EVERY MAN HIS OWN NEWSPAPER.

THERE lives in a prominent Hudson River town a young man of considerable energy and some wit whose chief ambition it is to be original, and to attain to this, as he tersely puts it, the only true way is in the line of minding his own business. One of the results of his system has been that he writes his own newspaper, since the newspapers as published contain only information as to the business of other people. Probably the most interesting column in this personal journal-which he calls the Yellowplush Gazette-is that which is devoted to society notes, among which, in the August issue, are found these:

The dashing Mrs. Porco-Sayre, of Chicago, who lately married Peter H. Sayre of the same city, is summering at Harrowgansett. She is reported engaged to Harry Beemington, of Providence, the wedding to take place as soon as her present husband will consent to a divorce.

Owing to the unexpected illness of Mrs. Pottle ton Potts at Newport, her bathing suits that have aroused so much curiosity will be exhibited at the Casino for one week-admission, twenty-five cents -the proceeds to be devoted to a Fresh-Air Fund in which Mrs. Pottleton Potts is interested, the object of which is, I am told, to send the little Pottleton Potts off to a farm during the heated term.

Henderson Hicks Harlow, the famous young poet who had a quatrain in the Bumbleton Gazette two years ago, is summering at the Pike House, in New

burytown, Connecticut. He is interesting himself in a projected Author's Reading for the benefit of the Newburytown library, at which, it is expected, Mr. Harlow will read his quatrain.

The eccentric banker Theodore B. Spendelton, has hit upon a novel way of spending the summer, having engaged for himself and family a suite of ten state-rooms on the Albany night boat for the whole month of August. The experiment will be watched with considerable interest, particularly by the transient passengers.

Thomas Peterby Parkins, the well-known poet, spent Sunday at the Mawkish House, Spattsville, New York. Mr. Parkins will be remembered as the author of that extraordinary volume of verse, Huckleberries from Helicon, which ran through three-eighths of an edition last winter.

The town band of Hicks Centre, the popular Pennsylvania watering place, gave a concert at the Hawkins House last Saturday. Yankee Doodle was rendered with great effect as a trombone solo, and Jerry Stimpson, the favorite base-drummer of the village, superbly played a solo arrangement of Tara-ra-boom-de-ay," made for him by his fiancée, Miss Maude Perkins, of St. Smithers P. E. Church choir.

A HARD POSITION.

"It's awful to be foot of the class," said Master Tommy, after school was over. "I knew my lesson splendid this mornin', but by the time the teacher got down to me I'd forgotten it all."

TOO QUICK.

SAM WHEELER was an uncouth rustic who, had his chances of education and observation been more complete, might have been launched upon the world as a second Munchausen. His favorite had to do with a sea-serpent, and ran something like this:

"When I wuz comin' over the ocean," he said, "we wuz all woke up one mornin' by the ship a-rollin' 'round considerable. Goin' on deck, we saw a sea-serpent crawlin' over it, an', gentlemen, it wuz such a big serpent that it took two days to git across that deck!" "Why didn't you kill it, Sam?"

"It went over so quick we couldn't," said Sam.

CLIFFORD TREMBLY.

NOT AVAILABLE AS AN INTERPRETER. THE late General Donaldson, a veteran of the Seminole war, the Mexican war, and the rebellion, used to relate the following anecdote of General Zachary Taylor. During hostilities with Mexico, General Taylor was, upon

a certain occasion, present at an advanced outpost. While there a Texan scout in the employ of our government, speaking Spanish only, evidently the bearer of very important tidings, rode headlong into the outpost, and leaping to the ground, rushed up to the General, whose uniform showed him to be an officer of high rank, and began in the most excited manner to pour forth a torrent of Spanish. The General, whose linguistic attainments ended with a knowledge of his mother-tongue, was completely taken aback, and so plainly did his face express his feelings that a sentry on duty near by burst into laughter. Noticing this, with a frown the General called to the sentry:

"Fellow, come here!" Trembling for the consequences probably attendant upon his want of respect the soldier obeyed. "Fellow," asked the General, "do you know any one around here who speaks Spanish?"

"Yes," replied the abashed soldier, designating the Texan; "that man does."

