The faces of the "panicstricken" seem to look brighter, although everybody talks of "shrinkage" and ruin. Meanwhile the beautiful weather keeps the carriages going and Fifth Avenue looking gay. "I shall fail, but my wife need not give up her horses," said a young broker the other day. The old days of commercial morality, when people reduced their style of living because they had failed, seem to have gone out of fashion. A letter from New York, this Queen of Commerce, is almost necessarily mercantile, as is our conversation. "How you all talk stocks and money!" said a gentleman just arrived from a ten years' sojourn in Europe. "When I went away you were talking of books, of art, of social ethics, of fine women, of good dinners, of whist and bezique: now you are all talking of longs and shorts, bulls and bears, a fraction of per cent., etc. etc.--all of you, men, women and children." We have a beautiful collection at the Art Museum in Fourteenth street of jewelry, objets d'art, and a good ceramic display, all clustered round the Di Cesnola sculptures and pottery. This collection, founded on the idea of the South Kensington Museum, makes a most agreeable lounging-place in the Kruger mansion, and is, in the absence of most of the opulent owners of private picture-galleries and the closing of the National Academy, almost our only artistic amusement at present. But the first of December will throw open many hospitable doors, and the new pictures and statues which have been accumulated during the past summer will become in one sense the property of the gazing public. MARGARET CLAYSON. NOTES.