and offices home like and comfortable. The house is of four stories like an L, and on five of its six sides is surrounded by a wide piazza affording a delightful promenade. It is but a step from this piazza to the green sward of the lawn, one of the most charming lawns in the world, surrounded on three sides by the ocean, and without obstruction in every direction. A glorious place for children, for croquet, for lawn tennis, for foot races, for kite flying. The point extending into the sea makes a haven for small boats or yachts, and just outside the surf is an inexhaustible fishingground. The colonel got rich many years ago in the hotel business, and now carries on the caravansary more as an English manor house in which to entertain his guests than as a public house. His prices are merely nominal, what ordinarily go to feeing servants at the great popular resorts. Three dollars a day for transient guests, and ten and twelve dollars a week for boarders may be considered very moderate charges for a first class hotel open less than three months in the summer. The season here commences about the middle of June and ends about the middle of September, although season after season his delighted guests refuse to leave his domain for a month or six weeks after the house is nominally closed for the summer. In short, Col. Dumas has a large first class hotel at Boar's Head, Hampton Beach, on the coast of New Hamp. shire, which he wishes filled all through the summer of 1886. Every visitor will be charmed with his sojourn there and will regret his departure. Write early for terms and accommodation that he may be prepared for you and that you may not be disappointed. LACONIA, N. H. The pioneer of the hosiery industry in Laconia was John W. Busiel, who came to Laconia in 1846 and began the manufacture of woollen yarns. In 1856 he began to use the yarn product of his mill in making the coarser grades of wool hosiery, and continued in the business until his death in 1872. His sons, Charles A. Busiel, John T. Busiel, and Frank E. Busiel, succeeded him under the firm name of J. W. Busiel & Co. They have largely increased the business and have erected as fine a set of mills as can be found in New Eng land devoted to the line of woollen goods. They are manufacturing the finer grades of woollen hosiery in full fashioned goods, using machinery of the latest pattern, some of which they control exclusively under letters patent. They employ two hundred and fifty hands, and their annual product is about $500,000, with a monthly pay roll of $6500 to $7000. Their goods are known in the trade as the Perfect Foot goods, and find a ready and increasing sale all over the country. "NEXT DOOR." A story modest in aim, boyhood life is tenderly revealed, not from the but cleverly executed and remarkably interest- standpoint of a literary critic, not as one who ing as a piece of narration, will be found in tries to write, but the most delicately sensitive "Next Door," by Clara Louise Burnham, memories of a devoted brother. School days This author writes agreeably, in a clear, fluent and college years are briefly but significantly style, and describes the domestic and social portrayed. Where the professional biographer life of our day in a manner which merits high would have reveled in the abundant material, praise. She has a good eye for character as we are given all that is of any real interest well, and in one of her personages, Aunt Ann without any of the tediousness that usually afEaton, has given us a genuine portrait of a flicts. In turning the pages as the paper-knife woman which many people will admire for its runs through the uncut leaves, the impression felicitous touches. The other people who fig- is that the biographer tarries too long on his ure in the story are perhaps less carefully dis- early foreign travels, but as we read, and find criminated; but unless it be the antipode of Mr. Longfellow's choicest descriptions, with a Aunt Ann in the city matron, who also pre- vein of wit rarely revealed by him intermingled sents familiar traits, the remaining characters with original art sketches, we regret that it so are all interesting to the reader. The quar- soon shades into his professional days at Bowtet of lovers especially enlists sympathy. It doin, only to rejoice us by emerging into a is on their experiences that the story turns. second European tour, prolonged but delightWe see what its inevitable result will be, for ful. the writer of this book is not one of those authors who are given to harrowing the sensibilities of his audience; but we follow the tale none the less, always entertained by it, and with a curiosity as to how the end is to be brought about, which is more agreeable than anxious misgiving as to what is to be done with the characters. This story, as we have said, is charmingly told. It has some of the qualities which have made the works of that English writer known as "The Duchess" popular, without her effusiveness, sometime slang and ultra-romanticism. The conversations are particularly good. They are easy and natural, and they well illustrate much of the manner of the day which is found among young people. Margery is agreeably and often spicily vivacious, and Ray Ingalls is a good specimen of a genuine, warm hearted youth. The humor of the introductions of two of the characters in the opening chapter is especially neat, and we can promise readers a genuine entertainment from the story throughout. ["Next Door," by Clara Louise Burnham. Boston: Ticknor & Co.: 12mo, pp. 371.] LIFE OF HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. With Extracts from his Journals and Correspondence. By Samuel Longfellow. Boston: Ticknor & Company. 