FOOTNOTES

FOOTNOTES[J]And that bill was introduced by myself.[K]S. 398, 1st Session XLVIIIth Congress.

[J]And that bill was introduced by myself.

[K]S. 398, 1st Session XLVIIIth Congress.

BY ROBERT R. DOHERTY.

It is strange how soon we all turn into redoubtable adventurers, after the “soft dews of kindly sleep” have fallen. Not Marco Polo, fresh from the glories of the Cathayan court; nor Orellana, with his glittering lies about Dorado; nor Hans Pfaali, big-mouthed with the wonders of his voyage to the moon; not even Baron Munchausen himself, could tell more astonishing tales, than can the prosiest among us on his return from Dreamland.

Dreams were believed by the ancients to be vehicles of supernatural communication with mortals. Homer says that they come from Jove; Mohammed tells us that Allah sends them; and according to Job, “God speaketh in dreams.” Milton, on the other hand, pictures Satan, “squat like a toad close at the ear of Eve,” assaying by his devilish art to reach the organs of her fancy, and with them to forge phantoms and dreams. So deep-seated was the belief in the supernatural origin of night visions, that the law of ancient Rome required those who dreamed of public affairs to report to the augurs, so that an authoritative interpretation might be promptly given to the rulers. There was hardly a governor or general of antiquity, but had a number of professional augurs in his retinue; and the course of events was often modified by the meanings they attached to their patrons’ dreams. Professor Creasy has written a unique volume on the “Fifteen Decisive Battles of History,” and has suggested another, on the dozen or more “Decisive Love Affairs.” As many fateful dreams could easily be selected, around which, as on a pivot, the destiny of the world has seemed to turn. The most ludicrous, and in many cases wicked interpretations were given to dreams; and Cato—himself an augur—said it was strange how two augurs could meet without laughing in each other’s face.

Even at the present day belief in the prophetic character of dreams is widely prevalent, and many lists of “interpretations” are in circulation among the credulous. When Rory O’More assured us that dreams go by contraries, he followed current superstition. Tears are supposed to indicate joy, and laughter, woe. Dream of the dead, and you may expect tidings of the living; dream of the living, and unlooked for danger—perhaps death—is imminent. Many of the interpretations printed in the “guide books” are, however, exceedingly natural, as, for instance, that visions of gold foretoken wealth, and orange blossoms, marriage.

Let us place in contrast with such fanciful absurdities a tabulation of some of the veritable indications of dreams, as made by a modern scientist. Lively dreams, according to Dr. Winslow, are a sign of the excitement of nervous action; soft dreams, of slight irritation of the brain, often in nervous fever announcing the approach of a favorable crisis; frightful dreams, of determination of blood to the head; dreams of blood and red objects, of inflammatory conditions. Visions of rain and water are often signs of diseased mucous membranes and dropsy; distorted forms frequently point to disorder of the liver. Dreams in which the patient sees any part especially suffering indicate diseases of that part. Dreams about death often precede apoplexy, which is so connected with determination of blood to the head. The nightmare, with great sensitiveness, is an indication of determination of blood to the chest.

To adequately define dreaming must ever be a difficult, if not an impossible task. Professor Wilson, of Edinburgh, has graphically outlined peculiarities which distinguish dreams from the imaginings of wakeful hours and from the hallucinations of madness. The current of thought that rushes through the sleeper’s mind is quite free from the control of his will. Dr. Rush has called a dream a transient paroxysm of delirium, and delirium a permanent dream; but the dreamer’s intellect is withdrawn from almost all relation to external objects; while the lunatic holds communication by all his senses with the world about him. But while sleep has thus closed “the five gateways of knowledge” to the dreamer, he still hears and sees and feels and smells and tastes. An imaginative person, on visiting Niagara Falls, can afterward reproduce it graphically in memory; but his most vivid mental picture seems pale and hopelessly inaccurate when the scene is revisited. The visions of our sleep, on the contrary, are among the most vivid of our life, and where the objects have been seen before, the most accurate. “The main difference,” says Dr. Smith, “betweenour sleeping and waking thoughts appears to lie in this, that in the former case the perceptive faculties of the mind are active, while the reflective powers are generally asleep. Thus it is that the impressions of dreams are in themselves vivid, natural, and picturesque, occasionally gifted with an intuition beyond our ordinary powers, but strangely incongruous and often grotesque; the emotion of surprise or incredulity, or of unlikeness to the ordinary course of events, being in dreams a thing unknown.”

