Only a lack of space prevented Mr. Windmuller from giving the Sunday schools a side wipe, and he comes very near it as it is. Evidently he looks upon them as a blot or something equally unpleasant. They have no bars, and, moreover, their teaching is all the other way. This makes our author a prey to melancholy and his brow is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. But what the Philistines are anxious to know is, does the ancient and honorable New York Chamber of Commerce believe that man reaches his best estate only when he has a jag on? R. W. CRISWELL. SIDE TALKS WITH THE PHILISTINES: BEING SUNDRY BITS OF WISDOM WHICH HAVE BEEN HERETOFORE SECRETED, AND ARE NOW SET FORTH IN PRINT. I suppose no one was much surprised that John Oliver Hobbes wanted a legal release from the man who called himself her husband, but when the mother of Fauntleroy and the author of the _Quick or the Dead_ followed in the category of misfits I doubt not Mona Caird lifted up her voice in the wilderness and there was joy in the camp of the Claflin-Woodhulls. But the marrying and giving in marriage go right along, for this isn’t heaven; and the multitude that don’t complain put the literary folks who do to a kind of proof not easy to face. Since nature made men and women to marry, the wire-drawn literary folks who can’t stay married have the floor for an explanation. There are bitter critics who cry “I told you so,” and maybe they did—when it is announced that Amelie Rives can no longer endure her Chanler. Perhaps he is only common tallow after all—half a dozen to the pound. The maids and manlings who read _According to St. John_ and believed Miss Rives’s emphasized statement that “Love is the fulfilling of the law” must wonder if she meant the law she has just invoked to give her liberty. It is a choice of the quick or the dead now—the dead love or the quick release—and there is something more than tragic in the appeal through a prosaic court to “deliver me from the body of this death.” No, there is no discredit to any one in the pleadings of the impulsive young Southerner for her liberty. Nobody has broken any law. They can’t live together—that’s all, and all the amatory fury of the novel that gave her fame is a dead waste. It was honest when it was written, no doubt, but the pitch was too high. The happy (more or less) millions who don’t run to the public with a transcript of their strongest emotions or to a court for release from their vows must have learned a secret unknown to the Hobbeses and the Riveses and the Bashkirtseffs. They have found the happy middle line between the neurotic extreme that holds the master emotion to be a matter of physiology or of pathology—the Zolas and the Helgardeners respectively. * * * * *