Night had come. It got in on the evening train, and was late, as usual. The drowsy bat was on the wing; or rather, the wing was on the drowsy bat. Both wings, in fact, were on the d. b. Down in the mossy glade, where deepening shadows mock the starlight’s gleam, she waits. Her Italian marble brow is clouded with a weight of sorrow. Her finely-chiseled chin is still; the plastic chewing gum, pasted on the trunk of a rugged oak, cools and hardens in the evening air. The firm tread of a manly No. 9 comes crashing through the woodland.

’Tis he.

“Bertrande!”

“Margueritte!”

They said no more. They could not. They had forgotten the rest of each other’s names. They sat in the deeping shadows of the gloaming, holding each other’s hands, and trying to think of something nice to say.

Suddenly his delicate nostrils quivered and trembled with a startled light.

“Margueritte!” he exclaimed, “we must fly! I hear the sound of native applejack upon the evening air! M’ff! m’ff!”

“Oh, hevings!” she cried, “it is, it is me long lost fathyer!”

“Then,” he exclaimed, drawing a United States regulation cavalry saber from his bosom, “I am lost!”

“Oh, no, not lost;” she said in earnest tones, “go straight ahead till you come to the _Hawkeye_ office, then turn up Market Street two blocks and follow the street car track south until you smell beer. Then you will know where you are. Fe-ly! Fe-ly! Me fathyer comes.”

“Methought,” he said, pausing in his flight, and speaking sternly, “Methought thou haddedest not a father.”

“I haive, I haive,” she shrieked, “and it is he!”

And as she spake a fatherly looking man parted the bushes and stood by her side. He was clad in a dark blue cut-away coat, with a button-hole bouquet, white vest, lilac kids, lavender pants, a pink necktie, waxed mustache, and a high hat. His boots were four and a half; his snowy handkerchief was perfumed with jockey club, and his breath with whisky sour. He was twenty-one years of old.

Bertrande regarded him sadly, and said to her he loved:

“It seems to me your father is rather juvenile.”

“Dear Bertrande,” she said, laying her head upon her father’s shoulder, “he married awful young.”

“Ah,” said Bertrande, bitterly, “I thought may be you had adopted him.”

And turning on his heel he was gone.

A REMINISCENCE OF EXHIBITION DAY.

“Well, no,” the boy said, “the thing didn’t go off exactly as I expected. You see, I was the sixth boy in the class, that was next to the head when the class formed left in front, and I was pretty near the first boy called on to declaim. I had got a mighty good ready and had a bully piece too. Ah, it was a rip staver.”

And the boy sighed as he paused to lift a segment out of a green apple, and placed it where it would do the most good, for a cholera doctor. We asked what piece it was.

“Spartacus to the Gladiators,” he said. “Just an old he raker of a piece. I got it all by heart, and used to go clear out to the Cascade to rehearse and hook strawberries. Old Fitch”--Mr. Fitch was the boy’s preceptor, one of the finest educators in the state--“he taught me all the gestures and inflections and flub drubs, and said I was just layin’ over the biggest toad in the puddle----”

“Excelling all your competitors, probably Mr. Fitch said,” we suggested.

“Yes,” the boy replied, “he’s a toney old cyclopedia on the patter, is old Fitchy. But him and me was both dead sure I was goin’ to skin the rag off the bush----”

“Win all the honors,” we gently corrected.

“Yes,” he said, “and the way it went off was bad. You see, I didn’t feel easy in my Sunday clothes on a week day to begin with. And my collar was too tight and my necktie was too blue, and I was in a hurry to get off early, so I only blacked the toes of my boots, and left the heels as red as a concert ticket. And the crowd there was in the school-house. Jammed. Every body in their good clothes and every body looking solemn as Monday morning. When my name was called something came up in my throat as big as a foot-ball. I couldn’t swallow it and I couldn’t spit it out. And when I got up on the platform--oh, Godfrey’s cordial! did you ever see a million heads without any bodies?”

