Venice that all boot-blacks must be crippled, and all aqua venders wear old, rimless straw hats and go about with bare feet, showing that all sumptuary laws are not yet abolished.

When the clock's long hands marked a few minutes of the hour, a half suppressed murmur of delight rippled over the expect ant watchers succeeded by a perfect quiet. The two bronze Hercules, who with the bell crown the tower, seemed to peep over at the slow moving hands to be prepared for their work. Then one bronze struck twelve ringing blows with his sledge, and they were echoed by his companion by twelve others.

The door to the left of the seated Virgin and Child then opened, and the Wise-men of the East came and went in procession, with such humiliation and automatic grace as only frequent rehearsals and many appearances could ever have perfected; and the right hand door was closed after them with a snap.

“Ah, oh, um, pshaw!" said the delighted or otherwise moved audience; but the program was strictly adhered to, and a repetition never granted to their encores. In ten minutes after, every soul of the audience had discovered how warm the sun was and deserted the Piazza. James B. Marshall.

Having heard that the beloved Scot (who, by the way, looks the Great-Heart that he writes himself to be, and is, to a degree almost unique among lions) had with him one of his large flock of children, I summoned all the Yankee within me and "made an effort" at identifying her. "Her," of course, for he who sings so tenderly of the exquisite satisfyingness of "a maid-child" would not import into admiring America anything less picturesque. I found her at first, it must be confessed, in the lovely daughters of the house, but at last in another girl sweet and sensible, and proudly paraded my success before a cruel man, who, chuckling over my discomfiture, presented instead of the poetic child a long boy, clever in both senses of the word, but very long and very Scotch. My inward bruise was spermacetied however by later information that she who should have been the MacDonald maid, according to my erring fancy, had been indeed born to one whom his own America and the world most honor and lament.

Now as Dr. Holland's Reception and the Atlantic Breakfast are, alas! things of the past, and incredible as it may seem to those who enjoyed them not of universal interest, the agitation of the present subject might seem irrelevant did not this need painfully come home to the business and bosom of us all.

Take one of a thousand illustrations. Tom, Dick and Harry chanced to meet at a crowded watering-place, and for lack of this missing seventh sense and the absence of some topic of common interest at the first, each went his solitary way unknowing and unknown. Years after it came out-or more probably never came out at all—that Tom's sister roomed with Dick's sister at Miss Porter's, and each other's unknown sister had ever after been the secret dream of each; and that Harry wrote that kindly notice of Tom's first book which set him upon his legs again when he was stumbling in obscurity and into despair!

Each for himself can easily recall times and places where a legible label attached to the person (with a list of his or her friends and relatives arranged perhaps after the laundry fashion with varying valuations)

would have transformed a chance acquaintance, with its mere surface-talk and barren stretches, into a vivid and refreshing experience and possibly into a life-friendship— and even into a wedding journey!

Now although this has long seemed to me the crying want of humanity, far be it from me to experiment toward the invention of a recognition-tag, if you please to call it so, or toward the seeking of what must surely (because so needful) be latent somewhere in the human economy--the seventh sense already suggested. No; invention is a concavity in my cranium, and whatever of even mechanical genius I possess is mute and inglorious. Once, indeed, it took voice and spoke out in a proverb which the family will not willingly let die.

The scene is the study of a dilapidated old parsonage. The Dominie and the young Divine are discovered musing over the aggravations of a gaping chimney-closet,-the door having lost its ancient button, and its mismated and cantankerous jamb refusing to take on the new one which, with much toil and more talk and unspeakable pride, the two theologians had at last constructed. Time had eaten out that jamb's heart of oak and in its stead was mere punk, scaling and crumbling at every touch. The Dominie curled his meditation-lock and the young Divine whistled characteristically over the difficulty, until their Deborah arose, and with that superior air and clean-cutting decision which so tenderly appeals to the best emotions of the manly heart, cut the Gordianknot by remarking: "What a blessed pair of geese! Why don't you put the button on the door?" (Do you know why not, gentle Reader ?) Since then, how many a brilliant project, and social reform, and "best laid schemes o' mice an' men and such small deer, has that villainous "button" filliped out of existence !

It was only yesterday that, on proposing timorously some scheme for the instant and universal amelioration of human misery, the third generation took up the old parsonage jeer, and child, sire, and grandsire seemed to whisper in my chagrined ear in that one voice "Why don't you put the button on the door?"

