erland), We will go and see this Grand Hôtel, and ind if there be some cozy front-window whereby we may roll our Chair, and look out upon the quay, the river, the palace, and the garden. Accordingly, we gave our cocher orders, drove to the Quai Voltaire-to the door of the hotel-parleyed with the pretty woman in the Conciergerie, who took a bunch of keys from their respective office knobs, tripped away before us over the waxen stair-ways (begged pardon if too fast), ushered us into a second-floor appartement. "En voici une qui est très jolie," said she-flirted back the curtains -showed me the view-the palace, the river, the cab-stand opposite. "There was no such view in Paris; no such air; there were the gardens; if Monsieur would trouble himself to look he would see the trees; every thing was clean--very clean; if Monsieur would trouble himself to look again, there was the Arc de l'Etoile; all the fire-works could be seen, if the Emperor should give a fete; did Monsieur think the Emperor would give a fete? people did say the Queen was coming; did Monsieur think the Queen was coming? And for how long would Monsieur wish the rooms? The chimney never smoked-never; besides it was just now swept; the citadines were convenient opposite; or perhaps Monsieur ordered from a stable? in which case there was a very honest man in the second court below. No, the theatres were not fardu tout; Monsieur had only to cross the palacecourt and he had Le Français; a step farther, under the peristyle, and he had Hyacinthe and Grassot; up the Vivienne, and he had the Vaudeville; besides which, there was the Odeon, just behind, where was a charming new piece by Edmund About-perhaps Monsieur had seen it?" So, and with such pleasant volubility, we are talked out of all our doubts, and slide easily and good-humoredly into our quarters at the Grand Hotel Voltaire. After all, it matters so little where one lives in Paris! He comes so soon and so thoroughly to pervade it all with his presence-feeding what are home-wants in other cities with the street air and out-of-door observation. Does any one suppose now that we have been eating the two-franc breakfasts of the Grand Hôtel Voltaire simply because we are living in the Grand Hôtel Voltaire? Not a bit of it. We have tasted the morning on the bridge and the quays, and traversed the garden, where the crysanthemums and salvias have replaced the verbenas and geraniums of summer, and have broken our fast at the marble tables of the quiet Poissonnerie, under the Rivoli arcades (about which Poissonnerie, and its presiding mistress and habitués, we reeled you a page of description some three months gone). Thence, lighting our cigar at the tobacconist of the Pyramides, we have sauntered through the quiet passage De Lorme, the stormy St. Honoré, read the day's play-bill at the Theatre Français (bearing promise of a new comedy by Uchard, who is winning other friends and fortune by the autumn repetitions of "Fiammina"), glanced over "Figaro" at the news-vender's stall within the drive of the palace, loitered at Chevet's window (poor Chevet, they say, is dead, but the shop holds its name and fame), where are luscious chasselas; peaches like melons; melons grown monstrously down by Cannes, where Lord Brougham has his French estates, and where Rachel is dying; prawn from Sicily; a silver salmon, dished, and sprigged with parsley, from Dunkeld, in Scotland; a pair of capercalzie from Christiansand; red-legged plover from the Landes by Bordeaux (Landes which are famous, just now, by reason of the cow-fights which come off twice a week at the Hippodrome, being effeminate echoes of the Castilian bull-fights); pippins from Pelham, Ulster County, New York; and smoked beef from Hamburg. We linger before the pipe window, wondering if the venturesome trader has yet disposed of that huge amber-tubed meerschaum, mounted with gold, and ticketed, these five years past, "5000 francs." Will he drop his price now that they are raising the discount rates at the Bank? A discount of six and a half for money is a heavy discount for France, and that is our rate now. The American eye rests wonderingly upon the tokens of trade permanence here-symbolized in so small a matter even as that amber-necked meerschaum. It is not unlikely that the very pipe we look on has hung by the same silken cord, before the same glass, through two revolutions in France-through rise and fall of Mobilier-through recruitments and capture of the Malakoff. Kings have suspended, and Councils; but the pipe-seller has not. So Chevet (or his widow) has shown the same epicurean temptations-cooked and ground the same exquisite coffee (if you provide your own table in Paris, send to Chevet's for coffee)-served up the same salmon and herring through four dynasties, and all the crashes of their change. Then there is the whip and cane-seller a short way beyond. Who does not remember his show, and the monstrous head, with beaded eyes, cut from some twisted root-a fearful shillelah, brimful of bloody possibilities? Yet the blouses have never seized upon it; they have twice sacked the palace overhead, and thrown chef-d'œuvres of Greuze and Le Brun from the windows, and thrust their knives through fine portraits of queens, and smashed all Pradier's porcelain statuettes (in the palace), but never damaged the stock or the trade of