We felt ashamed of our limited experience while we confessed that we could not recall having witnessed such a phenomenon.

“I never did till then,” the boy went on, “but they were there, for a fact, and I began to remember when these heads danced round and round the room that I had been forgetting my piece in the last five minutes just as fast as I ever forgot to fix the kindling wood at night. But I commenced. I got along with ‘It had been a day of triumph in Capua’ and ‘Lentulus returning with victorious eagles’ and all that well enough; but when I got on into the heavy business, I was left, sure. If Spartacus had talked to the gladiators as I did, they would have thought he was drunk and hustled him off to bed. It was awful. I stumbled along until I came to ‘Ye stand here now like giants as ye are. The strength of brass is in your rugged sinews, but to-morrow some Roman Adonis, breathing sweet perfume from his curling locks, will with his dainty fingers pat your red brawn and bet his sesterces upon your blood.’”

“That was excellent, capital,” we said, applauding, for the boy had growled off the last sentence like a first heavy villain.

“Oh yes, is it though?” he said, with some asperity. “Well, that’s the way I was going to say it that Friday, but what I did say was, ‘The strength of brass is in your rugged sinews, but to-morrow afternoon (you see I got to thinking of a base ball match) some Doman Aronis breathing sweet perfumery from his curly socks, will pat your bed rawn and bet his sister sees your blood.’”

“Did they laugh?” we asked.

“Oh no!” he replied, with an inflection that type won’t take. “Oh, no; they never smiled again; _they_ didn’t. It was when I got down a little that they felt bad. When he says, ‘If ye are beasts, then stand here waiting like fat oxen for the butcher’s knife.’ I told them, ‘If ye be cat fattle, then wait here standing like a butcher for the carving knife.’ And I got worse and worse until it came to this, ‘Oh, Rome, Rome, thou hast been a tender mother to me. Thou hast taught the poor timid shepherd boy, who never knew a harsher tone than a flute note, to gaze into the glaring eyeballs of the fierce Numidian lion, even as a boy upon a laughing girl. Thou hast taught him to drive the sword through rugged links of mail and brass and warm it in the marrow of his foe!’”

“Bravo!” we shouted.

“Cheese it,” he said, sententiously; “I didn’t say it just that way. I said, ‘Oh Rome, thou has ten a binder mother to me. Thou hast taught the poor boy who never knew a sheep note to glare into the laughing ear of a fierce Numidian eyeball even as a lyin’ boy at a girl. Thou hast taught him to mail his ragged brass through swords of link, and marry it in the warmer of his foe.’”

“And then?” we asked.

“I cried,” he said, “and went down. Everybody was cry’n’. They all had their faces in their handkerchiefs or behind fans, and were shaking so it nearly jarred the school-house.”

“You should practice elocution during vacation,” we suggested, “and you will not fail again.”

He bolted the rest of the green apple, threw his bare feet up in the air, and walked around on his hands in little circles. “Don’t have no speakin’ in vacation,” he said.

And we knew that, boy-like, he was going to let the days and the morrow take care each of its own evils, and we wondered as we came away how many fathers would recognize their own boys in the hero of this sketch, and if dear old Fitch, the oldest boy, with the clearest head and the tenderest heart we ever knew, would remember him.

MR. OLENDORF’S COMPLAINT.

