dat, de blockhead's vish! I no vant to be von Doctor." There is a story of the days when college honors were scattered broadcast over the land, that an illiterate rich man, having been honored with a degree by a college which he had laid under obligation, made a wager that he could obtain a similar honor for his servant. Winning the wager, he was so flushed with success that he laid another wager that he could obtain a degree for his horse. But that he lost; for the president wrote him a courteous note, saying that though they were very anxious to oblige so good a friend of the college, and though he had found, on examination of its records, that they had once conferred a degree on a jackass (naming the date of the gentleman's own diploma), they could really find no precedent for complying with his last request.

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Within the last twenty-five years there has been a very marked improvement in this matter, and it can no longer be justly asserted as was asserted some fifty or sixty years ago by Rev. Dr. S. H. Cox, of New York, in his sarcasms on what he styled "this semilunar fardel that the honorary degrees conferred by American colleges are. no test of competency," and that "talents are scarcely a recommendation for them, ignorance seldom a protection, juvenility itself no disqualification." Our colleges at least the leading ones, and many of secondary grade are growing more and more chary of their honors; and Father Taylor, the seamen's preacher, if living to-day, and asked why he had not been doctored, would hardly reply, as he once did to this question, "I suppose it is because my divinity has never been sick."

It must be a delicate question, in some cases, for a clergyman to decide whether to accept the honor of a doctorate.

The minister who covets and courts such a mark of distinction seems hardly to obey his Master's command: "Be ye not called Rabbi; " but to scorn or decline accepting such titles when bestowed unsought and, especially, to do so in a way to attract attention- - is often to betray as much vanity as that which prompts other men to parade them. It looks a little too much like trying to fill out a quartette of greatness with Moses Stuart, Albert Barnes, and Henry Ward Beecher. The affected humility of some such persons reminds one of the saying of Alexander the Great when some in his hearing praised Antipater, because he wore black while his colleagues wore purple: "Yes, but Antipater is all purple within.” It must be confessed that the virtue of some persons is unpleasantly ferocious. When Pope Alexander VI., in order to silence Savonarola, offered him the Archbishopric of Florence, with the prospect of a cardinal's hat, the monk was, no doubt, sincerely indignant; but there was a shade of vainglory in his reply, thundered forth from the pulpit: "I will have no hat but that of the martyr, red with my own blood!" What could be more ridiculous than the flourish of trumpets with which the apostle of utility, Jeremy Bentham, refused the diamond ring sent to him by the Czar of Russia, pompously declaring that it was not his mission to receive diamond rings from emperors, but to teach nations the lessons of wisdom?

Perhaps there would be no harm in a clergyman's receiving the degree of D.D., if, as some one has suggested, he would remember that there are at least some scores of men who have forgotten more than he ever knew or ever will know, who yet will never receive a degree. A very sensible course for a sensitive or conscientious clergyman to pursue,

is that taken by Rev. R. F. Horton, of London, Eng., who recently lectured at Yale University on Preaching; he said that while he did not see his way clear, without giving offence, to refuse the degrees that had been conferred on him, he hoped his congregation would address him as formerly. As to the actual value of college and all other titles of distinction, it is equally foolish to overestimate and to despise them. What Bacon finely says of nobility hits the happy medium on this subject as well: Nobilitatem nemo contemnit, nisi cui abest; nemo jactitat, nisi cui nihil aliud est quo glorietur, "No one contemns nobility but he who lacks it; no one boasts of it but he who has nothing else to brag of."

The Society SOME One has said that "of all the means of Women. of recruiting the exhausted energies of the mind after the toils and vexations of the day, none is so admirably fitted to fill up the elegant leisure of the scholar as the society of woman." The observation is true. Conversation with men demands some exertion, exacts some labor; it is too often a theatre in which the parties strive to outdo each other in argument, or to mortify their unread hearers by showing the depth of their knowledge and the acuteness or grasp of their minds. Even when free from all rivalry and contention, it is in many cases a mutual and incessant straining to say things which have an epigrammatic point and pungency, which are flavored with the salt of wit, startle by their abruptness, or give a pleasant shock of surprise. Conversation thus conducted, instead of soothing the ruffled mind, only tasks anew the faculties that have toiled all the day long in the world's mill.

In the society of women there is nothing of all this.

Nature has established a spirit of mutual concession between the sexes which forbids all contention; while that delicate tact which discovers instinctively the tastes and habits of thought of another, and adapts itself to them, which slides gracefully over matters without dwelling upon them and without effort, extracts the delicate aroma and the volatile essence, and gives as Dr. Donne said of Lady Anne Clifford -to every subject, "from predestination to slea silk," a pungent flavor and a piquant relish, is rarely found but in the society of intelligent and accomplished women.

Overworked THE "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table"

Women. expresses the opinion that an overworked

woman is always a sad sight, sadder far than that of an overworked man, because she is so much more fertile in capacities for suffering than a man. Besides her neuralgias and her backaches and her fits of depression, there are all the varieties of headache, "sometimes as if Jael were driving the nail that killed Sisera into her temples; sometimes letting her work with half her brain, while the other half throbs as if it would go to pieces; sometimes tightening round the brows, as if the cap-band were Luke's iron crown." But sadder far to our minds than all this misery, exquisite as it is, is the necessity to which woman is so often subjected of brooding day and night over the tormenting problem of "how to make both ends meet," by perpetual pinching and self-denial, and by the thousand shifts and devices for sustaining life on the smallest possible expenditure. The continual pressure of these small cares and anxieties exhausts as much as great ones; and they have this added bitterness, that they are petty and humiliating.

It flatters our vanity to demean ourselves well in a great crisis; the heroic string in our nature is touched, and we brace ourselves up for the trial; but there is no dignity or honor in bearing up under a succession of mean and paltry vexations.

Juvenal says truly, that poverty has no sharper sting than that it makes its victim ridiculous; and ridiculous does woman become, even to herself, when she is doomed by a limited income perpetually to think of sordid little economies, of petty savings which become imperative when every meal, every dress, every ride, every recreation, is a battlefield of ingenuity and self-denial against evermenacing debt and difficulty. "He who drinks beer, thinks beer," said Dr. Johnson; and it is equally true that those persons who occupy themselves with endless cares for small savings get to think candle-ends for their reward. It is pitiful to think of the deterioration of mind and feeling, the loss of dignity and self-respect, which is almost sure to accompany the constant practice of beating down prices and screwing cents and nickels from expense-bills. of Eve's descendants, women of rare mind and heart, no doubt escape this result; but the mass inevitably suffer. Among men, the evil of res angustæ domi is generally antagonized by vigorous efforts to earn, rather than to save; "it is but mounting a thousand additional steps," said Dr. Arbuthnot, when all his savings were swept away by the South Sea scheme. But" upon women," as one of the most thoughtful ones of our day has said, "to whom so few honest fields of industry are open, the necessity for a perpetual guard against the smallest freedom of expense falls with all its cruel and soul-crushing weight; and on the faces of thousands of them may be read the sad

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