A DARK, saturnine man sat opposite me at table on board the steamer. During the entire run from Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed no one at meal-times excepting his table steward.
Seated next to him, on the right, was a viva-cious gentleman, who, like Gratiano in the play, spoke "an infinite deal of nothing." He made persistent and pathetic attempts to lure his silent neighbor (we had christened him "William the Silent") into conversation, but a monosyllable was always the poor result--until one day. It was the last day of the voyage. We had stopped at the entrance to Queenstown harbor to deliver the mails, and some fish had been brought aboard. The vivacious gentleman was in a high state of excitement that morning at table.
"Fresh fish!" he exclaimed; "actually fresh!
They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish, of course. Can you tell me, sir," he inquired, turning to his gloomy shipmate, "what kind of fish these are?" "Cork soles," said the saturn-ine man, in a deep voice, and then went on with his breakfast.
LOWELL used to find food for great mirth in General George P. Morris's line, Her heart and morning broke together.
Lowell's well-beloved Dr. Donne, however, had an attack of the same platitude, and pos-sibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature seems to have its mischief-making bacilli. The late "incomparable and ingenious Dean of St.
Paul's" says, The day breaks not, it is my heart.
I think Dr. Donne's case rather worse than Morris's. Chaucer had the malady in a milder form when he wrote:
Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye.
The charming naivete of it!
SITTING in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the Lyceum Theatre one evening during that lady's temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bern-hardt picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty word on the mirror--Dearling, mistaking it for the word darling. The French actress lighted by chance upon a Spenserianism now become obsolete without good reason. It is a more charming adjective than the one that has re-placed it.
A DEAD author appears to be bereft of all earthly rights. He is scarcely buried before old maga-zines and newspapers are ransacked in search of matters which, for reasons sufficient to him, he had carefully excluded from the definitive edition of his collected writings.
He gave the people of his best;His worst he kept, his best he gave.
One can imagine a poet tempted to address some such appeal as this to any possible future publisher of his poems:
Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line, Take all, take nothing--and God send thee cheer!
But my anathema on thee and thine If thou add'st aught to what is printed here.
THE claim of this country to call itself "The Land of the Free" must be held in abeyance until every man in it, whether he belongs or does not belong to a labor organization, shall have the right to work for his daily bread.
