THE ASSEMBLY CALENDAR. CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK—July1-August BAY VIEW, PETOSKEY, MICHIGAN-July 15- BLACK HILLS, DAKOTA-August 11-August 26. Recognition Day, August 26. NIA August 7-August II. Recognition MOUNTAIN LAKE PARK, MARYLAND-August 4- BLUFF PARK, IOWA-July 16-July 27. Recogni- NEW ENGLAND, FRYEBURG, MAINE-July 28 tion Day, July 24. CHESTER, ILLINOIS-July 3-July 20. CLARION, REYNOLDSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA- COLFAX, IOWA-July 4-July 17. Recognition COUNCIL BLuffs and OmAHA, IOWA-July 2- GLEN ECHO, WASHINGTON, D. C.-June 16– ISLAND PARK, ROME CITY, INDIANA-July 29- July 13. Recognition Day, July 11. MONTEAGLE, TENNESSEE June 30-August 26. Recognition Day, August II. MOUNTAIN GROVE, BERWICK, PENNSYLVA August 15. Recognition Day, August 11. NEW RICHMOND, OHIO-July 21-August 5. Recognition Day, August 5. OCEAN CITY, NEW JERSEY—August 6–August 7. OCEAN PARK, MAINE-July 21-August 1. Recognition Day, July 30. OTTAWA, KANSAS—June 16-June 26. Recog. nition Day, June 24. OXFORD, ENGLAND Second Session, July and August. PACIFIC GROVE, San José, CALIFORNIA-June PUGET SOUND, WASHINGTON-July 15-August SAN MARCOS, TEXAS-June 24-July 22. Recognition Day, July 16. SEASIDE, KEY EAST, NEW JERSEY-July 6 August 28. Recognition Day, August 27. SILVER LAKE, NEW YORK-July 7–August 6. Recognition Day, July 16. WARSAW, INDIANA—July 15-August 13. Recognition Day, July 27. WASECA, MINNESOTA-July 1-July 22. Recog nition Day, July 21. WEIRS, NEW HAMPSHIRE-July 20-July 24. Recognition Day, July 23. WILLIAMS GROVE, NEAR HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA-July 15-July 24. Recognition Day, July 22. WINFIELD, KANSAS-June 23-July 3. Recognition Day, June 30. THE LIBRARY TABLE. "GOOD ENOUGH TO PRINT." I REALLY believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the other day to one who was talking good things,— good enough to print? "Why," said he, "you are wasting merchantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour." The talker took him to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw. "Nothing but a very dusty street," he said, "and a man driving a sprinkling wagon through it." "Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our thoughtsprinklers through them with the valve open, sometimes?" "Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget. It shapes our thoughts for us;-the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic,you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily, when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like it for modeling. Out of it come the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write such. Or, to use another illustration, writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it;-but talking is like playing with the pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can't help hitting it." " The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, fust-rate.' I acknowledged the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression, "fust-rate," "prime," " a prime article," 99.66 a superior piece of goods," "a handsome garment," "a gent in a flowered vest,”. all such expressions are final. They blast the lineage of him or her who utters them, for generations up and down. There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man's social status, if it is not already: “That tells the whole story." It is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from them. It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous question in the General Court. Only it doesn't; simply because "that" does not usually tell the whole, nor one half of the whole story.-" The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." THE MANNERS OF TWO NATIONS. CODES of manner have a very restricted rule. They are national, and in the nation each class has its own code. If, therefore, one nation judges another by its own standard, it is evident that abstract justice must be impossible; yet it is difficult to find any other criterion. The reader may try to find some criterion outside of national peculiarities, but he will certainly meet with this difficulty, that although people of different nations might be induced to agree about some virtue that manners ought to have, they are not likely to agree about its practical application and expression. For example, let us take the virtue of courtesy. Are people to be courteous or discourteous? We should find an almost universal agreement on the general principle that courtesy is a part of good manners; but we should disagree on the application of it. The great difficulty in judging such a question as this is that we require to have been long accustomed to manners of a peculiar kind before we can estimate them at their precise significance. If they are new to us, we do not understand them, we are not able to read the thoughts and intentions which express themselves in forms as in a sort of language. The words used in epistolatory forms are the most familiar example of the second meaning, the only true meaning there is in forms of any kind. If a superior in rank subscribes himself my obedient servant, I know that his meaning is as remote as possible from the dictionary sense of the words. