than ever.' That will be grandmother's turn at the clock. When my turn comes, I shall say about the same thing. Besides, we could arrange to have the first motion of the hand strike a bell, to give warning that the oracle is about to speak. The fancy pleases me wonderfully. It would soon become corrupted, to be sure, by being applied to spying in war and in politics; but it would still be very pleasant in the intercourse of friendship." In 1774--that is, two years after Barthélemy's letter--Lesage, a Genevese professor of physics, guardedly intimated that an apparatus could be constructed to fulfill these vague suggestions. There were a few experiments in electro-magnetism during the succeeding half century. It was reserved for our own Morse to put into practical application the grand system which the abbé Barthélemy had so curiously foreshadowed in a freak of fancy. * * * * * Endless are the blandishments and the seductive devices of trade. A famous dry-goods store lately startled the shopping community of Paris by opening a free restaurant, a billiard-hall and a reading-room for the use and behoof of its customers. When ladies go to purchase at this place, while preparing their lists a polite clerk escorts them to the _buffet_, which is set out with ices, cakes, madeira wine, and so forth; and, having ended their repast, they are again escorted to the counter at which they desire to buy. But sometimes ladies bring their escorts--husbands, brothers or other useful bankers and purveyors of lucre--and the question arises, therefore, how to provide for them. The device of the reading-room and the billiard-table is interposed for this purpose, and a servant in livery informs them when the buying is completed, and when their own duties--namely, of footing the bills--are to begin. The care and ingenuity with which the French guard against having any annoying moments in life are well exemplified in this device. The free reading-room as an adjunct of the dry-goods store is not wholly unknown in New York, but the free _buffet_ has not yet, we believe, been transplanted there. A very much cheaper and a far less praiseworthy mercantile trap for catching custom in the same branch of trade also originates at Paris. One popular store has a superb clerk, whose _spécialité_ is to place himself near the door, and to murmur whenever a new customer enters, "Hum! la jolie femme!" The storekeeper is said to have observed that the effect was immediate and lasting, the new-comer remaining a faithful and habitual customer; but this device is not to be ranked for breadth of enterprise with the one already mentioned. * * * * *