ANGIE B. WOOD, Westbury, Cayuga Co., N. Y. If your raisins came from Spain, no doubt your little guest came from the same place. * * * * * NANCY.--Thanks for your little story, but the adventure is hardly of sufficient importance to print. If you wish the manuscript returned, please send your address. * * * * * C. Y. P. R. U. The Postmistress has looked into the history of the word _hoiden_, concerning which a correspondent inquires. It is derived from the German _heyde_, which means heath or country place. Originally used to describe a rude (in the sense of rustic or home-bred) fellow, it has come to mean a wild, awkward, and romping girl. The received modern spelling is hoiden, but Churchill, Young, and Milton spelled it hoyden. The study of language is very interesting. Words are pictures conveying ideas to the eye of the mind almost as vividly as the artist's brush and colors convey them to the eye. From one generation to another, words change their social positions. _Fellow_, for instance, was once highly respectable. It is now a term of contempt. A very thoughtful writer says that "words once refined, elegant, and even solemn, come in process of time to suggest trivial, vulgar, or ludicrous thoughts or images." In fact, words are continually dropping out of use or gradually altering their signification, and, more slowly, new words, like new coins from the mint, are finding their way into circulation. The Postmistress was in a public conveyance one day, no matter when, no matter where. She was in a brown-study. But it was not so brown that her eyes and ears were shut to her neighbors. Beside her sat two fine-looking young people, who were making the most of spare moments. He was listening; she was reading. She read charmingly, with the right shadings to her phrases, and the tones of her voice were very musical. Still the Postmistress thought they had made a mistake in bringing their book with them, and reading aloud then and there. The persons themselves enjoyed it, but some of their neighbors were annoyed. An old gentleman who was reading the morning paper was disturbed by her inflections, and more than one young gentleman stared fiercely at him. It would have been better for both to have conversed in a low tone over the reading of the past or about the reading of the future than in the reading of the present to have in any way infringed on the rights of the travelling public.