it was evident that he was guided more by scent only in the simplest manner, with single thread; than sight. He worked the floor as a pointer but in the continuation of the work it is not dog works his field; and when he crossed the simply plain, but fanciful The usual border of trail of a beetle, even a few inches from him, the stocking which prevents the rolling up of a he became excited, and putting his nose to the the work is narrow, consisting of a row of turned fresh scent, followed up his prey. Further evi-loops; and the circle, the nicely shaped heel, which dence of this feature was observed by his discovery of a crevice in the floor, where he exhibited a singular mode of proceeding. Discovering smell that his game was there, he inserted his

is a little different from our method, show a very skilful hand. But in the point of the stocking is a characteristic difference between the Egyptian stockings and our modern socks. While front in a ings run tubes of equal width, like the fingers of a glove. This strange shape is made to suit the sandals, which are furnished with a strap, fastened about the middle of the sandal; and as the strap has to be laid over the stocking, the division is needed,'

and grasping he probably being too short ours end in two on the Egyptian stock

his claws, dragged out the black beetles one by one and gave them quick despatch.

But the tameness and apparent intelligence of the animal are his most interesting characteristics. The winter sleep is almost abandoned now, or is very short at the most, and in lieu thereof he comes into the kitchen at all hours, getting inside the fender, and stretching himself out before the fire for a snooze. He eats any pickings he can get, sharing the bones with the dog, lapping from his dish of water or milk, not sucking it up as a pig does. ft } o CCbjteu {e[ zpf cro!To f!” But it is very remarkable to find him tapping at the door. If, after taking a stroll in the back-yard, he finds the door of the house is shut, you hear a gentle tap, tap, tap, often repeated if you don't answer. You go and gently open the door; and the little animal actually tries to look you in the face, by turning up its nose and small pig-like eyes; which you at once interpret

Oh, thank you. I have been waiting here for some time,' as he mounts the step and walks in.

It may be thought such an animal in the house would be dirty. Not so. When you discover any smell, the odour approaches that of musk; moreover, the children are quite familiar with it, and take it up and let it eat from their hand. to dreq qe do ci Haded of jou

6

n

༈ ། ་།

Is it well with thee, and with thy husband, and with the

child?" And she said, 'It is well-2 Kings, iv. 26.

a YES; it is well! The evening shadows lengthen; T

Home's golden gates shine on our ravislied sight; And though the tender ties we strove to strengthen "Break one by one at evening time is light?) 12.9 semi oli mid me that be Arzuta si 31

wit Pub vihmoj ai tol za 'Tis well! The way was often dull and weary; The spirit fainted oft beneath its load; No sunshine came from skies all gray and dreary, And yet our feet were bound to tread that road!" t 91 Jewellel anil J-item

off c fr Late afla sit om

Tis well that not again our hearts shall shiver you
Beneath old sorrows, once so hard to bear;
That not again beside Death's darksome river
Shall we deplore the good, the loved, the fair.
pimbat vult chon mit Tourtel to pod
Techon of sug Tut to trotza ort of strai
No more with tears, wrought from deep, inner angeish,
Shall we bewail the dear Hopes crushed and gone;
No more need we in doubt or fear to languish;
So far the Day is past, the journey done
ezon 16 Jarochied ons garodies Laboa voul

sono clarinetsrib yuon lo seal of
As voyagers, by fierce winds beat and broken dat out
Come into port, beneath a calmer sky, poinde zort
we, still bearing on our brows the token
Of tempest past, draw to our Haven nigh.
lyts blo profound &

