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OUR RATE IS 50c. a line for advertising, in this department. We allow a special discount of 20% from this price for 12 insertions. No advertisement of more than 4 inches single column accepted at this price.

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JAMES SHIRLEY, DRAMATIST

A biographical and critical study of the principal dramatic poet
of the reign of Charles the First. By Arthur Huntington Nason,
Ph. D. 471 pages, 80; beautifully printed; choicely illustrated.
A joy to scholar and to book-lover. Price, $4.00 net.

ARTHUR H. NASON, Publisher,
Box 84, University Heights, New York City.

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COMPLETE ORATIONS, ESSAYS, AND DEBATES-$3.00 Ten minute original addresses, debates and essays on any subject prepared on special order. Prices of longer addresses, lectures, etc., sent on request. Send full instructions with order. Five minute addresses one dollar.

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etiquette of bathing. A small clique, led by Frances, insisted that it was only decent to save half the water to rinse off in. Some of the rest of us warmly argued this point. We held that it was impossible to take a real bath in half a reservoir of water, and that the results obtained by rinsing did n't compensate for the extra labor involved. Personally, I went through life unrinsed until we moved to the city. Arthur was the one to found a cult of outdoor bathing. In an angle formed by the walls of the dining-room and the library he constructed an impromptu room of sheets strung on clothes-lines, with the russet apple tree for one corner. "No roof but the blue above us. No floor but the beaten sod." The idea took like wildfire. Bathing out of doors, with the apple blossoms and blue sky over our heads, took on a tinge of romance that was not to be resisted. But of course it was limited to the very warmest days in summer.

When all was said and done, the thing we always came back to, like returning to the old-fashioned safety-pin after all these new-fangled contrivances to keep your skirt in place, was a wooden wash-tub by the kitchen stove. There we arranged clothes-bars and

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY:

chairs, draped them with sheets, blankets, and father's army blanket, to insure privacy, and successively performed the Saturday rite, while the rest of the family waited their turn.

Of course the old order changed in time. Galvanized tubs succeeded wooden ones, and finally a windmill and a tank on top of the house brought running water. When father gave up a country judgeship for a law office in town, and we moved to the city, bathing became an everyday affair.

I would not say a word in deprecation of modern plumbing. Beyond a doubt it is one of our greatest blessings and the herald of a true democracy, when there shall be neither a "great unwashed" nor a "submerged tenth." But, somehow, Saturday has lost its savor. Life is tamer than it used to be. No man in his senses would wish, in this day of Pullman sleepers, to cross the Great Plains in a prairie schooner, but the names of the men who risked their lives to do it are enshrined in history. And so I think we ought to build a little altar to the middle-class country mothers who, in the face of every obstacle, kept the Saturday-night bath a sacred institution, and handed it down to their children inviolate.

newspaper; but it is of a quality that makes it live ever after in the memory of the reader.

Only sometimes we lie,

The experience of your anonymous contributor, as told in the May Atlantic, is singular but not unique. From a scrapbook of the war-days of 1861, I extract the subjoined stanza of a poem in which the writer tells how he approached the Infinite. No name is given; it was but the vagrant verse from the poets' corner of a country Hear the long wave-roll of the infinite sea.

Where autumn sunshine streams like purple wine

Through dusky branches, gazing on the sky;
And shadowy dreams divine,
Our troubled hearts invest,
With the faint fantasy of utter rest
And for one moment we

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