Bonnets are crowned and laden with flowers, long streamers of them falling down the back, and falls of lace and ribbons hide the spot from which the chignon is gracefully retiring. The chignon shrinks from month to month. Let us hope that by Fall a graceful Grecian knot, or a bunch of curls, will entirely replace the monstrous burden.

Silk stockings of beautiful tints to match dresses, with highly ornamental clocks at the ankles, and high-heeled slippers trimmed with immense rosettes are very fashionable. But they are ruinous in price

-a single pair costing eight dollars. Ladies' boots cost as high as eighteen dollars a pair very frequently; slippers from three to ten; and rosettes anything. We pay for boots and shoes exactly what we did during the war, when gold was 2.50.

The fashion of wearing watches, chatelaines, and chains at the belt is growing. Tiffany has pretty smelling bottles, purses, and watches adapted to this fashion. The Nuremburg ladies in the time of Albert Durer wore their scissors, thimbles, and other implements at the side in this way, and the goldsmiths and artisans of the day displayed much ingenuity in these chatelaines. These of modern make are scarcely as ornate and picturesque as were those of olden times. The fashion is a pretty and convenient one, and it seems a pity that it is not followed more generally.

For note-paper, the prettiest shade is a sort of sage green with the monogram in colors. The street and number, or, if residing in the country, the name of your place, and the town and State, should be neatly printed in the right-hand corner of the first page.

Summer Drinks.

ICE-WATER should be drank but sparingly. A most excellent substitute for it is pounded ice taken in small lumps into the mouth and allowed to dissolve upon the tongue. This will prove very refreshing and much more enduring in its effects.

Lemonade is a simple and grateful beverage. To make it: Roll the lemons on something hard till they become soft; grate off the rinds, cut the lemons in slices and squeeze them in a pitcher (a new clothes-pin will answer for a squeezer in lieu of something better); pour on the required quantity of water, and sweeten according to taste. The grated rinds, for the sake of their aroma, should be added too. After mixing thoroughly, set the pitcher aside for half an hour; then strain the liquor through a jelly strainer, and put in the ice.

Travelers who find it inconvenient to use lemons can carry a box of lemon sugar prepared from citric acid and sugar, a little of which in a glass of ice water will furnish quite a refreshing drink, and one that will help oftentimes to avert sick-headache and biliousness. Citric acid is obtained from the juice of lemons and limes.

of cherries and bruise them; pour on a pint and a half of hot water, and boil for fifteen minutes; strain through a flannel bag, and add three pounds of sugar. Boil for half an hour more, or until the liquid will sink to the bottom of a cup of water (try it with a teaspoonful of the liquid); then turn into jelly cups and cover with paper dipped in the white of an egg.

To prepare the drink: Put a spoonful of the jelly into a goblet of water, and let it stand about ten minutes; then stir it up and fill with pounded ice. Currants and raspberries made into "shrub" furnish a pleasant and cooling drink when mixed with ice-water. Pounded ice is also an agreeable addition to a saucer of strawberries, raspberries, or currants. Pound it until it is almost as fine as snow, and spread it over the berries. With fruit it is also an excellent substitute for cream.

Water ices are always acceptable. Those made of lemon, orange, currants, strawberries, raspberries, and pineapple, are much improved by adding the stiff beaten whites of four eggs to every two quarts of the liquid. Put it in just as it is turned into the freezer, and it will freeze in a foam.

The Poetry of the Table.

In the first place, a starched and smoothly-ironed table-cloth-which, if neatly folded after every meal, will look well for several days. Then flowers and ferns in flat dishes, baskets, or small vases, or else a tiny nosegay laid upon every napkin.

The salt must be pure and smooth. The butter should be moulded into criss-crossed diamonds, shells, or globes, with the paddles made for this purpose.

A few pretty dishes will make the plainest table glow ;-a small bright-colored platter for pickles, horse-radish, or jelly; and butter-plates representing green leaves are also attractive.

A few pennies' worth of parsley or cress, mingled with small scraps of white paper daintily clipped, will cause a plain dish to assume the air of a French entrée. A platter of hash may be ornamented with an edging of toasted or fried bread cut into points; and a dish of mutton chops is much more impressive with the bones stacked as soldiers stack their guns, forming a pyramid in the center,--each bone adorned with a frill of cut paper. A few slices of lemon, mingled with sprigs of parsley and slices of hardboiled eggs, form a pretty garnish to many dishes; and nothing could be more appetizing than beef, veal, mutton, or lamb made into mince-meat, and pressed into form in a wine-glass, then fried in pork fat, with a sprig of green placed in the top of each little cone. The basket of fruit-peaches, pears, grapes or apples, oranges and grapes-should be tastefully arranged and trimmed with leaves and flowers. The bowl of salad should be ornamented with the scarlet and orange flowers of the tropæolum,—their piquant flavor adding zest to the lettuce, with which they can be caten.

