hat peculiar, she replied, "Oh, _that_ is
a very different thing!"

On which words for a text a curious sermon might be preached to the
Philistiny souls who live perfectly reconciled to absurd paradoxes,
simply because they are accustomed to them. Now, of all human beings, I
think the gypsies are freest from trouble with paradoxes as to things
being different or alike, and the least afflicted with moral problems,
burning questions, social puzzles, or any other kind of mental rubbish.
They are even freer than savages or the heathen in this respect, since of
all human beings the Fijian, New Zealander, Mpongwe, or Esquimaux is most
terribly tortured with the laws of etiquette, religion, social position,
and propriety. Among many of these heathen unfortunates the meeting with
an equal involves fifteen minutes of bowing, re-bowing, surre-bowing, and
rejoinder-bowing, with complementary complimenting, according to old
custom, while the worship of Mrs. Grundy through a superior requires a
half hour wearisome beyond belief. "In Fiji," says Miss C. F. Gordon
Cumming, "strict etiquette rules every action of life, and the most
trifling mistake in such matters would cause as great dissatisfaction as
a breach in the order of precedence at a European ceremonial." In
dividing cold baked missionary at a dinner, especially if a chief be
present, the host committing the least mistake as to helping the proper
guest to the proper piece in the proper way would find himself promptly
put down in the _menu_. In Fiji, as in all other countries, this
punctilio is nothing but the direct result of ceaseless effort on the
part of the upper classes to distinguish themselves from the lower.
Cannibalism is a joint sprout from the same root; "the devourers of the
poor" are the scorners of the humble and lowly, and they are all grains
of the same corn, of the devil's planting, all the world over. Perhaps
the quaintest error which haunts the world in England and America is that
so much of this stuff as is taught by rule or fashion as laws for "the
_elite_" is the very nucleus of enlightenment and refinement, instead of
its being a remnant of barbarism. And when we reflect on the degree to
which this naive and child-like faith exists in the United States, as
shown by the enormous amount of information in certain newspapers as to
what is the latest thing necessary to be done, acted, or suffered in
order to be socially saved, I surmise that some futur