The natives of Salvador can neither read nor write, but their happy days are numbered. The Baptist church is going to spend three millions on their conversion. Their capacity for resistance is not so great as that of the Chinese. Do you remember what Henry Ward Beecher said of the Chinese? "We have clubbed them, stoned them, burned their houses, and murdered some of them, yet they refuse to be converted. I do not know any way except to blow them up with nitroglycerine, if we are ever to get them to heaven." * * * "Do you not know," writes Persephone, "that with the coming of all this water, all imagination and adventure have fled the world?" Just what we were thinking t'other evening, when we dissipated a few hours with our good gossip the Doctor. "I am," said he, pouring out a meditative three-fingers, "in favor of prohibition; and I believe that some substitute for this stuff will be found." We pursued that lane of thought a while, until it debouched into a desert. The Doctor then took down the works of Byron, and read aloud--touching the high spots in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," "Don Juan," "Childe Harold," "The Prisoner of Chillon"--pausing ever and anon to replenish the glasses. It was midnight ere the book was returned to its shelf. It was a delightful evening. And we wondered whether, without the excellent bourbon and the cigars, we should not have had enough of Byron by 10:30. * * * An English publisher binds all his books in red because, having watched women choosing books in the libraries, he found that they looked first at the red-bound ones. Does that coincide with your experience, my dear? * * * Our interest in Mr. Wells' "Outline of History" has been practically ruined by learning from a geologist that Mr. Wells' story of creation is frightfully out of date. Should he not have given another twenty-four hours to so large an opus? * * * Visiting English authors have a delightful trick of diagramming their literary allusions. Only the few are irritated by it. * * * "And as I am in no sense a lecturer..."--Mr. Chesterton. Seemingly the knowledge of one's limitations as a public entertainer does not preclude one from accepting a fee five or ten times larger than one would receive in London. We are languidly curieux de savoir how far the American equivalent would get in the English capital. * * * You cannot "make Chicago literary" by moving the magazine market to that city. Authors lay the scenes of their stories in New York rather than in Chicago, because readers prefer to have the scene New York, just as English readers prefer London to Manchester or Liverpool. If a story is unusually interesting it is of no consequence where the scene is laid, but most stories are only so-so and have to borrow interest from geography. * * * THANKS TO MISS MONROE'S MAGAZINE.