The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, November 3, 1895, Page 15

. » » SAN FRANCISCO CALL, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1895. Their pet story up in Eldorado County | is that concerning Heads Peters. He was | the joke of ali the old mining country up there for so long that now that he has gone the tale of his adventures is told to | every stranger that enters one of the old cabins. Sam Newton told it to me—Sam, whose cabin high up on the river hill is almost the last mark of the high tide of gold miners who made that country hum s ago. Just beyond Sam’s s over the bank and down to the American River, and vbody who goes into that country stops at the shack upon the hill to inquire way. I stopped there. After we had dined on bacon and hot biscuit, and I had helped him clear up the mess and put the cabin to rights and we were sittingon the sawlog just outside the door m said suddenly: “Yes, a great place for consumptives | and people with asthma. Good many of | them stop over to Auburn.” | I told him there was nothing the mat- ter with my lungs, at which he seemed distressed, as if I could not therefore profit by the fine air and general salubrity of the mountains. “It 'minds me of Heads Peters,” Newton, shamelessly. I had reminded a good many people up in that country of Heads Peters, but per- versely had never asxed why. There was & whole evening before us, as we sat on the sawlog, however, and so I made the polite inquiry. Old Sam’s face beamed with pleasure when he found he had a man who had never heard the story of Heads Peters. It was about ten years ago, late one night, when Sam’s dog roused him by barking violently, and he was hailed by a voice outside the cabin. He lit up and ad- mirz;d the traveler. ‘g7 ou never see such a fellow,” Newton saifl. “He looked like a new doll in the city that’s fell off a delivery-wagon and been run ever in the mud.” Sam’s visitor was a young man with the remains of the swellest kind of English tourist clothes. He had a soft blue jacket, very short, but the pockets were out of it | and there was a bad patch on the tail where the owner had evidently satona hot ember from a campfire or' something of that sort. His trousers of light woolly stuff, absolutely clean and perfectly pressed, had frayed away at the bottom until- you could see the tops of what had been a pair of tan gaiters, but which were now laced with bits of buckskin. His clothes told who he was, and during the vears he remained in the neighborhood of Sam Newton's shack he gave over and over again the story of his adventures, which were all misfortunes. He was one of the Peterses of Lincolnshire. They don't know much about the Peterses of Lin- colnshire up in El Dorado County, but the way the young man told it and | the number of times he repeated it the Peterses of Lincolnshire must be a great indeed. This particular Peters was not great in body. He was small and his | lungs were weak. That was what brought bim to California. He came with a secre- | v and a valet and $150,000. Fora little | e he was a social lion around Los | Angeles and San Bernardino. Butbeinga | lion wearied him somewhat. His Eecre-% tary left him down there and disappeared | for a time. When he met him again the | seeretary was the social lion. He had taken his savings and gone into the hills. | There he wentto work for a sheepman | who had a moderate flock that grazed on the hills of Kern and Ventura counties . and cost him nothing for pasturage. The secretary did not get any salary because the sheepman had no money, but prom- ised to pay as soon as he sold his flock. A bucking bronco and anoble load of whisky prevented this consummation by landing’ the secretary’s employer at the bottom of a rocky gulch as dead as an abandoned claim. 8o the secretary took the sheep in payment of arrears of salary and became a | sheepman on his own account. Mutton | went up, the small flock became a large flock and within five years the secretary was a mutton magnate. And he was worth half a million dollars when Peters saw bim again, Peters was of a mathematical turn of | mind and easily figured that if his secre- | tary with a few pounds of capital could become a semi-millionaire in five years, a gentleman with §150,000 to invest ought to become a multi-millionaire in the same period. So Peters went into the sheep business on a large scaie, and when the five years were gone he not only had a smaller flock than he began with, but kis fortune had gone in a hundred ways. The people around | where he pastured lived exclusively on mutton and paid no price. His wool bearers hung in a hundred markets, but somebody else collected the price of the carcasses. And presently Peters lost even his sheep and disappeared from Los An- geles. His 'lungs were still troubling him and soon he was the star guestat the tourist’s hotel in Auburn. He had a world of good ciothes. He could still afford a pony, and his little pad-saddle and dainty spurs were the wonder of the mountains. His uncle, the head of the Lincolnshire Peterses, re- membered his