2 vols., 450 pp. each: price, $6.00. The life of no man of letters could be more welcome than that of the admired, honored, beloved poet of "creative imagination, airy fancy, exquisite grace, harmony and simplicity, rhetorical brilliancy, and incisive force,' who vitalized everything he touched in verse by the sympathy of his nature. He always touched humanity with voice or pen tenderly. Humanity's response is in the welcome given these exquisite volumes, which could not have been written with more appreciative fervor, or more modest, classic phrase, and could not have been issued with more delicate elegance than from the press of Ticknor & Co. As a biography it is complete in a sense that no other writer could have made it. The The Cambridge home, life, work and friends are left to appear as visitors here and there, delicate glimpses in journals, letters and poems. One of the most genuine phases of the writer's art is the ease, good taste, and discriminating judgment with which he brings into view for a moment's entertaining thought the characters worth knowing in both hemispheres for a halfcentury. The world is richer for having in its libraries and upon its tables two such elegant volumes as Ticknor & Co. have given us in Samuel Longfellow's life of his brother, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. THE SPHINX'S CHILDREN: AND OTHER PEOBy Rose Terry Cooke, author of Somebody's Neighbors, etc. 12mo. $1.50. "A bouquet of native New England flowers, and the flowers have a peculiar beauty and fragrance too."-Hartford Courant. PLE'S. The short stories in this volume are of the very essence of New England. A somewhat fanciful revery lends its peculiar title to the book, but the "Other People's" offspring are the individual product of the soil, full of the grit, the doggedness and the grim humor that came over with our grandparents' furniture in the Mayflower. These stories are the fruit and blossom of all that is noblest and best in the qualities of the Puritan, and it may be that their appreciation-though not their beauty or their power-will be restricted by reason of what is distinctive and individual about them. Surely no short story of recent years has surpassed "The Deacon's Week" in pathos, in artistic truth, in the inspiration of a sublime and noble purpose. It would seem that no one could rise from its perusal without an impulse toward kindness and charity and a sense of benefit received. Without a word of moralizing or tawdry reflection, it gives the same lesson that is practiced out by true and manly conduct and unselfishness. And all the time the perfection of the picture as a work of art, as a truthful portrait set out with exquisite literary finish, captures the mind and entrances the imagination. THE BUSINESS ELEMENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY. WHEN this country has attained to twice its present age, and Americans begin to think more of life than they do of money, some careful historian will trace the province of business in our national history, and make that chapter of American history one of the most readable in our chronicles. Since the days of Miles Standish, we have been a business people; and the phrase has meant more on this side of the Atlantic than it has in any of the mother countries. Blankets for corn, and whiskey for venison, has changed in the century to stock-jobbing and markdown sales; but nevertheless business is and was a dominant factor, and a matter of astonishment. One hundred years ago the old Dutch store-keepers of New York stood still in their doorways in mute astonishment as they saw farmers and strangers come by with their produce on their wagons, and a determination for a good bargain on their calculating faces. The same sentiment is with us who are idlers to-day, and stand at an elevated-railway station any morning, and watch the horde of passengers. If the Nick Van Stans stared in amazement, so do we, as we look at the trains discharging their loads, and see on anxious, worried, and excited faces the deep-worn signs of the never-ceasing struggle for business prosperity. It is quite the same to-day as it was in 1784. Then men traded under difficulties, and now gains are not to be had except at extreme risk. Then pirates, Indians, and other treachery lurked somewhere as a perpetual terror, just the same as treacherous Specula tion stalks through our daily markets ready to devour. Then there existed gigantic bubble companies that are the direct ancestors of our modern stock enterprises. Then as now big sums were risked, and at times the ventures exceeded in magnitude any thing we have seen. I like to hear wise men say that we of to-day are fools in business. Of course it is true; and why should it not be, when the men of 1884 are sons of men who in the years of a not-long-gone century did much foolish business? There is nothing new under the sun. that has shone on a goodly lot of American business folly. To him who points the finger of scorn at our Wall Street, I like to talk of the "Darien scheme," the "South-sea bubble," or perchance of the "scheme of William Law." Alas, we cannot make men like Law in this year of grace, our best efforts in that direction only resulting in a Ferdinand Ward! Just think of that man and his Mississippi scheme! He went to work on an arbitrary court, professing magnificent faith in boundless sources of credit. He made ready converts of wise men who could find no bound between the real and ideal. Under his sophistry Paris lost its head, and the world witnessed a financial excitement never equalled. There was a rush to the Bank of France, to change gold and silver for empty promises concerning an American scheme. The Scotch parvenu held levees, where the nobles of France were his obsequious courtiers. In short, he was the fashion, and has had no successor. He anti cipated such schemes as the Crédit Mobilier, and the selling of imaginary silver mines to sanguine English investors; but none of these ventures have equalled the original. Then a Scotchman could sell a French regent a league of Louisiana swamp for three thousand livres, while now we have "puts" and "calls" on railroad stocks that are just as swampy. Ah, but we cannot do such magnificent swindling in Wall Street! The good American is as "cute" as the