dry. They are determined to have a better time than their fathers had. I sympathize with the object. But I am not always sure that they are going about "the great task of happiness" in the best way. From Samuel Butler of saintly memory, for example, they have adopted the theory that the chief obstacle to happiness in the path of children is their parents. At first thought the idea perhaps commends itself as offering to youthful impatience—generally so vague and objectless—something definite to work upon. But then I pick up the morning paper and read that one of our young people has confessed to having placed poison in her father-in-law's coffee because "he was old and such a care." That obstacle to her happiness is removed, but now another has arisen in its place. To put the matter in the happiest light, there is a certain want of amenity in the act, which one suspects, will rather poison the pleasure which the act was intended to procure. There is an inauspicious rowdiness about the present picnic on Parnassus, Laurel wreaths snatched from the heads of others seem somehow to lack the significance of laurel wreaths bestowed—the leaves are scattered, the garland is bare.
It may be due to a Chinese prejudice, but I have never been able to join with any great alacrity of spirit in the nearly universal contemporary sport of deriding the classics, or indeed any perpetuated mold in which the human spirit of a bygone age or generation expressed all that it knew of grace or