nephew to the extent of a couple of hundred pounds a year, and on that Heads Peters shone in tourist and so- ciety circlesin the foothill country. The Englishman was interested in natives, and he used to sit on the veranda after the said glories of the wonderful gulches from which so many fortunes in shining gold- dust had been washed. One of these tales absolutely fascinated Peters. It was the story of the Demijohn mine at the foot of Six-bit Hill—the Demi- john mine, whose collapse was the convul- sion that ended the then fading glories of the Mammoth Bar camp. “There’s more money in Demijohn,” old miners used to tell him, “than ever come out of the Rattlesnake, the Big Bottle, the Grubstake and the King all put together.” If Peters had been a Western man he would have known better than to have put faith in old miners’ stories. There is not a placer district that hasn’t its Demijohn mine, with fabulous millions in it, waiting to be turned up. More millions than have ever been taken out of the hills have been sunk in Demijohns of various sections in the search for the great treasure. But Peters was from England, and, naturally, knew more than anybody. It never oc- curred to him to ask why, if these tales were true, the men whose business it was to mine did not corral the great treasures of the Demijohn at the foot of Six-bit Hill. If he had asked them, he would have heard a statistical account of tons of obdurate cement, rebellious quartz and lost lodes. I might as well tell now the story of the Demijohn mine. It was back in’'50 that the Demijohn was first exploited. The miners had washed the gulches all about it, but the flinty quartz on the little rise baffled them. They knew there was gold there, but it was only gold that a great amount of capital could get out. They vecked at it and blasted at it some, and abandoned it, and relocated it, and pecked at it and abandoned it again until it was counted a sure shot that the man who sought to wrest the treasure from the Demijohn would go beily-up before he saw the gleams of the gold. This was the state of affairs when Curly Cal Wright struck the Mammoth Bar camp. Curly was a promoter. He had washed in the gulches with the other Argonauts, and knew as much about a rocker or an arastra as any of them. And they all had great faith in Curly. He came this time with a surveyor and an assayer and the rest of the outfit that the old miners respected, as practical men always do the people with expert technical knowl- edge of their business. Curly relocated the Demijohn. He took in all the other aban- doned claims that adjoined it, and then announced in Mammoth Bar camp that a company had been organized in the City that was going to turn the Demijohn in- side out. For a short while there were great times at Mammoth Bar. A road was cut there from Georgetown, and the big freight teams crowded the road, bringing in ma- chinery and lumber for hoisting-works and mills. Curly Cal was superintendent. And pretty soon the steam whistles startled the deer in the hills, and the American River was boiling and raging at the dump of waste rock that was interfer- ing with its peaceful course. This was all after the bars had been worked out. There was no longer a dollar to the pan in the bottom, and the miners were glad to take $5 a day that was offered for men who could handle a pick ora drill. Gradually the Demijohn absorbed all the working population of the neighborhood. The stamps chewed up the hard quartz and the sluices swept the powdery mud away into the river. Everybody waited for the first clean-up at the end of the month. The clean-up was made. The re- sults were forwarded to the company in San Francisco. The amount of the clean- up was not told, but the rumor passed around the town that within thirty days the Demijohn had paid its owners $100,- 000. It hadn’t, but the story went anyhow. The works went thundering away on the second month's run. Nothing had been said about payday yet, but it was understood in town that the company was only waiting torealize on the bullion they got from the mill to satisfy the payrolls. Itdid not make much difference, because Mammoth Bar camp was proud of its Demijohn, and the saloon men and store- keepers supplied all demands and were content to wait until the men got their pay for a settlement of accounts. If anybody grumbled he was looked upon as a traitor to the camp—a man who would embarrass the great enterprise that had again brought prosperity to Mammoth Bar. There was another clean-up at the mill; another shipment to San Francisco, and a rumor that the second month’s run had been so successful that the company pro- posed to buy up all the claims for a mile around and increase its operations enor- mously. There was alsoa rumor that on the 5th payday would come, and every miner ran indebt a little furtheratthe saloons and the stores in anticipation of the two months’ pay which would soon be his. ? On the 4th a messenger on horseback came to the mine, and Curly Cal conferred with him in the inner office. The miners winked knowingly. Three hundred dol- lars