So

I

Country boys, on meeting with a hedgehog, but too often think it a duty at once to kill the poor creature, utterly ignorant, like many bigger boys and older men, of the services such animals perform in the economy of creatio of creation. fub pun dhigh after a KNITTING OF STOCKINGS BY THE ANCIENTID volt ti i new inEGYPTIANSippolaH domm Our contemporary, the Textile Manufacturer, says The Egyptians of the present, Kopts(as well as Arabs gun about with bare feet. The A sweet air cometh from the Shore immortalj udoncį Inviting Homeward at the day's decline tonefal ancient Egyptians, on the contrary, who are now Almost we see where from the open portalot, gova only to be seen in a dried condition in knitting stok Fair forms stand beckoning with their smiles divine. possessed a very good method of knitting ings, as is shown in the collection at the Louvre foirwalq mom snT Spatiu 179 4 in Paris. In the grave of a mummy there were otpad Ipi With all her myriad da Voice's found a pair of knitted stockings, which gave the Has lost the power our senses to entliral'; oder Tis well! The Earth surprising evidence, firstly, that short stockings, We hear, above the tumult and the noisespun violo resembling socks, were worn by the ancient imSoft bonds of music, like an angel's call A Egyptians; and secondly, that the art of knitting sit ni samui muilo „bernoqqu eta stockings had already attained great perfection in ancient Egypt. These qurious st stockings are knitted in a very clever manner; material, fine wool of sheep, that might once have been White, is now brown with age. The needles with which the work was done must have been alittle thicker than we should choose for the kame purpose, and the knitting is loose and elastic. The stocking is begun just as we make the design,

'Tis well, O friends! We would not turn retracing The long, vain years, nor call our lost youth back; Gladly, with spirits braced, the Futura facing, sw We leave behind the dusty, foot-worn track, imot s org eud yd arteymoy alt osiojo et444 gas bus noodmont and to gif Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Vater noster Row, LONDON, and 359 High Street, EDINBURGH

All Rights Reserved.

IS MERRIMENT DECLINING? THERE is an impression prevailing that 'the present is a somewhat mournful period; and that as man grows wiser his capacity for mirth grows less. It is remarked that our lighter literature has lost in jocundity during the past twenty years. No one has succeeded Dickens in broad hearty humour. We have no audacious versifier like 'Ingoldsby.' No half-smiling, halfcynical humorist has followed the lead of Thackeray into the follies and vices of higher society. Eccentricity is disappearing among the less polished of the people. Cabmen, clodpoles, and costermongers neither use the quaint locutions of former times, nor do they indulge in buffooneries to the extent of their predecessors. Chaff' is not so pertinent as it was; badinage is less relished in the clubs; tomfooleries have become intolerable.

Many social gatherings are bankrupt of joy. The class of merry diners-out, who once set the table in a roar with their madcap sayings, funny stories, and nimble repartees, those jolly fellows are becoming historic. The survivors do not evoke the tempests of cachinnation that once shook the dinner-table. Somehow, old-style jocularity has lost its savour.

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days. And the moving melodrama of Punch, which for a couple of centuries interested the youth of Europe, has lost much of its glamour for our urchins. The thin and incredulous crowd that condenses round the perambulating abode of the cynical hunchback, grows continually less; and the income of the showman dwindles portentously. For the twentieth century, it is to be feared Punch will be an archæological reminiscence, which will furnish a theme for the learned. In our ears resound the last bursts of laughter excited by his marital unkindness and the indignation of his dog Toby.

With moribund Punch are dying those antique festivals of which he was an important, nay indispensable feature. The puppet-show goes far away into time. Railways have killed the great fairs that used to be held in every part of Europe, and which gave the international multitudes opportunities for pleasure in the intervals of business. Village wakes,' formerly universal in England, have fallen into desuetude. May-day brings no rejoicings as of yore. The Maypole has lost its significance, and a group of morrisdancers would astonish our present rustics as much as Harlequin and Columbine would if they performed a lilt upon the Thames Embankment. Only draymen and carters pay homage now to Bacchanalian songs have quite disappeared, the genius of Spring. They adorn their steeds even from the symposia of students and tavern with gay ribbons and furbished harness, when roysterers. From negro minstrelsy, too, the fun the merry month opens. But there is something is exhaling. The modern playwright does not fictitious in the observance, and it will fade add much to the gaiety of life. Typical characters as the homage of the sweeps has done. have been used up' long ago; and the decay of sooty pantomimists who used to dance round Jackoddity and eccentricity robs the dramatist of new in-the-Green, no longer impede the traffic of models. A few years back, a new style of comic London thoroughfares. An unsympathetic police songs appeared, often inane in the text, but bade them, with other anachronisms, 'move on' blithesome in tune. Certain sections of society long ago. The fiery carnival of Guy Fawkes were greatly entertained by them. Yet these are has been extinguished by the same authorities. waning. Christmas pantomimes have delighted Only here and there is the effigy of 'Guy' to be several generations. But at length, the Clown' seen on the fifth of November dodging the fails to rejoice the youngsters by his grotesque guardian of order in the streets. Bonfires, squibs, ill-treatment of the Pantaloon and the police. the salvos of Lilliputian cannon, are forbidden; His knavish escapades and burlesque benevolences ay more, are voted unmeaning nuisances by the do not evoke the delirious approbation of former adult public.

