"With all my heart," replied Father McQuade. "Good spirits, like good wine, cheer the heart and brighten the eye." And so they filled all round. "Here's health to you all," cried Shane as they filled; "and from the veins of my heart you're welcome here." The toast was drunk with due honor; and for an hour or more the clatter of dishes and of tongues was heard, as cut after cut of the fowls disappeared, and joke after joke was cracked by the eaters. The influence of the bottle was very soon felt, and the conversation became uproarious, joined with shrill, hearty laughter, an occasional song, and a tough argument on some knotty point. There was sharp skirmishing between Father McQuade and Squire McKinney, with flashes of wit and spirts of humor which would have been loudly cheered at a more fashionable banquet; and still the clatter of tongues was kept up, and still the bottle passed merrily round. "A song!" cried Shane, at this stage of their proceedings. "A song! come, Ned Dolan, give us a song." "Yes, Ned," chimed in the rest, and Ned complied. "I give you 'Peggy my Dear,'" said Ned, when they were ready; and tuning up, he sang as follows:— Ah! a nice little girl was Peggy my dear, Oh, she's tall and she's stout, she's smart and she's bright, And a deil of a fellow can twist her in fight; Round her nice little waist I threw my right arm, O! say, Mr. Praste, do you see any harm? And I gave her a kiss on her lips that were red, O Peggy, my dear, I'll be after you soon, Roars of laughter greeted this song, and when it was ended Shane was in a mood of exalted beneficence; and, proud of his position as the giver of the feast, he overflowed with gayety, and said to his Reverence "An' I will say for you, Father McQuade, you're an ilegant gintleman, and the most able-bodied I ever engaged with; and it's the likes of me that feels the honor of your presence this night. And you too, Father O'Byrne; I shake hands to you, and drink your good health. Long may you live, and when you die, may you go strate to hea ven ! And all of you, my neighbors and friends! It does me good to see you here, -not forgetting your Riverence's nevue, Paddy McDavitt; and I hope soon to see him with the robes on his back, and to hear him prache us a good sarmen." Thus the carousal was kept up for several hours, until the silver moon had risen to the zenith, and admonished them it was time to think of leaving. Every soul was mellowed with drink, and all declared they had had a good time. 66 Katy," said the Reverend Barney O'Byrne, as he rose to take leave; “Katy, mavourneen, ye've done well; and it's me that gives you praise for it. An' now, Katy, you'd better, I think, get two of your men to go home with Father McQuade, for, though the night is clear, his eyes, you see, are none of the best; he's getting a little blind, and don't see his way very well after dark. Poor man! we should all be sorry to have anything happen to him." "Wid all my heart! Wid all my heart! Here, you spaĺpeens!" turning to two who were lingering at the door; "Go ye quick, and git his Riverence's horse; and when he is mounted, go ye on with him till he's up at his home." "Good night!" said the Father, as he gallantly mounted; "good night to ye all:" and the cavalcade left, his Reverence sup ported on each side by a servant. Strike, but Hear. TOPICS OF THE TIME. WE suppose that there is nothing simpler than simple addition, excepting, perhaps, those people who have no talent for it, of whom, unfortunately, there is a considerable number, especially among the striking craftsmen. If it were to be announced today that ten dollars will hereafter be the average price of a day's labor, among all the trades, we do not doubt that it would be regarded by the toiling multitude as the gladdest and grandest event that had ever occurred in the history of the national industry. Let us see, then, if we can, what the effect of such an advance in the price of labor would be. This is a rich country; and every rich country has a multitude❘ of artificial wants. To supply these wants, there have been organized a large number of productive industries; and hundreds of thousands of laborers are fed by them. The first effect of a doubling of the price of labor would be to destroy all those industries which are engaged in producing things that men and women can do without. When the price of the necessaries of life is raised, the use of luxuries is reduced in a corresponding degree. This law is just as unvarying in its operation as the law of gravitation. A man who spends $10,000 a year, giving $2,000 of it to luxuries, drops his luxuries, and spends his $10,000 on a smaller number of people. He dismisses a servant, and gives up his carriage. He stops buying flowers and giving entertainments. Every man and woman who had anything to do in feeding his artificial wants loses his patronage; and thus whole classes of people would, by such an advance in the price of labor, be thrown out of employment and into distress. This, however, would be only an indirect or incidental damage to the laboring interest, though it would be a damage to that interest alone. The rich would really suffer very little by it. There are certain things that we must all have the rich and the poor alike-houses to live in, clothes to wear, and bread and meat to eat. What