Of the vividness of impressions made in dreams, illustrations are plentiful. Dr. Abercrombie first told the often quoted story of the English army officer whose susceptibility was so remarkable that “his friends could produce any kind of dream they pleased by softly whispering in his ear.” On one occasion they led him, in this way, through a long quarrel, which threatened to end in bloodshed. Just as the dreamer was to meet his enemy a pistol was handed to him; he fired it off in his sleep, was awakened by the report, and repeated to his laughing friends the fancies they had whispered to him a moment before. A well authenticated case is on record of a young Englishman who, at the age of twenty-eight, through disease, lost the power of speech for four years. He dreamed that he fell into a cauldron of boiling beer, and in his agony and fright shrieked for help. Of course, he at once awoke, and from that moment the use of his tongue was fully recovered. A bottle filled with warm water, which touched the feet of Dr. James Gregory after he had fallen asleep, produced an awful vision of a bare-footed tramp over the hot crater of Mount Ætna, through clouds of sulphurous vapors, and amid spurtings of scalding lava. Because of a blister on the head of Dr. Reid, he “positively endured all the physical torture of being scalped, while dreaming that he had fallen into the hands of a party of red Indians.” A lady dreamed that a man entered her chamber, and tightly clasped her left hand in his without offering her further violence or uttering a word of explanation. She remonstrated with him in vain; she shrieked for help, but could not make herself heard; then began a desperate struggle with the imaginary stranger, which culminated in awaking the sleeper—but not in releasing her hand, which, to her great alarm, was still held as in a vise. Summoning all her will-power, she rose from her couch and crossed the room, and it was only when she attempted to light a lamp that she discovered that she was holding her own hand with the other, which had become numb by the tightness of the grasp.

Indefinite expansion of time—or, rather, a total ignoring of the limitations of time—is another peculiarity in dreaming. It has been demonstrated that a man can dream in detail the events of years, and consume in the act of dreaming only a small fraction of one minute. “I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one night,” says De Quincy, the prince of dreamers: “nay, I sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time.” Dr. Macnish, from whose delightful essays several of these illustrations have been taken, within an hour dreamed that he made a voyage, remained some days in Calcutta, returned home, then took ship for Egypt, visited the cataracts of the Nile, Cairo, and the Pyramids; “and, to crown the whole, had the honor of an interview with Mehemet Ali, Cleopatra, and Alexander the Great!” A gentleman dreamed that he had enlisted as a soldier, performed many military duties, deserted, been apprehended, carried back, tried, condemned to be shot, and at last led out for execution. His eyes were blindfolded; after an interval of awful agony he heard the rattle of the fatal musketry, and awoke—to find that “a noise in the adjoining room had at the same moment produced the dream and awakened him.” We have, perhaps, all, though in less degree, had similar experience of the rapidity of thought in dreaming.

There is hardly any limitation to the fancy of the dreamer; he may even lose his identity, and for the nonce personate Cæsar, or Cromwell, or the King of the Cannibal Islands. It is said, however, that no man or woman ever dreamed that he or she belonged to the other sex; although the strange notion that the dreamer is a fish, or beast, or bird, is not infrequent. Usually, however, “we are somewhat more than ourselves in our dreams.” The tired school girl cries herself to sleep over some difficult arithmetical task, dreams, perhaps, that her teacher assists her, and wakens with the correct “answer” in her mind. So Condorcet successfully pursued his most intricate calculations in his dreams; and Benjamin Franklin has acknowledged his indebtedness to his midnight visions for the solution of many grave political problems which had hopelessly taxed his reason during his waking hours. An austere philosopher, who ordinarily seemed to be destitute of risibility, tells us that in one dream he could compose a whole comedy, witness its performance, relish its jests, and laugh himself awake.

But to the marvels of Dreamland there is no end. “Strange it is,” says the poetical essayist, “when regal Mab rides forth, drawn by a team of little atomies across men’s noses as they lie asleep, galloping through lovers’ brains, and over courtiers’ knees, and lawyers’ fingers, and soldiers’ necks, and ladies’ lips!” Strange, indeed, and blessed as strange. Let us thank God for our dreams. They are the great levelers of life. The cruel distinctions of wealth and blood are forgotten, and our personal disadvantages are set aside. The bashful stutterer talks with the grace and fire of Demosthenes, and the wasted invalid regains his pristine vigor. In dreams

“The child has found its mother,And the mother finds her child,And dear families are gathered,That were scattered o’er the wild.”

“The child has found its mother,

And the mother finds her child,

And dear families are gathered,

That were scattered o’er the wild.”

The poor drudge who toils wearily through twelve long hours for the mere necessities of life, can at night sit on a golden throne and dispense royal favors. The ambitious soldier can fight bloodless contests, and win empires, without staining his soul with the crimes of a Napoleon.

And if the dreams of the mass of mankind be so full of wonders, what must be those of the giants of intellect and passion? What exquisite sensuous delight must have thrilled the poet Coleridge during his vision of Xanadu of Kubla Khan, when the mere fragmentary strains that he then heard sung are so beautiful! How wild and spectral, how awfully magnificent, were the dreams of Albrecht Dürer, judged by the allegorical pictures in which he has attempted to reproduce them! If to read of the visions of a Bunyan or a De Quincy thrills us, what must it have been to experience them—to have floundered with Pliable in the Slough of Despond, and stood with Christian on the Delectable Mountains—to have been “grinned at, stared at, chattered at,” by thousands of alligators such as the “Opium-eater” describes, or to have with him “sunk fathoms deep in Nilotic mud.”

