One of the metropolitan Sunday papers advertises every week in triumphant and gigantic capitals how many square miles of spruce forest were converted into paper for the Sunday edition. The number of square miles of forest that is disappearing in this way is something appalling. It seems to a few reactionary wits, unintoxicated with the spectacle of this modern progress, that sacrificing half a spruce forest to make a Sunday paper is much worse than butchering a little chain-gang of Christians to make a Roman holiday. It is a simple death notice in the Boston _Evening Events_, for February 2, 1896. It reads thus: “Miss Priscilla Prim, of 29976 Beacon street, Boston, died suddenly of a severe mental shock yesterday evening. Miss Prim was well known as the possessor of a very large fortune, a philanthropist, and a patron of the arts and all sorts of moral reforms and missions, and her decease will be mourned by all lovers of liberal culture.” She had just finished her supper, when a niece from Chicago, who was stopping in her house, to come out this season in the “smart set,” handed her a copy of the February FLY LEAF, fresh and virgin from the press that evening. It contained some opinions which are regarded as heterodox and impossible in “The Ladies’ Own Humbug and Treasury of Misinformation.” It appeared to lack reverence for the unsupported tradition of “culture” that lingers in modern materialistic, money-grubbing Boston, in every well-regulated household, quite independently of the fact that in thousands there is no evidence of civilization in the shape of books, ancient or modern. This flippancy is undoubtedly immoral, and its heinousness may be judged by its effect in this instance. Miss Prim was mad, indignant, furious, and fumed at the mouth with the passion of her outraged moral feelings. She sprang to her feet to write a letter of protest to the editor of the _Events_, when she stumbled over the only work of literature in the establishment--it was Mrs. Parloa’s Appledore Cookbook, by the way--and falling face forward upon the floor, she expired immediately of a severe bump and excess of moral emotion. It is time the old fierce Puritanical spirit was calmed in the blood of the hereditary Bostonians; but the old generation dies glum and hard, and will refuse Heaven if the Almighty is so captious as to demand a sense of humor.