he tells them freely and openlytells Hillas soon as he gets in the flat.

And in Omar's time the Sawâd was no longer at its best, for, a few years before the Arab conquest, abnormally high floods had burst the dykes; from below Hilla to above Basra the Euphrates broadened into a swamp, and the Tigris deserted its former (and present) bed for the Shatt-el-Hai, leaving the Amara district a desert.

We accordingly did not start this afternoon until 4 p.m., and travelled on to 8.45, encamping in an open grassy plain under Black Hilla volcanic eminence, the position of which is shown on the Admiralty charts.

Here and there grew some low herbage scarcely sufficient for the frugal camel; even this ceases a few miles before coming to Assad, and from thence to Hilla the desert appeared uninterruptedly in its sad and uniform nakedness.

Towards 10 o'clock in the morning, we halted for two hours only at Chan Nasri, as I was resolved to reach Hilla today.

In the afternoon we approached the town of Hilla, which now occupies a part of the space where Babylon formerly stood.

Four miles from Hilla we turned off the road to the right, and shortly found ourselves between enormous mounds of fallen walls and heaps of bricks.

As I had seen everything completely, I rode on as far as Hilla, on the other side of the Euphrates.

In Hilla I was received by a rich Arab.

These ruins are situated six miles distant from Hilla, in the desert or plain of Shinar, near the Euphrates, upon a hill 265 feet high, built of bricks, and consist of the fragments of a wall twenty-eight feet long, on one side thirty feet high, and on the other thirty-five.

There is an extensive view from the top of the hill over the desert, the town of Hilla with its charming palm-gardens, and over innumerable mounds of rubbish and brick-work.

In the afternoon I was again in Hilla.

On the 2nd of July I left Hilla at sunrise, and went on, without stopping, to the Khan Scandaria (sixteen miles), where I remained some hours; and then went the same day as far as Bir-Zanus, sixteen miles further.

The distance from Baghdad to Hilla is considered to be sixty miles, and from Hilla to Birs Nimroud six.

The distance from Baghdad to Hilla is considered to be sixty miles, and from Hilla to Birs Nimroud six.

But the two guinea pig children were not discouraged, and they kept on and on, and pretty soon, really and truly honestly, they were at the very top of the hilla place where they had never been before.

And then one night as I looked I suddenly saw a little flicker on the beacon hilla single red tongue of flame in the darkness.

HILLAS, BERTHA B. The bridge of life.

A quarter of a mile from the landing-place, clustered at the foot of a steep little hilla spur from the higher rangeslies the village of Bandipur, dirty and picturesque, with, its rickety-looking wooden houses, and its crowded little bazaar.

There were three men in the sled; Dan, the mail-carrier, crusty, belligerently Western, the self-elected guardian of every one on his route; Hillas, a younger man, hardly more than a boy, living on his pre-emption claim near the upper reaches of the stage line; the third a stranger from that part of the country vaguely defined as "the East."

"Letter didn't say anything about coming out in the spring to look over the country, did it?" Hillas shook his head.

Why don't you get out?" Hillas, following Dan's glance around the blurred sky line, answered absently, "Usual answer is 'Leave?

The edged voice snapped, "Visionaries!" Hillas's eyes opened again, wide, and then the boy was looking beyond the man with the far-seeing eyes of the plainsman.

Look like a blizzard to you, Hillas?" The traveller sat up.

He thinks of Hilla brave soul gone; And Ashby dead in pale disdain; And Stuart with the Rupert-plume, Whose blue eye never shall laugh again.