the whip and the cane-seller: regularly all his paper has gone through bank-royal bank, republican bank, imperial bank-and regularly he has met his quarterly payment of rent. After him, and in the body of the palace, just over against the spiteful cannon which gives a loud "bang" every sunny day at noon, is that other master of time, Leroy-Leroy et fils. Have you never seen and coveted their pretty watches? Pretty thirty years back, but like a jewel now. Watches with pansies on them-the centre three clustering diamonds, the yellow petals of topaz, the purple amethyst. The same shop-the same show-the same quiet-the same orderly and laborious advance in their craft, whatever may be bank-rates or the tone of the Moniteur. We are apt to sneer at the slowness of French tradesmen: they have not half so grand shops as ours-no such dazzling distribution of their wares; but, per contra, their suspensions are more rare; we do not lose sight of them so quickly. Always on this morning saunter through the palace we see things we ought not to see. Photography has taken license. You remember an old story of Pauline Bonaparte in an artist's studio: there are other Paulines. Artists have always claimed their models, and always found them: photography and the stereoscope, it is found, supply them with an infinity of attitudes and studies at a cheap rate-so cheap that the photographers have now put the models in the market: but the police are upon their track. Speaking of photography reminds us of another lack of ours in this department of art. When are we to have those beautiful studies from Naturebits of foliage, rock fragments, dank pools, still life-rendered to our eye at home as they are rendered on every shop-front here? Does it not count very little for our art aspirations, when all our advances and all our efforts in this way go simply and purely to portrait-taking? We have imperial photographs, and Hallotypes, and ambrotypes, and half-lengths, and full-lengths, but always the Honorable Mr. Flunkey, or the last lion, Fitz-Doodle. Walk the length of Broadway to see how photography is progressing, and how its wonderful hand is fixing and revealing the secrets and the beauties of Nature, and have we not always and nauseously Flunkeys and FitzDoodles? Nobody denies the elegance of these gentlemen; their attitude is all grace; their expression all dignity; their eye all loveliness: but when will the Bradys and Gurneys give us something else-something that shall teach us about the wonderful play of light and shadow over other surfaces than whiskered faces and Derby's coats? of the poems of the garret lover and liver; and gay equipages stop to buy and feast upon the paper luxury. Such type-such picturing-such poems such a bruised, weak, fond heart bleeding itself in the utterance! and yet how little, and how little worth Perrotin's luxurious edition, compared with the set of Russian sable over the way! Thinking of this, and of poor Gustave Planche, who died the other day in a hospital, with only one or two friends near him (he, who had made, opinions about art and poems which all the great, gay world accepted, and held, and uttered, and lived by), he dies there under the hand of Dr. Dubois, with some terrible gout or such like ailment, and is followed to the grave (going thither in a plain pine coffin) by only some half dozen; so utterly has he fallen away latterly from notice, so thoroughly drenched in poverty and misery—poor fellow! Here at Galignani's now (the court is large, but dingy, and has a smell of long-kept vegetables) Gustave Planche could not have borrowed a franc to help out his dinner. We idle into Galignani's not for a franc to help our own dinner, but for the reading of the papers: London, Belgian, East Indian, French. And what do the papers say? First, Stuttgardt and the imperial meeting has Only this morning we have regaled ourselves, not ceased giving food to the paragraphists and the through shop-windows, upon our walk, with charm-letter-writers. And this matter of newspaper leting photographic transcripts of a street of the buried Pompeii (where the abrasions of the chariot-wheels upon the paving-stones were as distinct as if we had laid our finger in them); others of some heathen temple, all bruised as time and savages have bruised them, and yet all aglow and golden with an Ionian sun; others of rare tree tracery, showing how hopeless intricacy (as the faint heart believes) is subordinated to a harmony that commands your wonder. We put it to the good sense of Broadway picture-gazers if such things are not better worth study than all the imperial portraits of all the Prima Donnas of the Academy? We were just now walking under the arches of the Palais Royal; we leave at the northern end, and come directly upon the Rue Vivienne. It is not a long street, or a wide one; yet a man or a woman may go astray in it-to their ruination; for the Exchange is upon it, where one may break himself in Mobilier, and Page's is upon it, where one may buy a Cachemire de l'Inde for 5000 francs. We observe, by-the-by, that this matter of womanly extravagance is just now exciting serious remark with you-since the crash; and that some philosophers are disposed to make the women the scape-goats of the crisis. The French have more gallantry; and, although the playwrights have pointed their shafts