pression in the lounge where he nightly licked himself from neck to tail-tip.

Before many moments I again burst forth in song. Instantly came the thump upon the floor, and once more George stood beside me, this time visibly excited. His body quivered, his eyes glared glassily, and he gasped as if trying to mew with a nightmare upon him. I was singing, I remember, The Clang of the Wooden Shoon, and I sang it as I believed it should be sung, not in the style of a clattering jig, but with a gentle, sentimental swing, and with a tender, suppressed passion, especially in the second part, where the movement changes, and the words grow regretful rather than reminiscent.

It was at this second part that I began to suspect what ailed George. I have always prided myself highly upon the middle register of my voice, particularly when employing the timbre sombre. Then "let the audience look to their eyes," for I would 66 move storms."

I had moved a storm indeed! George rose upon his hind feet, emitting a cry of anguish. Then he sprang upon a chair near by, and struck my hand with his paw. I continued to sing. He jumped on the keyboard and struck my mouth. I pushed him off to the floor, still continuing my singing.

It was getting to be a match between George Washington and me. Generally, in such a case, I feel exactly as did the Rollicking Mastodon towards the unappreciative Peetookle:

"I never will sing to a sensitive thing
That shatters a song with a sneer."

If George Washington had approached in a cold, calm, critical manner, the while twisting his tail delicately in lithe scorn, and had looked at me rebukingly, as much as to say,

"You need some harraway seed, And a little advice for your throat,"

I should have desisted, being quite unable to stand up against ridicule; but when he sought to bul- I should say, to intimidate me by violent and unlawful means, I felt an inclination to finish my song, even should the result be to burst the ear-drums of my auditor, and to destroy forever the equilibrium of his nervous system.

Moved, then, by a strictly human impulse, I stretched my throat to the utmost, and exaggerated the sombrousness of timbre to veritable inkiness, infusing into my wailing tones the most unheard-of amount of pathos. Truly, it was a part to tear a cat in, and the cat was forthwith torn.

This exceeding piercingness of vocal quality must have penetrated his vitals like a vulture's beak. But even now he would not proceed to extremities. He had already struck me, it is true, but successful appeal might yet be made to my better nature. So, to the clanging accompaniment of those wooden shoon, he mewed unearthly mewings, and pawed against me as if trampling down Satan.

I sang on. I marvel now at my own temerity, and, recalling what followed, I doubly value the sweet life that is left me. When, too, I reflect that George Washington first opened his eyes in the District of Columbia, under the shadow of the Senate Chamber (his mother was owned by the janitor of that department); moreover, that he ate animal food (cooked) but once a day, I can only admire the persistence of feral traits in him. Where he got his ear for music I do not pretend to conjecture, while as to his taste- But I must not forget how widely a cat's standard in these matters may differ from our own,— as widely, no doubt, as a Chinaman's; or the idea has just struck me - perhaps George Washington thought I was trying to ridicule his relatives. Could he, oh, could he have regarded my singing as a burlesque performance ?

Whatever the reason, the fact was patent his state of misery was fast passing into a state of fury. I kept on singing, with inconceivable foolhardiness dwelling upon those notes which held qualities the most exasperating to George. I wanted to see what he would do.

And this is what I saw. He bounced from the chair, and began walking back and forth across the room with quick, uneasy, elliptical movements. From his open mouth came snorts of rage, thick, short puffs, as if his throat were on fire, the tiger's grace before (raw) meat. Each turn brought him nearer to me, his body ever swinging closer to the floor. Now his legs appeared to have telescoped, and he slid about like a reptile.

I had reached the end of my song, and was prolonging the last note upon "shoon," making a round O of my lips, whence the sound issued in beating, brazen tones. It is n't every woman who can produce a tremolo below the staff. I was feeling very, very vain, meanwhile keeping an eye upon my audience. But my audience was already over the footlights. His whole body seemed to be in convulsions beneath its striped fur coat, the stripes themselves wavering horribly in long, uniform undulations, like serpents under drill.

