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Very few people realize how utterly worthless for all purposes excepting racing is the ordinary cup defender. As a matter of fact craft of this kind are not entitled to be called "yachts" at all. They are racing machines pure and simple. This year, more than ever before, they have reached the limit. The last boat built to defend the cup was enormously expensive to construct, equally costly to keep in commission, and worthless for cruising purposes or for any of the uses to which the ordinary yacht is put. It has no cabin room and requires an enormous crew. Here there is not room for a man to stand up below the deck. The distance between the floor of the yacht and the deck is hardly more than a man's height. This, however, would not be so bad if it were not for the braces and cross beams, which cut up the interior of the yacht from stem to stern. Steel braces cut up the cabin room at angles of forty-five degrees every few feet. It is impossible for two men to walk abreast inside the yacht anywhere between the bow and stern. Under these circumstances the construction of a cabin, or of comfortable quarters for the crew, is impossible. All that the inside of the modern racing machine is good for is, therefore, to store spare sails, blocks, spars, tarpaulins, etc. With a boat of this kind, requiring a large crew, it is impossible to go on a cruise, no matter how much her sail area may be reduced, for there would be no comfortable quarters below deck. The old fashioned yacht, on the other hand, was most comfortable for the owner and his guests and the crew, and indeed the pleasantest part of the craft was below deck, where a cosy cabin with ample room afforded every facility for enjoyment of life. OWNERSHIP OF LAND IN AMERICA Twenty-two million acres of land in the United States belong to men who owe allegiance to other governments. Massachusetts contains 2,720,283 acres of land; thus it is that men owing allegiance to other powers own more than enough land to make eight states of the size of Massachusetts. The largest amount of land in this country owned by any one man or corporation, is the property of a company called the Holland Land Company. Twice as much land is owned by aliens in the United States as is owned by Englishmen in Ireland. William Scully, of London, is a fair specimen of this class of plutocrats. He owns forty thousand acres of good farming land in Logan County, Illinois, besides large tracts of land in other counties. He rents this land for cash at a high rate, requires his tenants, who are mostly poor people, to put up their own houses, barns and farm buildings, makes them pay all the taxes, and receives from them $150,000 annually for permission to till the soil they live on, the value of which they have mainly made. He is only one of a large class of foreigners who own vast tracts of land in the United States. The Earl of Cleveland owns 106,650 acres; the Duke of Devonshire, 148,626 acres; the Duke of Northumberland, 191,460 acres, Baron Tweeddale, 1,750,000 acres. Byron H. Evans, 700,000 acres; Robt. Tenant, 530,000 acres; the Duke of Sutherland, 422,000 acres; M. Ellerhousen, 600,000 acres; and eighteen others, whose landed possessions in this country aggregate about 2,000,000 acres. NEW YORK'S MOVING STAIRWAYS The inconvenience and fatigue growing out of the congestion of passengers at the elevated railroad stations in New York have at last led to the construction of moving stairways at some of the busiest points of ingress to the trains. These escalators, as they are called, carry passengers up to the cars and thus greatly relieve the pressure of the hurrying throng. The operation of the escalators is indicated by the accompanying illustration.  A FARM WORKED BY CRAZY FOLK |