mercilessly at feminine extravagances these three years past, they have foreborne to accuse her taste (as a cause), which was only an illustration of that insatiate thirst for money and its display, which has now run wellnigh through its nine days of fever, and which (as with you) must have its period of relapse. (Pray, what think you of a set of sable which we see ticketed in this Rue Vivienne at 15,000 francs ?) And over opposite, or nearly opposite, is the shop and bureau of M. Perrotin, the publisher and patron of poor Béranger. Even now the affiche is in the windows of that delicate illustrated edition ter-writing has grown nowadays upon the Continent into almost a profession. Time was, and not long gone, when you looked vainly into a Continental paper for correspondence of interest; perhaps an occasional poster of financial affairs in London, or some one of the great capitals; but now we have in the Débats, the Presse, and the Nord (of Brussels), letters (and careful, painstaking letters) from St. Petersburg, London, California, New York, Rome, Calcutta, Stuttgardt, wherever public attention is directed. In this comparison our American papers are losing their old relative rank; in other respects their enterprise may be equal, but too little regard is paid to the quality and variety of their correspondence. This imperial meeting of Stuttgardt has had its narrative from the first feuilletonistes of France. We shall not follow them; for the matter must be old at home by this time. It is enough to say that Stuttgardt is a village-like city, with a great King Street, or Königs Strasse, running through its centre, and crossing the Square on which are the two palaces and the theatre; the Nesen brook runs through the city, and the hills rise swift from its valley-so swift, that the vineyards they are planted with seem to hang over the town. The King (of Wurtemberg) is a gay old gentleman, who has been thrice married (once to a daughter of Emperor Paul of Russia), who loves horses and theatres, and who keeps his money in gulden and kreitzers. In all the shop-windows of the Königs Strasse were to be seen portraits of the two Emperors, and of the august Grand Duchess d'Olga: we say august descriptively, for we chanced to have seen her queenliness some ten years back, before the glow of maidenhood was faded from her cheek. Altogether, between the Emperors, the Queen of Holland (who is daughter of the old King of Wurtemberg), the wassail, the visitors, and the pretty gar dens and charming salons of the Wilhelma, they had a gay time of it. Alexander was northernly severe and reserved; Napoleon buoyant and pru dently gracious. St. Petersburg (by her organs) | in which he proves, or seems to prove, that in Inmade light of the affair. Vienna was uneasy and dia all encouragement has been given by the Britsuspicious. Paris jubilant and hopeful. London ish to those institutions in which the Koran is too full of India to talk of Tilsit and its memories. taught. The only Christian college of the counThe affair, so far as personal to the two Emperors, try he represents to be in a miserably neglected was excellently managed by the sporting King; condition. so that it did not appear that Russia made any advances to France, or France any advance toward Russia. All ended as quietly (in a political point of view) as it had begun. The quidnuncs have been floored. Only the gossips of the good Wurtemberg capital will talk these many years to come of the time when the great Emperor of the North and the great Emperor of the West shook hands, and ate meat together, in the pretty palace of Wilhelma, upon the banks of the Nesen brook. Back now to Galignani's reading-room and the to her commerce; and, that she may not be troubled papers. in her exploitation, wishes to keep good the barrier between the East and the West. Chalons comes next to Stuttgardt. But even Chalons is over now; the camp is raised; the Empress (who insisted upon carrying her crinoline into camp-quarters) has come home; little pet Prince, in his white pants and sailor-hat, with Reine Hortense inscribed upon the band, has forgotten the wooden gun and the mock coat of the guard. If Stuttgardt was "reported," so was Chalons. We, in Paris, saw the rows of tents, the new-built railway (the construction fund having come by Imperial carte blanche), the Zouaves playing Arab marriages upon a turf-scene of, a hundred yards square, the striped pavilion of his Majesty, where he wrought with his secretaries until 10 A.M.; then in the saddle till 4 P.M.; then dining with thirty of his officers; and, after this, amusing himself with soldier theatrics, or with extempore fireworks, to which all the people of the pleasant Burgundy wine country came crowding. Altogether there were sights there worth the seeing, and an illustration of that order and system which kept the French army sound under the hardships of the Crimea. But to what end is all this? Is the Emperor simply gratifying his old author-ambition of the artillery tactics? Is he looking forward to the day of actual service? Is he ripening familiarity with his soldiery for some new day of need? We see no such questions in the Paris journals, not even in the British journals. Indeed, Chalons is forgotten now; we will forget it too. But-India: no, there is no forgetting there. Pageants we forget, and