The

Even

Christmas, too, grows yearly more grave. the strait-laced, the dyspeptic, and the saturnine formerly agreed to be jolly and sans souci at that gracious season. To be hospitable and to lavish hospitalities then, was deemed an imperative duty. Kill-joys might snarl and scoff at every other festivity, but to abstain from the wassail of Yuletide was equivalent to lèse-majesté. Immoderate indulgence in eating, drinking, and dancing was not only allowed, but encouraged by moral custodians. For a time the machinery of society was allowed to run out of gear-misrule reigned in place of law. If we have not changed all that, we have vastly modified the licensed dissipation of Father Christmas. Enjoyments are less gross, less prolonged, more intellectual, less sensual than they were forty years ago.'

The same may be said of the festivals of Easter and Whitsuntide. They are no longer marked by drunken orgies, by ribald pleasantries, by street jokes, as of old. Not that these have quite disappeared. Roughs, blackguards, and inebriated buffoons still accentuate our holidays with the marks of coarser times. But the public is against them, and their ideas of merriment are an offence to all of higher taste.

Nor is the sombre shadow falling upon British mirthfulness absent from other European countries. Modern Frenchmen are not so gay as their fathers were. They are losing that boyish insouciance which made them seize pleasure without effort. Cafés are more frequented than ever; theatres are densely crowded; racegrounds are black with excited spectators; and summer holidays are more enjoyed than before the era of railways; still, the face of Jacques Bonhomme has lost much of its old vivacity, and is sicklied o'er with nineteenth-century pensiveness. The old Gallic abandon has gone from rural and civic hearts, and an indefinable inquietude has taken its place.

In the United States, where business is more developed than in England, where it is the occupation of a whole people, holidays of a formal kind are fewer than elsewhere. On the fourth of July the nation rejoices universally in the anniversary of its independence; on the first of June it commemorates its fallen heroes, who gave their lives to maintain the Union. Whatever further relaxations are indulged in are according to the taste and financial capabilities of individuals. This, indeed, is the distinction between modern and ancient times. Formerly, the people amused themselves en masse, and at stated periods. Nowadays, individuals take their pleasures when and where and how they please. Superficially, the inhabitants of the United States seem to be immersed in almost incessant toil. Fundamen tally regarded, they are the greatest holiday. makers of the age. Rich and poor alike, when opportunity serves them, seek large and varied repose-not by hallooing in the streets, not by crowding into murderous congestions in some particular spot, but by dispersing over the whole planet.