Still I hung on to my "shoon." (By the way, life insurance companies will have nothing to do with me, for they say it is surely abnormal to be so long-winded.) George's gooseberry eyes had changed to fire-sapphires; he ululated like the whole first circle of the Inferno; his hinder parts were beginning to wriggle - slowly now — then quicker quicker!

We sprang simultaneously, feet, he to my arm.

I to my

I was thickly clad, it being winter time, but twenty-four claws (George had six toes on each foot), four tusks (I mean canines), four incisors, ten maxilla- Really, at this critical moment you cannot expect scientific accuracy of terms; I fear I have already spoiled the effect of a thrilling dénoûment. Let us say, then, that twenty-four claws and twenty-six teeth went through to my skin, thence penetrating the large, cushiony muscle upon the forearm. It was nip and tuck between us, but at length I shook him off, and well, for a parallel in anticlimax we shall have to go to the king of France and his four thousand men ; but in less time than it takes to write this George Washington was in his bath - tub again, scrubbing as if for dear life. All he asked was to be let alone. And I let him alone. That night I sang no more, and afterwards, whenever the song mania seized me, I saw to it that George was out of the way.

Had this thing happened in these days, I should probably have been dispatched straight to the Pasteur Institute. As it was, a witch-hazel pack soon restored my frayed flesh.

Whether any rabies remains in my system I know not. It were well to beware of me, for when I hear certain people sing I feel as George Washington must have

felt on that fateful night. But I do not bite nor scratch these people, and above all, I try never to behave as the Little Peetookle did. It is not well to have too sensitive a soul.

George Washington's sense of smell was not so discriminating as his ear for music. Once he mistook white paint for cream. It was a great disappointment to him, and one from which he never recovered.

The Evolution of a Familiar Quotation.

- The business of literature is to find truth; and nothing is so but a poet shall some time get hold of it. And what was old yesterday is lost to-day, and shall be set up for a startling novelty to-morrow. It was, we suppose, apparent to Adam that the worst element in his exile was the Paradise which had been. From him it is a far cry to Tennyson's

"That a sorrow's crown of sorrow

Is remembering happier things."

It is not uninteresting to make a partial list (for what reader extant knows the full roll-call?) of the lessees of this pathetic idea, a favorite one in the Latin literatures. Dante's Francesca utters it magnificently in her Nessun maggior dolore of the Fifth Canto:

"Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem,”

as we cannot but think, erroneously; for Eneas means only that to speak of old wounds opens them afresh. Seneca's "Nemo miser est, nisi comparatus" is a much closer prototype. Boethius thought it out, in his time, "that in any hard pass of fortune, the most bitter thing to the unfortunate one is to have been happy, and to be so no longer." Chaucer, in his Troilus and Cressida, makes a conscious copy of Boethius :

"For of fortune's sharp adversitie,

The worst kind of infortuné is this: A man that hath been in prosperitie, And it remember when it passed is." A couple of centuries later than Dante, his countryman, Marini, sings what we venture to translate as

"Suffering hath known not yet her fill of woes
Till she recall old bliss between the throes."

Beaumont and Fletcher and of Drummond. Difficult is the task of the aspiring soul of the twentieth century who would fain philosophize on the sadness of lost gladness. It may have been a comfort once to give an intelligent groan without feeling that you were doing it out of a book. But that privilege was sacred to Adam aforesaid. For the present, modern retrospective repiners, who are hard up, indeed, inasmuch as they can revert to better days, have nothing to do but to quote Tennyson. As poets will, he steals the plaint out of our mouths, and makes us forget that anybody ever "said his good things before him."

:

"For there's no torment gripes me half so bad As the remembrance of those joys I had." Drummond of Hawthornden has left us one sweet archaic line in a sonnet :

"Sith passed pleasures double but new woe."

dwelt upon. I refer, of course, in this last, to the system of not checking baggage.

