drug—subcutaneous injection is the worst. It acts the most speedily and apparently the most pleasurably; it passes off the most rapidly, and tempts, therefore the most frequent, re-application. Apart, moreover, from the poisonous influence itself, this mode of application has injurious effects of its own; produces callosities and sores of a painful and revolting character. Smoking seems to be the most stupefying manner in which solid opium can be consumed, the one which acts most powerfully and injuriously upon the brain. But opium-smoking is hardly likely to take a strong hold on English or European taste. A piece of opium no larger than a pea, chopped up and mixed with a large bowlful of tobacco, produces on the veteran tobacco-smoker a nauseating effect powerfully recalling that of the first pipe of his boyhood; while its flavor is incomparably more disagreeable to the palate accustomed to the best havanas or the worst shag or bird’s-eye than these were to the unvitiated taste. It is probable that the Englishman who makes his first acquaintance with opium in this form will be revolted rather than tempted, unless indeed the pipe be used to relieve a pain so intolerable that the nauseousness of the remedy is disregarded. Morphia in all its forms, liquid or solid, has a thoroughly unpleasant bitterness, but neither the nauseous taste of the pipe nor the intensely disgusting flavor of laudanum, a flavor so revolting to the unaccustomed palate that only when largely diluted by water can it possibly be swallowed. On the whole, the muriate, dissolved in a quantity of water large enough to render each drop the equivalent of a drop of laudanum, is probably the safest, and should be swallowed rather than injected. But rather than swallow even this, a wise man, unless more confident in his own constancy and self-command than wise men are wont to be, had better endure any temporary pain that nature may inflict or any remedial operation that surgery can offer.—_Contemporary Review._ FOLK-LORE FOR SWEETHEARTS. BY REV. M. G. WATKINS, M.A. As marriage and death are the chief events in human life, an enormous mass of popular beliefs has in all nations crystallised round them. Perhaps the sterner and more gloomy character of Kelts, Saxons, and Northmen generally found vent in the greater prominence they have given to omens of death, second-sight, ghosts, and the like; whereas the lighter and sunnier disposition of Southern Europe has delighted more in love-spells, methods of divining a future partner, the whole pomp and circumstance attending Venus and her doves. The writhing of the wryneck so graphically portrayed in Theocritus, or the spells of the lover in his Latin imitator, with their refrain— Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim,[4]