fire-works, and monarchmeetings; but the griefs that strain our hearts to bursting-these we cherish. We look around this reading salon to-day, here in the Rue Vivienne, and of the twenty who are present poring over those papers, wet from the mail, how many are eager for some little line of hope coming from the Indies! If we look toward China, says M. Berton, we find the same anti-Christian and purely mercenary aims: we find British fleets convoying fleets of opium, and forcing the Celestials to take their poison at the cannon's mouth. In the Ionian Isles the British Government has converted itself into an odious oppression. Even on Mount Lebanon, the Maronites are persecuted through British influence-one while by the Druses, and again by the Mussulmans. "England asks only to insure Asia "France can never consent to follow the lead of England in this selfish policy; she has another mission to fulfill." Louis Veuillot, the writer for the Univers, also takes strong ground in opposition to the anti-Christian action of England, and declaims indignantly against her policy. Those journals of a Legitimist or Papist tendency, as well as many of the Bonapartist organs, take the same position, and regard the misfortunes of England in the East as a just punishment for her recklessness. The Débats, meantime, sturdily undertakes the defense of British action, and entertains, or affects to entertain, no doubt of continued British successes. But the street people-the gossips, the clubmen they who make up the buzz which we call on dit? There is no Lafayette to be tempted, if there were temptation for a Lafayette. People watch, wait, shrug their shoulders. Poor Havelock (on dit) winning honors and rank now, when the gray hairs have overtaken him-kept back from the epaulets and the knightly touch thus far only by the res angusta-not of home, but of purse and connections! Splendid incompetence and fatuous ignorance still under the plush of high places. Too tardy admission of errors, and a concealment of first lack of penetration, with arrogant brusquerie and cruel discharges, or insulting, courtly, cool innuendoes. So they broke down the brave, fond heart of Raglan, an excellent gentleman, and shrewdest and thoroughest of good military secretaries, to record the humors and detail the orders of such a leader as Wellington, but with no brain to construct campaigns himself. And now Canning must go and be crushed under the same Juggernaut of popular clamor. There will be want, and waste, and new courts of inquiry, and other Hotspurs, weary with taunts, to dash out their brains gallantly, like the "Five Hundred" of Inkermann and Tennyson. So talk the clubmen. This, of course; but what do Frenchmen say of the affair? Are sympathies strong with England? By no means; far less so than upon our side of the The chatty woman, full of that outside, discurswater. And for two reasons: first, because French-ive charity which is more diffusive than penetrant, men put down all the Sepoy atrocities-just as they put down Marshal Pelissier's burning of the Arabs -to the chances of war. They reason such matters with soldiers, and not like Punch, or like fathers ef families. Second, they do not, and can not, forego their old and strong jealousy of British power in Asia. A distinguished Orientalist of France has just now published a brochure respecting this question, says, "Those paurres English, how dearly it costs them to make victories! And the officers' wives, who were so hardly dealt with-ah, mon Dieu! 1 hear they had such magnificent jewelry. I suppose it's all lost now!" Ask Monsieur Pastel how the matter is going. and if the French really feel sympathy for their neighbors over channel? "Sympathy? Sans doute: cela ne coute pas: mais—dam, if you ask if we will go yonder to fight for the Burrapootas-je dis que non.' "D'abord first of all (and he touches up the eye of his picture)-il fait chaud la bas—it is warm in India; ha! ha! very warm-nous autres-nous n'aimons pas le curry." Monsieur Pastel has given another vigorous touch to his work—steps back-gazes admiringly -reflects-resumes: "Et puis-et puis (with spirit) nous n'aimons pas les Anglais!" So its readers write. From all quarters and corners of this great country!-from the farthest Down East to the most distant West (if that point has yet been settled)—from the frozen North and the sunny South, we have letters like the leaves of autumn for numbers, like the fruits of autumn for richness and sweetness, bearing their grateful It comes to this at last-all the undercurrent testimony to the genial influence of this never-failof the street talk about India. Meantime the warming reservoir of mirth. Let's read two or three of tints of October are lighting the houses; "the these letters of cheer. Listen to the Maine man: world" is trundling its hoop again up the Champs "The Drawer is our delight by day and night. Elysées and down the Champs Elysées; the pleas- When we open it, we never wish to shut it, except ant Pré Catalan is redeeming the lost summer with to laugh till we open it to laugh again." a gayety that flashes like a blazing Salvia among the yellowed leaves of autumn. Longchamps has shown, these past sunny Sundays, its races; and the mass-going Parisians have closed their devotion with a bet upon de Morny's four-year-old mare. We can not say but there is a