The remark was made by Mr. Willing. In the mean time the captain had come on deck to witness the effect.

"You see," said he, "the ship is not haunted. Ghosts don't use such forcible language."

Captain Drinker was one of those luxurious East India skippers who rarely came on deck after ten o'clock at night. Before leaving Philadelphia he had a speaking-tube put in from his berth to a point directly over the head of the man at the wheel. A speaking-tube was never seen or heard of by a sailor before. The captain hearing the sails shake brought the tube into requisition.

We were not assured, however, by this oral and ocular demonstration of the captain that the ship was not haunted.-SAMUEL SAMUELS in From the Forecastle to the Cabin.

LEFT OUT.

Over par hed hill and plain
Sweep the legions of the rains.
Here its bounty knows no stay,
Here in showers it ebbs away,
Here, unelaked, the summer burns;
Downward, to the mother, turns
Choicest flower of all the fielde,
With a sigh it's spirit yields
You may blame the rain or no,
But it ever hath been so,-
Somethin! loveliest of its race
Perisheth from out its place,
For the lack of freshening care,
While the rain pours otherwhere.
From the caverned shores and seas
Springs the wafting sail-loved breeze;
To its port speeds many a bark,
Like an arrow to the mark.
Here, a zephyr's might, it blows,
Here the sea unruffled flows;
Here is neld, with sails asleep,
Swiftest ship that swept the deep.
You may blame the wind or no,
But it ever hath been so,-
Something bravest of its kind
Leads a frustrate life and blind
For the lack of favoring gales,
Blowing blithe on on other sails.

EDITH M. THOMAS, IN Atlantic.

LITERARY SECTARIANISM.

Few persons will actually own to sectarianism, whether theological or literary. Few will emulate the frankness of a women of strong character whom I once knew, and who used to say of herself that she was an unworthy but very bigoted Catholic. People seldom say that it is morally wrong to write in a style they do not, enjoy, but they think it enough to say that the style is an anachronism, like knee-breeches. But if an

author's method is an anachronism, his bookseller's account will be sure to make him aware of it,

so that the critics may spare their pains: and if ne still persists, it is pretty evident that he is writing something which he enjoys, and it is better to let him alone. After all, an anachronism is only a good thing born out of time; and there is a chance that it may prove to be the first wave of a new tide, instead of the last aimless plash of an old one. "There are errors which we should treat with respect." said Coleridge (I quote from memory), "so long as it is possible that they may be the refraction of some great truth not yet appeared above the horizon." When Emerson began to write his "Nature" and early poems, it seemed like a step back to the English seventeenth-century authors, but it turned out to be an incoming tide. When Thoreau carried up to his attic in Concord the 700 unsold copies (out of 900) of his first book, his work seemed a hopeless anachronism; but when only two volumes of a man's writings appears during his lifetime, and six more are called for after his death, as in case of Thoreau, it looks as if the anachronism were some where else.

What we demand of a man of genius is to do his own work, as Nature impels; his criticisms on the work of others are wholly subordinate to this, and are commonly less well done. It is in the perfection and precision of the instantaneous line, Ruskin says, that the claim to immortality is made and it is of secondary importance what the artist thinks of the lines drawn by his neighbors. It is curious that while religious sectarianism wanes, the literary type seems just now to be growing. In the last century, novelists of wholly different guilds could appreciate one another. When Jane Austen was laying the foundation of English realism-carrying it to such perfection that she could paint in any family three sisters, all commonplace and in themselves tiresome, yet so individualized by her that we should know, if we met them on the top of an Egyptian pyramid, which was Charlotte and which was Emily.Scott was able fully to recognize her genius, though so unlike his own. "The big bow-wow," he said "I can do myself like any one else, but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting....is denied to me." She, on the other hand, could write to a young author whose works she had been charged with pilfering: "What could I do with your manly, vigorous sketches, so full of life and spirit? How could I possibly join them on to a little bit of ivory, two inches wide. on which I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labor?" Those who could write thus were unsectarian, and is not this, after all, the larger way?— T. WENTWORTH HIGGINSON IN The Independent.

