Men of character and virtue slaves and creatures of every form. wink at their excesses; women of repute and modest bearing orget to chide or to repulse; that fatal heritage of flattery belongs to them equally with their title, their future, their estate; and save in a country like own own, where the press is free and editors are men, not worms, they never hear the faintest breath of blame, and are substantially deified to-day as they were in the times of ancient Rome, when an emperor would give himself out as the son of Jupiter or the descendant of Apollo, and statues were raised to his honour and sacrifices made in his name, all the same as if he had been the god whose paternity he claimed. It is praise and flattery all through; and if "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," it is also "the curse of kings to be attended by slaves," who, if they do not yet "take their humours for a warrant to break within the bloody house of life," yet do take their humours for a warrant of command which they are bound to obey, no matter how evil that command may be. And so with beauty. No sooner does a pretty fresh young thing make her appearance in society than all conspire to flatter her, and rob her of the very charm they praise. Now she is unconscious, devoid of vanity, considerate for others, without egotism or self-seeking; in a short time she will be made the exact contrary of all this. She will have been flattered into self-consciousness, which is the first step to vanity; and that very quality of her artlessness will be lost in the cloud of incense burnt to celebrate its charm. She will have learnt that she has fine eyes; and every look, every expression will have been chronicle and detailed; she will hear that she has fine hair, and she will learn its exact shade in the sun and the depth of its lustre in the shadow; and she will be told of her creamy skin, of her pretty mouth, of her graceful figure, of her sweetness and maidenliness, and simplicity and modesty. And the consequence of all this will be that she will study her looks and her poses, her complexion and her attitudes before the glass, till not a trace of unconsciousness is left, and she becomes as much a creature of art as if she were a paid actress on the boards. She will spend hours in arranging her hair so as best to show its curl, its sheen, its length, its thickness. Before this time she had dressed it simply, by which all its beauties were half revealed, half concealed; that beauty without intention which is the most beautiful thing of all. She will spend hours in learning this trick of her head, that action of her hands; this way of standing and that way of sitting; and here again she will lose all the grace of simplicity which first attracted to her the baleful crowd of flatterers who have destroyed what they so disastrously belauded. It is not only from the world without that we gather the sweet poison of flattery. We get quite enough at times at home, and are taught to believe that we are unique in our acquirements, and without rivals in our graces. The brothers of affectionate sisters are the cleverest and handsomest and most promising of all the golden youth of England; the sisters to each other are the most beautiful and the most accomplished. Lina's drawings are perfection; Nina's voice would be finer than Patti's were she to sing at Covent Garden; May's music is as good as Halle's; no one dances so well as Fay; Lily has the most splendid hair that can be seen out of a show; Milly has eyes that would make the fortune of one whose face was to be her fortune, should chance throw her into the way of King Cophetua. So on of all they do and are their work, their croquet, their tempers, their brains. Only when they go out into the world and measure themselves against others do they learn truly what their own dimensions really are. The loving flattery of home has made them bigger and higher in every way, and the waking to the bare truth is sometimes painful enough. But, bad as is all this flattery from the outside, that which we give to ourselves is the worst of all. "L'amour propre est le plus grand de tous les flatteurs," says Rochefoucault, and the Frenchman was right. If we were flattered every day in the week, and yet did not accept as true what we were told, it would do us no harm; but when we begin to flatter ourselves we have tumbled into the pit, and getting out again is the difficult problem, which not all of us are able to master. We have to be somewhat severely handled before we can say we have learnt our lesson-of how to walk in safety, free of flattery and its lures, and how to avoid the pitfalls of vanity resulting therefrom.—Queen. THE MIRACULOUS SKULL OF BUXTON.-In a small work published at the Advertiser Office, Buxton, in 1877, entitled "Skull Superstitions," by William Andrews, is an account of the Derbyshire Miraculous Skull, as follows:-Perhaps the most notable is the skull called "Dickie," which is kept at Tunstead, a farm-house about a mile and a half from Chapel-en-le-Frith; the place is on the north bank of the reservoir. The skull is in three parts. We find in "A Tour through the High Peak," by John Hutchinson, of Chapel-en-le-Frith, published in 1809 and dedicated to the Marquis of Hartington (afterwards the late Duke of Devonshire), that "The skull has always been said to be that of a female; but why it should have been baptised with a name belonging to the male sex seems somewhat anomalous; still not more wonderful, than a many, if not all, of its very singular pranks and services. To enumerate all the particulars of the incalculably serviceable acts and deeds done