EDITORS' TABLE.

It was the last night. There were only three of them, and they were having feelings appropriate to last nights. It is so much fun to have appropriate feelings. "The old order changeth," sad the Mikado, who is apt to be rather banal. The Gentle Alice looked as if she would like to emphasize his banality by a truly profound quotation from Thomas Hardy or Taussig's Economics or the Faere Queen, but her emotions were too much for her. "Yah," jeered the Bishop, with his usual forcefulness, "giving place to new. But where is the new?" Where, indeed, was the new? The Mikado shuffled the manuscripts disconsolately. "I have an idea," said Alice, her eyes glowing with the dawn of a great inspiration. But the others were used to that; even Alice's delightful ephemerality could not divert them.

"But it has changed, you know," said the Mikado, coming back to the subject;-it was very dull of him, but quite true. The Chancellor long since had become nothing more than a happy memory. The Aesthete, with all his winning little superiorities, was missing from this last gathering. Always graceful, always discreet, always with that delcate and inimitable subtlety, he too had gone, and left them to mourn the fine air of polish which he had brought to their uncouthness. But the Bishop! The new times sat very heavily upon him. No longer did the timid heelers rush in to hang upon his most contemptuous word; the end was rapidly approaching, and he became deeply philosophical. Alice and the Mikado applauded; they wanted to be philosophical too, but the Bishop did it so beautifully. There was no longer the old security; the spirit of radicalism was abroad, and the jeers of the reptile press weighed heavily upon them. Worse than that, Alice chanted the depressing statistics of the balance-sheet. Alice will do things like that at the most inopportune of times. It was too awful.

"Let's have bout rimée sonnets !" cried the Mikado, brightly. But the others groaned. The Green Light faded into eternity.

THE MIKADO.