758 care for the sick and dying, and provide for the families of disabled or deceased members. Upon high days and holidays these societies love to parade with all the pomp and circumstance of wide scarfs, flaunting banners, and gorgeous bands. A band may be composed of one or two wind instruments (difficult to identify), a drum, triangle, concertina, and tambourine, and afford more solid satisfaction to its patrons than the performance would seem to warrant. The societies divide with the churches the duty of satisfying the organizing instinct. Three denominations, Episcopal, Baptist, and Methodist, share a somewhat imperfect sway over the consciences and lives of the people. The race-love for show leads many of the stranger within their gates. Their costumes are wildly grotesque, home-made affairs, that enhance the drollery of the dances, grimaces, and antics of the performers. who are generically known as "Johnny Before and behind these masquers, Canoe," come troops of children, half afraid and wholly delighted with the performance. Fire-crackers play an important part in the Christmas observus. Indeed, "any noise, good or bad," ance, just as on the Fourth of July with is acceptable. dings and their festal opposite, funerals, As in all small communities, wedmake large demands upon popular interest. A wedding affords opportunities that the more sombre funeral does The Light at Mathewtown, Bahama Islands. colored people into the fold of the Established Church, where they are satisfied with ritualistic observance, while others find in the freer chapels of Methodist and Baptist persuasion that peculiar bliss that emotional natures enjoy when exchanging the experiences of a common faith. A chapel is a sort of safety-valve for the pent up emotions of men who elsewhere appear singularly quiet and repressed. However, on one day in the year at least, an exception is made to the general rule of orderliness and decorum. After the church services on Christmas Day, the towns are given over to the merrymakers, who go in companies through the streets, masked and hideously apparelled. They play every conceivable prank upon their brethren and incessantly demand money from their more exalted townsmen or from the not; yet I think that the general enjoyment of the latter is more keen. meet solemnly at some neighbor's house in the unaccustomed garb of holy days; To to talk in whispers of the departed brother or sister, with sundry digressions on every known topic under the tropic sun; the people are assembling and the to wait through the hour during which mournful preliminaries arranged, while a melancholy satisfaction. the hush grows more profound, afford ing-bird that sings lustily from his perch in yonder cotton-tree, or the wood-dove The mockthat calls from the tamarind in the next yard, are the only living creatures that do not seem to feel the presence of the mysterious visitor. The guests at length take their places in the procession that forms at the gate and walks to the quiet graveyard, preceded by the bearers and the dead. It is a rite to satisfy the negro's easily moved soul. How slow and eminently decorous is that assemblage. The afternoon sun makes long shadows for each mourner, for five o'clock is the usual time for funerals. The white sand of the streets, walled by the white calcareous rock fences, crowned with palm and cork, anaconda bush and jessamine, glitters beneath the hundred dusky feet that impress it. Yonder, after you have passed those few houses, innocent of windows, and roofed with thatch-palm, you are suddenly face to face with a high wall, behind which a few trees look over in a melancholy fashion. The gates are open, and the funeral procession follows that way after the bearers, who have already entered. A few mounds, fewer still having head-stones, lie in the shade of the cedars, or are sprinkled with the white falling oleander blossoms. And here, after a life scarcely less unobtrusive and quiet, we leave the islander to continue his repose. AT LES ÉBOULEMENTS. By Duncan Campbell Scott. THE bay is set with ashy sails, With purple shades that fade and flee, And curling by in silver wales The tide is straining from the sea. The grassy points are slowly drowned, The crows are feeding in the foam, "Come home," they cry, "come home, come home! And leave the marshes to the sea.' H THE AGE OF WORDS. By E. J. Phelps. ISTORY has given names to many ages in the life of the world; ours is the age of words those cheap and easy substitutes for thought: invented, the witty Frenchman said, to might better have said, to conceal the conceal thought; he want of it. Never since the creation has there come upon the earth such a deluge of talk as the latter half of the nineteenth century has heard. The orator is everywhere, and has all subjects for his own. The writer stayeth not his hand by day or by night. Every successive day brings forth in the English tongue more discourse than all the great speakers of the past have left behind them, and more printed matter, such as it is, than the contents of an ordinary library. Human utterance has become so constant, so multiplied, diffused, reported, and repeated, so typed, stereotyped, telegraphed, published, and circulated: all conceivable subjects are so discussed, considered, amplified, and reconsidered, in