They have a custom in Yorkshire of hiring all servants
at annual meetings, called statute fairs, which are, moreover, attended by eervante who are in place, and intend to re-engage. As these meetings, which are, in fact, huge picnics, produce a great deal of drunkenness and rather too many babies, an effort is being made to put them down. This has been very successful, separate places having been established for both sexes ; but this year the reformers went too far. They tried not only to separate the sexes at the fair, which was wise, but to keep them apart in the railway -carriages, which was rather absurdly prudish. A chorus of cries of "old maids" saluted the girls who had been induced to go in -the separate carriages, and when they returned in the evening those carriages were all empty. The worthy people who tried this device must have been clergymen. Laymen could not have been so ignorant of human nature, or of the fact that courtship has its good side.
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