re not a "humorous" department. I would not conduct
an exclusively and professedly humorous department for any one. I would
always prefer to have the privilege of printing a serious and sensible
remark, in case one occurred to me, without the reader's feeling obliged
to consider himself outraged. We cannot keep the same mood day
after day. I am liable, some day, to want to print my opinion on
jurisprudence, or Homeric poetry, or international law, and I shall do
it. It will be of small consequence to me whether the reader survive or
not. I shall never go straining after jokes when in a cheerless mood,
so long as the unhackneyed subject of international law is open to me.
I will leave all that straining to people who edit professedly and
inexorably "humorous" departments and publications.

3. I have chosen the general title of MEMORANDA for this department
because it is plain and simple, and makes no fraudulent promises. I can
print under it statistics, hotel arrivals, or anything that comes handy,
without violating faith with the reader.

4. Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department. Inoffensive
ignorance, benignant stupidity, and unostentatious imbecility will
always be welcomed and cheerfully accorded a corner, and even the
feeblest humour will be admitted, when we can do no better; but no
circumstances, however dismal, will ever be considered a sufficient
excuse for the admission of that last--and saddest evidence of
intellectual poverty, the Pun.

ABOUT SMELLS

In a recent issue of the "Independent," the Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, of
Brooklyn, has the following utterance on the subject of "Smells":

I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in
church, and a working man should enter the door at the other end,
would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the
sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer
for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch dog. The fact is,
if you, had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing up of the
common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of
Christendom sick at their stomach. If you are going to kill the
church thus with bad smells, I will have nothing to do with this
work of evangelization.

We have reason to believe that there will be labouring men in heaven;
and also a number of negroes, and Esquimaux, and Terra del Fuegans,
and Arab