apiece for 500 men was a whole lot of money, and it was obvious that such a fortune should be brought into the wild country with all due precautions. Late at night Curly Cal and the messenger rode awaygogether. In the morning the foreman went to the office for orders. There was no one there dadies had retired and listen to the talk of the miners and cowmen of the departed to give him orders, and no message as to what should be done. The foreman put the men to work and dispatched a messen- ger to make inquiries. The man came back with the word that the superintend- ent and his visitor had taken a team im- mediately on their arrival at Georgetown and had driven away toward Sacramento. The foreman thought a good deal, broke into the superintendent’s desk at last, scrutinized the records of what the mill had done during the two months, blew open the safe and took what was left, and that night he, too, disappeared from the vicinity of Mammoth Bar camp. There were hot times for a couple of weeks in Mammoth Bar. The other men found out that, instead of a fortune that the mill was supvosed to have yielded, the output | had been miserably small. The saloon- men and shopkeepers closed their places and joined the crowd of miners that wrecked the superintendent’s house and smashed the machinery, because there was nothing else on which to get even. One day the crowd, realizing that its own told the truth about hanging walls and the way the vein dipped, and reasoned that their yarns about the richness that was down in the earth somewhere thereabouts must be eqgally true. And he moved the remnants of his good clothes over to the river and started in as somany had be- fore him on the Demijohn. Pretty soon Uncle Peters, the head of the Lincolnshire Peterses, died and Heads came in for a nephew’s share of hisfortune. It was not as big as the pile that had gone with the sheep, but it was pretty big and easily enough, Peters thought, to be the foundation of millions. He had learned something about mines by this time, and the scratching he bad done encouraged him to persevere. So another mill went up on the old site, not so big and preten- tious as the one Cal Wright superintended, but quite a bit of a mill. ““Well,” said Sam Newton, ib telling the story, “it wasn’t six months before he was broke again, only he paid what he owed his men and stayed there.” Like enough he couldn’t have got away if he wanted to. By and by they stopped Heads Peters’ credit over at Georgetown, and it was only by occasionally deserting his claim for a day or two and working for somebody else that he was able to get bacon and flour enough to live on. Even the remnant of his good clothes was gone now. The light, woolly trousers were patched up with discarded overalls. The coat was no longer blue; but Peters, with the pity of the whole country on him, worked along. “It’s awful the way them tenderfoots takes it when they get the fever,” said Sam Newton, who had himself been peg- ging away for thirty years at a mountain of rock that had barely paid for his grub. “‘Peters was that sick with his lungs most of that time that he wasn’t fit to lift a pint flask, let alone a pick. Me and Maclaren and old Richards over the hill used to drop down once in awhile to see if he was dead, and forget a bag of flour or a slab of bacon at his place. We tried to get him to go over to the poor-farm, but he wouldn’t do it, and once we about made up our minds to send him to a Junatic asylum down at Stockton just to save his life.” Upin El Dorado County they always stop at this point of the story, The proper behavior of the man who listens to it is to ask for the end. “Well,” I said, ‘“‘what was the wind-up?” “Well,” said Newton, “you see that smoke over yonder? That’s from the town of Headsborough, the best littlo mining town in the State. That belongs to Mr. J. Headsborne Peters. He’s the head of the Lincolnshire Peterses now. That cussed fool tenderfoot had more sense than all California. He's been taking a million dollars a year out of the Peters’ claim for five years now, and the last time necessities were stronger than individual he come over the '48 trail he had on just WuaT I WouLDd Do IF I WERE A POLITICIAN. By W, C. MORROW. It being taken for granted that as a rule the conduct of politics in San Francisco has been corrupt; that it has been gener- ally in the hands of men lacking both hon- esty and patriotism, and that as a result the City has suffered great harm through the unsavory reputation of its municipal government, I would secure intelligent answers to these questions before deciding togo into politics as a business: Is tbar_e in the City a sufficient number of intelli- gent, public-spirited and honest men to control local politics if they were prop- erly organized? If so, why have they never properly organized? Would they, after organization, be sufficiently diligent, able and public-spirited? Have they the courage and manliness to defy the power of the evil men who ride and rob them? I am satistied that a careful study of the strong men in town would produce satis- factory