Physiologists have made many curious and valuable observations bearing on our subject. They have found that when a sleeper dreams, the brain swells greatly, and becomes red in color, while the brain of the dreamless sleeper is “pale, shrunken, and bloodless;” they have shown that, from physical causes, he that sleeps on his left side will have visions of fantastic incongruities, while the dreams of the slumberer who reclines on his right side will at least be logical and self-consistent; they have divided “the exciting causes of dream-images into peripheral and central stimulations”—that is, into those caused by muscular movements or positions, and by the hygienic condition of the various organs of the body, and those which originate somewhat mysteriously, in the nerve-centers.

After all, however, very little is known of the true philosophy of dreaming; and perhaps the quaint fancy of Sir Thomas Browne may not be as utterly absurd as at first it seems—that this life is but a dream, and that death will be an agreeable awaking to our real life, whose past is now forgotten only because we are now asleep.

BY SUSAN HAYES WARD.

Iss was gar ist,Trink’ was klar ist,Sprich was wahr ist.—German Dining Room Motto.

Iss was gar ist,Trink’ was klar ist,Sprich was wahr ist.

Iss was gar ist,

Trink’ was klar ist,

Sprich was wahr ist.

—German Dining Room Motto.

The central work-room of the house is the kitchen. There labor is continuous. There three times a day, year in and year out, the meals must be cooked, and the pots and pans washed. Slovenly work there tells all over the house. An ill-regulated kitchen involves poor cookery and waste, and cheapens the most artistically arranged dining room. But the importance of good, careful and intelligent cookery hardly comes within the limits of this article.

It behooves us, however, to insist upon it that the room where so much of the necessary work of home is carried on, should be airy, sunny, cheerful, well stocked with the implements essential to the lightening of kitchen labor, and adapted in every way to the comfort of its occupants.

A good farmer supplies himself with tools and machines for his farm work; but his wife often toils with cracked stove, green wood, and a scant supply of kettles and pans, when only a slight outlay would save her many weary steps and much worry of mind.

The kitchen should have painted walls that can be readily washed. Indeed, every surface in the room should be washable. There should be plenty of closet room, a large sink, a large work-table, comfortable chairs, at least one easy chair, a shelf for books, and room in the window for a few plants if desired. A picture or two would not be out of place if protected by glass, nor an occasional motto—like the charge to the German cook:

“Köchin, denk’ an deine Pflicht,Vergiss du heut’ das Salz ja nicht.”

“Köchin, denk’ an deine Pflicht,

Vergiss du heut’ das Salz ja nicht.”

Or the admirable rules for home living which Dr. Watts wrote for children:

“I’ll not willingly offendNor be easily offended;What is ill I’ll strive to mend,And endure what can’t be mended.”

“I’ll not willingly offend

Nor be easily offended;

What is ill I’ll strive to mend,

And endure what can’t be mended.”

There are many small houses where either kitchen or sitting-room has to serve also as dining room. Any sensible woman can make shift to get along comfortably in this way and eat her bread and honey with the queen in the kitchen when necessity compels, so long as she has neatness and despatch for hand-maidens. One large, light room is often far better than two small dark ones; but where a room does double duty there can hardly be unity in the arrangement and furnishing.

To my question, “What is of most importance in the dining room?” a man made answer, “the kitchen,” and a woman, “the outlook.” No doubt the provision of wholesome and abundant food for her family is the housewife’s first duty, but while fully endorsing the masculine paradox, we must not ignore the woman’s plea for a cheerful outlook.

If possible, the dining room should have as good a view as the house affords. Let it look out on the orchard, the sea shore, or the distant hills, rather than the stable or the clothes line. The view of a terraced, box-bordered garden, of a tulip bed and apple blooms, as seen from an old-fashioned country house dining room is one of the sweet memories which childhood has stored up for the enrichment of my coming years. Three times a day the household gathers here to take the goods the gods provide them, and then, if ever, they should enjoy a little leisure, and be in the mood to appreciate the best of the out-of-door world that surrounds them. A good view is better than pictures or stained glass for a dining room; but when a good view is out of reach and an unsightly one is unavoidable, then stained glass comes to our aid. If that darkens the room too much, ground or cathedral glass panes can transmit the light, surrounded by a border of color. That would be over-leaping the obstacle; but it can be quietly set aside by means of a pretty sash or half-sash curtain of Madras muslin or any pretty, thin, colored curtain material. A curtain is a simpler, franker, and consequently better solution of this difficulty than any of the pasted-on, semi-translucent, paper cheats that simulate stained glass

“In faint disguises that could ne’er disguise.”

Let honest poverty hold up his head and hang up a width or two of ten penny Turkey-red calico by the aid of button rings and a brass wire, so that it can be drawn across the lower sash, and if the color be in keeping with the room, it will look better than anything more pretentious and less true. Good stained glass, such as Mr. Tiffany or Mr. La Farge devise, is very beautiful, but like Adolphus’s tea-pot, it has to be lived up to throughout the room, and so is more expensive than in its first cost. The fine view, however, involves no extra outlay, and beside adding good cheer to that which the housewife spreads upon her board, it is no inconsiderable factor in the table-talk of the year, helping not a little in the entertainment of guests.

