with some show of pluck and patriotism, and made a stand for national individuality, but it was in vain. They, too, succumbed to the inexorable law of Uniformity. That law was liberal in one respect. It did not insist that the stove-pipe form should rule inflexibly. It admitted several variations, including wide-awakes, pliable felts, and that little, squat, lackadaisical, round-crown, narrow-brimmed thing worn by the Prince of Wales in the photographs taken of him and the Princess at Sandringham. But this has come to be the rule: that hats shall no longer represent distinct nationalities; that they shall be interchangeable in all civilised communities; in a word, that neither Englishman, American, French nor German shall be known by his hat, whatever be the form or material of its body or brim. If there were a southern county in England where the mercury stood at 100 degrees in the shade for two or three summer months, the upper classes in it would don, without any hesitation, the wide, flappy broadbrims of California, and still be in the fashion,--that is, variety in uniformity. The peasantry, or the lowest laboring classes of European countries, are now, and will remain perhaps for a century to come, the only conservators of the distinctive national costumes of bygone generations. During the conversation at the table, a farmer exhibited a head of the Hallett wheat, which he had grown on his land. I never saw anything to equal it, in any country in which I have travelled. It was nearly six inches in length, and seeded large and plump from top to bottom. This is a variety produced by Mr. Hallett, of Brighton, and is creating no little interest among English grain-growers. Lord Burghley, who had tested its properties, thus describes it, in a speech before the Northamptonshire Agricultural Society last summer:--