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Show THE BRIDGE OF BABEL. American steel men are not to build the new Galata bridge In Constantinople. In consideration of a loan from France, Turkey Tur-key agrees, according to Consul General Dickinson, to pay f2.113.000 for torpedo tx ats and armament and Sn28,000 for the bridge and "take It out of the loan." Steel and stone will not rob the bridge that spans the Golden Horn st its confluence with the Bosphoros pf its tnteerest as the one spot .in all the world that almost recalls re-calls Babel. The elder Dr. Rlggs, the missionary, a born linguist and a trained one. used to say that, you could hear twenty languages spoken in a single crossing. ' The present bridge Is a ramshackle wooden structure on piles that wabbles under un-der the carriages for which It wss never designed. A row of toll-takers in dirty I white nightgowns collect the debased "tin pennies" of the Porte. Behind is Europe; before is Asia; to the right the dome of St. Brphia above the fishing boats; to the left the banks and hotels of Pera on their hill beyond the little square of the Armenian massacre, with the palaces where Abdul stays among the foreigners. North runs the Bospborus. where a sheeted living body still occasionally splashes over the gunwale. All the tongues of modern Europe Eu-rope are heard here at times nearly forty from Austria-Hungary alone. The living Latin of Roumania and the living Greek of the Phanar are frequent. On the Asia shore begin the great caravan roads that draw hither men from all the myriad races from .beyond central Asia. This is the one of trading point where the two continents meet. Merchants say it needs but twenty years of good government gov-ernment to surpass both London and New York In commerce and population, as It already does In beauty and aspect. From the New York World. |