This brings us to answer the question we started with: Is merriment declining? Fully and frankly, we say No. The quality of merriment has changed, but the quantity of it now diffused through the Caucasian family of man is greater than at any previous time. Gregarious merriment has given place to personal merriment. We do not laugh en bloc, as the Athenians did at the comedies of Aristophanes; but the audiences of a hundred theatres delight in the doings on board H.M.S. Pinafore. The merry tales which amused the idlers of the Forum and market-place are now read by millions in every place. Verbal drolleries emitted from London, New York, Melbourne, or Calcutta, are despatched in printed form to every part of the earth, and tickle the fancy of innumerable readers. Could Italians have not been noted for joviality at the hurricane of laughter they provoke be conany period. Serene lassitude, puerile trivialities, centrated, it would stun the ears of humanity varied with frenzied lottery-gambling, have more than the most stupendous clamours of the marked the intervals of serious business. But elements. Weak as the comic journals of Britain, the Carnival provoked such merriment as the America, and France may be at times, the quantity nation was capable of, and foreign onlookers often of real humour they create in a year is extrawondered how men and women could find plea-ordinary. If we compare any good collection of sure in the childish nonsense indulged in. Now, bons-mots of the previous half-century with those the Italians themselves wonder where the fun appearing now, there is no disparagement of lies in silly practical jokes; and they also ask contemporary wit possible. Nor does the cariis it necessary to spend eleven days in a satur- caturist's pencil lose its point. It is not so coarse nalia which has quite lost its significance. Were as it was; but its tracings are quite as poignant to it not for municipal subventions and the astute- folly, sham, and pretence. The improved manners ness of interested shopkeepers and hotel pro- of the time are as marked in humorous literature prietors, the Roman Carnival would soon cease. and illustration as they are in other things; Even in the Eternal City, the spirit of commercial and this greater geniality is positive evidence utilitarianism has penetrated, and will end by that mankind is more wisely happy than it was abolishing a festival which it has already con- The greatest proof that amusement is desired, demned as ridiculous. And not only in Rome lies in the immense success that many of the is the Carnival decaying it is moribund in comic periodicals have attained. every part of the Peninsula, and indeed of the Catholic world. The number of religious holidays grows less, too. Business cannot be interrupted nowadays, when it has passed from the locality to the whole world. France, Italy, Spain, Austria, and other Catholic countries are bound by the telegraph, the Stock Exchange, and the ten thousand strands of trade, to do as Britain and America do, or take the disastrous consequences of negligence. i to this and nigga

Humour partakes of the idiosyncrasy of the period, like other matters. We cannot find the fun which lay under the noses of our fathers. It has gone with the objects that produced it. The rollicking scenes of Tom Jones and Roderick Random have gone with the turbulent, sensual, and ignorant people who lived amid them. Squire Western has not a representative in the most stationary of the shires. Our fox-hunters are like men of another species. No surgeon's

Dec. 23, 1882.]

ocean in which we swirl, we may well take courage, and believe that amusement is as much the appanage of man as labour.

But we also are legatees of the toils and tribulations of those who did in their day what we are doing now. The peace and security in which we live had to be fought for; the thousand instruments for winning food which cost us no invention, had to be pondered out by our fathers. We possess all the gains of the infinite labourers of the past, and among them the treasures of humour contained in the literatures of all peoples. Our sources of amusement are indeed inexhaust

mate could possibly meet with the adventures of Roderick, in our ironclads; nor is there probability of the existence of another Midshipman Easy, on board any ship in the fleet. Those who complain that Dickens has no successors, must address their grievance to history, which refuses to allow two epochs to be alike. Pickwick, the Wellers, and other worthies, belong to the age when steam was not. The amazing outbursts of enterprise which followed the invention of railways, flooded 'society' with a host of humblyborn plutocrats, whose financial dominion excited the wrath and the cynical jocularities of the privileged. But the nouveaux riches have multi-ible, and our leisure abundant compared with that plied to such a marvellous extent that to ridicule them would be absurd. The caste' spirit has evaporated to an immense extent; so that a speculative Jeames,' instead of being despised for seeking to rise out of a menial to a higher position, is applauded. First Lords have abolished the ruffians and tyrants who caused the woes, comic and tragic, of Marryat's heroes; and commiseration has done much to annihilate the picturesque squalor in which Lever's grotesque peasants fooled and fretted away their lives. Our recent humorists have been social reformers, the most searching and effective of all that extraordinary legion of humanitarians which have made the nineteenth century so different from its predecessors.

Education and the interfusion of town and country folks are fast erasing the quaint rurals whose psychological peculiarities were so wonderfully reproduced by George Eliot. Uncouth speech and archaic phraseology will erewhile be as rare in the village as in the city. Science is gradually destroying the superstitions which maintained romance in the country long after it had perished in the town.

