THE BURDEN OF POPULAR COMPLAINT for a fortnight has been all about the weather. Here, while we have been preparing ourselves for sunny skies and balmy breezes, we have received a set back violent enough to shatter our faith in the procession of the seasons. The hoped for advent of "Spring has been so long delayed that it looks as though we were to be transported by one fall swoop from the harsh and inhospitable conditions and surroundings of Winter to the perspiring perplexities of Summer. Unquestionably the depressing effect of the recent unseasonable weather has made itself felt on business, although merchants of experience and importance tell me that trade is, under the circumstances, much better advanced than they have had any reason to expect. Perhaps the most thoroughly disgruntled persons who regard it as a bounden duty to growl about the weather are the suburban agriculturists and the market men and middlemen dependent upon them for supplies and profile. The Long island farmers, as they rumble through the city, look as blue as if the bottom had dropped out of the universe or they had been compelled to endure a recitation from a full fledged Spring poet.

RIDING DOWNTOWN ON A GREEN AND GATES avenue car the day after the glass house disaster, I heard the conductor ask of a passenger:

"I hear that mayor Low was down at the fire and that he was hit with a brick when the wall fell. Is it true?"

"I do not know," returned the citizen.

"Well," drawled the conductor, "you can bet that he will be hit with a worse brick than that if he ever comes up before the people of this town for an office again."

But then this conductor does not live on Columbia heights.

AN INQUIRING PERSON who has been pondering the mysteries of the dudesque has discovered or evolved these definitions of the aforesaid in the various stages of development:

The Genuine Article__A Dude.
A Full Grown Female Dude__A Dudine.
A Juvenile Male Dude__A Dudette.
A Juvenile Female Dude__A Dudelette.

TO LOCAL BILLIARDISTS the recent tournament in New York has developed many features of interest and the brilliant performances in Irving Hall have undoubtedly given a marked impetus to the game here. For several years past the experience of persons who have undertaken to conduct public billiard halls in Brooklyn has been the reverse of profitable. Two usually well informed Brooklynites, looking a the matter from entirely different standpoints, undertook to explain to me the lack of interest in the game indicated by the absence of prosperity from the billiard halls. Said one: "You can attribute it to the increasing tendency in Brooklyn to make the most of our home life, which, in its pleasanter and nobler aspects is unparalleled by that of any city on this or any other continent. So thoroughly has this idea of home life and love of the home circle and its attractions been developed that the habits and conduct of our people differ from those of all other American cities. The contrast between Brooklyn and New York in this respect is so great that it has become a source of never ceasing wonder to observant visitors from abroad. Our devotion to domesticity makes itself felt on billiards as on every thing else of like nature. To a great many of our steady going people of the old fashioned type billiards appears to be nothing more nor less than an invention of the devil. The objections of these worthy but mistaken folks are not, as many suppose, based altogether upon the possibilities of danger from the not always desirable and beneficial surroundings of the average public place where the game is played. They object to the game itself, looking upon it as dangerous and demoralizing, and regarding young men who play it as hopelessly lost. But there are plenty of Brooklynites, less Puritanical in their notions, who still doubt the desirability of public billiard rooms and they have averted all danger by putting billiard tables into their houses, so that the number of private billiard rooms in this city is simply astonishing. These things have all hurt the billiard business, and I think it is a good thing for the community that it is hurt."