C. B. MOORE.

IT

T is rather a curious fact, overlooked, however, by Professor Lounsbury, that the Canterbury Pilgrimage was the precursor, and, perhaps, the earliest example of the familiar Personally Conducted Tour of the present day. The party of twenty-nine travellers met, by appointment, at the Talbot Inn, opposite St. Margaret's Hill in the borough of Southwark; the host of that caravansary acted as guide or "governor," and contracted, for a certain price, "to set a supper" for them; and so they went on their way; and eighteen of them, at least, kept diaries, or wrote to their local newspapers, tales which still are read, and discussed, and admired by the members of Chaucerian Societies in Edinburgh and Boston, at the end of five hundred years. How many of these pilgrims carried kodaks, or camerettes, or sketch-books, history, unfortunately, does not say. It is not often that two guides, or governors, of any tour, even in this age of enlightenment in that respect, can be found so thoroughly equipped and so universally well-conducted, personally, as are the three gentlemen who have recently sailed down The Danube, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea,' in three well-thumped canoes. Mr. F. D. Millet acts as scribe; this same Mr. Millet and Mr. Alfred Parsons are the limners of the pilgrimage; and author and artists are in thorough sympathy with their subject and with each other. Those readers who have followed Mr. Parsons from the source of the Warwickshire Avon to its mouth, and who have climbed the steep hill in the Quartier Montmartre, Paris, or have descended the precipitous cliffs of the Island of Capri with Mr. Millet, will cheerfully join their company in this joint excursion of theirs, and will find as much pleasure in the Danube as they have, in other seasons, found in Shakspere's land, or in sailing along the shores of the Mediterranean. There is something very fascinating, and even very soothing, in these pictures of the country and of its inhabitants, by pen and pencil, which greet us on almost every page of this study of the beautiful blue river. The bank-side towns, as Mr. Millet with his pen, and Mr. Parsons with his pencil, show them to us, are clean, quaint, and venerable in their massive remnants of feudal castles, and in their humble 1 The Danube, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. By F. D. MILLET. Illustrated by the Author and ALFRED PARSONS. Crown 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $2 50. New York: Harper and Brothers.

cottages with steep-tiled roofs and heavy timbered walls; while the natives themselves, drawn by Mr. Millet with pencil as well as with pen, are quite as clean and quite as quaint, and sometimes quite as venerablemen and women, with their universal kindliness and honest good-nature, being in complete harmony with every inanimate thing about them. These water-side hamlets, and these village Hampdens are not, as a rule, to be found in guide-book, atlas, or biographical dictionary; but their better acquaintance is here recommended to all persons who love nature, who are given to the study of their fellow-men, and who seek rest and absolute change of thought and scene. To those pilgrims who participate, on paper, in this harmonious paddle with Mr. Millet and Mr. Parsous, or who will follow them, next summer, in their own canoes, two sacred spots, the one lofty, the other lowly, will prove of particular interest, not only on account of their beauty, but on account of the musical and romantic associations which cling to them. The first, in point of age, if nothing else, is what is left of the famous castle of Dürrenstein, in which, according to tradition, Richard the Lion-hearted once languished, and to which the faithful minstrel went to sing him back to throne and freedom. The second is the modest Tuttlingen, which has but recently found itself glorious because within its narrow precincts was born, did live, and lies buried, the author of that once-familiar song which stirred the whole German Fatherland to enthusiasm, and which stirred no small portion of the American adopted land to frenzy-"The Watch on the Rhine"; a watch which set the time for the Old World, and was rarely in time in the New.

"THERE is a very remarkable bit of this continent just north of our State of North Dakota, in what the Canadians call Assiniboia, one of the Northwest Provinces. Here the plains reach away in an almost level, unbroken, brown ocean of grass. Here are some wonderful and some very peculiar phases of immigration and of human endeavor." Thus writes Mr. Julian Ralph. To these vast prairies, where every year settlers go mad from loneliness, and where polished Europeans till the soil and read the current literature of two continents in perfect content, went Mr. Ralph upon a voyage of discovery not many months

ago. He spent some time On Canada's Frontier," and he spent his time well. His vivid pictures of human endeavor, and of the curious phases of immigration which came under his notice are worthy of the frame in which his publishers have set them; and they are a valuable addition to any collection of landscapes and portraiture of the Wild West.

