and the United States in live stock, wool, barley, rye, peas, oats, and other farm products, while subsequent to 1866, when the reciprocity treaty had been repealed, duties were imposed on all these articles on their import from Canada into the United States. During the first period Canadian horses, for example, sold under free trade for shipment to the United States at from sixty-five to eighty-five dollars each, while during the years next subsequent to 1866 the value of the Canadian horses imported into the United States was returned at from ninety-two to one hundred and four dollars each; thus showing that the United States tariff did not force the Canadian horse breeders to lower their prices in order to compensate American purchasers for the duties exacted. And as regards the other products mentioned, the official data show that in no case did the imposition of duties under the United States tariff reduce the prices paid by American purchasers to the Canadian farmers for their products. These are very commonplace, very familiar, and very convincing facts which ought to silence all this talk about the foreign exporter or anybody else but the consumer paying the duty; but it is not at all probable that they will. OUR FLORIDA ALLIGATOR. BY I. W. BLAKE. An alligator is not an attractive creature. He has not a single virtue that can be named. He is cowardly, treacherous, hideous. He is neither graceful nor even respectable in appearance. He is not even amusing or grotesque in his ungainliness, for as a brute--a brute unqualified--he is always so intensely real, that one shrinks from him with loathing; and a laugh at his expense while in his presence would seem curiously out of place. His personality, too, is strong. Once catch the steadfast gaze of a free, adult alligator's wicked eyes, with their odd vertical pupils fixed full upon your own, and the significance of the expression "evil eye," and the mysteries of snake-charming, hypnotism, and hoodooism will be readily understood, for his brutish, merciless, unflinching stare is simply blood-chilling. Zoölogically the alligator belongs to the genus _Crocodilus_, and he has all the hideousness of that family, lacking somewhat its bloodthirstiness, although the American alligator is carnivorous by nature, and occasionally cannibalistic. Strictly speaking, however, the true alligator is much less dangerous than his relatives of the Old World, and he is correspondingly less courageous. One would suppose the saurians, or crocodilians, from their general appearance to be huge lizards, but the resemblance is superficial. The whole internal structure differs widely, and, subdivided into gavials, crocodiles, and alligators, they form a family by themselves which is widespread, extending into considerable areas of the temperate regions.