by Dickie' would form a wonder; but not a wonder past belief, for hundreds of the inhabitants for miles around have full and firm faith in its mystical performances. How long it has been located at the present house is not known; to whose body in the flesh it was a member is equally as mysterious, save that it is said (but what has not been said about it that is not pure fiction?) that one of two co-heiresses residing here was murdered, and who declared in her dying moments that her bones should remain in the place for ever. It is further said that the skull did not, some years back, appear the least decayed." It is believed that if the skull be removed everything on the farm will go wrong-the cows will be dry and barren, the sheep have the rot, and horses fall down, breaking their knees and otherwise injuring themselves. The most amusing part of the superstition connected with "Dickie" is the following: When the London and North. Western Railway to Manchester was being made, the foundations of a bridge gave way in the yielding sand and bog on the side of the reservoir, and, after several attempts to build the bridge had failed, it was found necessary to divert the highway, and pass it under the railway on higher ground. These egineering failures were attributed to the malevolent influence of "Dickie," the popular name of the skull. But when the road was diverted, it was bridged successfully, because no longer on "Dickie's " territory. HOARDING versus BANKING.- The successive collapse of the City of Glasgow, the Caledonian, and the West of England Banks, has naturally produced a feeling of intense distrust, especially among the poorer and more ignorant persons who have been in the habit of depositing their savings in such establishments, and it is scarcely to be wondered at that some of them have gone to the other extreme, and have resorted to the proverbial "old stocking." There are two obvious objections to hoarding; one is that the hoarder gets no interest for his money; and the second is that he runs considerable risk of losing his money by robery. At the present time, when banks are deservedly in ill odour, the small money-saver would do well to take the middle course, and put his money in the Post Office Savings Banks. We once more urge upon Lord John Manners the advisability of opening these useful receptacles on Saturday evenings. The risk of leaving considerable sume of money in the Post Office from Saturday night till Monday morning might be obviated in large cities by removing the cash thus collected to some central strong room. The banks would, for a trifling remuneration, readily afford such facilities. And now for a word about the recent bank failures. The question is, "Need a bank ever fail, unless there has been—not necessarily downright fraud, but negligence more or less culpable?" Men are very ready to make "ducks and drakes" of other peoples' money, and, in our opinion, bank directors and managers should be held far more strictly to account than they now are. If in the event of a bank failing, from whatsoever cause, the managers and directors. were, as a matter of coure, liable to be criminally prosecuted, there would be far fewer failures than there now are, and that mingling of ornamental dummies with keen men of business would become a less ordinary feature of directorial Boards.-Graphic. : SINGULAR SUPERSTITIONS.-An American paper has the following There are wonderful things to be studied in the vast laboratory where Nature has stored her treasures. The men who toil in the caverns of the ground, and tread the endless windings of the drifts, have their presentiments of calamity, and at times feel the touch of Death in the very air. A reporter was talking with an old miner, a few days ago, who implicitly believed that no death ever took place in the mines without a warning of some kind. "You see," he said, "death never comes of a sudden upon the men in the mines. You reporters write up accidents, and tell how something gave way or fell quick and killed somebody Now, this ain't so. There's always some warning. When I see my lantern begin to burn low down and blue, I know that there is danger ahead. If it keeps on a few days, and then begins to waver and flicker, I'll watch it close to see where it points. Now, you may set me up for When the flame leans a fool, but what I'm tellin' is the gospel truth. over (as if it was being worked by a blow-pipe) and points to a man, death has marked him. Some years ago, when Bill Hendricks was killed in the Savage, the flame of my lantern pointed right to him for over an hour, and when he moved the flame would turn, just as if Bill was a loadstone and the flame was a mariner's needle. I knew he was gone, and told him to be careful about the blast. Well, he got through that all right, and got on the cage. As he went up, the candle kept acting strangely, and at times the flame would stretch out, long and thin, towards Bill. At length it gave a sudden flicker, and Bill reeled to one side, and was caught in the timbers. I heard his dreadful cry as he disappeared down the shaft, and while he was bounding from side to side, dashing out his brains and scattering his flesh down to the bottom, my light went out. I never lit that lantern again. It hangs up in my cabin now, and it always will. There's more in a candle-flame than people think. I'd rather see a cocked revolver pointed at me than a candle flame; a revolver sometimes misses, but a candle-flame is sure to kill when it starts towards a man. I must start for my shift now. Don't give my name to anybody. There are some who would laugh at me." The man here picked up |