What have the English to say in defense of their perversity? They usually find it enough to point out that they do manage to travel upon their system, and hence that there cannot be anything very bad about it.

"Of joys departed

Not to return, how painful the remembrance!" After which Lord Tennyson's music fills the air, and settles the shape in which a very ancient conviction shall forever be quoted. Observe how ornate, yet how obvious, is its last rendering. The order of development has not always been in the due chronological line; the actual data of our search are of small value; but in point of excellence and permanence it looks as if the laureate's verses may stand as representative of the other twelve. It is to be noted that he sets out to quote his passage, not to recast it; to praise Dante, not to bury him. Still, to English readers, he supersedes his master, and the haunting memory of his words must color all that shall be said upon the subject hereafter; must eventually drown out, even to a scholar,

to defend it. Thus, the Earl of Meath, writing of American travel in a recent number of the Nineteenth Century, says: "To a Briton who does not like to be separated from his baggage, and who has been accustomed to give sixpence or a shilling to a porter [in spite of the notices in all English stations that the porters are paid by the company, and are not to be feed], and drive off in a few minutes with all his worldly goods on the top of his cab, it is irritating to find that neither cabs nor omnibuses are fitted to carry baggage, and that he is obliged to leave his luggage behind him, and quietly wait in faith at his hotel from half an hour to even four hours (as once occurred to the writer) before receiving his possessions." But the Earl of Meath makes a curious oversight in this passage. We do not defend everything American, but merely the system of check

ing luggage; and, in particular, we are far from congratulating ourselves upon the absence of cabs in America. The beautiful, bright, shining, flying London cab is alone enough to make London the most delightful city in the world to live in. But these two forms of comfort stand upon a totally different plane. We can't get the cabs by whistling for them. Cabs are dependent upon good pavements, and good pavements are dependent upon good city government, and good city government we cannot have, it seems, until we have made ourselves completely over. But the system of issuing checks is merely a matter of turning over the hand. The railroad companies have merely to say, "Let there be checks!" and immediately checks would be there. And no doubt the railroad companies would do their part quickly enough, if there were the slightest movement on the part of the traveling public, through the columns of the all-moving Times, in favor of it; or even if the railroad companies were not well aware that the English people to a man love discomfort far better than they love change.

Really the most important consideration that has bearing upon the matter is the question of the safety of the luggage, and of the consequent peace of mind of the traveler, and not merely the ease of getting hold of your box after it has once been put out at the proper station. I must frankly confess that, as matter of fact, my own sufferings from the English plan were not unendurable, but I was never done wondering how it would work when trains were crowded. I was, therefore, particularly delighted when I came upon the following vivid description of the system when under strain, which is given by Mr. Knowles in his charming article on Lord Tennyson, in the Nineteenth Century for last January, as the only specimen of a familiar letter from the great poet :

"I got to the station a full quarter of an hour before the time, but the place was fourmillante. . . . I stood and bawled ineffectually for porters, till at last I took my portmanteau in hand, and flung it into the truck of one of them, and told him to label it 'Lymington,' which he promised to do; then I rushed to the ticket office, where I waited among the multitude, and only got my ticket after the time was up; ran out

again, the whole platform seething and buzzing; could not find my luggage; at the very last saw it being wheeled trainward at the bottom of a heap of boxes; asked whether it was labeled Lymington;' bewildered porter knew nothing about it; train began to move. I caught hold of an open door, and was pulled in by two passengers. When I came to Brockenhurst, no luggage for me; guard intimated that he had noticed such a portmanteau as the one I described [!] labeled 'Southampton Junction ;' accordingly I telegraphed up the line. . . . This morning I sent a cart from Farringford to meet the earliest boat, and recovered my luggage at last." This passage ought to become classical.

