undertaken by the city.  These drinking-jets are in the main like those so familiar in American cities, and are provided, of course, with tin cups attached by iron chains—­“a la mode Anglaise” add the French papers in an explanatory way.  Now, the extraordinary fact concerning these fountains is, that no sooner had the first installment of nine been put up than all the tin cups, or “goblets,” as the Parisians call them, were stolen.  They were renewed, and again disappeared in a trice.  In short, within fifteen days no less than forty-seven of these goblets were made way with, despite their strong fastenings—­that is, an average of over five cups to each fountain.  What the sum-total of plunder has been since the first fortnight, or whether the fountains are still as useless as spiked cannon or tongueless bells, we have yet to learn.

Now comes a contrast.  The countrymen of Sir Richard claim that in London from time immemorial not a single cup was ever stolen from the public fountains.  So tempting a theme for generalization could not be resisted by the Paris newspaper philosophers, who have deduced from this theft of the cups a broad distinction between the British loafer and the French loafer, declaring that the former “respects any collective property which he partly shares,” while the latter does not even draw this distinction, but grabs whatever he can lay his hands on.  “The luck of the Wallace fountains,” cries one moralizer, “shows how hard it is to reform the Paris gamin so long as the law contents itself with its present measures.  If the state does not speedily educate children found straying in the street, it is all up with the present generation.”  Thereupon follows a disquisition on the part which Paris children played in the Commune.  “Now, the child,” adds our newspaper Wordsworth, “is the man viewed through the big end of the opera-glass;” and he points his moral, therefore, with the need of compulsory education.  “One of the first duties incumbent on the Chamber at the next session will be the solution of this question.  Let it take as a perpetual goad the fate of the Wallace goblets.  You begin by stealing a cup of tin—­you end by firing the Tuileries or plundering the Hotel Thiers.”  There is a droll mingling of Isaac Watts and Victor Hugo in this denoument, and despite its practical good sense one is amused at the evolution of a grave discourse from so trivial a text as the Wallace drinking-cups.

* * * * *

To people of a statistical rather than a sentimental turn, the mathematics of marriage in different countries may prove an attractive theme of meditation.  It is found that young men from fifteen to twenty years of age marry young women averaging two or three years older than themselves, but if they delay marriage until they are twenty to twenty-five years old, their spouses average a year younger than themselves; and thenceforward this difference steadily increases, till