He made his journey from Sprat's Landing to the Kootenay River upon one of a sorry quartet of beasts of burden which were employed usually in carrying material and supplies to the construction camps in the neighborhood. He describes them as "the kind of horses known all over the West as 'coyoses,' because of the humorous fancy begotten of the wilderness, and suggesting that they are only part horses and part coyotes." It is to be regretted that the characteristic humorous fancy of Mr. Ralph himself, has not invented some corresponding hybrid term suggestive of the human inhabitants of the country Mr. Ralph is depicting, and of the houses in which they exist. The people-excepting of course the gentlemen's sons from England and cultivated persons from our own East-seem to be a cross between the semi-barbarous whites of the Middle Ages and the semi-civilized Indians of our own day, a combination of prairiepigeon and prairie-hawk; and the hotel at Sprout's Landing, a town two months old at that particular period, was a pure specimen of a style of American architecture not to be found in Mr. Montgomery Schuyler's otherwise exhaustive treatise upon that subject. In a general way, says Mr. Ralph, its design was an adaptation of the plan of a hen-coop. It was two stories high, and it contained about a dozen rooms, the main apartment being, of course, devoted to the all-important bar. After the frame-work had been finished there was left only about half enough "slab-lumber" to sheathe the outside of the building, and these slabs were made to serve for exterior and interior walls, and for ceilings and floors as well. "The consequence was that a flock of gigantic prairie fowl might have been caged in it with propriety, but as a place of abode for human beings," according to Mr. Ralph," it compared closely with the Brooklyn Bridge!"

Mr. Ralph is a voyager of keen observation and of ready utterance. He has travelled widely and wisely, and to the literary temperament he unites that which is known as the journalistic instinct. He sees at a glance what is worthy of note, and he knows how to note it in a way which is at once picturesque, comprehensive, and entertaining. The result, in this case, is a panorama of the Canadian Frontier as it now exists, which is of no little importance from the historic as well as from the romantic point of view. The book is

2 On Canada's Frontier. Sketches of History, Sport, and Adventure: and of the Indians, Missionaries, Fur Traders, and Newer Settlers of Western Canada. By JULIAN RALPH. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 50. New York: Harper and Brothers.

admirably illustrated by Mr. Remington and others.

IN "White Lies," one of the most entertaining and amusing of the novels of Charles Reade, is a woodman named Dard. He is attached to the château and to the family de Beaurepaire in Brittany, both of them of prodigious antiquity and of equally prodigious poverty. While engaged in chopping an ancient tree he chops off one of his own toes, thereby bringing the young lovers together, and playing, in an indirect way no small part in working out the plot of the story. Dard loves and is loved by Jacinth, as confidential maid of the Beaurepaires, and he has an uneasy time of it until he goes to the wars with Colonel Jean Reynaud, and comes back a hero with one heel and a pension. He marries Jacintha in the end, becomes proprietor-with Jacintha-of the village auberge, and he is henpecked to an outrageous extent during the rest of his natural and deservedly happy life.

All this has nothing whatever to do with the history of the crippled Jean Renaud, The Woodman of M. de Beaurepaire, except in the curious coincidence of names, profession, and halting step. The first is a bright and cheerful story; the second serious and sombre. There is always music in the air which blows upon the characters in Reade's work; but "Singing is not in fashion among the foresters," says the author of "The Woodman"; none but the birds ever raise their voices in this solemn silence, and it is remarkable that even their song is sad." He compares the forest with the sea in its grandeur, its infinitude, its rolling waves, its deep murmurs, and its wild tempests; and he shows how the forest lords it over man, both in its calm and its wrath, and how man in this imposing wilderness is driven to silence and to contemplation. The foresters of M. de Beaurepaire live as their ancestors lived, not only in poverty but in contempt of comfort. Their theory is that the forest ought to provide all they want— theft is considered lawful; the feeling of mine and thine does not exist; they do not steal, they take. Reade's aristocrats, whose ancestors lived in comfort, live themselves in poverty which they hold in utter contempt; they are anything but silent and contemplative, they are strictly honest, except in their speech, but even the fibs they tell are justifiable, and all their Lies are White

To meet Colonel Knox's Boy Travellers in Central Europe will surprise no one. Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round in the far East, in South America, in the Russian Empire, on the Congo, in Australasia, in Mexico, in Great

