Another striking feature of European society to an American is the predominance of old women therein--ladies of sixty or seventy years of age, very much coiffees, tremendously dressed and glittering with gems. This element is far from being an attractive one. A venerable dowager with white roses and lilies of the valley in her frizzed gray hair, with many diamonds and pearls displayed upon a neck which should long ago have retired into the deep obscurity of kerchief and high corsage, is not a charming object. It has been made a subject of reproach against American society that it is given up so entirely to the youth of both sexes. Well, after all, it is better so--that is, so far as balls and dancing-parties are concerned. Seventeen in white tarletan is a far more beauteous and appropriate ornament for a ball-room than is seventy in white brocade or rose-pink satin. L. H. H. NATIONAL FORMS OF GREETING. The general structure of a language is admitted on all hands to be a good index of the character of the people using it. To cite but two instances: the firm, compact, stern mould in which a Latin sentence is cast seems only the natural mode of expression for those who so firmly, compactly and sternly carried their eagles in triumph over the world and assembled the deities of conquered nations in their own Pantheon; while the marvelous grace and flexibility spread like a transparent veil of ravishing beauty over the well-posed members of a Greek sentence could emanate, from no source so naturally as the gay, beauty-loving sons of the Hellenes, whose conceptions of beauty are the ideals for all time; whose flexible wit needed, as it created, the vehicle of its communication; and whose philosophical acumen could flash out in no speech less capable of manifesting delicate shades of thought.