Men and women seem incapacitated, in the very nature of things, from understanding each other. While mutually enamored they meet as upon a bridge--a Bridge of Sighs perhaps: break this, and they are for ever separated as by an impassable gulf. Leaving aside entirely the enamored state, do men as a rule seek the society of women and prefer it to that of men? The thriving clubs, the billiard- and drinking-saloons, and the other resorts of men common all over the civilized world, seem very like a negative answer to the question. In savage life we know that the sexes do not hunt or fish or do any work together. In our modern drawing-rooms most men confess themselves "bored." They long to get away to their clubs or some other resort of their fellows. When husbands spend their evenings at home, if no one happens to call it is not common for them to enter into long and exhilarating conversations with their wives. To be sure, wives are too often ignorant of the subjects that interest intelligent men; still, not more ignorant than before marriage, when the one bridge upon which they could meet was unbroken. _Then_ conversation never flagged: it was ever new and entrancing. Both talked pure nonsense, while having the art of "kissing full sense into empty words." On the other hand, it is, I think, quite a defensible proposition, despite the inferences to the contrary drawn from the failure of the Women's Hotel, that women enjoy conversation with women more than with men when there is no possible question of gallantry or flirtation; and, finally, that the recognition of the fact that men and women are not by nature in sympathetic accord, but only attracted through the law of compensation or opposites, will do more than all other things combined to make them study each other's natures and to respect sexual biases and characteristics, the motive for that study being, of course, the consummation of the ideal marriage, where man and woman set themselves together "like perfect music unto noble words." M.H. A RUSSIAN GENERAL IN CENTRAL ASIA. Afternoon in Tashkent, the burning sun of Central Asia glaring upon the dusty streets and countless mud-hovels of the great city; files of camels gliding past with their long, noiseless stride, led by gaunt brown men in blue robes and white turbans; a deep archway in a high wall of baked earth, above which appear the trees of a spacious garden, and just within the entrance two tall, wiry, black-eyed Cossacks, in flat forage-caps, soiled cotton jackets and red goatskin trousers, leaning indolently on their long Berdan rifles.