evil one, and both are "cuter" than the William Laws. He spoilt all by dying poor, while our modern speculator dies rich, even after he is ruined! Poor Law, if he had only known how to go into bankruptcy, or to settle his estate on his wife ! But there were solid business-men in those last centuries as well as speculators. In New York and Boston, at the close of the Revolution, there were merchants of ability and energy, stanch, steady heads of houses, without a particle of folly or romance about them. Such men might live over their shops, or might have ships trading in the Levant. Men who were the direct progenitors of some of our best modern houses got a respectable and honest living out of coffee and sugar, or in butter and eggs, and were esteemed for their principles. Such men got influence, and went about making their country's history. Theirs was an absolutely unique position. While lawyers played the leading characters on the stage, there were times when a businessman was asked for, and a John Jay stepped forward. The lawyer and soldier gave his country his brain; but the business-man added to that gift the product of his brain, his money. He had calculation and prudence about him; and, though the pet of Fortune, he never presumed on her favors. Strangely, the troubled times in which his lot was cast well served his sagacity. His tact developed into genius, and his gains were only measured by his credits. He knew no "bulls," and he never felt the mercy of "bears." Bon chien chasse de race; and, like the speculator, the old-fashioned merchant has his heirs in our time. When that American history is written, it will tell of these steady-going merchants of to-day, who are masters of many situations, and who are even wiser and stronger than their honored fathers. We want such men more now than we ever did before. In the twenty-five years since 1859, how many such men have there been! They do not fritter away time and talents in speculation. Their habits are of steady application. Their ways are respected. The self-styled capitalist is shy of entertaining proposals which are already prejudiced in the opinion of steady-going business-men. That which they accept is launched handsomely. If real business-men push a railway scheme, the public has no fear of what the Law and Ward element may do. The undertakings of the solid element are measured by its ambition and energy, rather than its resources; and it is not strange to see a million of capital follow in the road a single dollar has cut. But in the same history we shall have resigned to the life of swindlers. Their dinners, equipages, and other extravagance become parts of a system of imposture. They dare not do aught else than to try and maintain their position; and they strain every nerve for that purpose, until the morning comes when we read of their suspension, and in the crash the creditors are dismayed. It is a relief to a once honorable man to lose all, and make a clean breast of his folly. His only regret is that he may have cast his character after his fortune into the vortex of speculation. But if he hasn't done any act of overt criminality, he has come off better than he deserves, and can show that he has no moral liabilities. If the contrary is the case, the means did not justify it. From such means we shrink. If a well-known business-man goes openly into speculation, and is known as the promoter of a stock enterprise, we throw stones at him when he suspends. We cannot help it, and we do not want to help it. The public wants the business-men to do that which they advise the cobbler to do,—"stick to his last." If he fails to keep to that little law of conduct, he is supposed to be worthy of suspicion. Imagine how it will tell in that coming American history, that a most wonderful event was an assignment! As the story of Law's bubble and its bursting has amused us, so will our children be interested in reading of the crashes, suspensions, and panics of the last half of the nineteenth century. We are too near them, and too much in them, to realize how tragic, grotesque, and melancholy they are. But, when it comes to the fall of a real rascal, we can realize that; for such a person is known where the quiet business-man is not. You knew this rascal, and everybody did. He was smooth, seductive, and fashionable. He took liberties with the public credulity. He had talent and enterprise, and made a big show. He had gold-letter prospectuses, elegant offices, a sumptuous reception-room, and magnificent house, horses, and plate. He was puffed by the press. He was a lion in society, and gave grand entertainments. He subscribed largely to charities, and to churches and schools. He had lots of money; because, for some unexplainable reason, the public took in his scheme, and invested liberally in the stock that he sold. Then came the re-action. Insolvency followed close on inflation. The bankrupt became defendant in a legion of transactions. He was alleged to be a fraud. His establishments were in the hands of a keeper. He was in the last throes, when presto! he came up smiling. He had made friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; he had it in his power to involve others: immediately he had all the help he wanted, and he slipped through the fetters he should have worn. He had money laid by for the emergency, his broken character at once stepped forward again, and, before the scandal of his failure was cold, he was once more in the full tide of business. That was your sharp American gentleman rascal. The Old World has made marvellous progress in the ways of business, but we get the real drama of business in America. The story will be interesting reading, and no one will pass it by because it is dry as dust. Ours is a big field, big men, and big, bold ventures. The climate or the soil produces all kinds of daring and shrewdness. We have both the mushroom dealer, and the man of enormous wealth; men making splendid fortunes, and men continually failing and begin |