growing and tremulous apprehension that the Mobilier may go down, the bank run up its rates, money be rare and cherished, and hunger and dear bread make an uneasy winter for Paris. There are fears of that sort-not yet embodied in words—not yet hinted at in the journals-but covertly entertained and courageously put down-by going to see the old lady Dejazet. One shadow, on a far-away Paris street, we have to paint, and we have finished our portraiture of the month. A far-away street, beyond the Place St. Georges, to the south and to the westward of it, the Rue Blanche, where the street is steepest and narrowest, and least worthy of its white name, lived, these eight years past, Signor Manin, the President, in the dolorous times of '48, of the newly-sprung Venetian Republic. Upon the third floor he lived, in a modest appartement, with three little uncarpeted rooms, and an old Italian for servitor. A bed, a few chairs, a plain deal table, a bronze gondola upon the mantle these made up his room equipments. We have talked with him there of Venice past, and of Venice present, and have seen the blood mount to his forehead, and the tear to his eye, as some Dandolo hope, or some Dandolo thought, swept over him of the city he loved so well. In those cold, cheerless, Paris rooms, his only daughter, who had followed him to his exile, died, some four years ago; and since her death a subdued melancholy had possessed the father. Hope for Italy alone enabled him, through those four years, to crowd off the disease that threatened him; but the hope long deferred brought with it a fatal heart-sickness at the last, and the best and purest of the Italian patriots is now dead. We have no account of his last hours. A few friends only were in attendance, and these have no heart to tell the story of the exile's last moments. But those who knew him, and knew the exaltation of his patriot courage, know that the bitterness of death was sweet, compared with the bitterness of the thought which had haunted him many a year -the thought of Italy enslaved. May God (where else to look?) some day light again, and more largely, if it be possible, the Italian hopes which perished with the exiled Manin! Hear a Western witness, and a lawyer too: "The legal profession owe you many thanks for the entertainment you draw from the bar, and return to us in the Drawer. We draw largely on it, and the drafts are always honored at sight." A reverend correspondent writes, over his own name, from the interior of the Keystone State, and says: The Drawer is just the thing I need, and love to need. There is a time to laugh, and a time to cry; and the humor of the Drawer often aids my digestion, and its pathos provokes me to tears." A Southern reader says: "We watch for the Magazine, and when it comes, the call is first for the Drawer. No one can read the number in peace till the whole house has heard or read the Drawer." From as far northwest as Wisconsin a reader of the Drawer sends a pair of anecdotes, and adds: "I owe the Drawer more than these. What to do without it I do not know. I am the only subscriber in these diggings, and the stories in the Drawer I retail at all the tea fights, parties, bees, and weddings I attend, till I have got my name up as a wit and a wag. If the Drawer fails I am a gone man." But we will turn away from the thousand-andone testimonies to the inestimable value of these trifles, and once more open the Drawer to find what is in it for the month of December. Its friends have been very liberal. May their shadows and their letters never be less! HOMEOPATHY has just achieved a great triumph in Little Rock, Arkansas, according to a report furnished by a correspondent of ours in that place. One of the citizens being a victim of hypochondria, imagined himself to be a goose, and procuring an egg, proceeded to set! The doctors of medicine of the old school were called in, and all their prescriptions proved unavailing. He was bled, but he still would set; he took calomel, but he would set still! A newly-arrived homeopath was now called upon, as a last resort. "Like cures like" is the motto of his school; that is-it takes a goose to cure a goose! He ordered a pair of feather breeches to be worn by the patient, and a dozen eggs! The spell and the eggs were broken together, and the patient was himself again. Very eggs-traordinary, was it not? RARELY has a Quaker been in the Drawer; but a correspondent furnishes some anecdotes of a curious specimen of that excellent race, whose virtues are so generally celebrated that it is quite a treat to read of one who has more infirmities than his | neighbors: "But Wing Rogers outlived her, and consoled himself on her decease by composing the following "EPITAPH. ...Here lies wife second of old Wing Rogers, THE smallest joke of the season was made last Sunday-very bad day for making a joke, but it was a lady who made it, and she thought the better the day, the better the deed. Our minister gave notice, as the day was unpleasant, and few people were out, that the contribution for foreign missions would be repeated next Sunday. It would be taken up now, when he presumed that they would only give their mite, but would give liberally on the next Sabbath. I remarked to a lady on the way home from church that I did not understand the preach "Wing Rogers was a Quaker, whose fiery