The Woodman. By JULES DE GLOUVET (M. QUES NAY DE BEAUREPAIRE, Procureur-Général of France). Translated from the French by Mrs. JOHN SIMPSON. With Portrait. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 00. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Britain and Ireland, or in northern Europe, where'er his stages, or his railways, or his steamboats may have been, has some time and at some point found a warm welcome from Doctor and Fred Bronson, from Mrs. Bassett and Mary and Frank. We left the party, only a few months ago, at the North Cape; we stumble upon them this month on the deck of a packet crossing the English Channel from Southampton to Havre. From the fact that Fred, then, was beginning to quote poetry, we were led to infer that the Boys were growing up, an inference more firmly established now that we overhear Frank, at Trouville, explaining to his family the system of betting money at the horse-races in that wicked little town. Mrs. Bassett, in her innocence, fancied that the Pools in which the occupants of the grand stand were so much interested were either some large bodies of navigable water, upon which boating contests took place, or some peculiarly efficacious springs in which the betters bathed or quenched their thirst. Mary, who knew a little more about the subject, realized that to "go to the Pools" was not French for the familiar "take a tub" of the Englishman, but she fancied that they were called "Paris Mutual Pools" because they were invented, like other fashionable wickednesses, in Paris. Frank's interpretation of the mystery, as showing the extent of his general knowledge and the variety of his research, and as containing a mine of information useful to all classes of travellers, is given here in full. "The name is, in a certain sense, misleading," he remarks. "It is true that the system was imported into America from Paris, but the real name of it is paris-mutuels (mutual bets). The French word pari means a bet or wager, mutuel and mutual having the same meaning in the languages to which they respectively belong."

We made Mrs. Trollope's personal acquaintance a year or two ago through her husband's autobiography. First, as Miss Frances Eleanor Ternan, a musical student in Florence, and an intimate friend of Mr. Thomas Adolphus Trollope and his first wife. Second, as a governess to Mr. Trollope's daughter at Ricorboli, where the association was "eminently successful." And, finally, as the second Mrs. Trollope. "My brother," wrote Trollope in "What I Remember"-"my brother, who had assisted in the negotiation which brought Miss Ternan to Florence, when I told him of my engagement, said, 'Yes, of course, I knew you would.' And I did." The elder Trollope more than once confesses that he never had cause to regret that he did! Mrs. Trollope's name appears upon the title-pages of a number of clever novels, the scenes of which are laid in Italy and in

The Boy Travellers in Central Europe. Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through France, Switzerland, and Austria, with Excursions among the Alps of Switzerland and the Tyrol. By THOMAS W. KNOX. Illustrated. Square 8vo. Cloth, Ornamental, $3 00. New York: Harper and Brothers.

England, and her "Homes and Haunts of the Italian Ports," written jointly with her husband, shows her thorough knowledge of her adopted country, its literature, its scenery, and its life and emotions.

In her latest tale, That Wild Wheel, Mrs. Trollope devotes herself chiefly to the land of her nativity; and, with the exception of an occasional revolution towards Vevay, in Switzerland, she trundles her characters along the Grays Inn Road and its immediate neighborhood. Her title she finds in "The Idylls of the King."

"Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown; With that Wild Wheel we go not up or down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great." And on this hint she speaks. Her men and women know as little of Dante as they know of Urbino; but they are human and agreeable; their hearts are as great as their commonplace bodies will hold; their hoard is worth accumulating and worth preserving; and if the Wheel upon which they turn is not so very Wild after all, they go up enough and down enough to hold the public interest in their ascents and descents.

Aunt Anne is the central, but not the most lovable, figure in the story which bears her name. She is a very interesting individual to read about, but she must have been a most irritating creature to live with. After a very careful study of her character, as it is drawn by Mrs. W. K. Clifford, the present reviewer has not been able to make up his mind whether she was all rogue or all fool, or a curious combination of each. She was too wise-in spots--to have been altogether a villain, and she was too wicked-in places-to have been altogether an ass. She gave her nephew and her niece a great deal of trouble, and she did not always have a good time herself. She was a Harold Skimpole in petticoats; plausible, light - hearted, selfish, and very dangerous. She had more than one good Mr. Jarndyce upon whom she systematically imposed. She made at least one charming household very Bleak by her goings-on; and if she is based upon any particular feminine Leigh Hunt of the present day, and of her author's acquaintance, that feminine Leigh Hunt has every reason to complain of the vividness and correctness of the photograph. If she does not exist in real life she is very probable, and not at all impossible.

From the time of our first meeting with Aunt Anne-"a slight, shabby old lady of sixty, or thereabouts, with little lines all over her face which crossed and re-crossed and branched off in every direction "-until we bid her

5 That Wild Wheel. A Novel. By FRANCIS ELEANOR TROLLOPE. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $150. New York: Harper and Brothers.

6 Aunt Anne. A Novel. By Mrs. W. K. CLIFFORD, Author of "Love Letters of a Worldly Woman," etc. Post 8vo. Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25. New York: Harper and Brothers.