warn by their excitement.  But if Sin and Sorrow in their most fearful forms are to be presented in any work of art, they have rarely been treated with a loftier severity, purity, and sympathy than in Mr. Hawthorne’s ‘Scarlet Letter.’  The touch of the fantastic befitting a period of society in which ignorant and excitable human creatures conceived each other and themselves to be under the direct ‘rule and governance’ of the Wicked One, is most skillfully administered.  The supernatural here never becomes grossly palpable:—­the thrill is all the deeper for its action being indefinite, and its source vague and distant.”

[Footnote 2:  The Scarlet Letter:  a Romance.  By Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Boston:  Ticknor & Co.]

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The Emperor Nicholas has just published an ordonnance, which regulates the pensions to which Russian and foreign actors at the imperial theaters at St. Petersburgh shall be entitled.  This ordonnance divides the actors (national as well as foreign) into four classes.  The first class obtains, after twenty years’ service, pensions averaging from 300 to 1140 silver rubles.  The others, after fifteen years’ service, will receive pensions from 285 to 750 silver rubles.

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THE HAIR

CHEMICALLY AND PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED.—­Each hair is a tube, containing an oil, of a color similar to its own.  Hair contains at least ten distinct substances:  sulphate of lime and magnesia, chlorides of sodium and potassium, phosphate of lime, peroxide of iron, silica, lactate of ammonia, oxide of manganese and margaim.  Of these, sulphur is the most prominent, and it is upon this that certain metallic salts operate in changing the color of hair.  Thus when the salts of lead or of mercury are applied, they enter into combination with the sulphur, and a black sulphuret of the metal is formed.  A common formula for a paste to dye the hair, is a mixture of litharge, slacked lime, and bicarbonate of potash.  Different shades may be given by altering the proportions of these articles.  Black hair contains iron and manganese and no magnesia; while fair hair is destitute of the two first substances, but possesses magnesia.

No one ever possessed all the requisites of masculine or feminine beauty without a profusion of hair.  This is one of the crowning perfections of the human form, upon which poets of all ages have dwelt with the most untiring satisfaction.  However perfect a woman may be in other respects; however beautiful her eyes, her mouth, teeth, lips, nose or cheeks; however brilliant her expression, in conversation or excitement, she is positively disagreeable without this ornament of nature.  The question is sometimes asked, “What will cure love?” We answer, scissors.  Let the object be shorn of hair, and you may take the word of a physiologist, that the tender passion will lose its distinctiveness; it may subside into respect:  it is more likely to change into a less agreeable emotion.