Young Mr. Olendorf used to board at a nice boarding-house out on North Hill, a little this side of the North Pole. It was a good way out; but Mr. Olendorf always was fond of pure air and pedestrian exercise, and as his business hours were easy, he preferred the comforts of a home in the suburbs to the excitement and clamor of a down-town hotel. A mild-looking, meek-faced, soft-voiced young man was Mr. Olendorf, as ever you could wish to see. He rarely complained about anything, and he never spoke harshly of any one. He would sit on his trunk, when the family had carried his chair down to the parlor for the convenience of invited guests; and he would patiently sew on his shirt buttons with a darning-needle and carpet thread, rather than intimate to his washer-lady that it wasn’t just the thing to run fine shirts through a corn-sheller to wash them. Many a time he crawled into a bed that looked like the crater of an extinct volcano, rather than report the hired girl for neglecting to make it up. And six times a week he cleaned his grimy lamp chimney with his fingers, as far as they would reach, because, he said, in the fullness of his charitable soul, the girl had so much to do she hadn’t got round to it. And the seventh night in the week, the lamp being empty and dry as a flat bottle on a hunting expedition, he would undress by the dim religious light of a match. He used to wash with a piece of soap four inches long and two inches thick, as brown as varnish, and so hard it chipped the edges of the washstand when it was carelessly dropped; and often and often, when his eyes were full of soap, and he reached out his imploring hands, groping for the short, thin towel that was seldom there, he had to feel his way to the bed, abrading his shins against things that he couldn’t see and didn’t know the names of, and dry his face and hair on the pillow-slips. But he never murmured. He used to find bright streaks of red by the dozen in his pomade, and go down to the breakfast table with his own coal-black locks as dry as good advice, and marvel at the exceeding glossiness and slickness of the hired girl’s bright auburn cranium. But he said never a word. And the drouth used to strike his perfumery bottles once in a while, and leave them as empty as a lecturer’s head; and he would wind his modest nasal horn in a handkerchief that smelled like a wash-tub, and when his landlady’s daughters sailed scornfully past him, perfumed for all the world like the ghosts of his toilet bottles up stairs, he never looked suspicious, but only smiled apologetically, as though it was wrong in him to leave temptation in their way. And once, when he had an attack of cholera morbus, and sent out for a quart of brandy, and took a tablespoonful of it, and came back at night to find the bottle very empty, and the landlady’s husband very full, and lying in Mr. Olendorf’s bed with his boots on, young Mr. Olendorf only agreed with the landlady that it was very singular, and that the old man must be ill. So you see Mr. Olendorf was inclined to be rather peaceable and meek, and when he did complain there must be some reason for it.

One evening Mrs. McKerrel, his landlady, approached the young man for the purpose of securing the weekly dole which he paid for the comforts of a home, and bracing himself up by a desperate effort, Mr. Olendorf, for the first time in his life, complained.

“It’s the hash, Mrs. McKerrel,” he said plaintively. “It’s too monotonous. It’s good hash. I can’t say that it isn’t good. It is more nutritious than chopped straw, and a prize candy package doesn’t equal it for variety. But I want change. I like hash for breakfast. But when you give us baked hash for dinner and put boned hash on for supper, and give us plain hash again for breakfast, and serve stuffed hash again for dinner, it isn’t a square deal. I believe you impose on us. I never heard of ‘stuffed hash’ before I came here, and the only difference between it and the common kind is that it is thinner. The last ‘stuffed hash’ you gave us you made us eat with steel forks, and it was as thin as soup, and how is a strong man going to make out a dinner when he has only twenty-five minutes in which to eat soup with a three-tined fork? And I don’t think you do the fair thing by us on what you call ‘boned hash.’ It’s hardly right, Mrs. McKerrel, to make a hash of sardines and herrings and then call it ‘boned.’ It’s just like eating a shoe brush. Now there ought to be, once in a while, a change. Not too often, you know; I don’t expect you to keep a French restaurant for seven dollars a week, but just often enough to keep the bill of fare from growing tiresome. Say once every seven years. For instance, you may have ‘boned hash’ to-morrow for dinner, which, it being Sunday, you will. Well, then, you might have ‘boned hash’ every day until 1882, and then give us a roast, or a car-spring chicken. And so with ‘stuffed hash,’ and ‘hash a la mode,’ and ‘hash a la Mayonnais,’ ‘Lady Washington hash,’ ‘hash on toast,’ ‘spring hash, with mint sauce,’ and ‘hash a la mortar,’ and the other hashes on your bill of fare. By serving them up once every seven years, you have enough kinds to run clear into a Centennial.”