speeches, books, pamphlets, magazines, reviews, and millions of newspapers, that there is no escape anywhere from the ceaseless flow. Whatever is, is attacked; whatever has been, is denied; whatever is to be, is loudly predicted; whatever ought to be, is set forth by a thousand voices, each variant from all the rest. Ready-made opinions on all topics are abundant and cheap, and in ample variety. longer an excuse for any man to be igThere is no norant of anything, and whatever he ventures to believe or disbelieve, he equally sins against light. Invention is exhausted in multiplying the means of transmitting knowledge. We are stupefied by the diffusion of intelligence, and lose our eyesight under the excessive glare of light. While the simple-minded wayfarer, at a loss to know what he avoid, is bewildered and confounded by should attend to and what he should the very abundance of the argument that does not convince him, the literature he is unable to enjoy, the learning that profiteth him nothing, and the philosophy that conducts to no end. positiveness does not diminish, nor its modesty increase. We no longer sugWith the quantity of utterance its gest, we assert: we do not question, we denounce: we imitate, in all marketplaces, the adjuration of the Mohammedan fig-seller, and cry the louder as our wares grow stale: "In the name of Allah and his Holy Prophet "-Words! Words! How long the supply of material for so much deliverance may be expected to hold out, how long even the east wind of which so large a share of it is composed will continue to blow, is a question that cannot be answered. We certainly seem to be approaching the time when hardly anything will be left to be said on any subject that has not been said before-perhaps many times over; when all known topics will begin to be exhausted; when the numberless discussions that never come to an end will have quite lost their interest, teners and readers-few in comparison and the patient and overburdened lis with the speakers and the writers-will be ready to exclaim, "to the making of many books there is no end;" yet "there is nothing new under the sun," in the language of men. It is reported that when a Chinese official was once a prisoner of war on a British ship, the offer was made by his captors to send on shore for any books he might desire, to lighten the hours of his captivity. The offer was declined by the Mandarin, who gravely remarked that he had already read all the books in the world that were worth reading. May not the time be somewhere in the future when we shall, in like manner, refuse to listen any longer to the voice of the teacher, in the belief that we have already heard and read everything that is worth saying? The resources of the English language have been found to require expansion in order to afford a vehicle for all this discourse. There were not words enough in the "pure English undefiled" to meet the demand; because, as thought grows hazy, language needs to multiply. Words of clear and definite meaning do not answer the purpose, where ideas are uncertain and obscure. A writer who is not quite sure what he is trying to mean, needs a verbiage adapted to his state of mind. So a vast increase of words has taken place, with many of which dictionaries struggle in vain, to the sad detriment of our vernacular, and the much increased confusion of current ideas. In the compilation of the Oxford Dictionary, which undertakes to give an account of every word in the language, it is stated in the Edinburgh Review that thirty years' labor has produced one volume of 1,240 closely printed quarto pages in triple columns, only containing words beginning with the letters A and B, and that these number 31,254, including those of doubtful meaning, and of no meaning at all. At what remote period is it reasonable to expect that this work will be completed? And when finished, what, at the same rate of increase, will be the supplement to be added, of new words coined in the meantime ? But seriously, and in the most sober prose, consider for a moment how enormous, beyond human power of calcula tion, is the product of the printing-press at the present day, and how rapidly it is every year increasing, in all its forms and departments. Regard, in the first place, what is only a small part of it, the number of books that have been published in our tongue in the last forty years. Statistics of their quantity, if it were possible to compile them, would be startling. They cover, in an endless flow and repetition of words, every topic that is within the compass of human apprehension, in all views, right and wrong, that can be taken of it. That among this vast mass are to be found a considerable number of good books, additions in one way or another to the sum of useful knowledge, or to the means of rational mental enjoyment, is not to be questioned. But how large is this number? What proportion does it bear to the whole? By how much of the remainder is the world or any part of it the wiser, the better, or the happier? How considerable a share of it is even positively mischievous in its effect upon the popular mind, in the false taste, erroneous ideas, and unworthy prejudices it generates. And how certainly does the lapse of twenty or even ten years consign the great bulk of it to oblivion. The past