Sunday is strictly kept as a day of rest from their toils; then the poorest dress in clean clothes, men, women, and children going in family groups to church. After that, relations and neighbours pay visits. Man is no longer a beast of burden, but shews that he has a heart and a conscience; a happy spirit of good temper and frankness reigns everywhere. Indeed the high moral qualities of the natives, their love of education, and strong attachment to their native soil, make them a vigorous branch of the French nation, and one calculated to gain the traveller's respect.
[CRITICAL ODDITIES.]
That short pithy criticisms are occasionally as pointed as those that are more elaborated, may be gleaned from the following, which we cull at random for the amusement of our readers.
A little calculation would have saved a well-known novelist being taken to task by a fair graduate of Elmira College, who thus relieved her mind by writing as follows to the College magazine: ‘In a novel of Miss Braddon's, a book of wonderful plot and incident, the hero, after coming to grief in a civilised country, went to Australia to make his fortune; and while yet an apprentice at the pick and shovel, found an immense nugget of gold, which he hid, now in one place, now in another, and finally, was obliged to carry in his under-shirt pocket for weeks. When he reached home its sale made him immensely rich. I had a little curiosity in the matter, and obtaining the current price of gold, found, by a simple computation, that the nugget must have weighed a hundred and ninety-four pounds. A sizeable pocket that must have been!’
Albert Smith had his pronouns criticised in the following neat way by Thackeray. Turning over the leaves of a young lady's album, Thackeray came upon the following lines:
Mont Blanc is the Monarch of Mountains—
They crowned him long ago;
But who they got to put it on,
Nobody seems to know.—Albert Smith.
And wrote underneath:
I know that Albert wrote in a hurry:
To criticise I scarce presume;
But yet methinks that Lindley Murray,
Instead of ‘who,’ had written ‘whom.’
W. M. Thackeray.