The landlady, looking aghast, made an effort to speak, but young Mr. Olendorf motioned her to silence.

“And if you would speak to Mrs. Muldoon, dear Mrs. McKerrel,” he went on, “and tell her that, while I am not proud, I do not consider the hickory shirts which the estimable Mr. Muldoon wears while he is developing the railroad resources of the United States exactly the things to wear to church; and even if I had no other scruples against attending public worship in a section hand’s shirt, torn all the way across the shoulders and fastened at the neck and cuffs with horn buttons, Mr. Muldoon’s are five sizes too large for me, and I would rather she would send me my own. And if you can bribe her to put the starch in my collars instead of my handkerchiefs, I feel that it will improve the appearance of my neck, and spare the feelings of a lacerated and tender nose. No man, Mrs. McKerrel, can wipe his nose on a sheet of tin and do the matter justice.”

Mrs. McKerrel placed her hands on her hips and stood up, but Mr. Olendorf begged her to be patient just a moment, while he went on:

“And do you think, if I made a chalk mark on them, that your domestic could learn the difference between my hair brush and my shoe brush? And if I made her a little present, might she not be induced to look up something else to black the stoves with instead of my shoe brush? It is dreadfully mortifying, Mrs. McKerrel, to black your shoes after night and get clear in church the next morning before discovering that your feet are glistening in all the glory of ‘Plumbago’s New Silver Gray Luster,’ and everybody is laughing at you. And then, Mrs. McKerrel, I don’t know how my things get so full of snuff. I never use snuff, and I don’t want to complain, but----”

Here the exasperated matron could restrain herself no longer. Hastily thrusting her snuff-box back in her pocket, she bade Mr. Olendorf pack. What he wanted, she said, was a Fifth Avenue hotel for seven dollars a week, and he couldn’t have it in her house. He was too particular for such a plain woman as her; if he didn’t like the ways of plain people, he would have to go where they were nicer. He was too stuck up and fussy to live in her house. Boarders she had kept, of the very best people in the highest classes in society, and this was the first time she had ever heard a word of complaint in her house.

And that is the way Mr. Olendorf happened to call around at the Gorham and ask Andrews for a nice room, a long ways up. And Andrews gave him a key and told him to climb till he knew he was lost, and then crawl into the first bed he saw.

RURAL FELICITY.

Mr. Philetus R. Throop is a well-known insurance agent of Burlington. He is a perfect steam engine to work, and every Summer, when he feels about worn out by his labors, he goes out to the farm of his Uncle George and rests a couple of weeks. He went out last Summer, as usual, but he only remained a couple of days, and on his return he was heard to say that he would never, never, never, go into the country again if he died for a breath of fresh air. The causes which led to this determination were as follows:

