeth, and laying them on a blanket to dry. Another was pounding them on a granite rock, with a round stone muller: while a third was separating the good flour from the bad, by tossing it cleverly in a target-shaped basket. They have no pottery, but baskets supply its place, woven into elegant shapes, and capable of holding water. The bread is subsequently baked in holes in the earth. For drink they press a rough cider from the manzaneta berry. On looking into the cabin, we saw evidence of an approach to civilization, in a good pair of boots and a rifle the latter used to kill big game, while the flint-tipped arrows bring down the small. A sad sight presented itself as soon as our eyes became accustomed to the darkness. On the floor, moaning piteously and looking up to us for help, which we had no power to render, lay the poor old chief himself. He had met with an accident, broken his leg we were told. No surgical aid had been called in, nor could any relief be obtained for the acute pain he had been in for weeks. The two hideous squaws who attended him made us understand that mortification had set in. Finding that he was dying, in truly patriarchal style, he had, only the day before, summoned his tribe around him, given his last instructions, and appointed his successor. However filthy the Californian Indian may be in his habits, an incident like this is enough to convince us, that, had his white brother treated him otherwise than he has, there was a chance at least that he might have been raised to a state of comparative civilization. But now the time is past. The condition of this old chieftain was the condition of his people. Nothing is left for them but to fulfill their destiny, and soon the "place that knew them will know them no more" forever.

In the "Digger" Indian, the lowest of his race, these sketches of Californian society find an appropriate close. The object of this article will have been gained if it has brought together some few facts and considerations for the student of sociology at large, and if we have been able to impart to the reader some portion of that interest which our sojourn in the country awakened in ourselves.— Quarterly Review.

THE OLDEST RELIGIOUS BUILDINGS IN CHRISTENDOM.

IN neighboring valleys of the great chalk plateau which stands between the Nile and the Gulf of Suez, lie two of the most ancient, and it may even be said, looking at their results, two of the most influential institutions of Christendom. The monasteries of St. Antony the Abbot and St. Paul of Thebes, far hidden from the world, like river sources, in these rocky solitudes, are the first parents of the whole monastic system of the West, which has moved so strongly through history ever since. It is disputed between the monks of these two cloisters which is the earlier; but Antony and Paul were contemporaries, and both buildings probably originated about the middle of the fourth century of our era. Though so near Cairo, they are seldom visited by travelers, either native or European. They lie out of the way of the ordinary routes of traffic; they have never been the object of religious pilgrimages, because the Coptic Church has always discouraged the superstitious worship of saints and relics; and the ignoble army of the tourists have been kept back, partly because their attention has never been directed to them, and partly because they cannot be reached without a difficult desert journey extending, between going and coming, over four or five days. Dr. Schweinfurth, the famous explorer, has visited them repeatedly, and gives us a highly interesting account of them.

The cloisters stand in parallel valleys, separated by a single ridge, and opening into the great Wadi Arabah, which is some forty miles wide. As the traveler in this region penetrates through the rocky hills whose naked white sides dazzle him in the eastern sun, the comparatively luxurious and manifold vegetation of many of these valleys makes an extraordinary impression upon him. Some of them, says Schweinfurth, are like bits of the promised land, with a flora identical with that of Palestine, and much more abundant than in any other part of the deserts of Egypt. The rainfall, though small, is yet slightly more than in the latter, and the rocky mountain sides have this advantage, that they send down all the rain they receive to the soil at their feet. Schweinfurth thinks a little rain goes a long way in these parts, and that the plants and animals, like the human inhabitants, necessarily live on fasting diet. Most of the creatures of the desert never drink; even the gazelle finds enough water in the herbs it feeds on; and those herbs themselves may be like-gifted. A fasting life is a physical law of the land, and the numerous hermits who dwelt for years in caves and holes there in the time of St. Antony, only lived according to nature, in a deeper sense than they suspected. The dates that grow about a single well would be enough to sustain an ascetic for a twelvemonth, without

considering the hares and other animals that might afford him occasional meals; and an edible root, something like the carrot, is found in great abundance in this district of the desert, so that the stories told of the primitive Egyptian anchorites are far from incredible. The desert is not all desert; and Schweinfurth says, that in spite of the bare cliffs that overhang it, the quarter where Antony and Paul of Thebes settled is a perfect earthly paradise, as compared with the valley of the Subiaco in Italy, where St. Benedict dwelt; and he can easily understand how men should live there, as they did, for nearly a hundred years, without suffering any hardships, or conceiving the smallest wish to depart.

St. Antony fixed his abode in a cave near one of the very few perennial wells which exist in that district, and which, though all containing salt or other mineral ingredient, are of priceless value in such a climate. Round this well grows a small plantation of date palms, and in front of these palms have been erected the chapels and dwelling-houses of the present Monastery of St. Antony. Plots of garden or tilled land surround them, and the whole is encompassed by a strong wall. According to the tradition of the monks, this monastery has existed for 1,562 years, and, except for seventy years during the disorderly period following the first conquest of Egypt by the Turks three hundred and seventy years ago, it has been occupied all that time. We have an account of its founder, Antony, written by his contemporary, St. Athanasius. He was born of a rich Egyptian family in A.D. 251, and was left, by the premature death of both his parents, in possession of much estate while still a boy. Being a diligent attender at church, he was struck one day by the story of the rich young man, which was read as a lesson, and felt himself impelled to give all he had away to the poor. Committing his only sister to the care of friends, he betook himself to the solitudes where many hermits still lived, and after receiving their counsel and comfort, and passing through frequent struggles with. the devil, he resolved to spend his whole days in contemplation in the desert. At the age of thirty-five, he discovered the ruins of an old castle not far from the Nile valley, and made himself a dwelling out of them, while a friend brought him twice a year the necessary provision of bread and water. The Egyptians to this day have great skill in baking a kind of bread which will keep good for more than a twelvemonth. After twenty years of this life, during which he found constant occupation in preaching to the people, who began in great numbers to seek him out, he heard of the persecution of the Christians in Egypt under Maximinus's administration, and went to Alexandria longing for martyrdom. A hundred times he plunged into danger, and a hundred times he escaped, and concluding that he was reserved for another destiny, he returned to the desert, and falling in with an Arab caravan, accompanied it into the 'district where he finally settled, and where the present monastery

