ight, but he could not answer the
traveler's argument. "Do you presume to dispute with me?" he repeated.
"Get out of my sight, and if one of you three vagabonds, with your
trumpery stories, is found in all the kingdom of Jolliland by sunset
to-morrow, I'll have every man of you beheaded three times over. A man
see his back, indeed!"

And thus it happened that the tale of "The Crooked-Nosed Philosopher"
was never concluded, which was the greater pity, since, if the end was
like the beginning, it must have been a very marvelous tale.

SOMETHING IN THE OLD CLOTHES LINE.

BY PAUL FORT.

When I look at pictures of people of old times, I often think what a
curious thing it is that the only apparent difference between them and
the people of the present day is to be seen in their clothes.

If we could take a dozen or so of ancient Greeks and Romans; some
gentlemen and ladies of the middle ages; a party of our
great-grandfathers and mothers, and some nice people who are now living
in the next street, and were to dress all the women in calico frocks and
sun-bonnets, and all the men in linen coats and trousers and broad straw
hats, with their hair cut short; and were then to jumble them all up
together, and make them keep their tongues quiet, it would be very
difficult, if not impossible, for a committee, unacquainted with any of
the party, to pick out the ancients, the middle-agers, or the moderns.

Lady Jane Grey, or Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, or Helen of
Troy, would not look unlike the other women in sun-bonnets and calico
frocks; and while there would be a greater difference in the men, whose
nationality might show more strongly, Christopher Columbus, Nero, and
Marco Bozzaris would be pretty much the same kind of fellows as the
other men of the party.

It is certainly a fact that there are a great many more points of strong
resemblance between the people of past ages and ourselves than most of
us suppose. It is often very surprising, when reading of the domestic
life of the past, to see how precisely similar, in some respects, it was
to our own. And, as I have said, the people looked, with the exception
of their clothes, very much as we do--meaning by "we" the people of the
present day, all over the world.

In 1876, at the Centennial Exposition, I saw a marble bust--life
size--which was a portrait of a lady of ancient Rome. There was only the
head and neck, the hair was dressed very plainly, and it w