mystic hour of twilight, just before "John comes home to tea;" and always have a bit of poetry in your columns for her who has so potent a voice in the choice of a family paper. I publicly promulgate this bit of wisdom, though I am very well aware that you will pass it off for your own, and neither credit me nor my book for it!

A word on a practice too common in some newspapers. I refer to the flippant manner in which the misfortunes and misdemeanors of certain classes, brought to the notice of our courts, are reported for the amusement of the community at large. Surely, it is melancholy enough that a drunken mother should be picked up in the gutter with her unconscious babe; or a young girl, scarcely in her teens, be found guilty of theft; or, that a husband and father should beat or murder her whom he had sworn to cherish, without narrating it after this heartless fashion. For instance:

Or thus:

Now, I protest against this disgusting, demoralizing, and heartless mention of the sins and follies of poor wretches, the temptations of whose lot are as the sands of the sea-shore for multitude; who, ill-paid, ill-fed, worse-lodged, disheartened, discouraged, fall victims to the snares, in the shape of low groggeries, set for them by the very men who laugh over their well-spread breakfast tables, at this pitiful and revolting recital of their success. Oh, write over against the poor wretch's name, as God does, why he or she fell! or at least cease making it the subject for a jeer. Make it your son, your daughter, and then pen that flippant, heartless paragraph if you can. And yet, it was somebody's son, or daughter, or sister, or husband, unworthy it may be, (who is not?) but alas! often forgiven, and still dearly loved, to whose home that paragraph may come like a poisoned arrow, wounding the innocent, paralyzing the hand which was powerless enough before to struggle with its hapless fate; for not on the guilty does such blight fall heaviest. The young boy—the toiling, unprotected daughter—the aged mother—ah! what if they were yours?

About Doctors.—We wish doctors could ever agree. One's head gets muddled, reading their books on health, by antagonistic opinions on the same subject, from eminent sources. Experience is an excellent doctor, though he never had a diploma. What is good for you, you know is good for you although it may not be good for another. There is one point on which doctors all agree, and that is, they very rarely give physic to their own families. Why not? A friend suggests that it is from sheer benevolence, in order that they may have more left for other people.

MY NOTION OF MUSIC.

I've been defending myself from the charge of "not knowing what music is." Perhaps I don't know. But when I go to a fashionable concert, and the lady "artiste," I believe that is the regulation-word, comes out in her best bib and tucker, with a gilt battle-axe in her back hair, and a sun-flower in her bosom, led by the tips of her white gloves, by the light of a gleaming bracelet, and stands there twiddling a sheet of music, preparatory to the initiatory scream, I feel like screaming myself. Now if she would just trot on, in her morning gown, darning a pair of stockings, and sit naturally down in her old rocking-chair, and give me "Auld Robin Gray," instead of running her voice up and down the scales for an hour to show me how high and how low she can go without dropping down in a fit, I'd like it. One trial of her voice that way, to test its capacity, satisfies me. It is as good as a dozen, and a great deal better. I don't want to listen to it a whole evening. I will persist, that running up and down the scales that way isn't "music." Then if you only knew the agony I'm in, when drawing near the end of one of her musical gymnastics, she essays to wind up with one of those swift, deafening don't-stop-to-breathe finales, you would pity me. I get hysterical. I wish she would split her throat at once, or stop. I want to be let out. I want the roof lifted; I feel a cold perspiration breaking out on my forehead. I know that presently she will catch up that blue-gauze skirt and skim out that side-door, only to come and do it all over again, in obedience to that dead-head encore. You see all this machinery disenchants me. It takes away my appetite, like telling me at dinner how much beef is a pound. I had rather the ropes and pulleys of music would keep behind the curtain.

Of course my "taste is not cultivated," and moreover, the longer I live the less chance there is of it. On that point, I'm what country folks call "sot." Sometimes, when passing one of these concert-rooms of an evening, I have caught a note that I took home with me. Caught it with the help of the darkness and the glimmering stars, and the fresh wind on my forehead, and a blessed ignorance of the distorted mouth and the heaving millinery that sent it forth. But take me in, and you'll have an hysterical maniac. The solemn regulation faces, looking at that "music," set me bewitched to laugh and outrage that fashion-drilled and kidded audience. Bless you, I can't help it. I had rather hear Dinah sing "Old John Brown" over her wash-tub. I had rather go over to Mr. Beecher's church some Sunday night and hear that vast congregation swell forth Old Hundred, with each man and woman's soul so in it, that earthly cares and frets are no more remembered, than the old garments we cast out of sight.

When the words of a favorite hymn are read from the pulpit, and I am expecting the good old-fashioned tune, that has been wedded to it since my earliest recollection, and instead, I am treated to a series of quirks and quavers by a professional quartette, I can't help wishing myself where the whole congregation sing with the heart and the understanding, in the old-fashioned manner. I can have "opera" on week-days, and scenery and fine dresses thrown in. Sunday I want Sunday, not opera in negligé.

Of course it is high treason for me to make such an avowal; so, while I am in for it, I may as well give another twist to the rope that is round my neck. The other night I went to hear "The Messiah." The words are lovely, and as familiar to my Puritan ears as the "Assembly's Catechism;" but when they kept on repeating, "The Lord is in his hol—the Lord is in—is in his hol—is in—the Lord is in his hol"—and when the leader, slim, and clothed in inky black, kept his arms going like a Jack in a box, I grew anything but devout. The ludicrous side of it got the better of me; and when my companion, who pretends to be no Christian