AN ARAB CAMP BY NIGHT.

The outlines of the hills had vanished, the path had led us up from the bed of the torrent, so we no longer had that to guide us. To attempt to descend it would have been madness as we might have fallen over a precipice in the darkness; indeed, we were afraid to move except with extreme caution in any direction. We had a compass and watches and knew that by keeping due south we might if no accident befell us and the rocks permitted a passage, ultimately reach the plateau, but we also knew that the direction of our night quarters was due east, but here we ran the greater risk of tumbling into unknown traverse gorges with precipitous cliffs. We cautiously worked south but our progress soon became barred by thorny brushwood and we had to face the alternative of a night out of doors without water or anything to drink and a very limited supply of food.

We were just bracing ourselves to this unpleasant prospect when in a southwesterly direction we suddenly saw a gleam of light; it lasted for a moment then seemed to go out. But that one ray was one of hope and we steered cautiously for it. We had been scrambling by compass in the dark for about half an hour, and were just beginning to despair when the bark of a distant dog put new energy into us, and not long after around the shoulder of a hill we came upon an encampment and were greeted by the furious yells of a mob of noisy curs which infest the tents of the Bedouins. It was a startling apparition to burst upon these nomads in their remote retreat -horsemen of a type they had never seen before, and an armed soldier. Such children as were awake set up a dismal squalling, the women cowered tremblingly over their camp-fires under the pent roof of black camel's hair. Meanwhile the men had gathered round us, half timidly, half threateningly. The presence of the soldier suggested fear and suspicion while the smallness of our party encouraged the bolder ones to look defiant. As far as I could make out in the darkness there were about a dozen tents here in allapparently the fag end of an insignificant tribe whose name I forget. It was at first impossible to induce any one at that late hour to act as guide. Even abundant offers of backshish failed to shake their suspicion, which was to the effect that we wished to decoy one into durance to act as a hostage until some arrears of taxes which they owed the government should be paid up.

The other alternative was that we should take up our quarters in the sheik's tent, whether he liked it or not, which with a piercing wind blowing, accompanied by sleet was not a very pleasant

prospect. He seemed to relish it as little as we did and finally consented to be our guide as we made some silver gleam in the firelight. As he seized his eighteen-foot lance and mounted his ragged steed he looked like some Arab Don Quixote, and as the camp-fire threw its ruddy glow upon a group of wild-looking women, with dishevelled hair and tattooed chins crooning over a pot like the witches in "Macbeth," and upon barelegged men as they flitted to and fro between the black tents I thought I had seldom gazed upon a more weird and unreal-looking scene.

How our guide could find his way up the rocky hillside and across the prairie remained a mystery during the long two hours that we followed him. Of this I feel sure, that we scrambled up places in the dark that we never should have thought of facing by daylight. The very horses seemed to have become desperate and to have abandoned themselves to their fate. At last we dismounted and scaled the rocks like goats, everyone, man or beast, doing the best he could for himself on his own account, and so at last, wearied and half starved, for we had fasted for about ten hours, we reached the goal of our endeavor, too tired to see what an utterly miserable hole it was.--LAWRENCE OLIPHANT, IN Haifa.

THE GENIUS OF HARD WORK.

All who have watched the careers of their school-fellows must have noted how often the brilliant member of his class has succeeded in after life only in making of himself a brilliant failure; while the commonplace plodder, whose horoscope was far from bright or promising in those earlier years, has easily overtaken and passed his more favored rival. One need not look far to find the secret of it all. With those who have failed there is almost sure to be found the inevitable factor of shiftlessness. Easily dissatisfied, they have drifted from one vocation to another, veritable rolling stones, until all purpose and energy and stamina have disappeared, and they have finally found themselves forced by sheer necessity into the occupations and drudgeries of mere menials. It is the old story of the lump of gold continually bartered with ever increasing ill fortune until the poor old grindstone received in final exchange, is precipitated by a crowning stroke of ill-luck into the stream. Many a man with respectable parts to begin with has thus frittered his life away. One must learn to take into reckoning "the long results of time" and not alone mere present gain. May we not discover right here, too, an explanation of that which has often puzzled more than one of us,

