lendid, rich, full organ rang out gloriously by contrast,
although her constitutional jealousy showed itself unpleasantly in
some parts of the opera where Murska was so deliriously applauded.
Lucca, little woman, conquered herself at last, and handed the flowers
up to her rival with a pretty grace which was loudly applauded. It is
strange that the tact of woman, usually so apprehensive, does not more
often see the good effect of generosity.

One effect of the panic, it is to be hoped, will be to make the
dinners less magnificently heavy. I am sure every lady in New York who
was last winter constrained to sit from seven o'clock until eleven at
those monstrously elaborate and expensive dinners which have become so
much the fashion, will be glad to dine in a more simple manner, in
a shorter time, with less display, and with fewer courses, and fewer
excitements. One entertainer last winter introduced live swans and
small canaries to enliven his dinner. The swans splashed rather
disagreeably.

"Do you know why he had the swans?" said a lady to a gentleman.

"I suppose, he wanted the _Ledas_ of society," said the gentleman.

"Well, yes," said the lady, "but I did not know, although he is as
rich as a Jew, that he was a Jupiter."

The faces of the "panicstricken" seem to look brighter, although
everybody talks of "shrinkage" and ruin. Meanwhile the beautiful
weather keeps the carriages going and Fifth Avenue looking gay. "I
shall fail, but my wife need not give up her horses," said a young
broker the other day. The old days of commercial morality, when people
reduced their style of living because they had failed, seem to have
gone out of fashion.

A letter from New York, this Queen of Commerce, is almost necessarily
mercantile, as is our conversation.

"How you all talk stocks and money!" said a gentleman just arrived
from a ten years' sojourn in Europe. "When I went away you were
talking of books, of art, of social ethics, of fine women, of good
dinners, of whist and bezique: now you are all talking of longs and
shorts, bulls and bears, a fraction of per cent., etc. etc.--all of
you, men, women and children."

We have a beautiful collection at the Art Museum in Fourteenth street
of jewelry, objets d'art, and a good ceramic display, all clustered
round the Di Cesnola sculptures and pottery. This collection, founded
on the idea of the South Kensington Museum, makes a most agreeable
lounging-place in the Kruger mansion