The editor of an American mag-zine which has a stupendous circulation recently found a moral in the shrinking of the world's wildernesses for the following ez cathedra remarks "We might all of us just as well rab our eyes and wake up fo the fact that the populations of the world are fluid to-day; that the interintelligences of the world are almost instantaneous; that the new transportation of to-day has altered the wilderness absolutely and irrevocably.""
In the same issue this magazine begins a sena! story which finds in Peking an eventual setting. The liberties, which the author takes with the Peking as it is and as it has been within the memories of many of our living friends and with the Chinese.character and mode of speech as they are and always were, give the most imaginaative of us the creeps. None of us could remain long enough in China to know much about it and remain strictly literal-minded and at the same time sane. When a professional manufacturer of fiction in Philadelphia or Boston or Budapest takes it into his head to find location for the events of his latest soul spasm in the land and city of our adoption we do not demand rigid realism. We understand that if he had had the opportunities that we have had to know this country and its people, to know it so that he would never strike a false note either in description or characterization, he probably would have had no op-j portunity to cultivate the literary] patronage of a magazine selling; several million copies a week. When a reporter gets a story of; shipwreck from a sea captain do not insist that his technical; terminology be as accurate.as that! of the original raconteur. We do, not expect him to give the exact longitude and latitude of the spot on the ocean where the lee fore: top-gallant-sail brace snapped as' they were wearing ship; but we do) expect that he should make rather better story of the whole than -the master mariner involved could tell without outraging the latter making the crew haul on the shrouds or swarm up the binnacle. When highly paid fictionists see fit to localize their plots in China we! expect a good story in the first place, since we know that the editor! must have paid a good price for it, and, in the second place, we, should like to see it demonstrated that the new transportation of to-day has not wholly missed and gone by our particular wilderness. We want just a little evidence of inter intelligence without presuming to insist that it be either complete or instantaneous.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.