mouths. Fields lying waste;
villages dispeopled; private houses turned into hospitals; fever-parched
skeletons tottering from the doors of overcrowded asylums; children
wandering about in gaunt and squalid nakedness; crowds of men, frenzied
by prolonged misery and ripe for any outrage, roaming the streets night
and day,--such were the scenes enacted throughout the length of Finland
during two months and a half.

But better days are now dawning on the afflicted land. Roads and
railways are being pushed forward into the interior, and the ill-judged
attempts formerly made to Russianize the population have given place to
a more conciliatory policy. A Russian from Helsingfors tells me that
lectures are being delivered there, and extracts from native works read,
in the aboriginal tongue; that it is being treated with special
attention in the great schools of Southern Finland; that there has even
been some talk of dramatic representations in Finnish at the Helsingfors
theatre. Such a policy is at once prudent and generous, and far better
calculated to bind together the heterogeneous races of the empire than
that absurd "Panslavism" which is best translated as "making every one a
slave."

DAVID KER.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] Finland still retains its own currency of "marks" and "pennia."

[E] A fact.

[F] The statue of Peter the Great stands at the corner of the
Senate-House Square, overlooking the Neva, on a block of Finnish granite
twenty feet high.

[G] Since this was written two new lines have been opened.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE DEAD OF PARIS.

It is an expensive operation to die in Paris, particularly for a
foreigner. If an unhappy American chances to pay the debt of Nature in a
furnished apartment or a hotel, the proprietor makes the heirs of the
deceased pay roundly for the privilege which their relation has enjoyed.
No matter by what manner of death the departed may have made his or her
exit, be it chronic or epidemic--anything so impossible to communicate
as heart disease or apoplexy, for instance--every article in the room
must be paid for at its full value, or rather quadruple that amount. As
much as one thousand dollars has sometimes been charged for the
plenishing of a room, everything in which, if put up at auction, would
not have realized a tenth part of that amount. Through the efforts of
our representatives, however, this tax has been fixed at a s