right to insist that these should be specially classed as dainty little rogues. Still this useful scavengering habit is nearly allied to the pilfering one. Decay attacks part of a tree, for instance, and saprophytes set to work at the dead branch, but they are apt to extend their operations to the adjoining living tissues, which die, too, and decay, till in the end the tree may be entirely destroyed. The scavenger, we can thus understand, is apt on occasion to relapse into the thief and the out-and-out villain. To one or other of these two great groups, or occasionally to both, belong, besides a few flowering plants, the whole extensive division of the fungi, and it is to be noted that none of this curious class of plants is ever blessed with leaf-green or starch in any part of its substance. Whether minute even under powerful microscopes or measuring several feet across; whether hard as wood or a mere mass of jelly; whether horny, fleshy, or leathery; whether resisting the action of the elements for years or hardly able to outlive a puff of wind; whether beautiful, commonplace, or ugly; whether sweet-scented or otherwise, in this they agree, that in all of them is wanting that greenness which makes honest work possible, and those little grains of starch that come from honest work done.—_Good Words._ * * * * * I AM afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor are not so common in those whose benevolence takes an active turn as in people of sentiment, who are always ready with their tears and abounding in passionate expressions of sympathy. Working philanthropy is a practical specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with a peculiar sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its agencies, an organizing and arranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of cold, of hunger, and of watching. Philanthropists are commonly grave, occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose. Their expansive social force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only through its legitimate pistons and cranks. The tighter the boiler, the less it whistles and sings at its work.—_Oliver Wendell Holmes._ SLAVONIC MYTHOLOGY.[B] By ADLEY H. CUMMINGS. The mythology of various tribes and races has of late attracted much attention, while that of our own ancestors of the North has been studied with the greatest care. Little attention, however, has been devoted to the religious belief of the ancient Slavonic race, and yet it is replete with interest for all who yield to the fascination of ancient myth.