The dining room should also be conveniently near the kitchen, either in point of fact, or made practically near in the case of a basement kitchen by a “lift” or dumb waiter. The kitchen should not open directly into the room, or all the kitchen odors will abide there. An intermediate pantry or entry way shuts off many of the smells of cooking, and a small slide through which dishes can be passed serves to the same end, as it obviates the necessity of keeping the door ajar while food is carried back and forth.

How to light the dining room is a question of some importance. There should be light enough to show the table to advantage, but it should be possible to darken the room with shutters or blinds in the inevitable summer warfare with flies. A room looks better, artistically, where the light enters from but one side. Cross lights are the artist’s abhorrence.

In city houses a conservatory built out on one side gives a pleasant suggestion of the woods and out-of-doors, and at the same time gives the right effect of light and shade to the room. Kerosene lamps are not ornaments to the dining or tea table. They are cumbersome, malodorous, and their room is better than their company. A chandelier over the table, burning gas or holding lamps, is the easiest and cheapest arrangement, but not the most picturesque. The prettiest light of all, and probably the most expensive, as the prettiest things are apt to be, is given by wax candles from tall candlesticks. Four of these judiciously arranged on the table will give an abundance of light for those seated about it, if additional light be provided for the rest of the room by a lamp on the sideboard or in side sconces.

A dining room should not be too warm. It is an old boarding house trick to so heat the dining room as to take away all appetite for food. The room should, in fact, be kept a little cooler than the rest of the house, partly because the lower temperature provokes appetite, and in part because on leaving the table it is natural to feel a sensation of chilliness, the blood ofthe body being called aside to the business of digestion, so that it is comfortable after eating to step into a room a few degrees warmer than that in which one has been seated.

The color of the dining room depends upon its size, exposure, and upon whether it must do double duty as sitting room, or library. Dark, rich furniture and wall-hangings have been the rule for dining rooms for many a year. The larger the room, the more elaborate, rich and dark can be the furnishing, but a dark room that hardly gets a glimpse of sun throughout the year must be made sunny by plenty of yellow in woodwork, or walls; bright, sunny pictures with gilt frames; and by the glitter of brass or of the pretty, yellow English ware with which the china shops are aglow this year. For rich wall effects Japanese or leather paper is good, Lincrusta better, the latter being a comparatively new material, in substance something like linoleum, washable and very durable (so the manufacturers assert), having figures raised upon it, and coming in good designs and colors. With elaborately decorated walls, plain curtains are called for. Where the walls are to be furnished freely with oil paintings, let the pictures supply the decoration, and let the walls be as unobtrusive as possible—only ensuring that they are of a good back ground color; sage, olive-green, olive-brown, or dull red, in paint or paper.

Family portraits, if good, are not out of place in the dining room; but poor, old photographs in bungling, black walnut frames should be preserved in the private apartments of those who value them. They are never decorative; nor are pictures popularly known as dining room pictures much more pleasing. The effigy of a silver salver of leaden hue loaded with fruits of all climes, with a decanter of wine and a half empty glass, of fishes hanging by their gills, or dead ducks, each from one web-footed leg, is not nearly so attractive as a good portrait, landscape,genrepicture or flower painting, however good practice the manufacture of such studies may be in the art schools. I know a dining room where, outrivaling some amateurish fruit painting, an engraving after Rosa Bonheur of a shepherdess with her sheep has been a daily delight for years, and another where the only picture space in the room, that directly over the mantel shelf (the walls being darkly paneled), is filled with a water color copy of Sir Joshua’s “Angel Choir” that seems fairly to light and hallow the air around it, like the glories round the heads of saints.

An over-mantel is appropriate in the dining room if anywhere, as it affords shelf room for choice china or glass that ought to be seen. A little ingenuity can go a great way in dressing up a commonplace shelf so that it shall have dignity and importance. I have known one to have a very aristocratic air which was only an adaptation of part of a four-post bedstead, graceful, slender posts standing on either side of the fireplace, built up with shelves of varying width and length.

If books in every room are a prime necessity, as our model home-maker assures us, then there should be at least one book-shelf in each room.

“Pray what is that book-shelf for?” asks the visitor while seated at the dinner table in “The Poet’s House,” which Mr. Scudder has described for us. “Books of reference,” said Stillwell, promptly. “It’s extraordinary how many little questions come up for discussion at the table, questions of dates, of names, of quotations. So I keep a dictionary, a book of dates, a brief biographical dictionary, a dictionary of poetical quotations, and one or two other such books at hand. It is the sideboard to our mental feast. We don’t keep everything we possibly need on the table itself.” And others beside poets would find such a shelf of great convenience.

