started to lead us through all the stages of existence. Parents will
subscribe on the birth of their children to have them personally
conducted through life and everything explained as it is done at present
in the galleries abroad; food, lodging and reading matter, husbands and
wives will be provided by contract, to be taken back and changed if
unsatisfactory, as the big stores do with their goods. Delightful
prospect! Homes will become superfluous, parents and children will only
meet when their "tours" happen to cross each other. Our
great-grandchildren will float through life freed from every
responsibility and more perfectly independent than even that delightful
dreamer, Bellamy, ventured to predict.

No. 29--Husks

Among the Protestants driven from France by that astute and
liberal-minded sovereign Louis XIV., were a colony of weavers, who as all
the world knows, settled at Spitalfields in England, where their
descendants weave silk to this day.

On their arrival in Great Britain, before the looms could be set up and a
market found for their industry, the exiles were reduced to the last
extremity of destitution and hunger. Looking about them for anything
that could be utilized for food, they discovered that the owners of
English slaughter-houses threw away as worthless, the tails of the cattle
they killed. Like all the poor in France, these wanderers were excellent
cooks, and knew that at home such caudal appendages were highly valued
for the tenderness and flavor of the meat. To the amazement and disgust
of the English villagers the new arrivals proceeded to collect this
"refuse" and carry it home for food. As the first principle of French
culinary art is the _pot-au-feu_, the tails were mostly converted into
soup, on which the exiles thrived and feasted.

Their neighbors, envious at seeing the despised French indulging daily in
savory dishes, unknown to English palates, and tempted like "Jack's"
giant by the smell of "fresh meat," began to inquire into the matter, and
slowly realized how, in their ignorance, they had been throwing away
succulent and delicate food. The news of this discovery gradually
spreading through all classes, "ox-tail" became and has remained the
national English soup.

If this veracious tale could be twisted into a metaphor, it would serve
marvellously to illustrate the position of the entire Anglo-Saxon race,
and especially that of their American descendants as regards