namely, the fact that so many men of fine scholarship and much erudition are so often inefficient, and fail to impress themselves in any wise upon their fellows? They have stores of learning, but it is like lumber in a garret,-it is not available. They seem not to know how to use it or to make it effective. And so they remain apart from the great, busy, throbbing life of man, like driftwood

WHAT AILS AMERICA. To take Colonel Ingersoll seriously, of course, would be like asking for reverence from Mark Twain. He represents the natural reaction of American Bohemianism against the Puritanism of Boston and the overstrained Transcendentalism of Brook Farm. But he is just the sort of person of whom America does not stand in need. The

the rushing tide, and left behind. Or, to change the figure, they remind one of the great Corliss engine at the Exposition,-perfect in every part, but useless until the band is on and the connection formed. Somehow with most of these men the band is never on.

How ponderous that mass of wheels and rods and levers on yonder railway! How immense the weight, how motionless! Who can stir it? But stay! Let the engineer once open that throttle, and see-she stirs, she rouses herself! All those mighty, hidden forces which remind one more of omnipotence than all else which the hands of man have chained begin to assert their sway, and lo, what power! Alas! in these men of whom we are speaking, this force so essential seems forever lacking. The one great requisite never comes. The omission is a fatal one. It is the presence of a great, controlling, all-absorbing purpose, that shall make effective all the rest. It is the single eye. It is the undaunted will, bringing into subjection all the other powers, and making them pay it tribute. Storrs has given us a fine picture of this. "See the lawyer," he says, "before a jury in a case where his convictions are strong and his feelings are enlisted. saw long ago, as he glanced over the box, that five of those in it were sympathy with him; he as he went on, he became equally certain of seven; the number now has risen to ten; but two are still left, whom he feels that he has not persuaded or mastered. Upon them he now concentrates his power, summing up the facts, setting forth anew and more favorably the principles, urging upon them his view of the case with a more and more intense action of his mind upon theirs, until one only is left. Like the blow of a hammer, continually repeated till the iron bar crumbles beneath it, his whole force comes with a ceaseless percussion on that one mind till it has yielded and accepts the conviction on which the pleader's purpose is fixed. Men say afterward, 'He surpassed himself.' It was only because the singleness of his aim gave unity, intensity, and overpowering energy to the mind.

WILLIAM J. TILLEY,

He

in Masters of The Situation.

sented by its great cities, are its irreverence, its recklessness, its impatience-in one word, its Materialism. A nation in which the artistic sense is almost dead, which is practically without a literature, which is impatient of all sanctions and indifferent to all religions, which is corrupt from the highest pinnacle of its public life, down to the lowest depth of its journalism, which is at once thin-skinned under criticism, and aggressive to criticise, which worships material forces in every shape and form, which despises conventional conditions, yet is slavish to ignoble fashions, which, too hasty to think for itself, takes recklessly at second-hand, any old or new clothes philosophy that may be imported from Europe, yet while wearing the raiment openly, mocks and ridicules the civilization that wove the fabric-such a nation, I think, might be spared the spectacle of an elderly gentleman in modern costume trampling on the lotus, the rose, and the lily in the gar. dens of the gods. The exhibition can do no good; it may do no little harm. If the science of mythology did not exist, if the old gods or the new had any bloody altars left, if the tongue of free thought had not been loosened once and forever, it might be another matter, but the danger now is, not that men may believe too much, but that that they may believe too little; that in due time scepticism, which has demolished all religions and fatally discredited the divine religion of poetry itself, may turn the Temple of Mystery into a bear-garden or a beer garden, exchange the language of literature for the argot of the cheap press, and Americanize even the sentiment of humanity. "I beg to remind honorable gentlemen," said Benjamin Disraeli, on a memorable occasion, "that we owe much to the Jews." I beg to remind the Colonel Ingersolls and Mark Twains of that continent that we owe much to the gods, without whom.