Ward's "Shakespeare." AFTER six years patient waiting, Ward's statue of Shakespeare has at last been set up in the Central Park; even now, not on the handsome pedestal designed for it by Wrey Mould, which has not yet been sent from Scotland, but, though on a temporary basis, yet in the spot where, for many years to come, it will stand, rousing in the mind of the passer pleasant thoughts of the gentle genius it commemorates, and admiration for the artist who has so nobly fashioned it.

We heartily wish it were higher praise than it is, to say that Ward is the first of American sculptors. Nor will we dwell upon the statement, for, if report of him be true, he is too manly, too modest, and too generous, to take pleasure in being praised at the expense of countrymen. We will make a wider inquest and ask who, among modern sculptors in France, in Germany or in Italy-we do not name England, for England has no sculptors-can be placed above him? In France they can make clever statuettes-the prettiest, most taking ornaments in the world for parlor or boudoir. The Louvre is set round with a small army of these-portrait-statues of all the great men of France-the great and the little-great-but there is no Frenchman living who has proved that he can make a statue. The last fine statue made in France was the Voltaire of Houdon; since then, in spite of patronage public and private, in spite of commissions and competitions, no statue worth looking at twice is forthcoming. In Germany they do better, but they are so tied hand and foot there by classicism and conventionalism and all the nonsense of their stone ideal, that originality is of the rarest; Rauch, however, has done some strong work, and men of less name, such as Kiss and Dannecker, have made statues that are above the average, though in reality neither the Amazon nor the Ariadne can be allowed to have any real principle of life in it. Nothing in art can live or be the cause of life in others that does not grow out of the artist himself, and belong to his time and surroundings. And the works we have just mentioned are only a little above the average of works of their kind, as Thorwaldsen's works, and as the works of that immensely overrated man, Canova, were above the average work of the same kind, so that their performances lifted them above the dead level of their dull unartistic time, and like little wanton boys they swim on bladders these many summers in a sea of glory. But we hope our better feeling for true art, and our worthier conviction of its ends and aims, will stick fatal pins into their bladders before many years.

Italians might perhaps do something: witness Vela's "Napoleon" and Magni's "Reading Girl.” But Italy's splendid past weighs her down and clips the wings of her men of genius, and Italians are too poor, too indifferent to art to encourage modern artists; and, if you find fault, have the ready answer that there

is more splendid art in Italy now left from the old time than they can take proper care of. So the sculptors there do not work for their countrymen, who never buy or never give remunerative prices-who reads Vasari knows 'tis an old trick, this higgling and beating down-but work for strangers, and "sculp," to use the American word that just suits the work, whatever style of stone doll suits the traveling American and English.

Thus it happens that Ward has not a large number of competitors for the first prize, and indeed we dare say never thought about the first prize at all! "To do his level best " he learned in his Western catechism, and he has always done that. He has done it in his " Indian," which is the first true ideal statue that has been produced in America, and much nearer to being a god than the "Young Mohawk" of the Belvedere. And now he has done his level best again, in the Shakespeare, which is so fine a piece of creative portraiture that it seems inevitable it must come to be acknowledged the ideal statue of the poet. Ward has almost met Jonson's wish and, in this figure for gentle Shakespeare cut, has drawn his wit as well in brass as he has hit his face.

The statue modeled here in New York, in Ward's workshop, was cast by Messrs. Wood & Co., in Philadelphia, where, as also at Chicopee in Massachusetts, there has been for some time as good casting done as can be done anywhere in the world.

It is considerably larger than life, and is in dress an accurate but not pedantic presentation of the manners of Shakespeare's own time. He is not dressinggowned like the Houdon Voltaire, nor looks a clothes line on a windy day, like Roubiliac's posture-master in Poet's Corner, nor is he draped half-true, halfideal, like the great lumbering new Dante in Santa Croce Square, in Florence. Ward was taught in a good school and learned of his master, Henry K. Brown, to seek for truth and to ensue it, and so his Shakespeare is in his habit as he lived, like Brown's fine "Washington," and Rauch's "Frederic." The poet stands in a position as free as possible from attitudinizing or self-consciousness, or affectation. There is a straightforward, manly simplicity in the way in which the sculptor has trusted to the natural beauty of the human figure crowned with such a head, that goes at once to the heart. We doubt if any reader and lover of Shakespeare who was at the Park on the day of the unvailing, and saw when, with a touch, the flag that enveloped the statue-our own, the most beautiful of the flags of the world-vanished and revealed what it had hid, who did not feel his heart stirred, and even the tears, if he would but confess it, stirred in their secret places. For it is as it were a real presence, and the closer we study the head-the front of Jove himself-the more beauty, and nobility, and expressiveness of all powers and capabilities we shall find in it. It makes all other portraits and