answers to all these questions, not- withstanding the record of cowardice, in- competency and indifference that the absence of such organization has im- pressed on the history of the City. Believing that sporadic local “‘citizens and reform movements are bad politics and bad judgment from every point of view; that the vital element of official ac- countability to a powerful, extensive and permanently organized political body {s lacking in such movements; that munici- pal politics of that order cannot feel the moral pressure or exercise the dignified influence which would appertain to a local branch of a great National party, I would. proceed straightforwardly in the ranks of the National party of my choice, bring myself in line with its general policy and secure the full force of its moral influ- ence. Itis manifestly an appreciation of this philosophy that makes political ras- calry seek the shelter and enjoy the power which affiliation with an estab- lished National party affords. Probably the next step would be an at- tempt to secure the co-operation of news- paper reporters. The knowledge of men, af- fairs and methods possessed by these inde- fatigable workers is amazing, and, when combined, unmatchable. If organized asa bureau of information alone, leaving out of account any actual field work that they might be induced to do, they would repre- sent a force of incomparable value. Among them will be found some who are familiar with the shady mysteries of politics of the o “BOYS, IT'S ALL UP WITH US AND THE rights, broke open the Alhambra saloon, | appointed a barkeeper and a chairman and held a meeting. In the midst of it a| strange thing happened. A horse galloped | up to the door. A man alighted, and Curly Cal himself elbowed his way through the crowd. They closed the door behind him. Here was, at last, somebody on whom they could blame their misfortune. He was the only agent of the company they knew. He was responsible for rob- bing them of their dues and for raising false hopes, which had wrecked the camp. ‘Wright did not talk to any of them until he reached tbe bar. He hoisted himself upon this eminence and they could all see that he was unarmed and at their mercy. “Boys,” he said at last, “I’ve come back to tell you that it’s all up with us and the Demijohn. The company’s gone. He skipped out on the last steamer, and now the men that put up the works for him are coming to take their machinery back. He didn’t pay for anyihing. I'min the same boat as the rest of you, only worse, because they’re going to arrest me in the City for being a partner in the fraud. I haven’t got a cent. I haven’t been paid any more than the rest of you, and if you want to take it out of me, I'm here.” They couldn’t lynch a man after a state- ment like that. It did not restore him to their good opinion or their confidence, perhaps, but they let him go, and soon Mammoth Bar camp was only a huddle of abandoned shanties. The men who had supplied the machinery came up and took what was worth carrying away, and ihat was the last of it. This was the story Peters heard with many variations from the old miners, who would never belicve that the Demijohn was barren. They told him how the vein dipped and where the lode tended, and talked porphyry and hanging walls to him until he felt he was an encyclopedia of mining lore. That is how he came to be at Sam Newton’s place that night. He wanted to look over the old Demijohn. “I felt sorry for the chap,” said old Sam, “‘and told him the boys were stuffing him for a tenderfoot, and told him that since '50 a hundred men that knew all about mines had fooled with the Demijohn and given it ‘up as no good. But he thought he knowed more than any of us and down he went.” Heads Peters found that the miners had the same kind of clothes as the ones I first saw him in, but these was new.” MR. LUMMIS’ BEST BOOK. The Century Publishing Company ad- vertises extensively Charles F. Lummis’ book, *“The Man Who Married the Moon,”’ which contains some charming Indian folklore stories. The Nation saysof this Charles F. Lummis. volume, “It deserves to be classed with the best of its kind yet produced in this country.” Mr. Lummis is a resident of Los Angeles. ADRIFT IN THE CITY. This is a story for boys by that ever- popular writer, Horatio Alger Jr. It isa simply written and unaffected narrative of 2 plucky, brainy boy’s successful fight against tyranny and wrong. If we might venture a criticism, it would be that Oliver Conrad is almost too good, and his step- brother, Ronald Kenyon, almost too bad, for merely human boyhood, but the story is wholesome and entertaining, and will unquestionably find many interested boy :uderu. (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates Co.) DEMIJOHN.” Blinker Murphy kind; others who have made a special study of higher men and methods; still others who know from sole to crown the citizens whom personal van- ity urges to office-seeking; others still who are familiar with the interests and hindrances of men of a sterner mold; oth- ers yet who have not studied politics and