morial Hall left the quarry. Without this first
of implements none of the other machinery would ever have moved. The pen
is mightier than the piston. It is the invisible steam that impels all.

[Illustration: FRENCH RESTAURANT LA FAYETTE.]

In a visible form also it is here. The publishers of the London _Punch_
have selected as the most comprehensive motto for the case in which they
exhibit copies of their various publications a sentence from Shakspeare:
"Come and take choice of all my library, and so beguile thy sorrow." We
do not know that to dull his sorrows is all that can be done for man.
Literature assumes to do more than make him forget. The lotos-eater is
not its one hero. School-books, piled aloft "in numbers without number
numberless," may to the man be suggestive of hours without thought and
void of grief, but they certainly are not to the boy. Blue books, ground
out in a thousand bureaus, and contributed in like profusion, may be
pronounced a weariness to the adult flesh, however sweet their ultimate
uses. Unhappy those who wade through them for increasing the happiness
of others! These humble but portly representatives of political
literature are the log-books of the ship of state. They chart and
chronicle the currents and winds along its course, so that from the mass
of chaff a grain of guidance may be painfully winnowed out for the
benefit of its next voyage, or for the voyages of other craft
floundering on the same perilous and baffling sea. Everything comes pat
to a log-book. As endless is the medley of memoranda in blue-books. They
deal, like government itself, with everything. They take up the citizen
on his entry into the cradle, and do not quite drop him at the grave.
How to educate, clothe, feed and doctor him; how to keep him out of
jail, and how, once there, to get him out again with the least possible
moral detriment; how to adjust as lightly as possible to his shoulders
the burden of taxation; how to economize him as food for powder; and how
to free him from the miasm of crowded cities,--are but a small part of
their contents. And the index is growing, if possible, larger, as the
apparatus of government becomes more and more intricate. With such
contributions and credentials do the rulers of the nations enroll
themselves in the guild of authorship. They are proud of them, and
exhibit them in profusion, in whole libraries, rich with gold and the
primary colors.

Expositions, as we have before