The family of President Garfield have been spending the holidays all at home together. Mrs. Garfield is busy arranging a memorial room, set apart to contain relics and mementos of her illustrious husband. The walls of it are covered with framed resolutions and letters of sympathy, and there will be tables and cabinets loaded with similar tokens. When the arrangement is complete, the room will be one of the most noteworthy spots on earth, containing as it will expressions of love and respect from people in almost every nation of the world.
The London demand for bonds of the late Confederate States of America has recently become stronger than at any other time since the collapse of the Confederate government. A large block was bought a few days ago in Baltimore, on orders from a London banking house, at the rate of nine dollars and seventy-five cents a thousand. The demand has resulted in placing in the market several thousand Confederate dollars’ worth of bonds that have been pasted on fire-boards and screens.
One of the inconsistencies of our civilization may be seen in this item: “A Nevada penitentiary convict says that he was sent to prison for being dishonest, and is there kept at work cutting out pieces of pasteboard to put between the soles of shoes in place of honest leather.”
The people of the oil regions of Pennsylvania were afflicted with the spirit of speculation in oil, near the close of 1882. Professional men, traders of every kind, women who had saved a few hundred dollars, and, indeed, all classes of people, some with large sums of money, and others with small sums, ventured to speculate. Oil went from fifty cents per barrel up to one dollar and thirty-seven cents, and then dropped back to seventy-six cents. The result is that a great many people in moderate circumstances have lost all they owned. To hundreds of men and women it has been as disastrous as if all their property had been consumed by fire. _Moral._—It is wrong to speculate. It is dangerous every way, and, besides, it is gambling.
The Rev. Leroy Hooker gives us his comparative view of some of the poets in the _Canadian Magazine_ as follows: “It may not be too much to say that among the English-writing bards of the century, Tennyson’s only near competitor for the first place is Longfellow; and that Longfellow’s title to a place above Lowell is based not so much to his having projected upon the thought and sentiment of the century a more potent and permanent influence, as upon the fact that he has given us, in ‘Hiawatha,’ the nearest approach to a great epic poem that has been produced within the period—not excepting anything that even Tennyson has written.”