politicians, but whose knowledge of busi- ness and social ramifications and influ- ences would be of the greatest value; and 80 on through the whole list of the alert, shrewd, wise, patient, tireless men whose life-long business is the study and under- feel secure in their integrity. Two lines of fightinz would now develop, one directed to the organization of clean forces and the other aimed more immedi- ately at the overthrow of the public ene- mies who control the political machines which we shall have started out to destroy. Among the newspaper reporters will be found some who haye made a study of crime and criminals, are familiar with the methods of discovering them, and know how to find a rogue’s record and use it to keep him quiet. This part of the work need not be confined to a study of court records; a large body of the rascals who do “practical politics” have no such records, but they more than likely have a private score which could be used with equal effectiveness. If it should happen that the Police De- partment was a part of the corrupt ma- chine which it is desired to destroy the situation would be complicated, but we could find a way to circumvent that, as we shall see later herein. The two main lines of the fight must he carried on together and with equal vigi- lance. Organization of the clean ele- ments must not be done with any shouting or other noise. A first consideration would be means with which the working force could fight and as remuneration for its services. This latter might be put in the form of guarantees of office where it is desired, though newspaper men, as a rule, have rather a lofty scorn of that way of earning a livelihood. A *“sack” would be necessary. These men will be found to have very strong friends, through whom others can be reached, and the circle thus steadily widened. It would be shown to heavy tax- payers how grievously they have been robbed if they were honest, and how dan- gerous it would be for them to ally them- selves, however secretly, with political knaves who have assisted them in robbing others if they have been dishonest. Special game in such a hunt will be wealthy men who are suspected of having bribed public officers for the purpose of securing privi- leges to their own advantage and the injury of the public. Such men are the greatest cowards in the world. The moment a finger is raised in threat of their wealth or in menace of their avarice they become the most docile of coadjutors. The inferen- tial story of their wrongs could be easily dug out of the public records, and if shown rf) them it would whip them quickly into ine. Of course they could not be depended on, and of course while pretending undying fealty to their new allegiance they would not dare do so openly and would still maintain secret friendly relations with their political partners in infamy. That would be all right. Meanwhile we shall have secured their money and they will not have secured our whole plan of cam- paign. For that matter I would not care if they did, for it would be contrary to their policy to disclose it to the enemy. ‘We would always bear in mind the fact that such men dare not antagonize any force that may have the slightest chance of securing supremacy ; and while it is true that they do not want an honest govern- ment and would be injured in pocket by its establishment, their cowardice under certain circumstances would prevent them from fighting it openly and thus lend to knavery the strength of an apparently respectable support. We should give these men so much attention, because they are the backbone of corrupt municipal politics, and they rightly belong in the category of the thieves, pluguglies and bommers who understand the art of *‘practical politics.” ‘We would sedulously keep oui of the organization all cranks, professional re- formers and chronic agitators, and have only earnest, quiet, business-like, clear- headed and capable men and women; and women, if properly organized and willing to submit to the disciplinerequired in such a fight, would be among the most efficient agencies imaginable. Next would come a very hard task—the enlistment of persons of the desired kind who may have diverse political faiths. If they cannot be won by persuasion or argu- ment or moved by a conviction that they would be doing anoble work for humanity, they would not make useful assistants and would better be left alone. The raising of a fund must be held in abeyance until something like an organiza- tion has been accomplished. Among those able who would be willing to con- tribute if they were assured that the money would be honestly expended would be minor merchants who believe that their wealthy competitors have es- caped their aue share of taxation by re- sorting to bribery; high-minded persons of the wealthy classes who want a clean government for decency’s sake; wealthy rogues who are particeps criminis with political thieves; large property-owners who would not condescend to crooked- ness, and whose accretions of wealth through public improvements are held in check by official neglcct of the