might be done tactfully, endeavored to mitigate by a reproving glance, or by a still deeper plunge into nebulous rhetoric, as a sort of palliation to the Muse of Obscurity, which in our hearts we felt that good goddess would accept, strove to offset. ["Excuse me," said Mr. Tom Snobbe, rising and interrupting the reader at this point, "but is that all one sentence, Mr. Jones?" "Yes," Jones replied. "Why not? It's perfectly clear in its meaning. Aren't you used to long sentences on the Hudson?" he added, sarcastically. "No," retorted Snobbe; "that is to say, not where I live. I believe they have 'em at Sing Sing occasionally. But they never get used to them, I'm told." "Be quiet, Tom," said Harry Snobbe. "It's bad form to interrupt. Let Billy finish his story." Mr. Jones then resumed his manuscript.] A perceptible shudder ran through, or rather rolled over, the group, for it was corrugating in its quality, bringing forcibly to mind, quite as much for its chill, too, as for the wrinkling suggestion of its passage up and down our backs, turned as some of these were towards the fire, and others towards the steam-radiator, which now and again clicked startlingly in the dull red glow of the hearth light, augmenting the all too obvious nervousness of the listeners, the impassive and uninspiring squares of iron of which certain modern architects of a limited decorative sense--if, indeed, they have any at all, for the mere use of corrugated iron in the construction of a façade would seem not to admit of an æsthetic side to its designer's nature, however ornately distributed over the surface of an exterior it may be--have chosen to avail themselves, prompted either by an appalling parsimony on the part of a client, or for reasons of haste employed for the lack of more immediately available material, it being an undeniable fact that in some portions of the world stucco and terracotta, now frequently used in lieu of more substantial, if not more enduring materials, are difficult of access, and the use of a speedily obtainable substitute becoming thus a requirement as inevitable as it is to be regretted, as in the case of the fruit-market at Venice, standing as it does on the bank of the Grand Canal, a pile of stark, staring, obtrusive, wrinkling zinc thrusting itself brazenly into the line of a vision attuned to the most gloriously towering palazzos, as rich in beauty as in romance, with such self-sufficiency as to bring tears to the eyes of the most stolidly unappreciative, of the most coldly unæsthetic, or, in short, as some one has chosen to say, in an essay the title of which and the name of whose author escape us at this moment, with such complacent vulgarity as to amount to nothing less than a dastardly blot upon the escutcheon of the Venetians, which all of their glorious achievements in art, in history, and in letters can never quite ineradically efface, and alongside of