tone that would not
jar upon our slumbers. Do their worst, however, they cannot take from us
the delicious consciousness that it will be two years before another
Presidential campaign. Panoplied in that reflection, we can stand a good
deal.

We sometimes think it must have been a vast relief to the Poles when
partition came and the three powers for good and all put an end to their
perpetually recurring agony of electing a king. To the masses of the
people, who were serfs, and had no more the right of suffrage or any
other attribute of liberty than their cattle, we have no doubt it was
so. Only by the small minority of privileged and fussy nobles, who went
armed to the hall of election, ready to silence effectually any
troublesome minority-man who should undertake to defeat their choice
with his veto, could the loss of the wonted excitement have been
seriously felt. That it was a relief to the neighboring nations, whose
peace was constantly compromised by the recurrence of Poland's stormy
call for a new king, is certain enough. The change threw a few very
worthy men out of business--the Kosciuskos, Pulaskis, Czartoriskis,
etc.--but it did away with a much larger number who were standing
nuisances, and it left the surplus energy of many more to seek more
legitimate and profitable paths. Of course the fate of the Poles,
prosperous though their country is beyond anything dreamed of in the
days of its nominal independence, is not enviable to us. It were to be
wished that they had been cured of the regular--or irregular--spasms of
selecting a chief without losing their national autonomy. What we remark
is, that the strain of that convulsion was greater than they or their
neighbors could bear, and that all concerned, with the trifling
exceptions named, must have breathed freer and deeper when it was put an
end to.

E.C.B.

CONJUGAL DISCORDS.

The weaknesses and follies of woman are a theme on which men, from the
sage to the clown, have at all times been eloquent. Her natural coquetry
in dress, her maternal vanity, her devotion to the little elegancies of
the home, to clean windows and fresh curtains, are inexhaustible sources
of masculine merriment or abuse. What housekeeper ever complained of an
aching back or of nervous irritation without being scolded by her "lord"
for some extra work she had done in beautifying the home? Men never seem
to learn that women, as a rule, cannot find life endurable in the
atmosphere o