e. Lack of leisure is handicapping us in the writing of a romance.
We compose it while waiting for trains, while shoveling snow and coal,
while riding on the L, while shaving; and we write it on the backs of
envelopes, on the covering of packages, on the margins of newspapers.
The best place to write a book is in jail, where Cervantes wrote Don
Quixote; but we can't find time to commit a greater misdemeanor than
this column, and there is no jail sentence for that. The only
compensation for the literary method we are forced to adopt is that
there is a great deal of "go" in it.

* * *

Replying to an extremely dear reader: Whenever we animadvert on the
human race we include ourself. We share its imperfections, and we hope
we are tinctured with its few virtues. As a race it impresses us as a
flivver; we feel as you, perhaps, feel in your club when, looking over
the members, you wonder how the dickens most of them got in.

* * *

Prof. Pickering is quoted as declaring that a race of superior beings
inhabits the moon. Now we are far from claiming that the inhabitants of
our geoid are superior to the moon folk, or any other folk in the solar
system; but the mere fact that the Moonians are able to exist in
conditions peculiar to themselves does not make them superior. The whale
can live under water. Is the whale, then, superior to, say, Senator
Johnson? True, it can spout farther, but it is probably inferior to Mr.
Johnson in reasoning power.

* * *

The man who tells you that he believes "in principles, not men,"
means--nothing at all. One would think that in the beginning God created
a set of principles, and man was without form and void.

* * *

"Lost--Pair of trousers while shopping. Finder call Dinsmore
1869."--Minneapolis Journal.

The female of the shopping species is rougher and more ruthless than the
male.

* * *

"Ancient Rome, in the height of her glory, with her lavish amusements,
Olympian games," etc.--The enraptured advertiser.

The proof reader asks us if it was an eruption of Mt. Olympus that
destroyed Pompeii.

* * *

GARDENS.

My lady hath a garden fair,
Wherein she whiles her hours:
She chides me that I do not share
Her rage for springing flowers.

I tell her I've a garden, too,
Wherein I have to toil--
The kind that Epicurus knew,
If not so good