We have not any new kind of olives, but a new way of preparing them for use, that is, slicing them before they are bottled. Instead of paying for a lot of stones and serving the olives whole, now one may buy them all cut in rings, very pretty for garnishing dishes, very handy to help oneself to instead of a cold, slippery oval object sure to roll away unless very securely prodded with an olive fork; and it is very much more easily and gracefully eaten, since a ring may be severed, whereas a whole olive had to be lifted to the lips and nibbled, and then the stone discarded as deftly as possible. It is a wonder we have not had stoned olives before, since comparatively few have a chef at hand to stone them neatly, nor a cooking school teacher to impart the information. To be sure stuffed olives, the heart of pimentoes or celery, have been fads of fashion, but not everyone likes these combinations.

The dark, purple-red, ripe olives are softer in texture and much esteemed for the table as more easy of digestion than the green; in fact, they are given freely to children, who do not always chew their food properly, and to older folk who have not the best of grinders with which to divide the firm green olives into minute particles.

A blessing, indeed, in these rushing days is the sliced olive, a very handy adjunct to the salad garnishing, and eleventh hour entertaining, whether a mid-day luncheon or a mid-night supper.

In torrid heats of late July,
In March, beneath the bitter bise,
He book-hunts while the loungers fly–
He book-hunts, though December freeze;
In breeches baggy at the knees,
And heedless of the public jeers,
For these, for these, he hoards his fees–
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!

No dismal stall escapes his eye,
He turns o’er tomes of low degrees,
There soiled romanticists may lie,
Or Restoration comedies;
Each tract that flutters in the breeze
For him is charged with hopes and fears,
In mouldy novels fancy sees
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.

With restless eyes that peer and spy,
Sad eyes that heed not skies nor trees,
In dismal nooks he loves to pry,
Whose motto ever more is Spes!
But ah! the fabled treaure flees;
Grown rarer with the fleeting years,
In rich men’s shelves they take their ease,–
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!

ENVOY

Prince, all the things that tease and please,–
Fame, hope, wealth, kisses, cheers, and tears,
What are they but such toys as these–
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs?

Andrew Lang, in “Ballades and Verses Vain.”

[“The descendants of man will nourish themselves by immersion in nutritive fluid. They will have enormous brains, liquid, soulful eyes, and large hands, on which they will hop. No craggy nose will they have, no vestigial ears; their mouths will be a small, perfectly round aperture, unanimal, like the evening star. Their whole muscular system will be shrivelled to nothing, a dangling pendant to their minds.”—Pall Mall Gazette, abridged.]

What, a million years hence, will become of the Genus

Humanum, is truly a question vexed;

At that epoch, however, one prophet has seen us

Resemble the sketch annexed.

For as Man undergoes Evolution ruthless,

His skull will grow “dome-like, bald, terete”;

And his mouth will be jawless, gumless, toothless—

No more will he drink or eat!

He will soak in a crystalline bath of pepsine,

(no Robert will then have survived, to wait,)

And he’ll hop on his hands as his food he steps in—

A quasi-cherubic gait!

No longer the land or the sea he’ll furrow;

The world will be withered, ice-cold, dead

As the chill of eternity grows, he’ll burrow

Far down underground instead.

If the Pall Mall Gazette has thus been giving

A forecast correct of this change immense,

Our stars we may thank, then, that we shan’t be living

A million years from hence!

showing

Including a Treatise of the Etiquette of Marriage: describing the Invitations, the Dresses, the Ceremony, and the proper behavior of both Bride and Bridegroom, whether in Public or behind the Nuptial Curtain.

• It also tells plainly how to begin courting.
• The way to get over bashfulness.
• The way to “sit up.”
• The way to find the soft spot in a sweetheart’s breast.
• The way to write a love letter.
• The way to easily win a girl’s consent.
• The way to pop the question to her.
• The way “to do up things” before and after an engagement.
• The way to receive and the way to decline an offer.
• The way to “give the mitten” genteely.
• The way to make yourself agreeable during an engagement.
• The way Bridesmaids and Groomsmen should dress and perform their duties.
• The way you should act and the things you should do at a Wedding and at Wedding Receptions.
• The furniture, decorations and behavior in the Bridal Chamber.
• The way to make Wife and Husband “real happy.”

This is just the book that has long been wanted. It speaks in plain, honest words, revealing knowledge that everybody ought to know, upon subjects of as vital import to all as the very air we breathe. Neither those already married nor those contemplating the tying of the connubial knot, can afford to be another day with a knowledge of the

that are so truthfully and vividly explained in this work. It is just the very treatise to be in the hands of

In fact, there is not a lady or gentleman in the world–young or old, single or married–who cannot glean a vast amount of useful information that will enlighten them on all points of Courtship and Marriage, as well as their ancillary duties, pleasures and obligations.

This is the most complete, and by far the most valuable work that has ever been brought out on this all-important subject. We beg of you, therefore, not to confound it with any of the worthless books heretofore issued, but remember the title and obtain “The Real Secret Art and Philosophy of Wooing, Winning and Wedding.”

Four quarts chopped cabbage, two quarts green tomatoes chopped, one quart onions, one pint of peppers, four tablespoons of mustard, two tablespoons ginger ground, two tablespoons cloves, one tablespoon tumeric, one tablespoon celery seed, two pounds of sugar, handful salt, four quarts vinegar and boil one hour.–Mrs. J. Turrill.

