This being the case, an architect who has a normal vision, or corrects his vision by the aid of properly adjusted spectacles, and whose sense of proportion is also of a high order, will very likely continually be designing things that only a small percentage of those who are to look at them will be capable of appreciating. Out of a thousand grown persons who see his accurately proportioned work, one hundred will see it with normal eyes, and two hundred more, perhaps, will see it with eyes corrected by spectacles. Three hundred will therefore view his work as he does himself, and seven hundred, not knowing that their vision is defective, will judge that his work has been badly done. Therefore, build he ever so well, he is building only for a small minority. The children, with eyes ordinarily in a normal condition, should be the best friends an architect could cultivate, for they, in one sense, at least, usually have the capacity to look upon his work and say whether it be well done or not. But, unfortunately, about the time that young people reach an age when they begin to think seriously about art and architecture, the great majority of them also begin to lose that normal sight, without which distant objects can no longer be seen in accurate proportions. Or perhaps the architects might impress upon all those who criticise their work that a consultation with an oculist and a call upon a spectacle-maker would enable a critic to reform his adverse judgment. Such a course would be a good thing both for the eye specialist and the optician. But if an architect himself have defective vision, he can either design his structure by mathematical rules, or do for himself what has just been suggested for his critics. At any rate, the statistics available, and these are to a large extent only approximated, show that the eyesight of Americans is getting all the time more defective, and lead to the conclusion that in the course of a few more years the exceptional person will be the one who does not wear eye-glasses or spectacles or squint impertinently through the "monocle," that distinguishing mark of English and Continental dandyism. [Illustration: The Remarkable Adventures of Sandboys] THE LAST BEAR OF THE SEASON. [Illustration] When the boys, after a long and tedious railway journey from the hot city to the cool wooded mountain country, arrived at the much-beloved hotel where they had spent several very happy summers, the first person to greet them was Sandboys, the curly-headed hall-boy with the twinkling eyes and rapid-running feet. Sandboys, as they entered the great, comfortable hotel office, was in the act of carrying a half-dozen pitchers of iced water up stairs to supply thirsty guests with the one thing needful and best to quench that thirst, and in his excitement at catching sight once again of his two little friends, managed to drop two of them with a loud crash upon the office floor.