can be made to flourish in this way he will not “object” to the cleanliness if it will prevent an “appropriation;” besides the bouquets derived from such a source are almost sentimentally equal to the flower which the maiden sent her lover that had been “watered with her tears.” For many years the luxurious accessories of the toilet have been on the free list in the Senate. Thousands of dollars are invested yearly in soap, tooth brushes, infant powder, perfumery, brandy and whiskey, combs, Turkish toweling, lemons, and tea. And this is one of the safest investments of the public funds. What right has the nation to elect Senators if they cannot afford to keep them clean? Isn’t cleanliness next to godliness; and isn’t this purity of the body about as close to the Creator as the average Senator attempts to reach? Free flowers have been the only free luxuries in which the less aristocratic branch had the same right, and is it a wonder that it required more than $41,000 in a single year to make the sweets go around? OLIVIA. WHITE HOUSE RECEPTIONS COMPARED. CUSTOMS PREVAILING UNDER THE LINCOLN, GRANT, HAYES AND JOHNSON REGIMES. WASHINGTON, _February 6, 1880_. A residence at the national capital which spans the social rule from the days of queenly Harriet Lane to the present “first lady” at the White House affords an opportunity to note the different changes and peculiar innovations inaugurated by those whom fate or accident has called to wield the most powerful social scepter to be found upon the face of the globe. The public need not be told that the wife of our President has more real political power than Queen Victoria. True, she does not ride “in state,” drawn by eight cream-colored horses to open Parliament in person, but she waits carefully in an ante-room, and when Cabinet sessions are over seizes upon the head of any of the Departments, and then and there, like a Catharine or Elizabeth, makes known her command. Mrs. Abraham Lincoln inaugurated this excellent plan of doing business, because the exigencies of the war wholly occupied the mind and time of the President, and it became necessary for the “first lady” to look after the minor affairs of the country at this particular date. To prove exactly what the writer means, the case of the first Commissioner of Agriculture is called up. Several crafty men put their heads together and decided to call into being a “Bureau Of Agriculture.” Its different departments were to be “run,” each one by its particular head, independent of the other. It was to be a cluster of little kingdoms with a nominal head that should be empty of ideas, possessing only one requisite, that of managing Mrs. Lincoln and the appropriation of the public funds. These shrewd men made the good old Quaker Newton believe that he was among the greatest men of the universe, and while he was busy talking “spiritualism” to our “first lady,” escorting her with his old time