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to suppose that the words, as he uses them, are meaningless. Such a form, in English, is intended to convey the idea of distance without contempt. It is as much as to say, in familiar English, "I don't know you and don't care to know you; but I have no desire to be rude to you." The form Dear Sir, in English, has nothing to do with affection. It means, "I know very little of you; but wish to avoid the coldness of sir by itself." My dear Sir means something of this kind, "I remember meeting you in society." A literal translation of these forms into French would entirely fail to convey their significance. You must be on the most intimate terms with a Frenchman before he will venture to address you as Cher Monsieur. There is absolutely no form of address that translates the meanings of Dear Sir and My dear Sir. They can only be translated by Monsieur, which fails to differentiate them from Sir. The French forms in writing to ladies are still more severe. "How would you begin a letter to Madame L -?" I asked a French gentleman who is a model of accuracy in etiquette. "Well, in the first place, I should never presume to write to Madame L at all." "But if circumstances made it imperative that you should write to her?" "In that case I should address her as Madame simply, and at the close of the letter beg her to accept mes hommages respectueux." Perhaps the reader imagines that the lady was a distant acquaintance; no, she was the wife of a most intimate friend, and the two families met very frequently. In this case the point of interest is that the lady would have been addressed as a stranger from a want of flexibility in the French forms. There is a Frenchman who receives me with the utmost kindness and cordiality whenever I visit his neighborhood. We correspond occasionally, and his letters begin Monsieur just as if he had never seen me, ending with the expression of his sentiments respectueux. A very intimate friend in France will begin a letter with Mon cher Ami. I have only known three Frenchmen who used that form of address to myself. Two or three others would begin Cher Monsieur et Ami, mingling the formal with the affectionate. Englishmen hardly ever write My dear Friend; that is now an American form. The French tendency to be ceremonious is not confined to letter-writing. It comes upon French people in personal intercourse in a curiously occasional way. I remember a physician, now dead, who had excellent French manners of the old school. He talked with great ease and without the least affectation, but on all those little occasions when a Frenchman feels bound to be ceremonious he was so in the supreme degree. After talking quite easily and intimately with some lady whom he had known for many years, he would rise to take leave with graceful oldfashioned attitudes and phrases, as if she were far his superior in rank and he had spoken to her for the first time. It has happened to me to know rather intimately six or eight old French gentlemen who retained the manners which had come down from the eighteenth century. They evi dently took a pleasure, perhaps also some pride, in being able to go through forms of politeness gracefully, and without error. An Englishman would find it difficult to do that in equal perfection, his northern nature would not take quite so fine a polish. Even among French people, as manners become more democratic, these old forms are continually reduced.—Philip Gilbert Hamerton.* THE ARTIST'S SECRET. THERE was an artist once, and he painted a picture. Other artists had colors richer and rarer, and painted more notable pictures. He painted his with one color, there was a wondertul red glow on it; and the people went up and down, saying, "We like the picture, we like the glow." The other artists came and said, "Where does he get his color from?" They asked him, and he smiled and said, "I cannot tell you"; and worked on with his head bent low. And one went to the far East and bought costly pigments, and made a rare color and Another read in the old books, and made a painted, but after a time the picture faded. color rich and rare, but when he had put it on the picture it was dead. But the artist painted on. Always the work got redder and redder, and the artist grew whiter and whiter. At last one day they found him dead before his picture, and they took him up to bury him. The other men looked about in all the pots and crucibles, but they found nothing they had not. And when they undressed him to put his grave-clothes on him, they found above his left breast the mark of a wound-it was an old, old wound, that must have been there all his life, for the edges were old and hardened; but Death, who seals all things, had drawn the edges together, and closed it up. And they buried him. And still the people went about saying, "Where did he find his color from ?" And it came to pass that after a while the artist was forgotten-but the work lived.-Olive Schreiner.