Stand groups of slim lilies and jonquils in bloom;
On tiptoe, unseen 'mid a tangle of green,
They offer the midnight their cups of perfume.

At times, sweet and clear from some tea-garden near,
A ripple of laughter steals out to your ear;
Anon the wind brings from a samisen's strings
The pathos that's born of a smile and a tear.

THE difference between an English audience and a French audience at the
theatre is marked. The Frenchman brings down a witticism on the wing.
The Briton pauses for it to alight and give him reasonable time for
deliberate aim. In English playhouses an appreciable number of seconds
usually precede the smile or the ripple of laughter that follows a
facetious turn of the least fineness. I disclaim all responsibility for
this statement of my personal observation, since it has recently been
indorsed by one of London's most eminent actors.

AT the next table, taking his opal drops of absinthe, was a French
gentleman with the blase aspect of an empty champagne-bottle, which
always has the air of saying: "I have lived!"

WE often read of wonderful manifestations of memory, but they are always
instances of the faculty working in some special direction. It is memory
playing, like Paganini, on one string. No doubt the persons performing
the phenomenal feats ascribed to them have forgotten more than they
remember. To be able to repeat a hundred lines of verse after a single
reading is no proof of a retentive mind, excepting so far as the hundred
lines go. A man might easily fail under such a test, and yet have a good
memory; by which I mean a catholic one, and that I imagine to be nearly