effect would such a change have upon these? A house that cost $3,000 to build yesterday, will cost $6,000 tomorrow. The brickmaker, the stone-cutter, the mason, the carpenter, all working at double wages, would, by that very fact, advance the price of their own rent in a corresponding degree. The tenement that rents for $250 to-day will rent for $500 to-morrow, and if it cannot be rented for that sum, it will not be built at all. The same thing will be true concerning what are called the necessaries of life. If it costs twice as much money to produce a barrel of flour today as it did yesterday, it will double in price. Every article of produce, every garment that we buy for ourselves or our children, will have added to its price exactly what has been added to the cost of its production or manufacture; and when this excess has been added to the excess of rent, the laborer will find himself at the end of his first year no whit benefited by We what seemed to hold the promise of a fortune. cannot imagine a man with common-sense enough to labor intelligently who will be unable to see at a glance that our conclusions on this point are inevi table. Now there is beyond this direct result of a doubling of the price of labor an indirect effect upon the price of real estate, which greatly enhances the trouble of the laborer. The destruction of various branches of industry, and the rendering of other branches either precarious or insufficient in their profits, would inevitably concentrate capital, so far as possible, upon real estate. Idle or poorly-employed capital is always seeking for an investment; and if banking and manufacturing and trade become unprofitable, through a disturbance of just relations between labor and capital, the man who has money puts it into real estate. Under this stimulus real estate rises at once. It already feels this stimulus in this country, and it is destined to feel it still more and more. If the price of labor were doubled, the advance in rents from this cause alone would not only be appreciable but decidedly onerous. The inevitable tendency of every strike is to drive capital out of manufacturing into real estate, to raise the price of real estate, and to raise the laborer's rent. We have supposed this extreme case in order to show the laborer, as we could do in no other way, the tendency of his measures to secure large wages by arbitrary means. That there is a point beyond which it is not safe for him to go, is just as demonstrable as any problem in mathematics. There is a point beyond which it is not safe for him to push his demand for increased wages, or for fewer hours of labor, which is the same thing. Our impression is that he has reached that point, and we are speaking in his interest entirely. The present high and increasing price of real estate, and the buoyancy of railroad and fancy stocks, show that money seeks to get away from manufactures, and all those enterprises where capital is compelled to deal much with labor. This is a sad thing for labor-the saddest that can happen. The labor market should always be in that condition which tends to draw capital away from real estate. Then rents will be low, provisions will stand at a reasonable price, every hand will find sufficient employment with sufficient pay, and labor and capital be mutually dependent friends. We sympathize with every effort of the laborer to better his condition, and our simple wish is to warn him against supposing that increased wages beyond a certain point, which he seems already to have reached, will be of the slightest use to him. There is an average price for a day's labor which capital can afford to pay, and which alone labor can afford to receive. Beyond this all is disorder, injus tice, and pecuniary adversity and loss to every class. The extorted dollar which capital cannot afford to give to labor is a curse to the hand that receives it. The Wine Question in Society. IT is universally admitted among sensible and candid people that drunkenness is the great curse of our social and national life. It is not characteristically American, for the same may be said with greater emphasis of the social and national life of Great Britain; but it is one of those things about which there is no doubt. Cholera and small-pox bring smaller fatality, and almost infinitely smaller sorrow. There are fathers and mothers, and sisters and wives, and innocent and wondering children, within every circle that embraces a hundred lives, who grieve today over some hopeless victim of the seductive destroyer. In the city and in the country-North, East, South and West-there are men and women who cannot be trusted with wine in their hands-men and women who are conscious, too, that they are going to destruction, and who have ceased to fight an appetite that has the power to transform every soul and every home it occupies into a hell. Oh, the wild prayers for help that go up from a hundred thousand despairing slaves of strong drink to-day! Oh, the shame, the disappointment, the fear, the disgust, the awful pity, the mad protests that rise from a hundred thousand homes ! And still the smoke of the everlasting torment rises, and still we discuss the "wine question," and the "grape culture," and live on as if we had no share in the responsibility for so much sin and shame and suffering. Society bids us furnish wine at our feasts, and we furnish it just as generously as if we did not know that a certain percentage of all the men who drink it will die miserable drunkards, and inflict lives of pitiful suffering upon those who are closely associated with them. