Just the thing to read in the blistering days of July, if anything can be read then, is a graphic description of a snowstorm, or a lively account of the way a polar bear invaded the ice-hut of a benumbed Eskimo, or a history of the Washington Monument: something cold. Ice is as grateful in your dog-day literature as in your August julep. No one will hold that at such a time he prefers to contemplate a picture of Sahara or of a frying-pan. On the same principle, let us have, in art, our green leaves and warm colors amid the frosts of midwinter. Only the atmospheric extremes, summer and winter, can be seriously considered in "seasoning" periodical literature, the months our almanacs call spring being neither one thing nor another. In capricious April, however, a vision of golden and placid October would seem to be the proper thing, as would the freshness of May in the mellow melancholy of autumn. If editors receive more censures than compliments for publishing certain articles, into which the element of "news" does not enter, six months after the seasons of which they treat, there is one obscure contributor at least who considers the necessity a virtue. C. H. [According to the theory of "C. H.," the Christmas number of a magazine should be filled with midsummer idyls, while Christmas carols would be the appropriate reading in July or August. He thinks this would provide a grateful relief--like ice on a hot day or a blazing log on a cold one--from the effects of any intensity of temperature in the opposite seasons. But this is confounding sensations with mere conceptions, and seeking to "cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast." The ice cools and the fire warms, but a description of one or the other in place of the reality would make its absence only the more intolerable. Reynolds the dramatist tells us that one of his summer pieces was damned, owing to a scene in which the actors were served with plentiful libations of cool drinks--a tantalizing spectacle that drew a storm of hisses from the hot and thirsty audience. We hope the editor whom "C. H." has so inconsiderately assailed may not be tempted to revenge himself by exposing his contributor to a similar mishap.--ED.] A HINT FOR THE CENTENNIAL.