rally clever and amusing--"so very droll, don't you know." He
recites things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and mimics public
characters. He is a type of a class, and I take him to be one of the
elementary forms of animal life, like the acalephae. His presence is
capable of adding a gloom to an undertaker's establishment. The last
time I fell in with him was on a coaching trip through Devon, and in
spite of what I have said I must confess to receiving an instant of
entertainment at his hands. He was delivering a little dissertation on
"the English and American languages." As there were two Americans on
the back seat--it seems we term ourselves "Amurricans"--his choice
of subject was full of tact. It was exhilarating to get a lesson in
pronunciation from a gentleman who said _boult_ for bolt, called St.
John _Sin' Jun_, and did not know how to pronounce the beautiful name of
his own college at Oxford. Fancy a perfectly sober man saying _Maudlin_
for Magdalen! Perhaps the purest English spoken is that of the English
folk who have resided abroad ever since the Elizabethan period, or
thereabouts.

EVERY one has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it.
The fool and his bookplate are soon parted. To distribute one's _ex
libris_ is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that of
indicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it is
placed.

WHEN an Englishman is not highly imaginative he is apt to be the most
matter-of-fact of mortals. He is rarely imaginative, and seldom has an
alert sense of humor. Yet England has produced the finest of humorists
and the greatest of poets. The humor and imagination which are diffused
through other peoples concentrate themselves from time to time in
individual Englishmen.

THIS is a page of autobiography, though not written in the first
person: Many years ago a noted Boston publisher used to keep a large
memorandum-book on a table in his personal office. The volume always
lay open, and was in no manner a private affair, being the receptacle of
nothing more important than hastily scrawled reminders to attend to
this thing or the other. It chanced one day that a very young, unfledged
author, passing through the city, looked in upon the publisher, who was
also the editor of a famous magazine. The unfledged had a copy of verses
secreted about his person. The publisher was absent, and young Milton,
feeling that "they also serve who only stand an