There should be at least a square of carpet in the dining room under the table, not only for warmth and the look of comfort, but to prevent the noise of chairs scraping over the bare floor. In other rooms small rugs scattered here and there may suffice, though one large rug is always more restful to the eye, but a table around which a family gathers, either in dining or sitting room should for these obvious reasons always stand upon carpet. Where the floor is carpeted throughout and a crumb-cloth or drugget used, pains should be taken in the selection of the latter to get the colors in harmony with those of the carpet. Cheap druggets as a rule are so glaring and crude in color that any carpet that respects itself loses tone at once, and appears thoroughly commonplace when forced into association with the blowzy things. The patient seeker, however, may be rewarded in his search by finding a “Bocking” or drugget that shall be as thoroughly becoming to his carpet as is the tidy morning apron to the neat-handed Phyllis who wears it. Since the days of King Arthur the round table has been held the most delightful for social and hospitable purposes. With a small family there is a cosiness about a round table that is very charming, but when one is forced to enlarge the circle a small, round table can not be expanded to the required circumference. A solid table seven feet long and four feet wide will seat six comfortably, and eight without crowding, and is of delightful dimensions to sit about of an evening, when work or study is toward. If such a table be used (an Eastlake table, our furniture dealers would call it, since Mr. Eastlake inveighed so severely against what he styled the “telescope” table) there should be two side tables made four feet long which could be of service in the room, standing against the wall, but on occasion could be used to enlarge the dining table. H. J. Cooper, an authority on house-furnishing, after speaking of Mr. Eastlake’s objections and suggestions, says:

“We do not find, however, any great revolution in the matter of expanding dining tables, and are inclined to think their great convenience will prove a barrier to any wide-spread reform.”

A good table should be polished, not varnished, and protected when not in use by a substantial cover.

Side tables are serviceable when one’s space or purse will not allow of a sideboard, but sideboards are useful articles of furniture, and look better when made of the same wood as table and chairs. They should be simple of construction, with straight rather than curved lines, smooth surfaces, and with drawers easily get-at-able and lightly pull-out-able.

The sideboard should hold the table linen for daily use, the daily silver and cutlery, teacups and saucers. If, in addition, it can find room for a convenient box of biscuits, pot of ginger, or any simple refreshment for the late worker who likes a bite before going to bed, so much the better will it serve its purpose as a sideboard. Our grandmothers kept here decanters and wine glasses, but in these days of the W. C. T. U. wine is seldom found standing out boldly in sight in the dining room. In addition to the sideboard a small table or a butler’s tray should be ready to hand to hold dishes or food that must be used in the table service.

Cabinets for the display of china, closets let into the chimney for the safe keeping of nice glass, should feel themselves at home here, while plaques and old china plates seem to belong of right to the dining room, and can be arranged over doors by means of a tiny balustrade, or on the frieze, or as over-mantel decorations, while choice cups and saucers can fill the cabinet spaces. In the breakfast room, where I am now writing (not my own), I have just counted fifty-nine pieces of glass or pottery which hang on the wall or stand exposed on sideboard, mantel or shelves, besides the tiles of the fireplace, two small cabinets, each holding a half dozen rare and precious Japanese cups and saucers protected by glass, and two large cabinets filled to overflowing with specimen china, and yet the room does not seem at all overstocked with ceramic treasures.

Growing plants are charming dining room ornaments, but will only thrive where a minimum of gas and furnace heat and a maximum of sunshine and fresh air is supplied, with regular attention as to water and shower baths. They are sure, however, to reward painstaking care.

Decorative china and plants, however, are luxuries, though less or more within the reach of all. A screen, though usually looked upon as a luxury, is in the dining room almost a necessity, and it can be bought or manufactured at home for a nominal sum. Many a guest has been well nigh martyred at table with a fire in the rear and sunlight to the fore, whose meals might have been made a delight by a careful adjustment of shades and blinds and the judicious intervention of a screen between chair and grate. Doors must needs be left open as servants pass back and forth, and a screen between the mistress’s chair and the door may save her from many an annoying influenza.

A thick, white cloth of felt or Canton flannel should be spread over the table before it is “set.” This not only protects the polish of the table top, but makes the linen cloth lie much better, and appear to the best advantage.

Table linen should, so far as possible, be spotless. Fine damask is costly, but a clean, coarse cloth looks better than a fine one soiled and tumbled. It is true that table linen is worn more by washing than by use. Still it must be washed—at least that is the American theory. I have sat at a table in Saxony where the table linen bore the date of more than a century before, but there the wash was perhaps a semi-annual affair, and a breakfast cloth was made to serve from Easter till July, breakfast being only a simple meal of a roll and a cup of coffee.

We can lay down no further rule for the changing of table linen. It is perhaps better to keep breakfast and dinner cloths separate, the finer for dinner, that being the more formal meal; tea and luncheon can be served, if one wishes, without table cloth. If care be taken to lay a carving cloth or napkin under the meat platter, or a tea cloth where tea or coffee are to be poured, breakfast and dinner cloths can be kept fresh longer.

Some writers more nice than wise sneer at napkin rings, implying that no table linen should be used more than once without washing. But there are few families of any size that can afford such lavish laundry work. A family of six would require twenty-one dozen napkins in constant use, if given out fresh each meal. When the same napkin must serve for more than one meal, a napkin ring is the simplest and surest way of securing each person his own. Of course rings are only for family use, not for the transient guest, and they would be out of place at a dinner party.

