eeing how each age has made use of the wrecks of the preceding one as
material for new structures on different plans. What are we that we should
mention our preference for being put to some other use, more immediately
remunerative to ourselves!

We must be all wrong if we are not in sympathy with the age in which we
live. We might as well be dead as not keep up with it. But which of us
does not sometimes wish in his heart of hearts, that he had been born long
enough ago to have been boon companion of his great-grandfather, and have
gone respectably and in due season to his grave at a good jog trot?

The Joyless American.

It is easy to fancy that a European, on first reaching these shores, might
suppose that he had chanced to arrive upon a day when some great public
calamity had saddened the heart of the nation. It would be quite safe to
assume that out of the first five hundred faces which he sees there will
not be ten wearing a smile, and not fifty, all told, looking as if they
ever could smile. If this statement sounds extravagant to any man, let him
try the experiment, for one week, of noting down, in his walks about town,
every face he sees which has a radiantly cheerful expression. The chances
are that at the end of his seven days he will not have entered seven faces
in his note-book without being aware at the moment of some conscientious
difficulty in permitting himself to call them positively and unmistakably
cheerful.

The truth is, this wretched and joyless expression on the American face is
so common that we are hardened to seeing it, and look for nothing better.
Only when by chance some blessed, rollicking, sunshiny boy or girl or man
or woman flashes the beam of a laughing countenance into the level gloom
do we even know that we are in the dark. Witness the instant effect of
the entrance of such a person into an omnibus or a car. Who has not
observed it? Even the most stolid and apathetic soul relaxes a little. The
unconscious intruder, simply by smiling, has set the blood moving more
quickly in the veins of every human being who sees him. He is, for the
moment, the personal benefactor of every one; if he had handed about money
or bread, it would have been a philanthropy of less value.

What is to be done to prevent this acrid look of misery from becoming an
organic characteristic of our people? "Make them play more," says one
philosophy. No doubt they need to "play more;" but, when one looks at