† AMIEL. HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL was born at Geneva in September, 1821. He belonged to one of the emigrant families, of which a more or less steady supply had enriched the little republic *French and English. A Comparison. Boston: Roberts Brothers, +Dreams. Boston: Roberts Brothers. during the three centuries following the Reformation. Amiel's ancestors, like those of Sismondi, left Languedoc for Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His father must have been a youth at the time when Geneva passed into the power of the French republic, and would seem to have married and settled in the halcyon days following the restoration of Genevese independence in 1814. Amiel was born when the prosperity of Geneva was at its height, when the little state was administered by men of European reputation. In 1833 Amiel, at twelve years old, was left orphaned of both his parents. They had died comparatively young-his mother was only just over thirty, and his father cannot have been much older. On the death of the mother the little family was broken up, the boy passing into the care of one relative, his two sisters into that of another. Certain notes in M. Scherer's possession throw a little light here and there upon a childhood and youth which must necessarily have been a little bare and forlorn. They show us a sensitive, impressionable boy, of health rather delicate than robust, already disposed to a more or less melancholy and dreamy view of life, and showing a deep interest in those religious problems and ideas in which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the days of Calvin. The religious teaching which a Genevese lad undergoes prior to his admission to full church membership, made a deep impression on him, and certain mystical elements of character, which remained strong in him to the end, showed themselves very early. At the collége or public school of Geneva, and at the Academié, he would seem to have done only moderately as far as prizes and honors were concerned. We are told, however, that he read enormously, and that he was, generally speaking, inclined rather to make friends with men older than himself than with his contemporaries. Amiel is full of contradictions and surprises, which are indeed one great source of his attractiveness. Had he only been the thinker, the critic, the idealist, he would never have touched our feelings as he now does; what makes him so interesting is that there was in him a fond of heredity, a temperament and disposition, which were perpetually reacting against the oppression of the intellect and its accumulations. In his hours of intellectual concentration he freed him self from all trammels of country or society, or even, as he insists, from all sense of personality But at other times he was the dutiful son of a country which he loved, taking a warm interest in every thing Genevese. J-Jun. His was not a nature to be generally appreciated at its true value. The motives which governed his life were too remote from the ordinary motives of human conduct, and his characteristics just those which have always excited the distrust, if not the scorn, of the more practical and vigorous order of minds. Probably there was a certain amount of self-consciousness and artificiality in his attitude towards the outer world, which was the result partly of the social difficulties we have described, partly of his own sense of difference from his surroundings, and partly again of that timidity of nature, that selfdistrust, which is revealed to us in the Journal. So that he was by no means generally popular, and the great success of the Journal is still a mystery to the majority of those who know him merely as a fellow-citizen and acquaintance. But his friends loved him and believed in him, and the reserved student, whose manners were thought affected in general society, could and did make himself delightful to those who understood him, or those who looked to him for affection. "According to my remembrance of him," writes M. Scherer, "he was bright, sociable, a charming companion. Others who knew him better and longer than I say the same. The mobility of his disposition counteracted his tendency to exaggerations of feeling. In spite of his fits of melancholy, his natural turn of mind was cheerful; up to the end he was young, a child even, amused by mere nothings; and whoever had heard him laugh his hearty student's laugh would have found it difficult to identify him with the author of so many somber pages." M. Rivier, his old pupil, remembers him as "strong and active, still handsome, delightful in conversation, ready to amuse and be amused." Indeed, if the photographs of him are to be trusted, there must have been something specially attractive in the sensitive, expressive face, with its lofty brow, fine eyes, and kindly mouth. It is the face of a poet rather than of a student and makes one understand certain other little points which his friends lay stress on,—for instance, his love for and popularity with children.