Table cloths should be done up with a suspicion of starch, not enough to stiffen them, but with only so much as will make them iron well. Heavy linen looks and wears better than light. Large napkins are for dinner use. Delicate doilies of fine drawn linen work or silk embroidery are laid under finger bowls to protect the choice china plates on which the bowls rest. This doily should be laid to one side with the bowl, it should not be used as a fruit doily. I have seen an absent minded man roll up in a crumpled heap one of these delicate lace affairs costing five dollars, perhaps, and then carelessly wipe hands and moustache with it, while the mistress of the house looked on with an assumed placidity which spoke volumes for her powers of self-control.

The finger bowl is not an elegant affectation, but is a genuine comfort where fruit or sweets are served. Fruit napkins should be used to save large damask ones from stains.

If the first requirement for a well ordered table is cleanliness in damask and dishes, the second is tidiness and regularity of arrangement. If mats are placed under hot dishes let them lie on the square, and let the plates be put on at regular intervals, and in a straight line. A hotel waiter who flings plates and plated ware at the table by a dextrous twirl of the wrist is no model for the home table setter. Spoons for soup and dessert should lie to the right of the plate, knives above, forks to the left; this is the time honored usage, and it makes the labor of serving dessert easier if all knives, spoons and forks to be used during the meal are laid at the first by each plate. Tumblers stand to the right a little above the plate, butter-plates in a corresponding position to the left. Avoid the use of what are popularly known as “individual” dishes upon the table, such as butter plates, salt cellars, sauce plates, and so forth. This is another hotel fashion that should not find its way into the home. It is better to use a larger plate and take a greater variety of food upon it. The little butter dishes are really needed only with warmed plates; and beans, peas, corn, and other vegetables in separate dishes, about a dining plate, make a table look very untidy, and make extra and unnecessary work for the dishwasher. An English lady who visited me a year ago took home to London with her as an American curiosity a set of butter plates which, so she writes, she has not yet found opportunity to use, not having had any American visitors.

Steel knives are better, and where meats are to be served are more desirable in every way than plated ones, the latter being a device to save the labor of “scouring” with Bristol brick.

Flowers or fruit are never out of place upon the dining room table; a showyépergneis not necessary, for a pretty growing plant always makes a good center piece, and a single rose in a slender glass adds flavor to the best cooked meal. My grandmother of blessed memory used to say that the simpler the meal the more pains should be taken to serve it daintily. Broiled salt pork and baked potatoes, according to her theory, could be so bravely set out upon the table as to make a meal fit for gods and men. A parsley bed is of special service in decking out a simple dinner, and celery tops are not to be despised.

The heads of the household should face each other from the ends and not the sides of the table, if the meals are served English fashion, vegetables and meat being placed upon the table. No table can be set with any air of elegance when the meat platter or the tea equipage stand in the middle of one side. It makes comparatively little difference, however, when meals are servedà la Russe, that is with meats and vegetables placed at side tables and passed by servants, while only fruit, bon-bons and ornamental dishes appear upon the board. The latter fashion seems to be obtaining in America, and an intelligent diner-out remarked in my hearing the other day, that fifty years hence no meats at all would be carved at table. This Russian fashion is pretty and wholly luxurious, as it removes all possible demands for service or helpfulness from those seated at table, and devolves it all upon servants. The fashion requires more and better trained servants than most of us have at command.

The bane of modern entertainments is the enormous number of courses that style makes essential. Women with but one or two servants at the most feel called upon to give luncheon or dinner parties, and course follows course, many of them sent away scarce tasted, and the home silver and china not sufficing for the occasion, must be eked out by borrowing or by expeditious washings between the courses. The giving of such entertainments by persons of moderate means exhausts nerves as well as purse. Let us wisely give up aping rich people’s ways, and aim for simplicity in our table service.

Colored table ware is cheerier upon the table than white. Very pretty English or American sets can be obtained at low prices. The Canton china (willow pattern) comes in good shapes, is of good color and standard design, and single pieces can always be bought to replace what has been broken, but

“Porcelain by being pure is apt to break,”

Or at least to chip at the edges, and for every-day use pretty crockery is good enough unless a painstaking and cautious hand wields the dish-mop. The more covered with decoration (design and color being good) the prettier will be the effect of the ware when in use.

It is not at all necessary to have all the dishes upon the table of the same style and pattern. Harlequin sets can often be brought together so as to combine harmoniously, and pretty single pieces can be bought marvelously cheap. Amateur painted china is generally too costly for daily use, and when good should be treated with respect.

Plain silver is on the whole better for plain livers than that which is more elaborately ornamented, and absolutely plain solid silver forks and spoons can never be out of taste, and can easily be kept tidy with whiting. Electro-silicon and patent cleaners of that ilk injure silver and are ruinous to plated ware.

The beauty of silver and pottery depends first upon their form and adaptation to use; secondly, upon their decoration. Delicate chasings and thinrepousséwork are naturally as appropriate to silver as good shapes andflatdecoration are to earthen ware.