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people in polite life in America who would not dare to give a dinner, or a party, without wine, notwithstanding the fact that in many instances they can select the very guests who will drink too much on every occasion that gives them an opportunity. There are old men and women who invite young men to their feasts, whom they know cannot drink the wine they propose to furnish without danger to themselves and disgrace to their companions and friends. They do this sadly, often, but under the compulsions of social usage. Now we understand the power of this influence; and every sensitive man must feel it keenly. Wine has stood so long as an emblem and representative of good cheer and generous hospitality, that it seems stingy to shut it away from our festivities, and deny it to our guests. Then again it is so generally offered at the tables of our friends, and it is so difficult, apparently, for those who are accustomed to it to make a dinner without it, that we hesitate to offer water to them. It has a niggardly-almost an unfriendly-seeming; yet what shall a man do who wishes to throw what influence he has on the side of temperance? The question is not new. It has been up for an answer every year and every moment since men thought or talked about temperance at all. We know of but one answer to make to it. A man cannot, without.stultifying and morally debasing himself, fight in public that which he tolerates in private. We have heard of such things as writing temperance addresses with a demijohn under the table; and society has learned by heart the old talk against drinking too much-"the excess of the thing, you know "—by those who have the power of drinking a little, but who would sooner part with their right eye than with that little. A man who talks temperance with a wineglass in his hand is simply trying to brace himself so that he can hold it without shame. We do not deny that many men have self-control, or that they can drink wine through life without suffering, to themselves or others. It may seem hard that they should be deprived of a comfort or a pleasure because others are less fortunate in their temperament or their power of will. But the question is whether a man is willing to sell his power to do good to a great multitude for a glass of wine at dinner. That is the question in its plainest terms. If he is, then he has very little benevolence, or a very inadequate apprehension of the evils of intemperance. What we need in our metropolitan society is a declaration of independence. There are a great many good men and women in New York who lament the drinking habits of society most sincerely. Let these all declare that they will minister no longer at the social altars of the great destroyer. Let them declare that the indiscriminate offer of wine at din. ners and social assemblies is not only criminal but vulgar, as it undoubtedly is. Let them declare that for the sake of the young, the weak, the vicious-for the sake of personal character, and family peace, and social purity, and national strength-they will discard wine from their feasts from this time forth and forever, and the work will be done. Let them declare that it shall be vulgar—as it undeniably is—for a man to quarrel with his dinner because his host fails to furnish wine. This can be done now, and it needs to be done now, for it is becoming every day more difficult to do it. The habit of wine-drinking at dinner is quite prevalent already. European travel is doing much to make it universal; and if we go on extending it at the present rate, we shall soon arrive at the European indifference to the whole subject. There are many clergymen in New York who have wine upon their tables and who furnish it to their guests. We keep no man's conscience, but we are compelled to say that they sell influence at a shamefully cheap rate. What can they do in the great fight with this tremendous evil? They can do nothing, and are counted upon to do nothing. If the men and women of good society wish to have less drinking to excess, let them stop drinking moderately. If they are not willing to break off the indulgence of a feeble appetite for the sake of doing a great good to a great many people, how can they expect a poor, broken-down wretch to deny an ap petite that is stronger than the love of wife and children, and even life itself? The punishment for the failure to do duty in this business is sickening to contemplate. The sacrifice of life and peace and wealth will go on. Every year young men will rush wildly to the devil, middle-aged men will booze away into apoplexy, and old men will swell up with the sweet poison and become disgusting idiots. What will become of the women? We should think that they had suffered enough from this evil to hold it under everlasting ban, yet there are drunken women as well as drinking clergymen. Society, however, has a great advantage in the fact that it is vulgar for a woman to drink. There are some things that a woman may not do, and maintain