If an educated man, accustomed to traveling, is subjected to such cruel anxieties as are here described, what must be the state of mind of women, young people, rustics, foreigners, all those who are not accustomed to taking care of themselves, and all those who have not come to love the system because it is their own? We were not without experience of what happens in such cases. We were traveling third class, one day, when a working woman with three children got into our compartment. She was apparently going to make a journey of some length, and her husband was seeing her off; but all the exchanges of affection natural to the occasion were rendered impossible by concern for the accompanying "box." The woman was at a loss to know how she was ever going to recover it, and the husband, after various forms of reassurance, finally said, "Why, it is in the luggage van which Harry has charge of. You know Harry. He will have an eye on it, and see that it is put out at the right place." Surely, a system in which one has to rely upon a personal acquaintance with the luggage-guard (if that is what they call him), to secure peace of mind in traveling, is a system which some one ought to be sufficiently benevolent to endeavor to reform.

But the second subject in regard to which I wish to free my mind is a matter of graver import; for, after all, the first is largely a question of comfort. We had reserved England for the final part of our fifteen months' stay in Europe, and we had expected that there the charm which one looks for in the Old World would reach its greatest height. England, as I had known

it ten years before, had filled me with an acuter enjoyment than I had experienced in any other country of Europe. But the England of to-day is not the England of ten years ago. The England of to-day furnishes one impression which is deeper than any other, which penetrates and pervades and almost obliterates every other, and that is the impression of the ubiquitous advertisement. There is not a railway station in the whole country in which it is possible to make out the name of the station as the train draws in far and wide, high and low, every available inch of space is covered with the monotonous announcements that Venus soap saves rubbing, that Pears' soap is matchless for the complexion, and that a thousand other things are indispensable to the comfort or the happiness of the traveler. Especially is this the case in the stations of the Underground Railway in London. As there is no guard, and as the name of the station is absolutely undiscoverable amid the sea of advertisements, one's place of alighting becomes a pure matter of chance, unless one's fellowtravelers are polite enough to come to the

rescue.

London is an imposing city. Its streets contain vehicles of two sorts only, the hansom cab, which is always handsome and highly polished, and goes at a very rapid pace, and the omnibus. The omnibus is smaller than with us, less lumbering, more lively, and it would be a pleasing object if it were not that it is one moving mass of advertisements. Everybody who is not old or infirm sits on top, as long as there are places to be had; and to see the nicest-looking people walled in with announcements, in enormous letters in bright yellow and red and blue, of "Colman's Mustard," "Custard Powder, Saves Eggs," "Hudson's Soap,

Less Labor, Greater Comfort,” strikes the traveler who is not accustomed to it as so strange that he can hardly believe he is not in the clutches of a bad nightmare. But when it comes to Oxford, the High Street of which is lined with the most beautiful college buildings to be found in England, the street in which one has always been told the poetic charm of the Old World reaches its highest point, — when one sees this street invaded by an enormous horse car with its high top wall emblazoned with "Happy Thought, Use Sunlight Soap," and all the other familiar devices, then one's feelings become far too deep for words. Oliver Wendell Holmes has said that England has of late years been turned into the home of Colman's mustard. It is, in fact, quite impossible to estimate the loss to the traveling American occasioned by seeing the loveliest country on the globe desecrated through and through by this absorbing passion for advertising. In one respect, we hasten to admit, a lower depth has been reached in America; thanks, it may be, to a more jealous property in land in England, the landscape itself is not so basely treated as with us; but, after all, mammoth advertisement in fields which are anyway without beauty is a far different thing from the absolute destruction of a species of loveliness which has no rival in the world. is a feature of English scenery which travelers have seldom dwelt upon, and hence the surprise and shock with which one discovers it are so much the more painful. If it is an element of the so-called Americanization of England, it shows, I fear, that England is destined to out-America America in sacrificing every atom of the charm which once made life worth living to the conscienceless struggles of modern competition.

This