Does Writing Pay? In a letter written shortly before his death the late Mr. James Parton gave this experienced view of the financial side of authorship: "An industrious writer, by the legitimate exercise of his calling (that is, never writing advertisements or trash for the sake of pay), can just exist, no more; by a compromise, not dishonorable, although exasperating, he can average during his best years $7,000 to $8,000 a year; but no man should enter the literary life unless he has a fortune or can live contentedly on $2,000 a year; the best way is to make a fortune first and write afterward.".

(Current Literature.)

English as She is Pronounced in India.In the pronunciation of English by the people of South India "every" becomes "yevery," and "over," "wover." One of the best illustrations of this peculiarity I have heard was mentioned to me by some members of my family. As they were traveling along a road in Tinnevelly, they passed a finger-post at a cross-road, on which the name of a place was inscribed in English. They did not catch the name as they passed, and therefore sent back a native girl to find it out for them. The girl knew very little English, and on her return said she could not make out the name, but could repeat the letters. "What were they?" Answer: "Yen, yeh, yell, yelle, woe, woe, war!" These dreadful sounds represented the name "Nalloor.' Bishop Caldwell, Dravidian GramILDERIM.

mar, p. 4.

Unlucky Days of the Year.-In Grafton's manual of his Chronicles 1565, the unlucky days, according to the opinions of the astronomers, are named as follows: January 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 15, 17 and 20 are unlucky; February 26, 27 and 28 unlucky, 8, 10 and 17 very unlucky; March 16, 17 and 20 very unlucky; April 7, 8, 10 and 20 unlucky; May 3 and 6 unlucky, 7, 15 and 20 very unlucky; June 10 and 22 unlucky, 6 and 8 very unlucky; August 29 and 30 unlucky, 19 and 20 very unlucky; September 3, 4, 21 and 23 unlucky, 6 and 7 very unlucky; October 4, 16 and 24 unlucky, 6 very unlucky; November 5, 6, 29 and 30 unlucky, 15 and 20 very unlucky; December 15 and 22 unlucky, 6, 7 and 9 very unlucky. (Pittsburg Dispatch.)

Oddities of the British Constitution.-A London paper informs me that, in the eye of English law, a Scotsman, domiciled in England, is a foreigner. That is the decision of the Lord Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Wright. Also, it appears from their judgment in Grant v. Anderson that a Scotsman does not acquire a domicile in England by having a business representative and a warehouse in London. In effect, therefore, a Scotsman is, as one of the counsel in the case pointed out, "even more of a foreigner in England than a Frenchman is, since he has more protection against being sued outside the jurisdiction of his own courts."

NATU SCOTUS.

"Christmas" in Shakespeare (Vol. viii, p. 88). Your correspondent "A. D. E.," has missed the most beautiful of Shakespeare's allusion to Christmas-that in Hamlet, i. 1. 158-164:

"Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes, Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all the night long : And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.' W. J. R. [We understood our correspondent A. D. E. to refer to the ED. AM. N. AND Q.]

only three occurrences of the word "Christmas" in Shake

speare.

Pillars of the Church.-(Vol. v, p. 103. etc.) "The archbishop is said to be the chiefest pillar and undersetter of the church," said Abp. Whitgift. AMICUS.

New Light on Bunker Hill.-"History as she is wrote" receives a valuable addition from the pen of a British female bookmaker, who says of her visit to Boston, "We went up to Bunker Hill, where is a ridiculously ugly monument in honor of the victory gained by the Yankees over the English.' Hitherto it has been the general impression that after a gallant defense the "Yankees" retreated. (Harrisburg Cali.)

Our good friend, The Harrisburg Call, may be interested with the following extract from "The Book of English History," by the Rev. R. J. Griffiths, B. A., LL. B., St. John's, Cambridge: Whewell University Scholar, etc., pp. 117–118.

In 1775 the American War of Independence commenced. Washington was appointed Commander-in-chief of the "United Colonies," and a Declaration of Independence was adopted at Philadelphia in 1776. The principal battles were:

feet.

One of these novel abodes is at a height of eighty feet above the ground, while the home of a neighboring one is forty feet higher. Each house is reached by a ladder made of some creeping vine, which is suspended from one of the door posts, and can be drawn up when it is desired. Each house is large enough to contain ten or twelve persons, together with ammunition for a long siege.

Such lofty habitations are only occupied in time of war, at night, or when danger is expected. At other times the more convenient and accessible huts on the ground are preferred. J. VAN D.

NEW YORK CITY.

Men Who Wear Small Hats.-I never saw an earnest worker, or a man who had real and serious duties to perform, who wore a hat too small for him.

