THE FRENCH PRESIDENT ON THE WAY FROM VERSAILLES.
When Français Felix Faure, the newly-elected President of the French Republic, made his first railroad journey after election, he found that being a mere President is almost as unpleasant as playing king. For fear of anarchists a strong force of soldiers and four sappers and miners guarded each of the railway bridges and grade crossings between Versailles and Paris. Extra policemen and a little army of five hundred detectives watched the palace in which the National Assembly sat. A strong battalion of lancers and more foot soldiers than you could count escorted the new President to the special train in waiting at Versailles at 8 o'clock on Friday morning, January 18th. Fortunately no anarchist got a shot at the President as he was whirled along, but as he emerged from the St. Lazare railway station in Paris voices in the crowd yelled at him, "Down with the check-takers!"—a pointed hint that M. Faure was implicated in the Panama Canal scandal.
A CORRECTION.
"I've dot two Movver Gooses,"
Said Mollie. "If you please,"
Said Johnny, "Don't say Gooses,
Because it's Mother Geese."
DR. RAINSFORD'S ADVICE TO BOYS.
When we were boys we did things without thinking much about them. Boys do not generally think much; yet I think even when I was a boy I found myself sometimes wondering why it was so hard to do the things I wanted to do well. It was ever so much harder, of course, to do well the things that one did not specially want to do. I want to talk to you a little about the reason that lies back of this difficulty of doing things well.
When I was thirteen my father gave me a gun. That birthday long ago is one of the very reddest of red-letter days in my life. I have had many a good time since; but none of these good times, I think, have quite come up to that hour, so full of astonishment and delight, when I saw the very thing I had been longing for and dreaming about so long—saw the soft-looking brown barrels lying snugly against the green-baize lining of the case, and felt the ring of the lock under my fingers as I drew the hammers of my own gun back. (Those were the days of muzzle-loaders, boys.) But when I had got that gun—the desire of my eyes, the pride of my life—it was, oh, how long, before I could hit things flying with it. On Saturday half-holidays (we had only one half a holiday a week when I was at school), I used to practise steadily. All my savings went to shot, powder, and wads. I almost lost the desire for candy with its disuse. I even turned my back on the pond where we used to fish for roach. I had seen my father kill birds flying, one with each barrel, and there was neither rest nor satisfaction for me till I could do the same. I think I took to shooting naturally; yet how long it was, and how hard I had to work, before I learned to shoot steadily and well.