According to my friend, Ernest Ingersoll, a large proportion of the red coral used by jewelers in making ornaments comes from the Mediterranean coast of Algeria, where it is gathered chiefly by an ingenious machine. Nets, the meshes of which are loose, are hung on the bars of a cross, and dragged at the bottom of the sea among the nooks and crevices of the rocks. These nets, winding about the branches of the coralline growth, break off its branches, which adhere to the meshes. When he thinks it is laden, the fisherman draws the net to the surface and helps himself to the coral. This is sold in various markets, and afterward worked into ornaments, necklaces, bracelets, and other pretty articles for girls and their mammas. A SUGGESTION TO THE BOTTLED FISH. READING, MASS., DEAR JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT: I read in the February number about the bottled fish. I think it is very queer. In "Grimm's Fairy Tales" there is a story about a fox that crept into a hole where there was something to eat. After he ate it he grew so fat that he could not get out, and he stayed there till the farmer found him and killed him. I suppose it was the same way with the fish, only he fed on oysters, and as I think there are no farmers at the bottom of the sea, he stayed there till he was drawn up. If I had been that fish, I would have starved myself till I was thin enough to get out. I have taken St. Nicholas since I was two years old, and my mamma says she brought me up on it, so you see I have been well brought up. I remain yours truly, E. S. K. PACKARD. THE NEWSPAPER PLANT. You are to be told in this month's ST. NICHOLAS, I hear, about a curious "lace-leaf," a "vegetable necktie," and a "caricature plant." If so, this is a good time for me to show you a curiosity called the newspaper plant, which the Little School-ma'am described the other day to the young folk of the Red School House. It seems that in certain far-away countries called New Mexico and Arizona, there are great tracts of desolate desert lands, where the very hills seem destitute of life and beauty, and where the earth is shriveled from centuries of terrible heat. And in these desert-tracts grow a curious, misshapen, grotesque and twisted plant that seems more like a goblin tree than a real one. Of all the trees in the world, you would imagine this to be the most outcast and worthless--so meager a living does it obtain from the waste of sand and gravel in which it grows. And yet this goblin tree is now being sought after and utilized in one of the world's greatest industries--an industry that affects the daily needs of civilization, and is of especial importance to every girl and boy who reads the pages of ST. NICHOLAS.