*Abridged from Mrs. Humphrey Ward's Introduction to "Amiel's Journal." The perennial familiar blooming borders of those "old-fashioned flowers," as well as the more prosaic domain of our gardener's immediate concern, whose paths lead to the kitchen, wear a strange look at night, and seem peopled with foreign shapes. His "Limas" and scarlet runners now excite his wonder, if not solicitude, with their apparent drooping foliage, all the three leaflets nodding as if broken at their juncture with the stem, the two side leaflets in many instances touching their backs beneath the stem. But he will find them firm and self-willed in their attitude. His pea blossoms have taken in sail, and nod on their keels. The leaves of his young cabbage plant, usually more or less spreading, now stand quite erect, guarding that promising young head within, for this plebeian cabbage head knows a trick or two above its garden associates, and can get a blessing from the ambrosial ether in a bright, glistening sheen and a border of dewdrops, even on a cloudy night, when all his neighbors are athirst. The tobacco field over the wall looks bewitched and all on end, the plants simulating the conical shape they soon shall bear in the drying-house. The flowers on the potato plants, saucer-shaped by day, are now perchance nodding with their open rim puckered in gathers around the central stamens-a common caprice of these flowers, but dependent upon some whim which I have not yet solved. Turning to his "posies," our floriculturist may pick an exotic bouquet from his own familiar borders. His starry "bluebottles" have raised their horns and assumed the shape of a shuttlecock. His balsams wear a hang-dog look, with every leaf sharply declined. Certain of his coreopsis blossoms are turned vertically by a sharp bend at the summit of the stem. Many of his favorites, like the Eschscholtzia blossoms, have closed their eyes or perhaps hung their heads, and refuse to look him in the face while his climbing nasturtiums, especially if they should be of the dwarf variety (minus), await his coming in hushed expectancy, and their wall of sheeny shields flashes a "boo" at him out of the darkness, which immediately reveals the changed position of their foliage. Every individual shield is now seen to stand perpendicularly, the stem being bent in a sharp curve. In the midst of his surprise the flowers one by one now seem to steal into view, peering out here and there behind the leaves, and he will discern a grimace there that he never noted before. That bright bouquet upon his mantel will henceforth wear a new expression for him and a fresh identity. He will find himself ex changing winks thitherward now and then, and hover about the room among his friends in the proud consciousness of a certain preferment not vouchsafed to common mortals. The effect of such a bank of nasturtium leaves as the writer recently observed is irresistibly queer. So instinct with mischievous consciousness did it seem that he found himself entering into conversation at once, and laughed outright in the darkness. It has been supposed that this vertical position of the leaf was assumed to avoid the collection of dew, but this is obviously an error. There is no disposition in the nasturtium to avoid moisture, as would be apparent to any one who has watched the leaves during rain, catching and coddling the great dancing drop at its hollowed center, and loath to let it fall. Our midnight gardener has still further surprises in store for him among his plantations. Following the alluring fragrance of his melilot, he turns the rays of his lantern among its branches, and finds them full of nocturnal capers. The single leaflet of the melilot is threefold, like a clover, to which it is closely akin. At night these three leaflets twist edge uppermost on their stems, with the faces of the outer pair turned inward, while the end leaflet folds its face flat to one side or the other, to the cheek of its chosen chum for the night, and there they are, a dozy company in truth, yet not without a subtle suggestion that it may all be a subterfuge for the moment to cover some mischief or other. And here is another interesting specimen close by, a member of that same somniferous tribe-the blue lupine the "sad lupine" of Virgil (tristis lupinus). Just why Virgil should have attributed sadness to the lupine I believe has not been satisfactorily decided, although many learned pens and much printer's ink have been devoted toward a solution of the problem, one authority finding a last resource in his exasperation in the belief that the antique poet "stood in need for the meter of his verse of two long syllables which the word tristis supplied him with." The plant is certainly bright and cheery enough by day, and whatever its changed aspect by night, it is certainly not one of sadness. The blue flower-spikes rise up precisely as at midday, but the foliage presents a striking contrast, every wheel-shaped leaf now drooping like a closed parasol against the stem. The various lupines are full of individual whims in their choice of sleeping postures, some species raising their leaflets in the form of a beaker, and others following the bent of the nasturtium already described. Every corner of our garden offers |