Yes: little dinners are costly. Nature seems a trifle prodigal herself in some of the little dinners she gives, does she not? Think what a dainty and costly dinner a cat or a snake has when it dines on some beautiful bird. Beauty, "God-like speed of beautiful wings," exquisite song. It looks like reckless extravagance, supplying so much for a snake's or a cat's dinner; and it costs the bird all it has in the world. Somehow one is not so much shocked at the bird's own dinner; although it is, you know, a costly affair for the worm, and the pretty moths, and other tiny winged creatures he dines on. It costs them all they have in this world. When we consider all the little dinners occurring all over the world daily, the sum total is appalling and ghastly. Let us go into some dining-room and look on through one of our own little dinners and see what we do daily in the way of dining. While the ladies are removing from their hands the skins of what was erstwhile a warm, palpitating little creature, full of young life and securing his own dinner from the soft, warm, generous teats of his mother, a neat little waitress in clean white cap and apron places before the host a prettily garnished dish of crabs, each in his little shell and "deviled" up deliciously, ready for the dainty lips of the refined diners. If pain can purify and ennoble a creature, as some good people believe, the crab has been made worthy of his place at the little dinner by his agonized death; being boiled alive may perhaps atone for the unpleasant habit he had of dining on the swollen, bloated, purple dead body of some unfortunate man or woman who had found a resting place (?) in the sea. When one considers all that the crab had been guilty of in the way of dining, his horrible death seems almost necessary to make him fit for the palates of creatures who might think; when the appetizing variety of dead matter contained in the crab has been disposed of by the dainty diners, the neat little waitress removes the empty shells, and places before the genial smiling host another long dish, also prettily garnished with parsley or nasturtium or water cresses, in the midst of which lies a fish. a shad, or red snapper, or any fish suitable to the time and place of the little dinner. The fish's dead baked or boiled eyes, and half opened mouth, stare in a most ghastly manner, from among the pretty water cresses; if he is a shad, or any other vegetarian fish his fate seems an undeservedly cruel one, and his poor baked mouth seems to gasp "Why am I being devoured in this (nice) way? I haven't eaten any other little fishes or any dead man; I have not been dining indiscriminately on my neighbors." But this little dinner party is deaf and blind, and not squeamish, so the fish follows the crab, and the waitress removes the bones. Then she brings in another platter on which rests a portion of the emblem of innocence and purity — a leg of a lamb; — a little leg that had a few short days before frisked so happily and awkwardly about, or rested as its little owner slept peacefully beside its pleased and proud mother, with its little head nestled against her soft, warm woolly sides — a happy innocent mother and child, without a thought, let us hope of the little dinner at which they were so soon to assist. And the odor of the mint that grew perhaps along the stream that runs through their pasture, not suggestive of the gruesome and time-honored uses it might serve. The little leg is stark and stiff enough now, and if we wanted to be funny in a time-honored way, we might say something about a caper not being left in the little leg except such as is supplied by the cook; but with the thought of the love we have seen in the meek eyes of the mother as they watched the little legs frisking around them, we cannot be funny. When each of the diners has eaten his or her share of the so lately frisking little leg, the waitress removes the "remains," and brings in veal croquettes, or may be cutlets, — small, choice portions of the remains of a pretty young creature whose "Feast of Life" was short; only a few short, beautiful sunny days in the meadow among the fragrant grasses he had beside his mother — a mother whose heart throbbed with the same love that the thought of another young creature, left in its dainty cradle among the warm blankets and fragrant laces, may arouse in the hearts of some of the guests at this dainty little dinner; when a man came and dragged him terrified from her side, and tied his trembling little legs with a cruel rope, and plunged him into a cart, as ruthlessly as if he had been a sack of potatoes instead of a living creature with the same heart action as his own, and a brain and nerves, and jolted him down to the railway station where a snorting, hissing monster awaited him to take him to the city. Imagine what must be the terror of a little calf or lamb taken suddenly from its quiet pasture and protecting mother, and hurled into all the unknown and frightful sights and sounds of a rail- road depot and a crowded city market place. Whilst one mother dines on the pathetic little choice bits, the other mother runs wildly about her desolate home, rending the air with her agonized cries; all through the long nights she bellows forth her grief to unheeding ears, and when the first sharp pain is past the soft pitiful moo's show that the strong mother love endures. If any respectable man or woman has ever seen a cow when her calf is being taken to the butcher, seen her running wildly along the fence which separates her pasture from the road, watching with startling agonized mother eyes her young lying tied in the cart disappearing down the road and bleating piteously to her; watching and running wildly along the fence, until a turn in the country road hides it from her sight, he or she will surely say that a veal cutlet is a costly bit; the agony of terror and thirst of the young creature, the outraged mother love, the bloody hand of the butcher. Ah, well, a tigress would feed with equal complacency and relish on the dainty bit of humanity upstairs in the cradle; would snatch it quite as ruthlessly from its pretty warm nest, and before its mother's eyes. It is comforting amid all the horrors of the "vast scene of carnage, death, agony, decay," to think of the dumb mothers who do not dine on the young of their neighbors. And what a prolonged little dinner the vile worm has on all the mothers and all the babies.