her social standing. Let her not quarrel with the fact that society demands more of her than it does of men. It is her safeguard in many ways. Novel-Reading. THE novel has become, for good or for evil, the daily food of the civilized world. It is given to youngest childhood in Mother Goose and other extravagant and grotesque inventions, it is placed in the hands of older childhood and youth through the distributing agencies of a hundred thousand publishing houses and Sunday-school libraries, and prepared for the eyes of the adult world by every magazine and weekly newspaper that finds its way into Christian homes. Among all peoples and all sorts of people, of every age and of every religious and social school, it is the only universally-accepted form of literature. History, poetry, philosophy, science, social ethics and religion are accepted respectively by classes of readers, larger or smaller; but the novel is read by multitudes among all these classes, and by the great multitude outside of them, who rarely look into anything else. The serial novel is now an invariable component of the magazine in America and England; the French feuilleton has been so long established as to be regarded as a necessary element in the newspaper; while in Germany, the land of scholars and philosophers and scientific explorers, the story-tellers are among the most ingenious and prolific in the world. It all comes of the interest which the human mind takes in human life. If history and biography are less read than the novel, it is because the life found in them is less interesting or in a less interesting form. The details of individual experience and of social life are far more engaging to ordinary minds than the proceedings of parliaments and the intercourse of nations. From these latter the life of the great masses is far removed. The men and women whom one meets at a social gathering, and the dramatic by-play and per. sonai experience of such an occasion, will absorb a multitude of minds far beyond the proceedings of a Board of Arbitration that holds in its hands the relations of two great nations, and possibly the peace of the world. The daily life of the people is not in politics, or philosophy, or religious discussion. They eat and drink, they buy and sell, they lose and gain, they love and hate, they plot and counterplot; their lives are filled with doubts and fears and hopes, and realizations or disappointments of hope; and when they read, they choose to read of these. It is in these experiences that all classes meet on common ground, and this is the ground of the novel. In truth, the novel is social history, personal biography, religion, morals, and philosophy, realized or idealized, all in one. Nay, more: it is the only social history we have. If the social history of the last hundred years in England and America has not been written in the novels of the last fifty, it has not been written at all. In the proportion that these novels have been accepted and successful have their plots, characters, spirit, properties and belongings been taken from real life. There is no form of literature in which the people have been more inexorably determined to have truthfulness than in that of fiction. History, under the foul influence of partisanship, has often won success by lying, but fiction never. Under the inspirations of ideality, it has presented to us some of the very purest forms of truth which we possess. So universally accepted is the novel that it has become one of the favorite instruments of reform. If a great wrong is to be righted, the sentiments, convictions and efforts of the people are directed against it through the means of a novel. It is mightier to this end than conventions, speeches, editorials and popular rebellions. If a social iniquity is to be uncovered that it may be cured, the pen of the novelist is the power employed. The adventurer, the drunkard, the libertine, the devotee of fashion and folly, are all punctured and impaled by the same instrument, and held up to the condemnation or contempt of the world. At the same time, we are compelled to look to our novels rather than to our histories and biographies for our finest and purest idealizations of human character and human society. There is nothing more real and nothing more inspiring in all history and cognate literature, than the characters which fiction, by the hands of its masters, has presented to the world. There was a time when the church was afraid of the novel; and it is not to be denied that there are bad novels-novels which ought not to be read, and which are read simply because there are people as bad as the novels are; but the church itself is now the most industrious producer of the novel. It is found next to impossible to induce a child to read anything but stories; and therefore the shelves of our Sunday. school libraries are full of them. These stories might be better, yet they undoubtedly contain the best presentation of religious truth that has been made to the infantile mind. The pictures of character and life that are to be found in a multitude of these books cannot fail of giving direction and inspiration to those for whom they are painted. Among much that is silly and preposterous and dissipating, there is an abundance that is wholesome and supremely valuable. Religious