A quart of pins, hair-pins, and needles was lately found in the nest of a mouse when some workmen tore down the piazza of an old hotel in Massachusetts. So that accounts for some of the pins which are always disappearing. They were taken away by a foolish little mouse, and could not have made a very soft bed for her family.
Louie Le B.—We will lay your little friend's pretty poem aside until cold weather comes round again. Thank you for sending it.
C. Y. P. R. U.
A Feast in Tahiti.—We are sometimes ready to imagine that we know better how to decorate our houses and dinner tables than the people do who live in the far-off East. But Miss C. F. Gordon-Cumming, who was invited to a feast in Tahiti, has given a very beautiful description of the style of entertainment. It would be hard to find anything prettier:
"Good Queen Pomare had lately died, and the islanders were in mourning for her. At the same time they were welcoming her successor, King Ariiane, with demonstrations of joy. He was making a royal progress over his domains, and stopping at Paea, he and his suite dined in the town-hall. Dinner was laid for three hundred guests. At one end was a table where the chiefs had prepared to entertain the royal party, and other tables had been spread by the families of the neighborhood for themselves and their friends. The building was decorated with palms and tree-ferns, and festooned all over with deep fringe made of hybiscus fibre dyed either yellow or white. There must have been miles of this fringe wreathed about the hall.
"On sitting down, the table seemed to have a series of white marble vases arranged along the centre. On looking closely, these vases turned out to be lumps of the thick, fleshy stalk of the banana near the root. They were of the purest white. In them were stuck branches of the thorny wild lemon-tree, and on each thorn were fastened bunches of gay artificial flowers, either made of colored leaves, or of the silken white fibre of the arrow-root, or of bamboo fibre. From some of the banana vases floated silvery plumes of aerial film like fairy ribbons. This was the snowy reva-reva, extracted from young cocoa-palm leaves. The worker who produces this lovely gossamer keeps a split stick stuck in the ground at her side; into its cleft she fastens one end of each ribbon as she peels it. It is so very light and soft that but for this precaution the first faint puff of air would blow it away.
"When the feast was at an end, the guests adorned their hats with these graceful plumes, and with the pretty, fanciful flowers. Then everybody adjourned to the grassy shore, and seated there, they watched the golden moon rising above the calm sea, while companies of glee-singers filled the air with soft, sweet music."
We would call the attention of the C. Y. P. R. U. this week to the article on "St. Elizabeth of Thuringia," by Mrs. Helen S. Conant, and to "Sea-Anemones," by Miss Sarah Cooper. The boys will learn how to help the ducks and fishes to an easier life in shady ponds by reading Mr. Allan Forman's article entitled "Trapping Torups."