The world would smell like what it is-a tomb.

But for them, Europe would have been Americanized long ago, but for them, Europe would have arrived centuries since at the blessed era of presidential elections, colossal public swindles, races for money bags and the torturing rack of the interviewer, and the inquisition of the newspaper. -ROBERT BUCHANAN IN A Look Round Literature

SONNET TO MR. HAGGARD.

Not in the waste beyond the swamp and sand,
The fever-haunted forest and lagoon,
Mysterious Ker, thy fanes forsaken stand,

With lonely towers beneath the lonely Moon!
Not there doth Ayesha linger,-rune by rune
Spelling the scriptures of a people banned,-
The world is disenchanted! Oversoon

Shall Europe send her spies through all the land! Nay, not in Kor, but in whatever spot,

In fields, or towns, or by the unsatiate sea, Hearts brood o'er buried Loves and unforgot Or wreck themselves on some divine decree, Or would o'er-leap the limits of our lot, There in the Tombs and deathless, dwelleth SHE! -Dedication in He.

A CYNIC ON SOCIETY.

"And those scented notes," queried Harleston, glancing at a marquetried table on which a number lay scattered, "will then only win regrets?" "Regrets!" said Aylmer, with an amused look; "not in the sense that I understand the word Let me read you one," he added, as he went to the table and made a chance selection. 'Mrs. Kilian Van Dam requests the pleasure of your company very informally on Tuesday evening next, at eight o'clock.' Pretty and complimentary, is it not? Carrying impliedly the kindest remembrances of the sender, but in reality little more than the perfume that still lingers about it. You smile at my assertion. Wait a moment. I have repeated the note as written, let me read it between the lines. Thus interpreted, it runs: Mrs. Kilian Van Dam will derive little if any personal pleasure from your acceptance. However, you are unsophisticated enough to go. The house is packed to suffocation and the heat intolerable. After a gushing welcome from the hostess, followed by a narrow escape from her daughters, who are bent on the capture of every stray man, you push and wedge through the swarming crowd composed of matrons dressed with the extravagance of queens, and men who either stand around like lonely sentinels, or else collect in little groups and talk over that never failing topic, business. When you peep into the ball room you find an assemblage composed of interesting young idiots who bang their hair and delight in giving feebly ludicrous imitations of the English swells, and girls who at the age of sixteen have lost all their girlish freshness and handle their love affairs with the savoir faire of a woman of thirty. It makes no difference that the house only holds three hundred, the enjoyment is proportioned to the jam; and a brief allusion in the morning papers to the brilliant gathering repays for three hours of slow asphyxiation.--Two Gentlemen of Gotham.

E. P. Jackson, a teacher in the Boston Latin School, it is said, is the author of A Demigod.

It is said that Oliver Wendell Holmes intends to give readings from his unpublished writings. A new play adapted from the popular novel As in a Looking Glass will be shortly produced.

Miss Iza Duffus-Hardy's new novel is The Girl He Did Not Marry. Probably this a companion picture to "The Girl I Left Behind Me."

Professor Edw. A. Freeman has been obliged by ill health, the result of overwork, to obtain leave of absence from Oxford, for a time.

George Ohnet's Noir et Rose has been translated into English under the title Cloud and Sunshine.

Henry Stanley, it is understood, before setting out on his expedition to relieve Emin Pasha, made arrangements for publishing a book describing his adventures.

M. Mace, formerly chief of the police detectives of Paris, has published a remarkable book, called Un Joli Monde, in which he describes in a style worthy of Eugene Sue or Gaboriau, the vices of modern society.

