Science assures us that but for death—including decay—the world would now be so overcrowded that there would be “standing room only,” even for scientists. Electroplating proposes to enjoin decay. Is it advisable? Is it wise? Is it fair to posterity? Shall we impose ourselves upon those who “inherit us,” without providing for the expense of our warehousing? It can hardly be expected that even the most “well-preserved old gentleman” will be an object of veneration and affection to his great-great-great-grandchild, even if he is so fortunate as to be authentic—unless, indeed, he happen to be plated with gold. In that case, though, he would be hardly likely to descend intact to so remote a generation. An unusually comely electroplatee of the opposing sex might be a joy forever as a work of art, and the task of polishing her be a labor of love for many centuries; but the common ruck of hard-shell ancestors, although bearing inscriptions attesting their possession of the loftiest virtues in their day and generation, would inspire an insufficiently tender emotion to pay for their lodging. The time when our beautiful, but not altogether wholesome, cemeteries shall be no more, and in the place of them countless myriads of battered and rusted images shall be corded up like firewood all over the smiling land is a time which we may be thankful that we shall not live to see, and which our love of display should not make us selfishly assist in expediting. It is a glittering temptation, but in fair play to posterity (which has never done anything to embarrass us) it ought to be put resolutely aside. THE AGE ROMANTIC Who would not like to have been an Athenian of the time of Pericles? Yet who would have liked to be one? The Periclesian Athenian whom we would all like to have been—provided that we could be also Rooseveltian Americans—took little thought, doubtless, of “the glory that was Greece.” He considered himself singularly unfortunate to live in so prosaic an age. Ah, if he could only have been born an Assyrian in the golden prime of good King Assurbanipal, before the invention of such hideous commonplaces as mathematics, oratory, navigation (with its flaring pharos on every headland), its bad poets, its Pan and the peplum! A picturesque period is always remote in time; a picturesque land, in distance. It is of the essence of the picturesque that it be unfamiliar. Look at the suave Mexican _caballero_ with his silvered _sombrero_, his silken sash, embroidered jacket fearfully and wonderfully bebraided, his ornate footgear. How he shines in the light of his uncommon identity!—how dull we look, how odious in the comparison! Can it be possible that this glorious creation envies us the engaging simplicity of our habiliments and the charm of our unstudied incivility? And does he execute a rapture over the title “Mister” and the soft, musical vocables of the name “John Henry Smith”?