busts of Shakespeare look like the tired and castaway efforts of students in a master's workshop, while above them, not disdainful, but strong, and sweet, and full of encouragement, rises the master's work to whose resemblance their feebleness had so long aspired.

Labor versus Capital.

IN the discussion of this question the Builder states the case as follows. In our large manufactures the tendency of the scale to turn in favor of labor as against capital may be most plainly pointed out, and so long as competition is the principle that regulates trade this movement of the scale must go on; for it will be seen at once that the increased facility of obtaining information which modern science is daily yielding is mainly an advantage to the workman. is his interest to communicate knowledge to his fellows, while it is the interest of the employer to keep

It

it to himself. Let us take such an instance as the arrival of a large foreign order. Suppose that the Russian Government wishes to purchase 50,000 tons of rails. Every iron-master who catches scent of the commission will maintain the utmost possible silence. He will seek to make use of his knowledge in order to obtain the job. The fewer of his competitors who tender, and the less those who do tender know of the course of business adopted by the Russian Government as to inspection, mode of delivery, payment, and other details, the better will it be for his chances of securing the order. On the other hand, with the workman the case is diametrically opposite. "Here is our master," they will say, "with a heavy contract round his neck. He is no doubt under penalties as to time. It is a good opportunity for obtaining an increase of wages." The more fully knowledge is spread among the producers of labor, the more united and effective will be their action. And it is evident that, from year to year, it will be more and more difficult for the masters to obtain exclusive information, and more and more easy for the men to communicate intelligence. It is hard to see how the continuance of the competitive system among manufacturers can fail to involve them in constantly-increasing difficulties. Unless something in the nature of a vend or syndicate be introduced into the great trades, our manufacturing industry contains within its bosom the elements of its own destruction.

Charles Dudley Warner's "Saunterings." * THIS is a delightful book. Racy, graphic, varied, tender, droll, all at once and all in turn, Mr. Warner's sketches of travel are as peculiarly his own as are his chapters on Gardening, or his " "Back-Log Studies." Everything he describes is lit, and everything he says is kindled, by that subtle, elusive, indescribable sparkle of which only the true humorist knows the secret. Much more goes into the making

J. R. Osgood & Co.

of genuine humor than the world usually reckons. The thing commonly called humor, and laughed over, is no more like the true article than pin-wheels are like Northern Lights. True humor is quiet, under. toned, and sad. Beneath all its fun is a pathos of great tenderness: supporting and lightening all its burden is the never-failing sense of the grotesque, the unexpected, the laughable; it has poetic sensitiveness side by side with prosaic detail; and hard matter of fact underlying all its dreams.

Many humorists whose claims to be so called have never been disputed, have lacked this essential element of tenderness or pathos. The world is very quick to laugh, despite its sins and aches, and adopts its court jesters quite too easily. This is especially true in America, where a man needs only to hit on some new silliness of spelling, to be heralded far and near as a wit, and to make a fortune out of an almanac. There ought to be another name for this class of amusers; they might be called Ticklers, since all they do is to make men laugh for a minute or two. The true humorist does much more than that. His sayings abide with us: we like him best when we are sad. Who ever saw the day too dark to read beloved Charles Lamb in? Who that has known sorrow will read Warner's story of the sweet Sorrento maiden, Fiametta, without lingering over its last sentences?

"I could not say whether, after all, she was altogether to be pitied in the holy isolation of her grief,

which I am sure sanctified her, and in some sort ina le her life complete. For I take it that life, even in this sunny Sorrento, is not alone a matter of time."

And this is the same man who, in this same book, gives the following definition of Columbus: "Columbus was evidently a person who liked to sail about, and didn't care much for consequences."