stands. Here he got agricultural implements from visitors who fɔllowed after him to obtain his intercession, and made a garden, being the first recluse to adopt the rule of praying and working. Contin uous corporal inactivity, he felt, impaired the vigor of the mind, and continuous prayer tended to positive mental disease. He is reported to have wrought many miracles, but always in answer to prayer, and his fame was such that the desert began to live with disciples coming to him for counsel, and suppliants begging his intercession in their behalf. Even heathen philosophers made pilgrimages to him, and Constantine the Great wrote him a letter with his own hand, and sent it by a special embassy. He was not a scholar, it is doubtful whether he could even read and write, but like many Coptic Christians of the present day who are in a similarly illiterate condition, he could repeat most of the Bible by heart. As an old man of a hundred years, he appeared once again in Alexandria, A.D. 352, to oppose the errors of Eutychus. He died five years thereafter, and, in accordance with his own request, lest his bones should be worshiped, he was buried secretly; and to this day no one knows where he was laid.

The Monastery of St. Antony is the largest in Egypt. It covers fifteen acres of ground, and the wall that surrounds it has a circumference of 1100 yards. This wall is thirty or forty feet high, and on approaching the cloister nothing is seen over it but here and there the crown of a palm tree. Visitors are admitted by means of a primitive hoist of which the monks are particularly proud, but they are not admitted till their arrival is announced to the members of the community by the sound of a bell, and one of the monks is sent down to ascertain the nature of their business. This custom was of course intended originally as a protection against being surprised by enemies, and it is now really only a quaint and interesting way of giving a hearty welcome to strangers. There is a gate in the wall, but it is never opened except twice a year, once when the patriarch makes his visit, and again when the camels come back with the year's firewood. After the traveler has got to the top of the wall, the whole monastery-the little chapels with their little cupolas, the big square tower in the center, the dwelling-houses, the deep green palm-trees behind-bursts at once on his view, and to an eye accustomed for some days to the desert, gives the impression of a complete town. The buildings are of the plainest kind, as is the case with all churches and cloisters in Egypt; there is nothing but bare whitened walls, with no attempt at ornament except here and there a Coptic cross, made out of chalk, and usually in the form of a St. Andrew's cross. The monk's houses are not cells, though they are called so. They are built in a row, each having its own door, like the houses of the poorer classes in an Italian suburb, and the separate rooms are not five feet high, and so narrow as hardly to serve for more than a sleeping place.

They are in fact more like pigeon-houses than human dwellings. The cells to the west of the cloister, which are the oldest, are of course the worst in this respect; but even the new houses which were added at the time of the renovation and extension of the monastery in 1859, are miserably small. That restoration was accomplished by means of a subscription raised for the purpose by the patriarch Cyril, who had himself lived there for many years as a monk. All cloisters in Egypt have a tower, and in the eastern parts of the country this tower is always four-sided, like that of St. Antony. The tower was a necessity of more primitive and unsettled times, and it contains within it a chapel, a kitchen, sleeping apartments, and a subterranean water supply, so that the inmates might endure a prolonged siege. It is connected with the rest of the cloister by a drawbridge, which is now rusty through centuries of disuse.

The most interesting antiquity in the place is, of course, the chapel in which St. Antony himself is alleged to have said mass to the first monks. In those days there was no community of life among them, but only of religious worship. They dwelt here and there in caves on the hill-sides, and only came together to prayer in Antony's chapel. It was fully two or three hundred years after this date, and in consequence of the dissensions between the monophysite and orthodox Christians, that walled and fortified cloisters came into existence, and therefore the chapel is very much more ancient than any other part of the monastery can possible be. It was formed after the model of the temple of Jerusalem, and, like all Coptic churches, consists of three divisions-the choir, narthex, and holy of holies-each of which has a cupola over it. The walls are covered with frescoes-genuine specimens of old Byzantine art -which are probably the oldest pictures in Christendom. They are now blackened with age. Nobody has touched them for a thousand years; only the rain has here and there made a white stripe through them, and occasionally a visitor has cut his name across them. The oldest European visitor is Frater Bernardus a Ferula from Sicily, who inscribes his name in full, with the date 1626, and the addition Primus visitator Catholicus hic fuit. Some of the old Coptic monograms which appear on the walls testify to the age of these pictures, for they are so old that no one is now able to decipher them. The pictures themselves are for the most part representations of our Lord, of the Apostles, of the Virgin, and of Christian knights on horseback. One of the latter, clad in Roman armor, is conjectured by Schweinfurth to be the Emperor Constantine; and this, if true, would be curious, because the head of the figure is surrounded by a nimbus, which would betoken the belief in the divine sanctity of kings. There are three other churches within the walls of the cloister, and it is singular that in none of them has any regard been paid to orientation. They do not lie east and west, and