novels, too, have become a large and tolerably distinct class of books of very wide acceptance and usefulness in the hands of men and women. The church, least of all estates, perhaps, could now afford to dispense with the novel, because it is found that the novel will be produced and universally consumed. The trash that is poured out by certain portions of the press will continue to be produced, we suppose, while it finds a market. The regret is that such stuff can find a market, but tastes will be crude and morals low in this imperfect world for some time to come. Let us be comforted in the fact that sensuality tires, that there is education indirect if not direct in coarse art, and that there will naturally come out of this large eating of trash a desire for more solid food. A long look at the yellow wearies, and then the eye asks for blue. If we look back upon our own experience, we shall doubtless find that we demand a very different novel now from that which formerly satisfied or fascinated us, and that we ourselves have passed through a process of development which helps us to pronounce as trash much that formerly pleased us. Let us hope for the world that which we have realized for ourselves. THE OLD I SHOULD like to live in a community where every man's face would represent his idea of himself. Even as it is, there is not a countenance in the wide world so homely that its owner does not find in it a grace unseen by others. It is this consciousness of at least an approach toward the beloved ideal that makes ugly folks quite as much given to throwing sheep's eyes at themselves in mirrors as handsome people are. Photographic albums abundantly record this pathetic striving after ideals-shown in every case where the artist has not posed and retouched subject and negative out of all individuality and expression. But it is not merely at the photographer's that people endeavor to impress upon others their own conception of themselves. We go through life trying to do it. And oh, what a hard time some of us have! Think of a man with a brain that feels broad and towering, and a narrowing forehead, at an angle of forty-five degrees; imagine another with a Wellington heart and a turn-up nose, or a girl whose idea of herself is something like Mrs. Browning, and who stands six feet in her stockings. A youth of my acquaintance, who affects the appearance of a rake, is miserably baffled by a goody style of countenance; to judge from his face one might suppose that he had attended the recent American Derby' for the purpose of distributing tracts. You apprehend at once how this accounts for a great many things in life that seem ludicrous on the surface. The clustering curls and shrinking ways, for instance, of the large young lady above mentioned would not seem at all incongruous could we behold the girl as she appears to herself. THERE is something touching in the attachment that everybody has for his own countenance. Is not that one of the tenderest things in Dickens-Charlie's hiding the looking-glass from poor disfigured little Dame Durden. I am certain that a sudden change, though for the better, in the face of the plainest person I know would make him homesick. I confess to a subtle satisfaction in my last photo CABINET. graph, which I am very well aware is not shared by any of the friends to whom I have presented copies. They talk about the position being forced or natural; or the eyebrows not being brushed; or the hair being too formal; or the picture flattering me a little; or not flattering me at all; or its being too light; or too dark; or too festive; or too solemn; or about its being a capital likeness; or an abominable one-according to variance in prints, moods, and notions. But what interests me in it-they have no souls for. I wonder if I am as inappreciative in the matter of other people's photographs. I declare I shall look through the next photograph album with new eyes. As unsatisfactory as they are in the main, photographs show a man to himself in some respects better than the looking-glass does. For in the lookingglass you are always met by that frightening pointblank stare. On the other hand, you can gaze upon your own photograph just as composedly as upon that of the King of Siam. There is no social custom more widely observed than that already alluded to, of looking siddewise at one's self in mirrors. Scarcely one adult passenger in a hundred fails in the observance while pissing through the ladies' cabins of the J-y C-y ferry-boats and ninety-eight of the ninety-nine do it on the sly. The strange part of it is that, while every. body knows precisely what his file leader is about, everybody imagines that he himself has never been caught in the act. It is one of the delusions to which humanity is subject.-Why cannot we be frank about it? Suppose we try to be frank about it to-morrow! DID you never catch a glimpse of yourself unexpectedly in a looking-glass, and think at first it was a stranger approaching? And did you never get a sudden view of your own personality by means of a psychic accident such as that? A friend of mine, who is as unconceited as any man I know, told me that he once saw his own character, that way, and it brought tears to his eyes. It was only for an instant,-a flash of lightning in a dark night,-but he was confident it |