public wel- fare and by a pilfering of the money paid as taxes for the public benefit; rich and decent men who have a harmless vanity which desires gratification by election to a responsible public office, which, though small, may be an introduction to loftier flights if the movement which seeks their support is within the lines of a great Na- tional party with which they affiliate; and 8o it would go. The sources from which the fund might be drawn and the means which might be employed legitimately to raise it are of endless variety and limited only by the intellectual abilities of those charged with the task of raising it. In this branch of the work the services of able women would be exceedingly valuable. An important step near the beginning of the undertaking would be the organiza- tion of a Grand Jury of a kind not very familiar to the people hereabout. This does not mean to reflect on all the Grand Juries which have been drawn here, but merely to say that the work even of the best Grand Jury that we have ever had might be surpassed in excellence. This jury would come after the organization had been effected. Its work would be first to bring the Police Department into per- fect harmony with the purposes of the movement. Both in this and in the work of brineing the gin-soaked, ill-smelling knaves and vagabonds of “‘practical poli- tics” to terms if not to the venitentiary, the corps of newspaper men could per- form invaluable and heroic service. And they would enjoy it more than the most stirring detail that the city editor ever gave them. Under the present system of drawing Grand Juries some difficulties would pre- sent themselves, including influences which might or might not affect the con- duct of some branches of the Superior Court, but & way out of all these, and a clean one at that, could be found. The primaries and elections would be merely matters of detail. Men who have the sense and public spirit and courage to do all that has been indicated here would know what to do when these occasions arose. With the whole police and legal machinery of the City under decent con- trol the task of guarding the polls and count would be simple enough. A part of the scheme would be to punish to the last limit every one who violated the smallest provision of the election laws. What would be the effect on the City of the establishment of a municipal govern- ment on these lines? Is it necessary to ask that question? There are in this City some bodies of earnest and public-spirited citizens who are seeking to secure a decent administration of municipal affairs. The only trouble with them is that they are non - political. Embracing, as they do, men from several political parties, they cannot ally themselves with any one party, and so attack the evil at its root. The best that they can do—and they are doing that with eminent efficiency—is to stand guard around the sheep fold and keep the wolves at bay. But why should the wolves be permitted to prowl and threaten, their lean flanks eager for food and their jowls dripping hungrily with foam? Why not sally forth and hunt them to their lairs in the jungle and there finish them forever? That is the duty of those who call themselves men and citi- zens. e e S THE STORAGE BATTERY IN CENTRAL StA- TI08 WoRK,—There is just now quite a run on storage batteries for central station work, and station superintendents give extraordinary reports of their value. The batteries were primarily intended to help out the station at the time that the great est amount of current was needed. Steam plants were formerly used for this maxi- mum load service, but it isnow found that batteries of the same capacity come much cheaper. The reason for this is that they are ready for use at all times, and as they can be switched on during the one or two hours of the maximum load, they do away with the necessity for running the steam plant too hard at any time. On svstem nights and Sundays, when the output is small, they come in most handily. The company hastherefore been reaping all the advantages of the service, and providing effectively for all the exi- gencies of the maximum load for much less than a steam plant would have cost them. More than once when the station has peen shut down for fifteen hours or more, the batteries have satisfactorily furnished current for the whole ex- tensive system. The makers of the batteries evidently have the utmost con fidence in their quality and efficiency. They undertake to insure and keep in re- pair the whole plant at 4 per cent per annum of the original cost. STYLE IN BOOKBINDING, Fashions of the Past and Happy Xne ventions of the Present. BY KATHERINE DURHAM. The history of bookbinding is as old ag bookmaking. In the boards placed, for their protection and preservation, on each side of the two-leavea wax tablets upon which records of the public acts of consuls and magistrates of Rome were inscribed, it had its beginning. From that now distant day the office of bookbindings has ever remained the same, but in points of kind and style they have been adjusted from time to time to