You see, he got a late start on his last trip out into the country, so that when he reached his Uncle George’s farm it was about nine o’clock in the evening, and the family, after the good old-fashioned custom, had gone to bed; not a light was visible about the house. Mr. Throop got out of the wagon in which a neighboring farmer had brought him, before they reached the house, so that the noisy wheels would not apprise any waking member of the fact that a visitor had come. Then he climbed over the fence and skipped briskly across lots to reach the house, and give Uncle George and the family a good surprise. Mr. Throop was not so familiar with the farm as he ought to have been to attempt such a nocturnal expedition. He had not gone twenty steps before he stepped into a great ditch, and had time to say all he could remember of the child’s prayer, “Now I lay me,” before he reached the bottom, and then had plenty of time to compose and repeat a much more appropriate and longer one before he crawled out again. After that he went more slowly, picking his steps with the greatest care, and straining his eyes as he peered into the darkness to distinguish noxious objects. But it was very dark, and of course appearances were unusually deceitful. He would walk around a patch of young clover or luxuriant turf, his heart standing still the while with the terror of having so narrowly escaped walking into a great well, and the next minute he would, after peering ahead of him until his eyes ached and sparks of fire danced before them, walk with the greatest confidence and composure into a pile of last year’s peabrush seven feet high, knocking off his hat, scratching his face and tearing his clothes. And then such a time as he would have hunting for his hat, and all the imaginable and unimaginable things that he would pick up in mistake for that useful article of apparel, can be far better imagined than described. And once he ran into a fence and nearly put his eye out on the end of a great stake that was standing out like the point of a _chevaux de frise_. And just before he got to the barn-yard he was amazed to discern a creek flowing between him and the fence, and after vainly hunting in the dark for a bridge, he pulled off his boots and trousers, and, holding the bundle of clothes high in his arms, waded across a stubblefield! so dry, every foot of it, that he might have lighted a match on it anywhere. He thought every tooth he had would chatter out of his head before he could get into his clothes again. Then he got into the barn-yard. He knew it was the barn-yard after he got into it, because in less than a minute after he had climbed the fence, he fell over a slumbering cow, and before he could get up, the frightened animal rose to her feet and bucked Mr. Throop over her head. Then he heard a cow get up just before him, and another just behind him, and two or three to the right and left, and when a cow with a bell that could be heard two miles got up and began galloping around the yard stirring up the rest of the cows, Mr. Throop would have willingly given up the best risk he had ever taken for a lantern. It wasn’t safe to stand still, so he took his hat in his hand and went along, swooping it around him in great circles, shouting “Swoosh! Hi! Hooey! Scat! Whish! Whoosh! Ste-boy!” as he went along. He only hit one cow with his hat, however, and the animal thus rudely assailed reached out and kicked him in the groin and doubled him up, and with a farewell flourish hit him on the side of the face with the end of a tail so full of cockle burs that it weighed twenty-seven pounds and knocked him so flat he thought he never would want to get up again. Then he saw what he supposed was the house, looming up black and quiet before him, and he thought his troubles were over. They had just begun.

The next minute he stepped under an open shed where the agricultural implements had been stored during the Winter. The first intimation he had of this was by falling over a plow. He scraped both shins, from the instep to the knee, across the edge of the share, and one of the handles caught him under the chin and jabbed his head up and back so suddenly that he heard his neck crack, and the other hunched him in the floating ribs and knocked enough breath out of him to start a tornado, in a small way but on a safe basis. He thought he never would get away from that plow, for he no sooner got one leg out of one entanglement of draught-irons, coulter, share and handles, than he got the other one snarled up in a still more hopeless maze of mould-board, clevis, sole-plate and beam, besides several other parts that he didn’t know the names of. And when at last he vanquished the plow he lost himself in a cultivator, and wore himself out trying to crawl through the gang of coulters. When he got clear of that he fell in with a reaper and mower, and after prodding his instep into indescribable agony by thrusting it against the sickle guards as he fell, he caught hold of the reel, which, of course, immediately whirled with his weight. But it chanced that quite a large colony of barn-yard fowls had used the reel as their roosting place during the Winter, and as it whirled round the amazed and bewildered Mr. Throop rained down upon himself a terrific tempest of hens and roosters, Brahmas, light Cochins, ungainly Shanghais, and a variety of other breeds in such a tumult of squawkings and cacklings, and flappings of wings, and vague but vigorous clawings of feet, that he didn’t care whether he got out alive or not, and, indeed, before he got through with the reel he knocked himself down with its vindictive slats seven times. Then he got away from that and impaled himself on a horse rake, and fell over the handle of a fanning mill, and nearly killed himself in the horse-power of a thrashing machine, and finally got into the house yard, felt his way to the house, and fell exhausted and speechless against the front door with a diamond-shaped harrow hanging around his neck. And Uncle George, awakened by the thump at the door, opened an up-stairs window and demanded who was there, and receiving no answer shot twice at the recumbent form of Mr. Throop with his revolver. And when they came down with lights and opened the door, they were as greatly surprised as Mr. Throop could have wished.