As civilisation goes on reducing all classes to intellectual uniformity, amusements will necessarily change. But they will not fail. The appearance of a new school of humorists in America is evidence that laughter and smiles are not becoming obsolete. Preoccupied by the cyclopean labours of converting the wilderness into infinite cities, and eager for wealth beyond all other people, the Americans find time to enjoy the drolleries arising from the very gravity of their pursuits, and from the odd incidents arising out of the blending of many races into one people. German ponderosity and Hibernian flightiness are producing a novel sort of literature, as the two races mingle, and promise mankind incalculable entertainment when the American genus homo becomes more distinctive.

of former times. It is admitted that human nature is capable of indefinite improvement, and that our faculties expand with their exercise. Hence it follows that the joyous susceptibilities of our species may be expected to develop with the rest. And such we find to be the case. The higher races have the sense of humour much more acute than the lower. Savages rarely laugh. The incidents of their lives have little in them that is comical. Semi-civilised Mongolians cannot comprehend the frolicsome gaiety of the Western world. The Japanese are truly a merry race, but resemble our children rather than our youths in their amusements. Among ourselves, too, the modes and sources of humour are higher than they were. Obscenity and profanity do not evoke the laughter of our rustics, as they did even a few years ago. Idiots and mental weaklings do not furnish butts for rude jokers now. The base and the malignant may still find a ferocious pleasure in scoffing at the deformed and the oddtempered; but the sympathies of the people are with the sufferers. Ill-natured wit is less relished than at any previous time; cruel amusements are ever growing wider asunder.

Amusements, like other things, are less violent than they were; people can enjoy fun without the strident roars of noisier times. It is not Laughter holding both his sides that relishes a good thing' most. We can digest a joke without any more symptoms of the process than a smile; and yet the assimilation of it into our mental being will be more complete than if we had gone through muscular paroxysms in 'getting it in. No people enjoy the absurd more than the Americans; still they laugh less than the English. It is indeed possible to be merry in a quiet way, and that we are becoming. Our merriment is of a temperate kind, and therefore will last longer than the furious pleasures of earlier times.

A TRUE STORY OF THE OLD!
COACHING-DAYS.

Considering the incessant activity of the time, the large demands made by science upon the attention of all but the lowest classes, and the MANY years ago, when a journey from Edinburgh serious problems arising from the profoundly to London was a matter of days instead of hours, modified condition of society, it would not be I started to make it, for the first time in my wonderful if fun and frolic were wholly eclipsed. life, in the stagecoach which I shall call the We cannot be in two places at the same time; Royal William. I was travelling alone, inasmuch nor can we be under the influence of two moods. as I knew none of the other passengers; but Joyousness depends upon favourable conditions, the guard had been tipped' to look after me, and upon good health and kindly relations with men | he did that as well and for as long as he could. and things. When we find, therefore, that in It was about ten days before Christmas. I was spite of the rush and roar prevailing everywhere, going to pay my first visit to London, having in spite of remorseless egotisms, and of the left school for good' some months before. The 'malady of thought, that laughter prospect of the journey had been scarcely less innocent and hearty still ripples over the grim delightful than that of London itself, and, tedious

endemic 036

One passenger proposed that we should all crowd together inside the coach, then-necessity having no law-feast upon any edibles that happened to be in it, and finally try to sleep till morning, But, for several reasons, few of us cared for that plan, without first making another effort to get back to the high-road; so the guard took his horn, and two gentlemen a lantern, and they went off together to reconnoitre, In ten minutes they came back to say that they could not make anything of the situation; but that they had seen the lights of a house down in a hollow not far were of the opinion that it would be better for us to try to reach it, rather than remain where we were all night. We all got out of the coach and started for the house, leaving guard and coachman behind, but promising to send them assistance when we f reached our destination. The two gentlemen with the lantern guided us; and in about a quarter of an hour we reached the lodge-gates, after much parleying whereat, we were at length allowed to proceed to the house itself.