ENTERTAINING VARIETIES. 405 



met in Italy by the member proposing him. This rule is said to have led on one 

 occasion to a resolution of the members which might well astonish geographers. 

 A candidate had been elected on the strength of his having been met at Avignon 

 at that time really more Italian than French in all its associations. The mis- 

 take was seen, and in order to maintain the validity of the election a special 

 resolution was carried, that "in the opinion of this society Avignon is in Italy." 

 It was then considered that a dangerous precedent might have been created, and 

 forthwith a second resolution was passed, that "in the opinion of this society 

 Avignon is the only town in France which is in Italy." 



Christian Liberality . President Arthur being on Long Island the other 



Sunday with some publicans and sinners, and the party being an hungered while 

 the corn was not eared, plucked the contents of a trout-pond and did eat. 

 "Whereupon the Scribes and Pharisees are shocked at this desecration of the 

 Sabbath-day. The " Christian Union," in an article suffused with complacency 

 at its well-known Christian liberality, remarks : " The country can afford to 

 have a mistaken public policy maintained through four years of misadminis- 

 tration better than it can afford to have a bad example of Sabbath-breaking, 

 impiety, and vulgarity, set before the whole community by men of the first 



eminence." 



Ownership and Rental. Of the 3,800,000 farms, approximately, into 



which the cultivated area of the United States is divided, sixty, or even seventy, 

 per cent are cultivated by their owners. In the Northern States the proportion 

 rises to eighty per cent, or even higher. Connecticut, Maine, and Massachu- 

 setts, of the New England States, and Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, of 

 the Northwestern States, show an excess of ninety per cent. 



The bigotry of the orthodox Eussians, like that of the conservative 



Spaniards, is a sort of mental disease, but there is less method and more humor 

 in the madness of the Muscovites ; a facetious answer has often propitiated the 

 wrath of their clerical inquisitors. The Synod of Moscow once arraigned the 

 philosopher Lermontoff on the charge of being an abettor of the Copernican 

 heresies, especially of the "doctrine of plural worlds," and requested him to 

 explain his paradogmas. " From the bugs in the beard of your Eminence," 

 Lermontoff addressed the "grand metropolitan," "I infer that the beards of the 

 worshipful coadjutors are similarly infested, and by a parity of reasoning the 

 population of this earth inclines me to suspect a plurality of inhabited planets." 

 They let him go. 



General Skobeleff, in his memoirs of the Turkish campaign, tells an equally 

 good story at the expense of his orthodox countrymen. When the vanguard of 

 his cavalry approached the hamlet of Kerzanlik, in the eastern Balkan, the 

 frightened burghers sent out a deputation of prominent citizens to implore the 

 clemency of. the conqueror. Skobeleff returned an evasive reply, and, after a 

 private consultation with his colleagues, the spokesman of the committee repeated 

 his appeal with the following amendment : that, rather than have their town 

 pillaged, the citizens would agree to supply every trooper of his command with 

 sixteen pints of slibovitz (plum-brandy), and consent to believe in any number 

 of gods not exceeding two dozen! 