As to glass, there is a crystal craze at present, and “hob-nail” glass glitters on all tables. Miss Lucy Crane, in her lecture on “Form,” says (and I quote freely because her words are timely):

“As the beauty of glass consists in its transparency and lightness, and its capability of being twisted or blown or moulded into a multitude of delicate forms, it early occurred to the manufacturing mind that if made thick and solid, and cut into facets it would resemble crystal; and thus it has come to be a fixed idea that hard glitter is its most valuable quality, so it is made inches thick, and pounds heavy, to enhance its brilliancy; and being one of the most fragile of substances, it must be engraved with people’s crests and monograms as if it were intended to carry down the name of the family for generations to come! Being of its nature transparent, it must be rendered opaque of set intention by coloring matter, and then painted and gilded! Since at its strongest glass can never be anything but fragile, at least let it keep the beauty belonging to fragility; since it is naturally transparent, let the light be seen streaming through it, sometimes delicately tinted, sometimes iridescent, and, instead of being cut, let it be blown and twisted into the thousand delicate shapes to which it easily lends itself, and of which in the Venetian glass of a bygone day, and in its present revival, there are such delightful examples.”

I saw last evening a handful of flasks on their way to the laboratory, whose soap bubble effects were far more beautiful than all the cold glitter of all the “hob-nail” ware that Sandwich has ever produced.

In a boarding house it may economize labor to set the table over night, but it is pleasanter and more homelike to have it set fresh and clean with the morning light; beside, to have the dining table clear of an evening is often a great family convenience.

The dining room affords grand opportunity for the domestic artist. The bread board, bread and carving knife handles, salad fork and spoon, all offer employment to the carver’s tool, to say nothing of cabinet, sideboard and over-mantel. Tiles for tea pot rests and all sorts of china call for the decorator’s skillful brush, while tea cloths and coseys, doilies, mats, centerpieces and carving cloths all await the embroiderer’s needle.

Arise, my young readers, and take your tools in hand, for home work is the fairest adorning of the homelike house.

Mexico is a country reaching from the Gulf on its eastern coast to the Pacific Ocean, almost 2,000 miles, with a breadth varying from 140 to 750 miles. The whole territory of Montezuma, at the time of the Spanish conquest, was not less than 1,600,000 square miles, more than one half of which has been obtained by the United States by purchase, enforced treaties, or otherwise. The plains on the coast are low, marshy, and in the summer and autumn malarial diseases are very prevalent. Strangers can visit the place with safety only about four months in the year, when severe northern gales cool the heated atmosphere and dissipate the seeds of disease.

There are 6,000 miles of coast line, but, considering its extent, it does not furnish many good harbors.

The main body of the land is an elevated plateau, traversed by chains of mountains, some of which are of extraordinary height. The eastern Cordillera, or chain, that runs nearly north from the initial point has an elevation of 6,000 feet, the western nearly 10,000. Traversing the longitudinal range, there are several cross ranges containing some of the highest volcanoes on the continent. They are all quiescent now, and none of them have been active during the present century. There are not many lakes, and none that are very large. The basins of some, though of sufficient extent, are so arid, and evaporation is carried on so rapidly that the water in them has, at times, quite disappeared. Neither are the rivers of much importance as thoroughfares. The Rio Grande, forming the boundary between Mexico and Texas, is the longest (1,500 miles), but navigable only for a short distance. Those in the mountain region are impetuous torrents, larger near their source than afterward, as they lose more by absorption, in passing through arid portions of the table-lands, than they gain by drainage, except in the rainy season. After plowing deep furrows, and cutting out immense ravines among the foot hills of the mountains, some are partly exhausted, drawn into reservoirs and canals constructed for purposes of irrigation, and spread out into sluggish bayous, of no great depth, before they reach the sea. The lack of navigable streams has been seriously felt.

Climate, other things being equal, decides the flora of a country, and in this respect Mexico has many advantages. Were the country level from the Gulf to the ocean, it would have mostly a tropical climate, and produce only the vegetation of the tropics. But, rising in successive stages to a height of 19,720 feet, the temperature changes with the elevation, and a large portion enjoys the climate of the temperate zones. The low lying region near the coast, called the “hot country,” has a rich soil, a humid atmosphere, and abundant rains, that perpetually nourish a rank tropical vegetation. At an elevation of 3,000 feet we reach a delightful zone where the extremes of heat and cold are unknown, the temperature ranging from fifty to eighty-six degrees. Here the forms of vegetable life, mingling those of the lower and upper regions, have a charming variety. Crossing this wide belt, with its luxuriance in things of surpassing beauty and usefulness, and advancing gradually till the mountains begin to show their rugged forms, at an elevation of 8,000 feet a colder climate is reached, with a corresponding change in the vegetation that now ranges from the corn, barley, and other useful cereals and hardier fruits to the cryptogamia of the mountain top. Take it all through, from coast to mountain, it is quite safe to say Mexico has a flora not excelled by any other country of the same dimensions. And it has increased with the advance of civilization. Many plants, flowering shrubs, and fruit-bearing trees that were not indigenous, but successive contributions from the Old World, have a vigorous growth, and produce abundantly. Apples, pears, peaches, cherries, oranges and grapes, with a variety of choice East India fruits, are widely distributed through the country. In the coast region, and to an elevation of about 1,500 feet, they have cotton, cocoanuts, cocoa, cloves, vanilla, nutmegs, peppers, and other spices of commerce, beside the fruits ofnearly all tropical countries of the east and west. Higher up they have sugar, coffee, indigo, rice, tea, bananas, and an abundant supply of edible roots, such as yam, arrow-root, sweet potato, and all the fruits of America, Central Asia, and Barbary.

