you give him the tools to work with, he'll straighten everything out for
you as neat as a pin."

The meeting dissolved without taking heed of my suggestion, and the
world knows the result. However, there's one thing I am proud of. I
claim to have discovered GRANT four years before WASHBURN did. That's
the secret why I can have any office I want under the present
administration.

SARSFIELD YOUNG.

* * * * *

THE PLAYS AND SHOWS.

The popularity of opera among fashionable people in this city varies
inversely as the intelligibility of the language in which it is sung.

To illustrate! The Italian opera is fashionable, though not one in ten
of the people composing an average audience understand a word that is
said or sung. The French opera is less fashionable, but perhaps
one-third of the audience can understand the less ingenious of the
indelicate jokes. The English opera is not fashionable, but every one
can understand every word that Miss RICHINGS or Miss HERSEE pronounces.
These facts undoubtedly stand in the relation of cause and effect.
Wherefore the axiom with which this column begins.

To be sure, the words of an opera are a matter of very little
consequence, the music speaking as plainly as the clearest of Saxon
sentences. But the fashionable public knows less of music than it knows