temper and overbearing disposition spent themselves in petty tyranny over a lovely, gentle wife, who Lore his abuse without complaint, and so encouraged him to become worse and worse. Perhaps the following incident is as precious an example of conjugal ugliness as the records of marital life will show. They had been married several years, but she had never been allowed to visit her parents, who lived but the distance of a two days' journey off. She had proposed it often, but it threw him into a furious passion, and she had settled down into the enjoyment of her prison. One day he delighted her by saying that if she would get ready, they would start the next day and make a visit at the old homestead where her aged parents were living. With a lighter heart than she had had for many a year, as this new streak of kindness appeared, she made all needful preparations, and the next morning they set off, full of good spirits, ander's idea. "Nothing is plainer," she said; "he with the prospect of a happy time of it. During the day, as they rode, he was full of his pleasant stories of early days, reminiscences of their courtship, and anticipations of the pleasure they would have when they reached the home from which she had been separated for so many years. They rested for the night half-way on their journey, and the good woman really began to live again, in the hope that her Quaker husband had indeed become a friend. The next morning they were up with the sun, and as they started from the door, he turned his horse's head toward the home they had left, say-shirt; and, the bride being in bed, in a rich undress, his ing, as he did so, 'Well, wife, I guess thee has felt good long enough; we will go back now!' And back they went. "Such a wife was a world too good for such a scamp, and in great kindness to her she was permitted to die; and, in just punishment, the Quaker was soon hitched to a woman that was more than a match for him. They had been in partnership but a few days when he told her to bring a pail of water from the well, which she did, and he kicked it over, sat down, and told her to bring another. This was to establish his authority, and give her to understand that he was master. She read him in a minute. Bringing the pail of water, she very coolly threw it into his face, and as he slowly recovered from the strangling, he spluttered out: 'We'll be quits now, wife!' "In a towering passion one day, he declared he would set the house on fire, and took a shovel of coals for the purpose. She seized the bellows and followed him, to blow them up instead of him. This cooled him off, for she was too much for him with fire as well as water. "But Rachel was taken sick, and threatened to die. She wanted a doctor, but her loving husband would not go for one. The neighbors were in, and they were all of the opinion that she was drawing near her end. Her breath was short and quick, and her eyes were set, and her fect were cold; and her affectionate spouse at last said he thought he had better go for the doctor. As he was about to start, he stepped up to the bedside on which lay his dying wife, and said, in a plaintive voice: "Well, Rachel, if thee should be taken away, who would be thy choice for me to marry again?' "Rachel arose in the bed, fixed her eyes on her loving husband, and exclaimed, 'I'll live to site thee!" And live she did, meant that what we would give to-day might be a mite, but next Sunday it must be mightier." AMONG the strange customs of other times, an incidental allusion was lately made in the September number of the Magazine, in the article on "Handel," to the age of George the Second. The allusion is in this passage: "It is curious to read that, there having been at this time a partial reconciliation of the Royal Family, his Majesty did his Royal Highness the honor to put on his Majesty came into the room, and the Prince following soon after, in a night-gown of silver stuff, and a cap of the finest lace, the quality were admitted to see the Prince and Princess sitting up in bed." This royal entertainment was not an uncommon one in those days, as the reader of Dr. Doran's "Kings and Queens" will remember; but it is quite a novelty to us to learn, as we do from a correspondent writing from the old North State, as North Carolina is often called, that there is a region thereabouts in which that old English royal custom is still kept up among the sovereign people. He says: "This announcement will doubtless take many by surprise, and add another rivet, fastening upon us the sobriquet of the Rip Van Winkle State, in spite of the wonderful revelations of the census, which says, in so many words, that the North Carolinians do not breakfast upon tar, dine upon pitch, nor sup on turpentine. The fact, however, is indisputable that, in Wilkes County, among the mountains that are offshoots or spurs from the Blue Ridge, the people, as in the days of George the Second, are in the habit of visiting the bridal chamber, and tak. ing a peep at the couple in bed. So, Hurrah for the old North State!" Is the following worth a place in the Drawer? It was written by a lover who sent it with his daguerreotype to the lady who had requested it; "Thine own is graven on my heart, In dust thou still may trace it." A VIRGINIA gentleman furnishes some reminiscences of the late Parson Coles, whose ministra |