by simplicity of life, or the love and lasting joy inspired by that honourable confidence in one another’s best and noblest attributes, which should frankly and openly set the seal on friendship, and make Hospitality a glad duty as well as a delight. “Old-fashioned” as it may be, no new fashion can ever replace it. THE VULGARITY OF WEALTH There are certain periods in the lives of nations when the balance of things in general would seem to be faultily adjusted; when one side of the scale almost breaks and falls to the ground through excess of weight, and the other tips crazily upward, well-nigh to overturning, through an equally undue excess of lightness. The inequality can be traced with mathematical precision as occurring at regular intervals throughout the world’s history. It is as though the clock of human affairs had been set correctly for a certain limited time only, and was then foredoomed to fall out of gear in such a manner as to need cleansing and winding up afresh. A good many people, including some of the wisest of our few wise men, have openly expressed the opinion that we, of the proudest and greatest Empire at present under the sun, have almost reached that particularly fatal figure on the Eternal Dial, When all the wheels run down, and when the scales of Justice are becoming so dangerously worn out and uneven, as to suggest an incapacity for holding social and political weights and measures much longer. One of the symptoms of this overstrained condition of our latter-day civilization is precisely the same danger-signal which has in all ages accompanied national disaster--a pernicious influence, like that of the planet “Algol,” which, when in the ascendant, is said to betoken mischief and ruin to all who see it rise on the horizon. Our evil Star, the evil star of all Empires, has long ago soared above the eastern edge; fully declared, it floods our heaven with such lurid brilliancy that we can scarce perceive any other luminary. And its name is Mammon. The present era in which we are permitted by Divine law to run through our brief existence and make our mark or miss it, as we choose, is principally distinguished by an insane worship of Wealth. Wealth in excess--wealth in chunks--wealth in great awkward, unbecoming dabs, is plastered, as it were, by the merest hap-hazard toss of fortune’s dice, on the backs of uncultured and illiterate persons, who, bowed down like asses beneath the golden burden, are asininely ignorant of its highest uses. The making of millions would seem to be like a malignant fever, which must run its course, ending in either the death or the mental and physical wreck of the patient. He who has much money seems always to find it insufficient, and straightway proceeds to make more; while he who has not only much, but superabundance of the dross, scatters it in every direction broadcast, wherever it can best serve as an aid to his own self-advertisement, vanity and ostentation. Once