chinchillas, charming little creatures, nearly akin to the rat, were a few years ago a favorite form of adornment, the soft gray of the fur harmonizing beautifully with blue velvet, for instance. It remains to be seen where this cruelty will stop. An Italian countess prided herself on the fact that she had a cloak trimmed with the heads of beautiful little kittens. A hundred little animals put to death to satisfy the cruel vanity of a woman!

Let the strong hand of the law intervene and stay this destructive custom which is silencing the song and stilling forever the life of the beautiful birds that voice the benediction of God. Remember that God will hold you responsible for the treatment of animals. Said Jesus, when speaking of the birds: "Not one of them is forgotten before God."

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE TONGUE.

WOMAN

OMAN generally gets the credit for the gossiping business. It is said that when the Lord made man he gave him ten measures of speech and that the woman ran away with nine of them. The Chinese say that a woman's sword is her tongue and she never lets it rust. Many a woman's tongue is like an express train running along at the rate of sixty miles an hour, pouring out its rain of sparks on every side and setting everything on fire. But justice compels me to say that the men are just as bad blabs as the women. Indeed, many women have become so useful to the community that they have retired from the gossiping business, and babbling, tattling, sly whispering and impertinent meddling men have

succeeded them and are trespassing constantly on the community with their tongues.

Doré's hideous picture from Dante, in which men are represented as gnawing skull bones in the infernal regions; in which men are represented as feeding from off their victims- these are enough to shock us and make us hate such pictorial illustrations; but we see these things in life.

Without any intention, perhaps, of doing injury to a neighbor, a careless remark may be seized by a babbler, and as a snowball grows by rolling it, so does a story by telling; it passes through the babbling tribe, growing larger and larger, and darker and darker, and by the time it has rolled through Babbletown, it has assumed the magnitude and blackness of base slander.

The world with calumny abounds;
The whitest virtue slander wounds.

There are those whose joy is night and day

To talk a character away.

Eager from place to place they haste

To blast the generous and the chaste;

And hunting reputation down,

Proclaim their triumphs through the town.

An unjust and unfavorable innuendo is started against a person of unblemished character, it soon assumes the dignity of a problem, and, to use the figure of another, is solved by the rule of double position, and the result is increased by geometrical progression and permutation of quantities; and before truth can get her shoes on, a stain, deep and damning, has been stamped on the fair fame of an innocent victim by an unknown hand.

'Twas but a breath

And yet a woman's fair fame wilted,

And friends once fond grew cold and stilted;
And life was worse than death.