“He that has money in the scales,” says Saádí, “has strength in his arms, and he who has not the command of money is destitute of friends in the world.”—Hundreds of similar sarcastic observations on the power of wealth might be cited from the Hindú writers, such as: “He who has riches has friends; he who has riches has relations; he who has riches is even a sage!” The following verses in praise of money are, I think, worth reproducing, if only for their whimsical arrangement:

à Paris Chez Janet, Libraire et Marchand de Musique
Rue St. Jacques No. 59

circa 1810

We group under this heading a pile of leaves that seem, as they lie upon
the desk, to be constantly quivering with horror lest some form of tobacco
might be used in their vicinity. We are quite safe critics in this respect,
as the weed does not flatter and tone down feelings of the highest propriety,
and we write at a pinch, but not in consequence of one. Perhaps it would
be presumptuous to hint that we ruminate only “the cud of sweet and bitter fancies.” There was a period in our college career — if considerable
careering may be thus strictly designated — when a cloud seemed to us, as
to Ixion, loveable: but, profiting by the disappointments of that unenlightened heathen who did not appear to smoke his error, we tried to learn
to blow our own cloud. How we used to recline, with eyes half shut in a
surmise of pleasure, to wink out of consciousness our one-armed and stiff-runged family rocking-chair, and a much stiffer exercise of differential calculus: for in those days we could not ride to the pure mathematics on a pony or with a coach; and the only “joker” we knew was the instructor who
pretended that calculus was learnable. But our efforts at narcotizing the
entire absence of cushions to our chair and rank to our course, were always
closed suddenly by searing the lips or extinguishing the right eye: we
could never learn to shift our cigar along the “hedge of the teeth” with
that Olympic abandon of the born smoker; it had to be held with great circumspection, the drift of the curls to be narrowly watched, all talk suspended on pain of choking, all thought centred upon each judicious whiff.
We remember faintly that occasionally our delicious repose was marred
by a revulsion of feeling that expected to find something timely in the
closet: that day we smoked no more, nor read, for that matter, either. On
the whole, we never fought our way through the jungly belt of Terai up to
the cloud-land where your predestined smoker lies pillowed upon his fatuity, “careless of mankind.” Indeed, it became with us a question whether the
pituitary glands would continue to moisten Mrs. Scrimpflint’s otherwise
unboltable rations, or whether we should grow up capable of spitting upon
any politics or theology we might despise.

We are ready, therefore, to take high ground upon the matter of tobacco,
and to declare its essential incompatibility with the moral sense. Here we have “an appeal to Lord Renfrew, the Prince of Wales, on the
pernicious eiiects ot his cigar and pipe.” He is addressed as “a prospective monarch,” whose “likeness is among us in daguerreotypes by thousands:” he is told that his habit may not only disable him, but, through
him, future kings on his throne, — “we desire no extinction of this royal
line” — drop therefore “your meerschaum and its affinities.” If we knew
what effect this appeal has had upon the Prince, we should feel more competent to recommend the series of papers to untitled smokers.

Wood-cuts are also pressed into the service of Mr. Trask’s crusade.
Here is a picture of a “boy who first smoked a paper cigar, then a grape-vine, then the real article,” — favored child, in these days of oak-leaves and
fillings: he is confessing at his mother’s knee, but he does not look haggard enough to satisfy our own vindictive recollections of the vice.

Here are “Twenty Reasons why ministers of the everlasting gospel
should not use Tobacco.” And we are told that “dying saints, well nigh
suffocated with the poisonous odor, have, with trembling hands, waved
pastors from their bedsides.” Alas, Mr. Trask, if dying saints would only
wave from their bedsides the suffocating doctrines that their pastors bring,
we should be inclined to waive the matter of a smoke whose torment does
not ascend forever and ever.

Well might a saint say to his pastor,—

“O, search beyond this earth — search regions of the blest;
Can ye not find some place where we unsmoked may rest?”

But clergymen are warned upon one point of considerable importance.
”Many tobacco-users fall dead suddenly. You may fall dead in your pulpits. Some preachers have.” Yes, how many, and they stay stone-dead,
not knowing it, but without having used tobacco! It occurs to us to ask
whether in such cases the use of tobacco might not act, as ammoniacal
salts, or burnt feathers, and wake the preacher from his deathly swoon. It
would be certainly legitimate to try a post-mortem experiment of this
nature. Several kinds of Siberian and Flat-head wizards prophesy under
fumigation. Let it be tried, as a last resort before sepulture, wherever
there is a pulpit whose recumbent has ceased to breathe the breath of
life. Goethe has a verse, in his West-Easterly Divan, that hints how the
original process of informing bodies with souls, might be cheaply imitated
by us with a pinch of snuff alone:

“The Elohim into his nose
With best of spirit breezing,
Some sign of life the creature shows
By hearty fit of sneezing.”

The subject is however too grave for jesting. Wherever under the present condition of the clerical profession, we could find a live minister, we
should be tempted, notwithstanding our old grudge at honest smokers, to
attribute some etherial influence to his cigar.

But let us not be misunderstood. We like clean and healthy ways. And
we like to see a tract upon some pernicious habit written without cant and
coarseness, so that laughter might not come in to half betray the cause.
These little papers are too evangelical for us, and are pitched to the senses
which cannot appreciate “the real article” of tobacco or theology. What
benefit, for instance, will the Republic reap from such a verse as this,
thrust into the hand on every railroad, and proffered at the street-corners?

“The jaws then give a flirt,
The tongue, too, takes a tuck;
The pucker lets a squirt,
That drains it of the truck.”

      J. W.