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"Second the motion," cried Miss Snob, with great promptitude.

"I cannot consent to put that motion," the president said, with great dignity. "We have made up our minds to have a fair now, and we might as well have it and be done with it."

"I move," Mrs. Browne put in sweetly, with the intention of suiting everybody, "that we have a fair and a strawberry-festival."

Miss Snob seconded this motion with her customary enthusiasm.

"It is moved and seconded," the president said, "that we have a fair and a strawberry-festival. But that seems a great deal; and I think I had better declare it not a vote, unless doubted."

Nobody was clear enough about the effects of doubting a negative proposition.

But Mrs. Growler was pleased to observe, "Well, anyway, now I come to think it over, I think, on the whole, I won't be on the arrangements committee at all; but I'll be chairman of the finance committee when that is fixed,—and that'll leave only three on the arrangements."

This moved Mrs. Henderson to resign, and, Mrs. Lowell following her example, Mrs. Hoyt was left in solitary grandeur upon the committee.

Matters were not improved, moreover, when Miss Keene remarked, "If we've voted 'the previous question,' I don't see but we've still got to fix the day. All that is undone now."

"Certainly," responded the Hon. Mrs. Sampson Hoyt, with the virtuous joy of an iconoclast gazing on the ruin he has wrought.

"We don't seem to have anything exactly fixed," the president said, with a helpless and conciliatory smile. "If somebody would make a motion—"

"It's too late to make any more motions to-day," Miss Sharp interrupted, with much vigor. "It's ten minutes of six."

At this announcement of the lateness of the hour, the entire company started to their feet in dismay; and although, when the president and secretary tried next day to remember what had been done, that the latter might make up her report, they recorded that the meeting adjourned, that statement must be regarded as having been purely a parliamentary fiction, entered in the secretary's book to gratify that instinct innate in woman's breast to follow exactly the regular and strictest forms of recognized rules of order. Arlo Bates.

Delightful as modern ideas are, they offer certain disadvantages in the fact that the moment one is fully realized by the imaginations of every-day people it is found that the leaders of fashion use it simply as a point of departure, so that what has been a coveted object to the awakened zealot for æstheticism becomes shortly an abomination of taste to be discarded. After compassing heaven and earth to buy a Turkey rug, one finds that Turkey rugs are a delusion and a snare, and that, instead of their imparting an air of finished taste and elegance to a room, they suggest, on the contrary, low standards and a satisfaction with a mere modern and meaningless imitation. One may afford to have the rules of decorative art taste change where Japanese fans are concerned, since fans are inexpensive and in the long run capable of being worn out by legitimate use. But to have indulged somewhat immoderately in a taste for china and Venetian glass, with the idea that they will permanently enrich and beautify one's rooms, to line the walls with beautiful blue plates, and then to have them relegated to hanging shelves, next to have shelves discountenanced and cabinets insisted on, and lastly to have all table-utensils banished from parlors and living-rooms,—this is indeed to be stranded at high tide, with all the useless and fossil remains of a former period left to be disposed of as one's dark pantries may suggest. Needlework as well has the drawback of depreciating in beauty and worth; and one may employ toilsome processes and