With regard to sobriety, it is well known that local option succeeds in closing the liquor saloons in very many operative American towns, and with the happiest results. The county of Barnstaple in Massachusetts, for example, with a population of 32,000 souls, and having no licensed liquor saloons, yields a crop of only three convictions per annum for drunkenness. The county of Suffolk, on the other hand, with a population of nearly 400,000, and a license for every 175 of its inhabitants, acknowledges one drunkard for every 50 of its population. The labor in one case is nearly all native; in the other, largely foreign. It is almost, if not quite, impossible to obtain the statistics of pauperism in America. The "indoor" poor, as paupers in almshouses are called, can be found and counted with comparative ease, but how can the outdoor paupers be found? It is no use inquiring for them from door to door, and the poor-master's disbursements are so limited in amount that his bills for pauper relief become mixed up with other items, so that they cannot be separately stated. The total number of paupers resident in American almshouses is 67,000, or about one in every 70,000 of the whole population. In England, we have still one pauper in every fifty thousand of the population. Such being the more important aspects of native American labor, as displayed by the statistician, it is time for the social observer to give his account of a typical American artisan's home. We are at Ansonia, in the Naugatuck valley, one of the chief towns of "Clockland," where, within a radius of twenty miles, watches and clocks are made by millions and sold for a few shillings apiece. Our friend Mr. S. is an Ansonia mechanic who occupies a house with a basement of cut stone and a tasteful superstructure of wood, having a wide veranda, kitchen, parlor, and bed-room on the ground floor and three bedrooms above. The house is painted white, adorned with green jalousies, and surrounded by a well-tilled quarter acre lot. Its windows are aglow with geraniums, and from its veranda we glance upward to the wooded slopes of the Green Mountain range, and downward to the River Naugatuck, whose blue mill-ponds look like tiny Highland lakes surrounded by great factories. Within, a pleasant sitting-room is furnished with all the comforts and some of the luxuries of life, the tables are strewn with books, and the walls decorated with pretty photographs. Mr. S.'s wife and daughter are educated and agreeable women, who entertain us, during an hour's call, with intelligent conversation, which, turning for the most part on the events of the War of Independence, is characterized by ample historical knowledge, a logical habit of mind, and a remarkable readiness to welcome new ideas. No refreshments are offered us, for no one eats between meals, and, in private houses, as in the public refreshment rooms, where native labor usually takes its meals, nothing stronger than water is ever drunk.