literature of our language is splendid and unsurpassed. The race that produced it has now swelled in this country alone to nearly sixty-five millions. We boast loudly of our largely increased machinery for education, our monstrous and numerous libraries, our extraordinary spread of intelligence, our immense advances in learning and knowledge, our wide range and extension of thought; we lay the whole world under contribution, and print a thousand volumes where those who gave us our permanent literature printed oneand yet, in the whole of it, what and how many real additions have we made to that literature? Who and how many are the living writers who have contributed anything to it that will live in after-time, or whose names will be likely to be remembered when they have been fifty years dead? Where are our poets, our dramatists, our historians, our essayists, our philosophers, our really capable critics? These are questions that everyone can answer for himself. It is the object of the present suggestions to ask them, not to answer them, nor to challenge the claim to distinction that any person may think belongs to him. There can be no juster commentary upon current literature than results from taking a lantern and honestly searching for its great men, among the multitude of its disciples. A few will doubtless be found-some of them beyond the iron gate of threescore years and ten. But how few and far between in such a countless army of authors, let each observer judge for himself. Popular literature nowadays consists in large part of fiction, of which the authors are more prolific than the Australian rabbit. Now, that fiction may be, to a certain limited extent, one of the most charming as well as wholesome forms of literary production, will not at this day be questioned. Poetry may be expressed in prose as well as in verse. And how deftly in either form the golden thread of romance can be wrought by enchanted hands into the web of human life, some names attest that always will be household words wherever the English tongue is spoken. But the everlasting repetition, through countless thousands of volumes, of the story of the imaginary courtship and marriage of fictitious and impossible young men and women; and when all conceivable incidents that could attend this happy narrative are used up, and the exhausted imagination of the narrator refuses any further supply, then in their place an endless flow of commonplace and vapid conversation, tending to the same matrimonial result, until it is clear that the parties, if they were real, would talk themselves to death-this is the staple of what is now well called fiction, because it never could exist in fact. What a food for an immortal mind to live on, year in and year out, as its principal literary nourishment! And what sort of mental fibre is it likely to produce? Is it from such nutriment that are to be expected the robust and vigorous masculinity that should belong to the American man, or the finer but equally healthy and sound qualities that should distinguish the American woman? The taste for this kind of food is the morbid appetite produced by long nourishment upon pastry and slops. A healthy stomach would reject it. But though such a craving widely exists, and grows by what it feeds on, very much of the circulation of this kind of literature is due to the ingenious exertions of the publisher. Each successive production is "pushed" and "noticed" so as to be brought for its brief moment into the public attention. For a few days or weeks it is made to be more or less talked about and written about, before it is supplanted by a new and similar work of genius. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, read the book because it is talked about, and they are ashamed to say they are not acquainted with it. Not to have read the "Washerwoman of the Pyrenees," or "The Jack of Trumps," or "Peter's Wife's Sister," while they happen to be in vogue, would indicate a want of literary culture. So the reader who has no time to make acquaintance, and never does make acquaintance, with the really choice literature of his language, who only knows by name the great authors he has never read, toils in vain to keep up with the contents of his circulating library, which offers him a fresh bill of fare every month; quite unmindful that each one of these butterfly celebrities, after its nine days of popularity, disappears and is heard of no more, altogether eclipsed by the equally ephemeral glitter of its successor. a very characteristic anecdote that is told of a young ladies' seminary in England, whose pupils, being asked who is the greatest writer in the English language, unanimously named Shakespeare; being next inquired of who was their favorite author, replied, by a large majority, "Edna Lyall.” It is It is undeniable that, outside of a certain limited class of scholarly and thoughtful people, the great majority of all who read anything except the newspapers, read books of this description. The statistics of popular and circulating libraries show that seventy-five per cent. of all the books taken out are novels of recent production. A library for the general public that did not furnish them could not be sustained, whatever real treasures of knowledge and literature it might offer. Probably the most numer |