of using it to announce the dinner-hour, the hour of resuming work after the nooning, and the hour of quitting work for the night, ought to be abolished everywhere.  There is not the faintest excuse for it, because clocks and bells will do the same work exactly as well.  On the other hand, the whistle causes perpetual irritation to the nervous, feeble and sick, and frequent cases of horses running away with fright at the sudden shriek, smashing property or destroying life.

Let us give moral aid and comfort to the campaign, Cisatlantic and Transatlantic, against the steam-whistle.  In the local councils of Philadelphia, Camden and other cities it has been well opened in our country; in the House of Commons has been introduced a bill providing that “no person shall use or employ in any manufactory or any other place any steam-whistle or steam-trumpet for the purpose of summoning or dismissing workmen or persons employed, without the sanction of the sanitary authorities.”  They call this whistle, by the way, it would seem, the “American devil,” for the Manchester Examiner congratulates its readers that the “American devil” has been taken by the throat, and ere long his yells will be heard no more.

John Leech, it is said, was actually driven from house to house in a vain effort to escape the nuisance of organ-grinders, whom he has immortalized in Punch by many exquisite sketches, showing that they know “the vally of peace and quietness.”  Some of his friends declare that this nuisance so worked on his nerves that he may be said to have died of organ-grinders.  Holmes has immortalized the same guild of wandering minstrels as a sort of “crusaders sent from infernal clime to dock the ears of melody and break the legs of time.”  And yet the hand-organ, so often the subject of municipal legislation, is dulcet music compared with the steam-whistle, even when the latter instrument takes its most ambitiously artistic form of the “Calliope.”

SIAMESE NEWS.

Letters recently received from Bangkok, Siam, bearing date July 25, 1872, give the following interesting items.

His Majesty has just appointed an English tutor to his royal brothers, associating with them some of the sons of the higher nobles to the number of twenty.  This certainly indicates progress in liberal and enlarged views in a land where hitherto no noble, however exalted his rank or worthy his character, was considered a fit associate for the princes of the royal family, who have always been trained to hold themselves entirely aloof from those about them.  The young king now on the throne has changed all this, and says he wishes not only that his brothers shall have the advantage of studying with others of their own age, but that they should thus learn to know their people better, and by mingling with them freely in their studies and sports acquire more liberal views of men and things than their ancestors had.  He insists that his young brothers and their classmates shall stand on precisely the same footing, and each be treated by the teacher according to his merits.  The king intends to appoint yet other teachers in his family for both boys and girls; and though perhaps the time may not yet have come, it is certainly not far distant, when Siam will sustain high schools and colleges, both literary and scientific.