From a partial catalogue of the productions of the country there is evidence that its agricultural possibilities are very great. Nearly all fruits and grain, indeed, nearly all plants that grow, are either indigenous to the country or may find a congenial home within its limits. Some parts of the upland require irrigation to make them productive, and, if the dry season is prolonged, water must be stored in basins for the use of stock. The neglect of this, especially where the land has been long cleared, causes barrenness, and gives the country a desolate appearance.

The agriculture of the country has never been of a high order, though the Aztecs, at the time of the Spanish invasion, were an agricultural people, and about as well acquainted with the arts and processes of husbandry as most nations of the East were at that day. Having incorporated in their communities the shattered remains of the old Tolteck tribes they had acquired considerable civilization, and were not, as the invaders supposed, rude nomads, or even herdsmen, but cultivators of the soil, and fixed in the possession of their estates. Theirs was not a skillful husbandry, since necessity, mother of inventions, had not greatly improved either their methods or their instruments. They had no plows, harrows, or cultivators, but used hoes, knives, and sickles made of copper. In planting, the earth was loosened with a hoe or stick, and the seed, when dropped, covered with the foot.

The present state of agriculture, though much improved, is still very inferior, and the production, reported in the last census, $177,451,985, might, from the same areas, be greatly increased. Before the recent advent of railroads those far in the interior had no adequate means for exporting the excess of their products, and little inducement to raise more than they needed to consume.

Mexican forests furnish in abundance nearly, if not all, the useful timber trees of the north, and those valuable woods that grow only in the tropics. Some sixty varieties used for timber are mentioned, and twenty suitable for the finest style of interior finishing and furnishing.

The mines of Mexico have long been famous, and are not surpassed in richness by those of any other country in the world. Early in the fifteenth century the inhabitants had accumulated wealth from that source, and the glitter of their gold led the avaricious Spaniards to undertake the conquest of the country. Just how long the mines had been worked before the invaders came is not known. After a change of owners, and the improved methods they adopted, the product was greatly increased, and ever since, though subject to many interruptions on account of political disturbances, it has been larger than in any other country except the United States. The Spanish settlers at once engaged in working the mines of Tasco, Pachuca, Zacatecas, and Guanajuato. Cortes selected for himself and worked the gold mines of Techuantepec, and the silver mines of Zacatecas, that were found productive. The mine at Real del Monte, near the city of Mexico, has yielded largely, and enriched several successive owners. And the principal vein at Guanajuato, noted for its richness, is described as ten yards wide, and has been worked a distance of more than eight miles. In the early part of this century the annual product of these mines exceeded twenty-five million dollars, and they seem inexhaustible. The whole of the gold and silver taken from the mines of Mexico up to 1870 was estimated at $4,200,000,000. The seven principal mines of San Luis Potosi are said to be very productive, and the whole of Sinaloa abounds in silver mines. In Sonora there are one hundred and forty-four operated, chiefly producing gold, and a much larger number in which, though productive, work is suspended. Many large mining districts are simply located, and their development delayed, awaiting more ready means of access to them. That country alone, probably, could furnish the world a full supply of the precious metals for centuries, or until they become as plenty and cheap as they were in Jerusalem in the time of Solomon’s reign. Mexico has not only mines of gold and silver, but the country abounds in other minerals of no less importance. Iron, tin, copper, lead, mercury, cinnabar, and nearly all the known metals are more or less abundant. Coal is found in three or four districts, but to what extent, or of what quality we are not informed. The products of the coal fields, and their rich quarries, and of the oil belts, can be but little known till their facilities for transportation are improved.

The roads constructed as thoroughfares of travel and commerce will modify the industries of the country through which they pass. Mining and stock raising, already extensive, will be increased. Farming and farms, such as we have in the States, will be common, and, as the resources of the country become better known, many enterprising men will be attracted to the Mexican plateaux; society will improve, the reign of superstition will cease, and a free government for an intelligent Christian people, though for a time struggling against chronic tendencies to revolution, will become established, and strong as it is liberal.

Mexico encourages immigration, but, naturally enough, prefers those of the Latin race, as more like the native population. Still, having friendly relations with the United States, and greatly improved opportunities for intercourse, prejudices will be overcome, barriers that have hindered immigration taken down, and perfect liberty of conscience proclaimed through all the land, to all the inhabitants thereof.

BY ADA IDDINGS GALE.

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