Many great lawyers and statesmen, cranky but shrewd speculators, popular preachers, and history, making generals and editors wear hats too large for them-sometimes so large that they act as extinguishers and are stopped in their downward course only by the projection of the ears; but I never saw one who wore a hat too small, perched upon the

top of his head. Indeed, I might assert as a positive and invariable fact that, save in cases of dire necessity, such as shipwrecks or utter and hopeless poverty, the man who wears a hat too small for him is a silly, frivolous, conceited creature, with no serious ideas on any subject, and only the most flippant and shallow views of life and its obligations. Even among tramps and vagabonds, the fellow with the "dinky" derby balanced upon his mop of unkempt hair, is the most hopeless wreck among his class; while there is always a gleam of intelligence, a spark of hope, in the tramp whose hat is too large for him. (Kate Field's Washington.)

Epitaphs (Vol. viii, p. 82, etc.). A Welsh Epitaph.-Here lies in a horizontal position the outside case of George Rutleigh, watchmaker, whose abilities in that line were an honor to his profession. Integrity was the mainspring and prudence the regulator of all the actions of his life. Humane, honest, industrious, his hands never stopped until they had relieved distress. He had the art he never went wrong except when set a-going of disposing of his time in such a way that by persons who did not know his key, and even then was easily set right again. He departed this life November, 7, 1811, wound up in the hope of being taken in hand by his Maker, thoroughly cleaned, regulated, and repaired, and set a-going in the world to (Current Literature.)

come.

Fort

The Largest Artesian Well.-The drillers engaged in sinking a well for the Natatorium at Fort Worth, Tex., struck a flow of water which excels that of any artesian well known. The flow is six hundred gallons per minute and is as clear as crystal. The well is 1,052 feet deep, with a ten inch bore at the top, tapering to five inches at the bottom. Worth can now boast of the largest flowing well in existence, the largest hitherto known being at Bourne, Lincolnshire, England, which discharges a half-million gallons daily. At Aire, in the province of Artois, France, from which province is derived the name of artesian wells, there is a well from which the water has continued to flow for more than a century, and at the old Carthusian convent at Lillers there is another which dates from the twelfth century.

(Boston Transcript.)

A Tree that Foretells Rain.-The journal Ciel et Terre, recently called attention to a remarkable property of the Fontainebleau service-tree (Sorbus latifolia). The leaves, which are green above and white bclow, turn so as to present the white under surface to the sky just before rain. When the tree turns white it is a certain indication of rain. This vegetable barometer is easily procured and is, moreover, a highly ornamental tree. (Portland Transcript).

The Sounds of Color.-A beam of sunlight is made to pass through a prism, so as to produce the solar spectrum or rainbow. A disk, naving slits or openings in it, is made to revolve, and the colored light of the rainbow is made to break through it and fall on silk, wool or other material in a glass vessel. As the colored light falls upon it, sounds will be given by the different parts of the spectrum, and there will be silence in other parts. If the vessel contains red worsted and the green light flashes upon it, loud sounds will be given. Only feeble sounds will be heard when the red and blue parts of the rainbow fall upon the vessel. (Electrical Review.)

ED. AM. N. AND Q.

How Names Grow (Vol. viii, p. 69, etc.)IHPETONGA. RETURN JONATHAN MEIGS.I am not sure but "How names degenerate" would be a better heading to my first clipping, which I take from the Star, this city. "I have heard 'Ihpetonga' [see Vol. viii, P. 79] which Brooklyn's Four Hundred have adopted as the title of one of their most select associations, claimed as Greek, also Indian. I learn from Simeon B. Chittenden that it comes from the vocabulary of the now defunct Long Island Indians. "Ihpetonga," he tells me, "is Indian for It therefore applies to the a 'sandy cliff.' Brooklyn heights, and has been selected by

a number of the residents of that section as the name for one of its most prosperous social organizations, whose main object is to give a ball once a year."

pass the Sunday near the lady at "meeting." On the last visit, as he slowly mounted his horse to ride away, the sight of his dejected face touched the young lady, and, lifting her hand, she beckoned to him, crying, "Return, Jonathan." The phrase was adopted as a Christian name in the family that sprang from the subsequent union, and a man named "Return Jonathan Meigs" has just died in Washington. M. O'N. NEW YORK CITY.

The Squaring of the Circle.-There is a record of an attempted quadrature in Egypt 500 years before the exodus of the Jews. There is also a laim, according to Hone, that the problem was solved by a discovery of Hippocrates, the geometrician of Chios-not the physician---500 B. C. Now, the efforts of Hippocrates were devoted toward converting a circle into a crescent, because he had found that the area of a figure produced by drawing two perpendicular radii in a circle is exactly equal to the triangle formed by the line of junction. This is the famous theorem of the "lunes of Hippocrates."