the books they encased, keeping pace with the changes in materials, strong and heavy when books were bulky, and required weight to keep the leaves of parchment flat, elaborate and costly when they were made more beautiful in handiwork, and neat but inexpensive with the coming of the modern paper-books, given to the pub- lic by the thousands. Those of parchment were the first true books, and the heavy boards on their siaes were covered with leather or parchment, Metal clasps and hooks kept the boards shut, and niails were usually inserted, the round and projecting heads of which pre- served the flat surfaces of the bindings. The high price of manuscripts throughe out the middle ages, due to the scarcity of parchment and the time and labor neces sary for transcription, explains the luxury of ornament which came to be used to decorate their outsides. The thick wooden boards were enriched with ivories, precious stones, engraved gems, plaques of gold and silver, both engraved and filigreed, and the finest enamels. As the books were not often moved about, the weight of their covers was no objection. These elaborate bindings were the work of monks, and were wrought by command of wealthy people to dedicate to the church, or by choice of the monks themselves as cases worthy of the devotional works which they inclosed, and often placed in homage on the high altar itself. The number of such bindings which have come down to our time is small, for they were too valuable to escape the cupide ity of rulers and the fury of reformers. In England the spoliation of the monasteries under Henry VIII and the wholesale de- struction under Edward VI of all vestiges of the old learning wrought irremediable havoc among the fine libraries, and such bindings as might till then have escaped were swept away under the act ‘‘to strip off and pay into the King’s treasury all gold and silver found on Popish books of devotion.” The destruction was not so wholesalein other parts of Europe. A few examples are still to be found in the more important libraries and in a few private collections. With the multiplication of books by printing and the use of linen paper in their manufacture, more simple and less costly bindings were made. They were of plain leather, decorated with blind tooling or tooled in gold. Their weight also was lessened by the substitution of mill boards for the hard-wood sides. Expressed in these new materials, the art of bookbinding reached its height, in the point of design, in France in the sixe teenth century, and in its technical qualie ties in England in the latter half of the lastcentury. England has since continued to hold the palm. With the growth of mechanical aids in decoration taste declined. There came the temptation to lavish decoration withe out regard to balance of parts or appro~ priateness of design. The best bindings of to-day are imitations or reproductions of those of earlier periods. America has never produced bindings equal to the best of English manufacture, but the machinery of American invention for making cloth covers is that in use in England to-day. The designs used for the decoration of covers have been various: Panels filled with interlaced lines, geometrical figures, men seated on horseback, fabulousanimals of various descriptions, chain work, straight lines and segments of circles, tooled with dies of great number, the beauty of which consisted in their indie vidual delicacy and arrangement. Mosaics or inlaid leather were also used in France, and in Italy originated the cameos. These were placed as a center piece in relief, taken from antique gems and medals, and were made of a sort of laquered paste pus on the leather. The cameo edition of one of the American publishers is in imitation of this style. ' Leather has sometimes given place to other materials, as damask, velvet, satin and embroidery, and there are the half bindings, with covers and backs of leather and the sides of marbled paper. Some of the most beautiful books which have survived the vicissitudes of time are those once made for Henry II. The de- signs are bold and fine and unfettered by any tradition. Their main characteristics of reserve and simplicity are their chief excellencies, Little else than his own em- blems and the arms of France are upon them. Some of the minor details of bookbinde ing are the decoration of the backs, in har- mony with the sides, and of the edges in various manners and styles. This latter is much neglected now. The old medes were nearly always gilt edges, some plain and some gilding on marbled, painted, colored edges and landscapes. Fine bindings are still made by hand, but cloth covers are wholly of machine work, decorated and lettered complete be~ fore being placed on the books. Strips of cloth are left loose on the back of machine made books. to be pasted to the inside of the covers, which are finished with the lining papers extended into first fly-leaves, Accomplished craftsmanship leaves nothing to be desired in the execution, but happy invention must be employed, op never again will bookbinding become g fine art.