latest American girl to learn that the European "no" bility " is not composed of noble men-the new-made 66 countess" is already pining for her own country. I expected it. I confided to Anna that her " 99 Count was utterly no account, and advised her to use him for fish bait instead of for breeding purposes. I counseled her to give the miserable tramp a cold "hand-out" and the marble heart. I implored her to consider her latter end and have no dealings with titled dudes. I suggested that she spill her gilded affections on some honest American mechanic who could be trusted to carry in the coal, come home reasonably sober, avoid the company of courtesans and sure-thing gamblers and love her as long as there was any of her left. But it's a sheer waste of advice to give it to a woman. Anna found the "Count on the matrimonial bargain-counter and gathered him in-paid for him, much as one might purchase a hairless Mexican pup. And the indiscriminating dailies fairly chortled in their joy. They informed the world that the union was a love match pure and simple-as though the average daily editor could distinguish between a Cupid-shaft and an affection of the kidneys! They slobbered over the young turtle doves until the bridal wreath floated in the lather, and prattled of the "holy union of two young hearts.” Rodents! And while sassiety and the press was slopping over, the Castellane family was recalcitrating like mule colts because Miss Gould would not turn over her entire fortune to her fiancé even threatened to break off the alliance at the very steps of the altar. But the Goulds knew the market quotations of expired patents of nobility, kept a stiff upper lip, and " the great house of Castellane " grew hungry and came off its perch with the frigid hauteur of a lame parrot making a sneak on a rotten peanut. Anna captured the erstwhile coronet-encumbered by an

early morning accident, such as will sometimes happen in respectable families. And now we are getting the second chapter of this "true love" tale. According to apparently reliable reports, the "Countess " Castellane is one of the most miserable of mortals. Ze count-without a coronet-is blowing in her boodle on bawds and boozers while neglecting and humiliating his wife in every possible way. So brutal is his treatment, so ostentatious his neglect of the woman who has paid for the very clothes he wears and the bread in his belly, that even the heartless cosmopolites of the wickedest city in the world profess to pity her. I have tried to be sorry for the “countess "; but I can't. I am indignant that a scrawny little French fice, who insults his own country by pretensions of "nobility" in the days of the Republic, and whose forefathers were kicked across the frontier like so many sheep-killing curs by the outraged peasantry should dare mistreat a countrywoman of mine; but reason tells me it is retributive justice. When the daughter of a mouse-trap-maker and map-peddler becomes too purse-proud to marry an American sovereign, and seeks among the syphilitic dudes of a fallen dynasty a companion for her bed, she deserves to suffer the tortures of the damned. It is a grim satisfaction to know that most of these title-hunting Yankee dunderheads get their just dues. If any American woman has wedded a European "nobleman " and "lived happily ever afterwards," I have yet to hear of it. Social claptrap and sacerdotal ceremony cannot sanctify a contract to commit a crime against nature, nor purge 66 a marriage of convenience" of the taint of prostitution. The woman who barters her beauty for a title, her soul for social distinction is even more culpable than the courtesan of Boiler avenue, whose fee is a dollar bill. In both cases it is cold-blooded barter and sale, but to the crime of a

loveless marriage is added the vice of hypocrisy. The bawd may be driven to sell her body for bread, but the title-hunter sacrifices her purity to gratify a prurient ambition. It is scarce to be expected that women who purchase their marital companions should make model wives-that is not a clause in the contract. The penurious 66 nobleman" marries such a woman not because he cares for her companionship, but because he needs money which he is too indolent to earn and too cowardly to steal. Having given her his name in exchange for a grub-stake, he feels that he has performed his part of the contract, has discharged his entire duty. He understands full well that the woman wedded him solely for his title that it was social ambition instead of love's passion that brought her to his bed—and he heartily despises her, as all hypocrites do their fellow humbugs. There is no contempt so profound, no hatred so implacable as that with which the impoverished patrician regards the aspiring parvenu; and scarce has the epithalamium ceased ere this feeling begins to make itself manifest. The man who weds a woman solely for her wealth cannot possibly possess the instincts of a gentleman. Though he wear a crown, he is at heart a human hyena, capable of any crime that requires no courage just the kind of a creature to find a fiendish joy in torturing the helpless, in making a woman's life a hell. All the manhood which the "older nobility" of Europe ever possessed was bred out by selfish marriages and shameless bawdry years ago. Most royal families were originally established by the plunder and oppression of the weak by the strong. The "nobility" was composed of the obsequious servants of marauding sovereigns, the hired assassins of crowned hoodlums, its ranks regularly recruited from professional panders and the spawn of prostitutes. For centuries the European "nobility” was

but a foul cesspool into which emptied the social sewer. The throne was surrounded by "ennobled " bastards and shameless bawds swayed the sovereign's scepter. "An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit." Idle lives, vicious habits and inherited disease have degraded the present "nobility " below even the brutish level of its progenitors

-has transformed it into a disreputable omnium gatherum of wife-beaters and sure-thing gamblers, scorbutic cowards and brazen cuckolds. Here and there may be found a family, lately ennobled, that has not yet become irremediably rotten; but the tendency is almost invariably downward—each succeeding generation drifting further from the distinctive virtues of manhood. And it was one of these hoodlums that Miss Gould bought for a husband. Her marital experience is that of most American women who have traded cash for coronets. The "Countess " Castellane and the "Princess" Colonna should retire to the woodshed and mingle their tears. They might retrieve their mistakes by employing a half-grown "coon" to bump together the empty pates of their titled nincompoops until they pop like a pair of painted bladders, then marry good Texas Democrats and rear a crop of boys with brains in their heads and iron in their blood.

***

THE MORMONS OF MEXICO.

AFTER suffering unremitting persecution at the hands of religious bigots for half a century, the Mormons are moving into Mexico, where, I am informed, there is little inclination to interfere with their polygamous practices. And they are repaying the hospitality of our sister republic by transforming her arid wastes into fruitful farms. A dispatch announces, as an item of news, that "they are

industrious and law-abiding citizens who are aiding wonderfully in the development of the country." The same could be said of the Mormons in America so long as the religious fanatics could be kept off their collars. The United States never had better citizens than were the Mormons so long as they were let alone. Their industry, thrift and penchant for attending strictly to their own business has passed into a proverb. This much may be said of them without indorsing their religious doctrines. I have ever been undecided whether Joe Smith was а faker or a fool; but certain am I that the brutal treatment accorded him and his followers in this country should call a blush of shame to the cheek of every American citizen. It was a crime unparalleled since the persecution of the Quakers by the Puritans; was committed by a country posing as the refuge of the world's oppressedthe chief exponent of individual liberty. There was not the slightest danger that polygamy would become a serious menace to American morals; the attempt to engraft it permanently upon Anglo-Saxon civilization were as futile as the labors of the Del Rio idiot to convince men who have circumnavigated the globe, that it is flat as a cellar floor. Instead of warring upon the seraglios of the Latter Day Saints, we should have considered ways and means for the abolishment of our own bagnios. We should have gotten the beam out of our own eye before going for the mote in the optic of the Mormon. The Church of the Latter Day Saints would have quickly perished had we let it alone. A religious craze thrives on persecution—“ the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church." Having mur'dered the founder of the new faith, we drove his followers -men, women and children-into the snow-clad, blizzard-cursed western waste. It was not a social convulsion that expelled the Mormons from the older States, but re