Arminius Vambéry, the well known writer on politics and life in Russia and Turkey, is preparing a series of lectures on Russia and England in Central Asia, for delivery in the chief cities of Great Britain.

Prof. Henry Morley expects that his History of English Literature when completed will fill twenty volumes. It is likely to be completed in the near future. Twenty years have now elapsed since the work was undertaken.

George W. Cable, the novelist, is the originator of the home culture clubs, a new method of stimulating literary and scientific study among his neighbors at Northampton, Mass., which has proven a great success there, and the example might be followed with profit in other places.

The best romance that has been published in Peru for years is Tradiciones Cuzqueñas which is just now the popular success. The writer is Señora Clorenda Matta de Turner, wife of an Englishman, resident in Lima.

One of the really good sober books of the month is marred by an undignified attempt at a triple pun: "In an August day there is nothing particularly august even if it ends in a gust." Why do authors sacrifice themselves in trifling struggles with humor?

Miss Marietta Holley, better known as "Josiah Allen's Wife," and author of Betsy Bobbitt and Samantha at the Centennial, will publish in the spring a book caricaturing the fashions, flirtations, poodle dogs and other characteristics of Saratoga Springs.

Dr. J. C. Street, of Boston, has written The Hidden Way Across the Threshold, a work treating occult energies; of God as a fountain of infinite and eternal energy, of theosophy, of esoteric Buddhism, modern spiritism and other current isms.

Mrs. Harriet Taylor-Upton, daughter of Hon. Elijah Taylor, of the House, has been engaged in Washington for some months upon an important historical series for Wide-Awake, entitled The Children of the White House, to be fully illustrated from original sources.

The Pall Mall Gazette says it is the intention of some of the English friends of Walt Whitman to procure from a number of English authors and critics some short signed articles upon his work and its literary significance, and to collect them into a volume, the proceeds of the sale of which will be given to the poet.

Ignatius Donnelly, denies vehemently that his famous Shakespeare-Bacon cipher has failed, and he is now hard at work upon his book devoted to the subject. "I propose to stick to my book," he says, "until I put it in the hands of the printer, and I hope to do that by July. The world will never cease to be astonished, not at my book, but at its marvelous revelations."

Tolstoi has written a play Le Pouvoir des Ténèbres or L'oiseau est perdu quand il a une patte engluée, to be presented in St. Petersburg after Easter. It is morbid, brutal and disgustingly immoral. Even if Russian peasantry can have sunk to a level to make this picture possible, Tolstoi could have better employed his time than in flaunting it in a dramatic presentation which can do no good in any respect. The only thing to be thankful for is that it is so destitute of dramatic effect as to make its failure a foregone conclusion.

A collection of fifty short stories by popular English novelists is to be issued as a souvenir of the Jubilee season.

A comic opera by W. D. Howells, A Sea Change; or, Love's Stowaway, will be published by Ticknor and Co.

A selection of the most striking stories of the late Philip Bourke Marston is being prepared in London, under the title A Song's Sake.

The Century's war articles are parodied in Geo. W. Peck's latest struggle How Private Geo. W. Peck Put Down the Rebellion.

M. de Lesseps is about to bring out his memoirs in a couple of volumes, under the title Souvenirs de Quarante Ans.

G. Eugene Simon, formerly French Consul in China, has written an account of the social life of that country under the title Chinese Society.

Mr. C. Stansfield-Hicks has just completed a work on Yachts, Boats and Canoes, with special reference to their design and construction. Sampson, Low & Co. will publish it.

The essays on Goethe, read before the Milwaukee Literary School last August, are soon to be published under the title Poetry and Philosophy of Goethe, edited by Marion V. Dudley.

Cassell & Co. will shortly publish The Dictionary of Religion, an encyclopædia of doctrine, sects, heresies, ecclesiastical terms, history, biography, etc., edited by the Rev. Dr. Benham.

Prof. Paolo Zineada is preparing a Bibliografia Generale Italiana which will describe the national literature of the present century, down to the most recent times.