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Excerpt from Egyptian Obelisks At the request of Lieut-Commander Gorringe I long ago promised to prepare for him an account of the transactions which led to his undertaking the important operation so clearly and so fully described by him in this book. From that promise I may hold myself released. He has embodied all the essential features of these transactions in the admirable narrative which has grown under his hands, as I hoped that it would, into a full and interesting history of the Egyptian obelisks. The pains and skill with which this history has been constructed out of the few and fragmentary records which remain to us of these august monuments, illustrate the spirit in which Lieut-Commander Gorringe accepted and executed the trust confided to him by Mr. Vanderbilt in the interest and for the benefit of the people of New York. It is easy, and of course it is becoming, to applaud the success of such an enterprise. But no man knows so well as I do the discouragements and difficulties through which success was won, and it appears to me to be my duty, therefore, to bear witness here once for all to the absolute simplicity of purpose and single-minded public spirit to which New York is indebted for the, possession of the great obelisk of Alexandria. No arguments were needed to commend the project either to Mr. Vanderbilt, whose liberality made it practicable, or to Mr. Evarts, who put and kept all the machinery of the State Department at work to accomplish it. But from the day in August, 1879, on which Lieut.-Commander Gorringe sailed for Europe on his mission, to the day in January, 1881, on which, in the presence of assembled thousands, the majestic monolith swung at a motion of his lifted finger into its final resting-place in the Central Park, his indomitable energy was confronted at every step, not only with that wholesome and bracing public indifference to such undertakings which success always startles into enthusiasm, but with a