But the topknots of to-day are bought at a monstrous price. Carlyle says of certain enormous fire-flies on an island of the East Indies that, placed upon poles, they illuminate the journeys of distinguished people by night. "Great honor to the fire-flies!" he exclaims; "but--" It is a great honor to the golden-winged woodpecker to be shot and then daintily poised upon the hat of Cyrilla as, enveloped in a cloud of dudes, she promenades the Avenue on Sunday afternoon; great honor to the woodpecker; but--The naughty dog in the country who hunts and kills chickens is made to wear a dead chicken hung around his neck, and is at last shamed out of his murderous fancy. How if Cyrilla, strolling in the summer fields, haply with young Laurence hanging enthralled upon her sweet eyes, her low replies, should chance to meet the cur disgraced with the dead chicken hung around his neck, she with the dead woodpecker upon her head! The lovely lady puts a premium upon wanton slaughter and unspeakable cruelty. She incites the murderous small boy and all the idlers and vagrants to share and shoot the singing bird, and silence the heavenly music of the summer air. She cries for "slarter," and, like the white cat enchanted into the Princess, who leaps to the floor in hot chase when the mouse appears, the Queen of Beauty, with a feathered corpse for a crown, begins to seem even to Laurence unhappily enchanted. CHEAPENING HIS NAME A distinguished public man once said to the Easy Chair that after an election in which he had taken part, and in which his party had succeeded, he always signed the recommendations of anybody who asked him for any office he wished. And when the Easy Chair remarked that he must have sadly cheapened his name with the appointing power, the excellent statesman answered, "Not at all; because I wrote by mail that no attention was to be paid to my request." Perhaps he thought that this was not cheapening his name. But what must the appointing power have secretly thought of a man who respected his own name so little? And an eminent public officer of long service told the Easy Chair that a recommendation was once delivered to him by an office-seeker from a President of the United States; and when the officer, delaying the applicant, asked the President if he really wished the person appointed, the President replied, "Not in the least; but I gave the letter to him to get rid of him."