clergyman: “A sailor going to sea, his wife desires the prayers of the congregation for his safety.” The minister, either through carelessness or short sightedness, misread the request thus: “A sailor, going to see his wife, desires the prayers of the congregation for his safety.”

A few days since, a gentleman wrote on a slip of paper the address of a friend, namely: “Adolph Windermeer, Jr., care of Sylvester Windsor & Co., New York.” Not seeing any comma after the name “Sylvester” or “Windsor,” I inquired if “Sylvester” was the Christian name of “Windsor;” to which he replied (marking in a comma), “Oh, no.”

A few of the above illustrations I have taken from my father’s book on Punctuation.

While the rules governing punctuation are now generally adopted, there are a few cases where printers and proof-readers disagree. In the division of a word at the end of a line, the English prefer to divide on the vowel, as in ha-bit, pre-face, pro-phet; the American, on the consonant, as hab-it, pref-ace, proph-et. The former division shows the origin of the word; the latter, its pronunciation. Of the two, I prefer the English style; for instance, in the word cre-a-tion, of three syllables, it is better to divide on the second vowel, thus crea-tion,—the syllable tion being more easy to pronounce; and the vowel at the beginning of a line being unsightly.

It is also not uncommon, in some American books, to omit the comma after the second noun in the case of the mention of three nouns, as in the sentence, “Industry, honesty, and temperance are essential to happiness,” and also to omit the comma after the second name in the sign of a firm of three, as, “Little, Brown, & Co.” While in this country the omission of the comma in these instances is often made, it by no means follows that such omission is correct. Another difference from the English practice is that of omitting the comma after the given number of a street, as, “274 Washington Street.” In this case, the grammatical reason for placing the comma after the number is that there are not 274 Washington streets, but that the meaning is No. 274 of Washington Street.

Many authors and printers vary also in the capitalization of certain compound titles or names, as, the “Charles River,” the “river Thames,” “New York City,” the “city of Boston,” the “Blue Hills,” the “White Mountains,”—the words River, City, and Mountain beginning with a capital letter or with a small letter according to their position in the sentence.

When two nouns are jointly used, the first serving as a qualifying adjective to the second, a hyphen should be inserted between them. Writers and printers frequently omit the hyphen in such cases, causing an unnecessary obscurity to the reader; thus, “Colonel Baden-Powell, when in West Africa, fell in love with a native saying, ‘Softly, softly: catchee monkey!’ which, when Anglicized, is, ‘Don’t flurry: patience gains the day!’” I had some difficulty in understanding the meaning of this pleasantry till I supplied the hyphen between the two words, native-saying. When a compound title becomes very common, the two words coalesce, as, cornfield, farmyard, schoolhouse, etc.

It is not uncommon to see the titles of books, especially in the printed catalogues of our Public Libraries, begin with a small or lower-case letter. This style is not only incorrect, but misleading, and corrupting good taste, and should not be adopted by men of letters. The reason given for it, namely, ease in reading, is