THE GARDEN OF THE GODS.

The people around Barnes Street well remember when Mr. Middlerib planted the “garden of the gods.” He bought cartloads of rich earth for it, and loaded it with patent fertilizers, and ground and stirred and raked it until the soil was fine as corn meal. The seeds were received by express, and there wasn’t a package that didn’t have a full college course of Latin printed on the back, and Mr. Middlerib grew bald trying to pronounce the fearful and wonderful names of the seed, that were to make the garden of the gods the wonder of South Hill. When these germs of magnificent flora were planted the neighbors hung over the fence in silent admiration and listened to Mr. Middlerib’s botanical lectures, delivered over every package that was opened. Where the _abolutus haciedendus microbulus_ was imbedded, he erected a large trestle immediately, for that impetuous climber to ascend and ramble over. And where he implanted the _diocantanean psyttachineliensis psoddium_, he reared a tall, straight stick for that towering mass of blossom and foliage to shape itself against. He refused the most penetrating hints for a few seeds of the _bianthus geridian psottoliensis giasticus, floridens bilthus_, and the care and great gravity with which he earthed the germs of the _bibulus Burlingtoniensis giganteus_ brought tears to the eyes of the women. And when the seeds were all planted, how zealously Mr. Middlerib watched and wrought and fought for their protection. He would get up in the night to chase the neighbors’ cows around the house two or three times, and across the garden of the gods four or five times, and out of the front gate once, and return to his virtuous couch with profanity in his heart and mud on his feet, and one slipper down by the cistern and the other in the verbena bed.

All the cut-worms in the State of Iowa appeared to be attending a mass convention in the garden of the gods. When the tinner came to fix the spout, he stuck the ladder by which he ascended to the roof in that sacred ground, and the carpenter who patched the cornice set one of his trestles in the same place. Every tramp who came to beg, selected that one favored locality as the only spot in the world where he might assume the usual humble and respectful position, and rehearse the stereotyped application for provender. Mr. Middlerib nearly wore out his voice shouting at people and cows, and railing at cut-worms, and one Sunday morning he fell asleep in church, and Mrs. M. prodded him with her parasol just as the minister said, in impressive accents, “And here we are treading on sacred ground.” “Git off of it!” yelled Mr. Middlerib, dreaming of the grocer’s boy standing on the g. o. g., and using his oft-repeated phrase, “Scatter, or I’ll bury ye in it!” And it raised such a church scandal that Mr. Middlerib was obliged to double his subscription to keep in good fellowship.

But after manifold troubles, the garden came along beautifully, only the plants acted a little queer. The climber refused to climb, save in a horizontal position, but after its own way; and in all general directions on a horizontal plane it manifested a disposition to crowd all over that part of South Hill. The _diocantanean psyttachineliensis psoddium_ scorned the straight stick by which it was expected to brace itself, and grew out in crooked branches like a garden oak. But the tender care it received, and the rich earth in which it was planted, showed what wonders cultivation will do, and when, at last, Mr. Middlerib, after long and manfully holding out against the declarations of the envious neighbors and the hints of his wife and daughter, was obliged to sit down on the porch, one lovely Summer evening, and admit that he had wasted enough breath to make a tornado, and filled the air with vociferous and murderous threats and vituperations, and quarreled with three-quarters of his acquaintances, all for the sake of raising a jimson weed, it was nevertheless a jimson weed nine feet high, with blossoms as big as inflated sun-flowers. So he let the jimson weed stand, and argued with every one who came to the house that, with sufficient care and proper cultivation, it could be developed into a fruit-bearing tree. As for the _abolutos haciedendus microbulos_, as soon as he was morally and botanically certain that it was just chickweed, Mr. Middlerib one night secretly pulled it up and threw it away, and ever afterward professed to be heart-broken because some rascally, envious florist had come up from Keokuk and stolen the choicest climber in the Mississippi Valley. The _bianthus geridian psottoliensis giasticus, floridens bilthus_ never showed itself until toward the latter part of June. Then it thrust up a delicate, fragile little sprout, drank in a little of the glad free air and pure sunlight, heard itself called by its full name, and drooped under the burden and died. The _bibulus Burlingtoniensis giganteus_ came up and did well. It did not flower very abundantly; but it developed very marked qualities. The chickens came up and pecked at it, and then laid them down under the currant bushes and closed their eyes upon this world of sorrow and mysterious plants. The pigs got into the yard and rooted a little of it up, and their sudden demise gave rise to the rumor of the hog cholera, and the air of the hill was vocal for the next five days with the protests of healthy porkers against the popular modes of treating the hog cholera, such as boring holes along the spine with a red hot iron and splitting the ears and tail and rubbing in salt and cayenne pepper. And after Master Middlerib fooled with it and got some of it on his face, which immediately swelled up so that nothing was visible to his eyes, and his eyes were visible to nobody, for nearly a week, the wonderful plant was pulled up with the kitchen tongs and thrown into the alley, where the geese of South Hill found it, ate it, grew fat on it; and came around and asked for more. Nothing that grows under the heavens can kill a South Hill goose.

