e who only makes every thread yield its best uses.

A national fault of ours is that of not getting the full use of things.
European cities, for example, earn millions a year by selling their
street dirt. American cities pay millions to get rid of it. In Europe
it dresses sterile soil; in America it is dumped into channels to
obstruct navigation. One can almost admire the humble Paris
_chiffoniers_, as being a guild employed in redeeming to a hundred
services what has been thrown away as useless--they rescue vast
fortunes yearly. On the Pennsylvania oil lands twenty men put up a
derrick, sink a test well, and fail. Sixteen out of the twenty
reorganize, sink a new well within fifty rods of the other, build a new
derrick, and never touch the old one, leaving it to rot. The expense of
this kind of machinery is great; and yet out of the abandoned derricks
in the oil regions you could almost build a timber track from Corry to
New York. It is, I say, almost a national trait to accumulate what will
be left to rust unused--although it is doubtless not American ladies
alone that fill their wardrobes with garments never worn out. When a
European friend of mine came to travel in this country, one of his
first surprises was the hundreds of miles of expensive fences he saw
enclosing very ordinary fields; next he noted the unused ground along
the tracks of railroads. "That land would all be covered with
vegetables in our country," he said. At his hotels he thought there was
more wasted in labor, food, and superfluities than would have sufficed
to reduce the cost of living by a third; indeed, I fancy he believed
that despite our cry of "hard times" and "enforced economy," the sheer
current _waste_ of America would pay the national debt in a year.

VICTOR HUGO.

What freshness and fecundity in the veteran poet who signalizes his
seventy-sixth birthday by publishing the "Legende des Siecles"!
Hugoesque alike in its grand apostrophes and its gentle idyls, in its
resounding declamation and its simple pathos, this new outcome of an old
mint has every coin stamped with the image and superscription of its
creator--Hugo's in thought, feeling, audacious style, easy
versification, quaint novelty of metaphor; Hugo's in its cadence by
turns joyous and mournful, now in sonorous, thrilling ballads of battle,
anon in charming genre fireside pictures, here riotous in rhetoric,
there pedantic in research, everywhere lofty in aspiration, though
pu