Therefore I meekly submit to those whose native invention has not been thus early nipped in the bud, the problem of how this particular door shall be buttoned. But even more than an Edisonian genius of discovery will be needful here. The obstacles and embarrassments are great. The people one is most eager to recognize like to rest from their labors as they walk abroad, and not have their works follow too close upon their heels. These might stubbornly decline, for example, the wearing of phylacteries and symbolic legends, though a vestry-full of such appropriate insignia were to be made ready for them by princely publishers and entertaining editors against their next Feast-day. Fancy rows upon rows of these empty but eloquent dominos, each emblazoned with titles and symbols, abiding its time for its delicate betrayals the moment it shall be donned by its lawful claimant! The idea is fascinating and capable of indefinite ap plication, but for the stubbornness already alluded to, and perhaps for its unlucky suggestiveness of the old-fashioned cap and bells.

No; I have no remedy to suggest for the want I deplore; and can only affirm that whomsoever shall discover a method of identifying at first sight any one whose personality is, or may hereafter become, interesting to us, without at the same time infringing in the least said person's individual rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," independently of everybody else, and in perfect incognito if so he choose,—ah, blessed be the man who shall invent this paradox of patent enlighteners!

"There's millions in it!"

Meantime I pine, because I shall never know who was "the lady in the pink josey" (as the delightful but alas! extinct showmen of the old panoramas used to say) at Dr. Holland's Reception; and because I did not know in time that the creator of the incomparable and let us hope everlasting "Peterkins" sat, say within a stone's throw and a woman's throw at that of me at the memorable Breakfast!

Mrs. Edward Ashley Walker.

D. H. R. Goodale.

T seems strange that Nature should ever dabble in art and thus become a mimic of herself, but she very often does. Who does not know specimens of her sculpture, colossal, unshapely, and sometimes ludicrous? Who has not studied the edge of some rock or the profile of some mountain and found the face of man or monster lurking there?

As a painter, however, she has less of a reputation, since her products in this branch of art are more rare. Even the Man in the Moon, which we used to consider a painting done in the richest colors of silver and gold, is now demonstrated to belong to the province of sculpture, and, taken at its lowest, it is a bas-relief, touched up with the sua and shadow of mountains and valleys, and glossed over with a little of the illusion of our own fancy.

Upon the slope of a spur which projects from the San Bernardino mountains in southern California there is a great patch of brown earth, several hundred feet in dimensions, which is quite destitute of the chaparral or other green vegetation which surrounds it. It seems to have been shaped by design, so regular and well-defined is its outline, and so striking is its resemblance to an Indian arrowhead, or to the similar shape of the ace of spades. What is the cause of this barren spot no one can tell. It has been there since the time of the oldest inhabitant, who, in the graphic system of nomenclature in vogue among the first families of the West, called this the Ace of Spades Mountain. But in later days that name has been changed into Arrowhead Mountain, in deference to the church-going community in the vicinity and to the inmates of the water-cure at the warm springs at the base of the hill.

Wonderful as is the Arrowhead, it is insignificant in comparison with the natural picture which adorns the front of Shakespeare Cliff, in Nevada. When Nature came to paint this, her first portrait, she sought out the most secluded and withal the loveliest spot in all her dominions, and here the

coy, maiden artist established her studio. This was on the shores of Lake Tahoe, in the little recess now called Glenbrook by the mildly romantic people who live their Summers there. In Glenbrook there stands a butte of rock five hundred feet high, whose top breaks into three shafts, like the towers of a battlement. Its face is smooth, but walk to the rear and you find the secret of its construction, and see the cuneiform bars of trap piled in regular order, as if Nature were architect as well as artist, and forming a great arch whose center is lost in the heart of the hill.

Upon the fair surface of this cliff she began to paint a piece of human portraiture. For her subject she took the head of him who was the greatest writer that ever she made, and during all of these many years that men and women have been wrangling over Shakespeare and questioning his existence even, she has been leading her humble lichens to grow into a profile which was the subject of the following conversation :

"Look at this side of that cliff over yonder," said my companion, "and what do you see?"

Very good. Now which of the old Englishmen is it?"

"It looks like Shakespeare." "True enough. And that is Shakespeare Cliff."

Not that the likeness is correct and complete in all of its details. Indeed, a person of slow imagination has been known to stare at the cliff for half an hour and come away with nothing but a patch of tawny lichen upon his mind. It may be remarked, also, that the face is not so vivid upon the rock as it is in certain photographs whose negative impressions have evidently been "doc