that he shall admire at the point of the social bayonet. How do
you treat the stranger? Do you adapt yourself and your surroundings to
him, or insist that he shall adapt himself to you? How often does the
stranger, the guest, sit in helpless agony in your circle (all of whom
know each other) at table or in the drawing-room, isolated and separate,
because all the talk is local and personal, about your little world, and
the affairs of your clique, and your petty interests, in which he or she
cannot possibly join? Ah! the Sioux Indian would not be so cruel as that
to a guest. There is no more refined torture to a sensitive person than
that. Is it only thoughtlessness? It is more than that. It is a want of
sympathy of the heart, or it is a lack of intelligence and broad-minded
interest in affairs of the world and in other people. It is this
trait--absorption in self--pervading society more or less, that makes it
so unsatisfactory to most people in it. Just a want of human interest;
people do not come in contact.

Avid pursuit of wealth, or what is called pleasure, perhaps makes people
hard to each other, and infuses into the higher social life, which should
be the most unselfish and enjoyable life, a certain vulgarity, similar to
that noticed in well-bred tourists scrambling for the seats on top of a
mountain coach. A person of refinement and sensibility and intelligence,
cast into the company of the select, the country-house, the radiant,
twelve-button society, has been struck with infinite pity for it, and
asks the Drawer to do something about it. The Drawer cannot do anything
about it. It can only ask the prayers of all good people on Christmas Day
for the rich. As we said, we do not have them with us always--they are
here today, they are gone to Canada tomorrow. But this is, of course,
current facetiousness. The rich are as good as anybody else, according to
their lights, and if what is called society were as good and as kind to
itself as it is to the poor, it would be altogether enviable. We are not
of those who say that in this case, charity would cover a multitude of
sins, but a diffusion in society of the Christmas sentiment of goodwill
and kindliness to itself would tend to make universal the joy on the
return of this season.

SOCIAL CLEARING-HOUSE

The Drawer would like to emphasize the noble, self-sacrificing spirit of
American women. There are none like them in the world. They take up all
the burdens of