h to-day is so very different from what it has been in other periods
of the country's history, especially as "the capriciousness of beauty,"
the "heartlessness" and "carelessness" of youth, are charges of a too
suspiciously bromidic flavor to carry conviction.

The present generation is at least ahead of some of its "very proper"
predecessors in that weddings do not have to be set for noon because a
bridegroom's sobriety is not to be counted on later in the day! That young
people of to-day prefer games to conversation scarcely proves
degeneration. That they wear very few clothes is not a symptom of decline.
There have always been recurring cycles of undress, followed by muffling
from shoe-soles to chin. We have not yet reached the undress of Pauline
Bonaparte, so the muffling period may not be due!

However, leaving out the mooted question whether etiquette may not soon be
a subject for an obituary rather than a guide-book, one thing is certain:
we have advanced prodigiously in esthetic taste.

Never in the recollection of any one now living has it been so easy to
surround oneself with lovely belongings. Each year's achievement seems to
stride away from that of the year before in producing woodwork, ironwork,
glass, stone, print, paint and textile that is lovelier and lovelier. One
can not go into the shops or pass their windows on the streets without
being impressed with the ever-growing taste of their display. Nor can one
look into the magazines devoted to gardens and houses and
house-furnishings and fail to appreciate the increasing wealth of the
beautiful in environment.

That such exquisite "best" as America possessed in her Colonial houses and
gardens and furnishings should ever have been discarded for the atrocities
of the period after the Civil War, is comparable to nothing but Titania's
Midsummer Night's Dream madness that made her believe an ass's features
more beautiful than those of Apollo!

Happily, however, since we never do things by halves, we are studying and
cultivating and buying and making, and trying to forget and overcome that
terrible marriage of our beautiful Colonial ancestress with the
dark-wooded, plush-draped, jig-sawed upstart of vulgarity and ignorance.
In another country her type would be lost in his, forever! But in a
country that sent a million soldiers across three thousand miles of ocean,
in spite of every obstacle and in the twinkling of an eye, why even
comment that good taste is