The oldest mathematical book in the world, the "Papyrus Rhind" in the British Museum, professed to have been written by Ahmes, a scribe of King Ra-a-us, about the period between 2,000 and 1,700 B. C., was translated by Eisenlohr of Leipsic a few years ago, and it was found to contain a rule for making a square equal in area to a given circle. This was put forth as the transcript of a treatise 500 years older still, which sends us back to, approximately, 2,500 B. C., when Egyptian mathematicians solved, or thought they had solved, the problem of squaring the circle.

The rule given by Ahmes requires that the diameter of a circle shall be shortened by one-ninth, and a square erected upon this shortened line.

The Babylonians, who were also great mathematicians, had a solution, to which a reference in the Talmud has been traced. The Babylonian method, however, was not a quadrature, but a rectification of the circumference. (All the Year Round.)

Horn Mad. (Vol. viii, p. 83.) "They can preach no doctrine but sack and red noses. As for the wild-man, they have made him (Thomas Randolph, K.

advancing with a golden sickle in on hand, and the sacred branch born uplifted in the other. (See Description Plate in Burnet's Turner).

The relations of mistletoe to primitive religions is best illustrated by the Druidical worship. The Gaelic veneration for the oak was only surpassed by that entertained for the mystic plant, as Cowley again, says,

"With more religion Druid priests invoke Thee, than thy sacred, sturdy sire, the oak." Chéruel's description of the ceremony of gathering the guide chene, is as follows: "The oak mistletoe was a plant held sacred by the Druids. They used to proceed in great state to gather it on the sixth day, or rather the night of the sixth moon after the winter solstice, when their year began. This night they called nuit mére. The chief of the Druids cut the mistletoe with a sickle of gold; the other Druids arrayed in white tunics received it in a golden basin, which they displayed to the worship of the crowd, immediately afterward. As the greatest virtues were attributed to the gui, among others, wonderful healing properties, they put it in water and distributed the lustral fluid among those who desired it, as a preventive, and cure of all kinds of disease. The water was believed to be a sovereign remedy for witchcraft and sorcery." (Dict. Instit., Moeurs et Coutumes de la France, 1855.)

It is a relief to turn from the mystery, the gloom, the tragedy and the religious awe which gather around the golden bough, to its mirth-provoking survival at Christmastide, even in our own time.

"And forth to the wood did merry men go
To gather in the mistletoe,"

says Sir Walter in his lines on the English Christmas of the olden time. (Marmion, Introd. Canto vi). But although writing at the beginning of our century (1808) of usages then nearly obsolete, he says also:

"Still linger in our northern clime
Some remnants of the good old time."

One quarter of a century later a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, notes the survival of the mistletoe at Christmas:

"In the humble laborer's cottage the mystic mistletoe has its share of attraction, frequently being suspended from the ceiling, in a large cluster of boughs, rich in green

"But why may we kiss unreproved beneath the mistletoe?" asks a writer in The Cornhill of December, 1891, who, seeking a mystical interpretation of the custom, casts out a hint toward an explanation to this effect: "In many primitive tribes when the king or chief dies, there ensues a wild period of license, an orgy of an anarchy, till a new king is chosen and consecrated. During the interreguum of terror and misrule, when every one does what he believes right in his there are no laws and no lawgivers. But as own eyes, everything is lawful, or rather soon as a new ruler comes to his own, the community resumes its wonted respect for order and decency. Now is it not probable, that the mid-winter orgy is due to the cutting of the mistletoe or golden bough, and perhaps even to the killing of 'Rex Nemorensis,' 'King of the Woodland,' along with it! Till the new mistletoe grows are not all things permissible? Is not kissing under its påle yellowish leaves and white berries a dim memory of the wild orgy of licence which succeeded the overthrow of many gods or priests ?"

Robert Herrick's metaphorical use of mistletoe is, perhaps, the most interesting reference to the plant in English verse:

ANIMAL NAMES IN GEOGRAPHY.

(VOL. VIII, p. 52. UNDER CRAB ISLAND),

On our New England coast I find islands and rocks named Bald Porcupine, Bantam, Bass, Bear, Bird, Black-snake, (Ledge), Brant, Buck's, Buffalo, (Ledge) Bull-dog, Calf, Cat, Catfish, Clam, Cod, Colt, Coney, Coot, Cow, Crab, Crane, Crow, Deer, Dog, Dolphin, Duck, Eagle, Ewe, Fish, Fish-hawk, Flye, Fox, Gannet, Goat, Goose, Goslings,