MISLETOE.—If you wished to paint portraits or landscapes, your first step would be to learn to draw and study perspective; then the colours, and how to produce others by blending them. So, if you have any original thoughts, and beautiful similes occur to you by which you could illustrate those thoughts, you should study the art of metrical composition in all its varieties, so that corresponding lines should always correspond and the emphasis fall on the right syllable. What you send us is not even good prose, the mere construction is all wrong, and there is no new idea in it; but the religious feelings expressed are very good. JACK.—If such an unfeminine name be selected by a girl, we certainly advise her to wear gloves when rowing. Perhaps thick washed-leather ones would be the most suitable. We suppose you mean a sign denoting a pause, only you make a straight line over a dot instead of a curved one with the points downwards. A pause leaves the duration of the note, or the rest over which it is placed, to the performer’s taste and musical feeling. Were there no dot beneath the short curved line, it would be a “bind” or “tie” connecting two notes, the first of which alone is to be struck. _“FEATHERY FLAKES,”_ OUR NEW CHRISTMAS PART, IS NOW PUBLISHED. [Illustration] FEATHERY FLAKES. What time we for a while have bidden Farewell to summer’s bright array, And azure skies again are hidden By grim December’s garb of grey; When the pale sun, his warmth withholding, Too often shows a cheerless face, And falling snow is fast enfolding Earth’s treasure in its soft embrace; We give these pure white showers a rival And namesake in our Christmas page, Whose charm shall have less brief survival, And banish not with winter’s rage. Go, Feathery Flakes! Go forth, nor tarry At limits of our colder zone; And may you, for the trust you carry, Be warmly met and widely known. * * * * * [Transcriber’s note—the following changes have been made to this text. Page 132: swalowed to swallowed—“swallowed with perfect ease.”]