Good as the book is, we are not sure that the preface is not the best part of it. It is droll from beginning to end, and it is more than five pages long,a most audacious boldness for a preface; but the boldness of its length is eclipsed by the boldness of its subject. Herein is illustrated the absoluteness of resource of the true humorist. Let us ask the wittiest man of our acquaintance what he thinks of Christopher Columbus! What should we get? But Warner has written five pages chiefly about that wellknown discoverer, and without mentioning a fact of his history, has set him in a new light forever. The Italians in Boston, it seems, had been firing off guns in his honor about the time that this preface was written. "There is something almost heroic," says Mr. Warner, "in the idea of firing off guns for a man who has been stone dead for about four centuries." Then the question comes up naturally, whether we ought, after all, to be so very grateful to Columbus. He was a "well-meaning man," says the quiet preface, "and if he did not discover a perfect continent, he found the only one that was left." But "the Indians never thanked him, for one party. The Africans had small ground to be

Mrs. Thaxter's early life was passed on a singularly isolated island on the New England coast, and her whole heart is wedded to the sea. Every song she sings has the under-tow in it. Every picture she sees has the horizon line of one who has looked out perpetually over far waters. She is next of kin to all lonely winged things which dwell among waves and rocks: gulls are her boon comrades, and sand-pipers are her brothers. Perhaps no poem in the book is more characteristic than one called "The Sandpiper," of which we give the first and last stanzas.

"Across the narrow beach we flit,

One little sand-piper and I,
And fast I gather, bit by bit,

The scattered drift-wood bleached and dry.
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,
One little sand-piper and I.

For the sun dropped down and the day was dead;
They shone like a glorious clustered flower-
Ten golden and five red.”

And this from a description of morning-glories, in the poem called "Before Sunrise:"

"O bells of triumph! delicate trumpets thrown

Heavenward and earthward, turned east, west, north, south, In lavish beauty,-who through you has blown This sweet cheer of the morning, with calm mouth?" Or these closing stanzas of "A Thanksgiving:" "Into thy calm eyes, O Nature, I look And rejoice;

Prayerful, I add my one note to

The Infinite voice;

As shining and singing and sparkling

Glides on the glad day,

And eastward the swift-rolling planet
Wheels into the gray."

We hope that Mrs. Thaxter will hereafter sing songs of a wider range. She has not once yet struck her highest note. The quality of these proves that, and we shall hold this dainty and tiny volume merely as a melodious and graceful hostage. "LUCRETIUS." *

THIS is an era of classic translation. very contagious in literary undertaking.

Example is It seems,

Lucretius; or, The Nature of Things. Translated into

before any one of his American peers in projecting and commencing his task.

The publishers' part in this book is highly prepossessing. They present us a well-favored volume without and within. If we pause, however, to study the portals by which we enter the palace of the translator's work (and Florence of the Middle Ages taught us that doors also may be a true product of art), we are a little damped and disheartened. The dedication reads as follows:

"To H. A. J. Munro, of Trinity College, Cambridge, to whom all admirers of Lucretius owe a debt of gratitude for his labors in the emendation of the text and the interpretation of their author, this work is respectfully inscribed by the translator."

A lucky throw of the eyes may possibly show at once to one reader in ten that "their" has "admirers" for its antecedent, (implying such possessorship as admirers can claim in the author admired,) but to the nine readers remaining, "their" will seem a negli gent slip for "its," referring to the "text." Mr. Johnson might have said "to whom all admirers of Lucretius owe a debt of gratitude for his labors in the emendation of their author's text and in the interpretation of the poem," and avoided the unfortunate ambiguity.

The introduction is not destitute of value, but it is curiously made up of long quotations from Professor Munro and from Professor Sellar, so inserted as to render it sometimes quite impossible to determine where they severally begin, where they are interrupted by the translator himself, where they end, and to which writer they belong.

We turn over to the Notes, and find the greater part of them credited by the translator to other writers than himself. It is Mr. Johnson himself, however, who quotes Milton's line,

"The womb of Nature and perhaps her grave," so as to make it jingle after this fashion:

"The womb of Nature and perhaps her tomb." When we commence reading the text of the translator, however, we are bound to admit that the ill auguries thus gathered are to a considerable degree falsified. The famous invocation of Venus with which the poem of Lucretius begins, and of which Mr. Lowell has pronounced the characteristically extravagant opinion that it is "the one sunburst of purely poetic inspiration" in the Latin language, is really rendered with remarkable fidelity and even with such felicity, too, as may come to a versifier from fidelity in following a poet. The translator misses the pregnant meaning of the poet, when he renders

"Whose presence fills

All things beneath the gliding signs of heaven," for "Who dost throng with life," etc.

English verse by Charles Frederic Johnson, with Introduction and Notes. New York: De Witt C. Lent & Co.