There were other plants in the garden of the gods that came up and grew to maturity and brought forth blossoms each after his kind, but as they turned out to be various species of rag-weed and dog-fennel, they were not considered worthy of mention by Mr. Middlerib. But he is disheartened with scientific gardening, and he only lives now for one object: to ascertain whether these Latin names are really the scientific names of those plants which they set forth, or he was swindled by the traveling seed agent.

A TRYING SITUATION.

There was a time when Mr. Bilderback was almost persuaded to cut off his pew rent, renounce his religious convictions, and become an atheist or a pagan, he wasn’t very particular which. He was for many weeks in great distress of mind, and professed the greatest hatred of all churches, on general principles. This state of affairs, which fortunately was not permanent, was brought about by a very annoying, though perfectly innocent occurrence. One beautiful but rather warm Sunday morning he was dozing comfortably in his pew, in the church of which he is one of the main sleepers, when he became aware of an apparition gliding solemnly down the aisle with a collection basket in its hand. Mr. Bilderback braced up into an erect posture, cleared his throat in a ponderous tone of Roman firmness, as one who should say, “Who’s been asleep?” And as the basket was extended toward him, he felt in his trousers pocket for his wallet. It wasn’t there, and as he withdrew his hand, and felt in the other pocket, he felt that the eyes of the congregation were upon him, and that was all he felt, for he certainly didn’t feel any pocket-book. He nodded the basket man to wait a second, and leaned over to the left while he felt in the right inside pocket of his coat, from which in his growing nervousness he drew half a dozen chestnuts which rolled over the floor with a rattle that sounded in his hot ears like the thunders of the Apocalypse, and made him warmer and more nervous than ever. Then he leaned over the end of the pew and felt in the other inside coat pocket and drew out a bundle of letters, a lot of postal cards, a circus ticket, a photograph of an actress, a funny story printed on a card, a pocket-comb and a long string, and his face grew so warm his breath felt like a hot air blast. Then he squared his elbows and went for his vest pockets, and strewed the pew cushion with quill toothpicks, newspaper scraps, street car checks, a shoe buttoner, some lead pencil stubs, and crumbling indications of chewing tobacco, a bit of sealing wax, a piece of licorice root about an inch long, and three or four matches. Then he leaned forward and, stung to madness by the smiles which were breaking out all around that church worse than the measles in a primary school room, dived into his coat tail pockets, and drew forth a red silk handkerchief, two apples, a spectacle case, a pair of dog skin gloves, an overcoat button, and a fine assortment of bits of dried orange peel and lint. Then he stood up, devoutly praying that an earthquake might come along and swallow up either him or the rest of the congregation, he didn’t much care which, and went down into his hip pockets, from which he evolved a revolver, a corkscrew, a cigar case, a piece of string, a memorandum book, and a pocket knife. By this time Mr. Bilderback’s face was scarlet clear down to his waist, and he was so nervous and worked up that he nearly shook his clothes off, while the man with the basket couldn’t have moved away, if he had died for staying. And when Mr. Bilderback, in forlorn despair, once more rammed his hand into the trousers pocket where he began the search, the congregation held its breath, and when Mr. Bilderback drew forth the very pocket-book which he had missed in his first careless search, and had since all but stripped to find, there was a sigh of relief went up from every devout heart in that house. But Mr. Bilderback only dropped into his seat with an abruptness that made the windows rattle, and registered a mental vow that he wasn’t going to come out to church again to be made a fool of by a man with a long handled darning basket.

