hose commerce is worldwide; whose
inventions have revolutionized ways and means of getting and doing and
having things; whose enterprise is boundless; whose self-contained
courage is resistless in onset as it is strong in resistance; whose busy
going to and fro, or whose steady home-work, always has an eye to the
main chance; whose stateliness as shown in the conservative wealth of
the Old England is matched by its progressiveness as developed in the
New; whose Anglo-Saxon _homes_ are models of what is nowhere else so
readily found, "home comforts," won by hard work or conserved by happy
inheritance. Has not the Anglo-Saxon a character all his own--a
compound, doubtless, of the good (and often the bad) elements which he
has absorbed with his natural acquisitiveness from others? And can the
same number of words better gather up the sum and substance of it than
his salutation, "How do you _do_?"?

J. A. H.

SEASONABLE READING.

I once wrote for a monthly magazine an out-door paper--a summer study,
intended to enliven the reader's feeling rather than enlighten his
understanding--and timed the production of it so that it should appear
during the winter. The thought that it would be read only by bright
firesides cheered me not a little in the writing. The editor,
endeavoring to propitiate that thoughtless creature, "the general
reader"--in matters of art but another name for "the general prejudice"
or "the general ignorance"--notified me in January that he would prefer
to hold the contribution till summer came again, when it would be
regarded as "more appropriate, and just the thing to be read under
green arbors and spreading beeches." I was glad to know that he thought
it just the thing to be read anywhere, but nevertheless resolved to lay
before the general reader, or the general prejudice, or the general
ignorance, my little protest.

Most people are aware that the effects of Nature are so evanescent that
the painter generally makes his study as if he were observing an
eclipse. Down go a few strokes; into the spaces go notes, signs,
symbols--all in the shortest kind of shorthand. Six months afterward,
when the picture is made amid other scenes, the sketch and notes are
used, to be sure, so far as they go, but the artist uses his good memory
more. All people know that a book or canvas gives us not Nature, but an
interpretation, a translation, a few selections, a memory of Nature. If
the work be good, we are glad