se new-comers are all accounted for as the
produce of seeds brought by the German army. They will gradually die
out; and yet some few may remain as permanent conquerors of the soil,
since among the flora of Paris is still reckoned one plant whose seed
was brought into France by some Russian forage-train in 1815.

* * * * *

As the impudence, dishonesty, laziness and rapacity of servants at
watering-places have long been familiar subjects of satire, it is
just to say a word on the other side in favor of some extreme
Northern resorts. At the White Mountains, for example, the waiters and
waitresses are of a better class than is generally met. Some of the
young girls are farmers' daughters, who go to the hotels to see the
fashions and earn a little pocket-money. The colored cook at one of
the great houses teaches dancing during the winters. Not a few are
school-teachers, others students at country academies, who pass their
vacation in this way in order to earn enough to buy text-books or
pay the winter's tuition. Many of them are more intelligent and well
educated than some of the shoddies they wait upon. They are usually
quicker in movement and of more retentive memory than the average
American waiter; and though each has a great deal to do at times, yet
even during the tremendous moment of dinner they contrive to find a
few little intervals for harmless flirtations in the dining-room. They
are for the most part well-mannered too, and if they talk to you of
each other as "this lady" or "that gentleman," what is it more than
some waiters do with far less reason? The New Hampshire villages
become versed every summer in the latest imported fashions, thanks to
the quick eyes of the hotel waitresses.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Lars: A Pastoral of Norway. By Bayard Taylor. Boston: Osgood & Co.

Mr. Taylor's muse has of late become very still-faced, decorous and
mindful of the art-proprieties. Cautious is she, and there is perhaps
nothing in this pastoral that will cause the grammarian to wince, or
make the censorious rhetorician writhe in his judgment-seat with
the sense that she is committing herself. Not such were the early
attributes of the great itinerant's poetry. When he used to unsling
his minstrel harp in the wilds of California or on the sunrise
mountains of the Orient, there were plenty of false notes, plenty
of youthful vivacities that overbore the strings and were heard as a