NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The Springfield Republican waxes indignant at the character of the songs recently introduced into the public schools of that town. "Over the Garden Wall" and "Evelina" meet with its decided disapprobation for school children. It continues : "In defense of the song-book it should be said that the music of much of it is really meritorious. As every high-school boy is supposed to aspire to a collegiate education, he may count it fortunate that this book reveals the longings of the average dissatisfied college boy, as witness this yearning for metamorphosis :

"I wish I were a hinosorhecus,

And could wear an ivory tooth-pick on my nose."

"But I'm a June-bug and I'm a beetle,

I can buzz and bult my head against the wall."

In order to combine with the foregoing lesson in natural history a harmless drill in mathematics, and so give the book value as a compendium of musical forms, a chant is inserted, having for its words the pathetic trilogy of the 'three little kittens in a basket of saw-aw-dust.' This number doubtless suggested serious thoughts to the compiler, for he accompanies it with the touching refrain, 'I've lost my doggy,' and the more pretensions, 'A horrible tale,' in eight-line stanzas with a moral beginning con dolore and increasing in pathos till it becomes as much more doloroso as possible."