MR. BILDERBACK LOSES HIS HAT.

“No,” Mr. Bilderback said, “it wasn’t.” He put it there last night, the last thing before he went to bed, he remembered most distinctly. It wasn’t there now, and he didn’t know who had any business to move it. Somebody had done it, and he hoped to gracious that it would be the last time. Somebody was always meddling with his things.

Mrs. Bilderback, coming down stairs with a weary air, asked if he had looked in the closets?

“Closets?” Mr. Bilderback snarled, “Kingdom of Ireland! Does any sane man put his hat in the closets when he wants it every time he goes out? No. I hung it up right here, on this very hook of this particular rack, and if it had been left alone, it would be there now. Some of you must have moved it. It hasn’t got legs and couldn’t get away alone.”

Master Bilderback suggested that it wouldn’t be very surprising if it felt its way along fur a little ways, for which atrocities he was rewarded with a wild glare and a vicious cuff from his unappreciative parent. Then Mr. Bilderback said, “Well, I suppose I can walk down town bareheaded.”

Well, that was the usual formula. Every body knew just what it meant, and as soon as it was said the family scattered for the regular morning search. Mrs. Bilderback looked in all the closets with the air of John Rogers going to the stake, and then she went into an old chest, that had the furs and things put away in it, and was only opened twice a year, except when Mr. Bilderback’s hat was lost, which occurred on an average three times a day. She shook pepper or fine cut tobacco or camphor out of everything she picked up, and varied her search by the most extraordinary sneezes that ever issued from human throat, while ever and anon she paused to wipe her weeping eyes and say that “well, she never.” Mrs. Bilderback’s search for the lost hat never got beyond that chest. She would kneel down before it and take the things out one by one, and put them back, and take them out, and sneeze and sigh, and wonder occasionally “where the hat could be,” but her search never went beyond that old moth proof chest.

Miss Bilderback confined her search to the uncut pages of the last _Scribner_, which she carefully cut and looked into, with an eager scrutiny that told how intensely interested she was in finding that hat. She never varied her method of search, save when the approaching footsteps of her father warned her that he was swinging on his erratic eccentric in that direction, when she hid the magazine, and picking up the corner of the piano cover looked under that article with a sweet air of zealous interest, exclaiming in tones of pretty vexation, “I wonder where it can be?” And it was noticeable that this action and remark, both of which she never failed to repeat every time her father came into the room, had the effect of throwing that estimable but irascible old gentleman into paroxysms of the most violent passion, each one growing worse than its predecessors, until they would culminate in a grand burst of wrath in which he ordered her to quit looking for his hat. Then she would retire with an injured air and tell her mother, between that indefatigable searcher’s sneezes, that “one might wear one’s self out slaving and looking for pa’s hat in every conceivable place, and all the thanks one got for it was to be scolded.” Master Bilderback, he helped hunt, too. His system of conducting a search was to go around into the back yard and play “toss ball” up against the end of the house, making mysterious disappearances, with marvelous celerity, behind the wood-pile or under a large store box, so oft as he heard the mutterings of the tempest that invariably preceded and announced his father’s approach.

But Mr. Bilderback. His was a regular old composite system of investigation; it combined and took in everything. He raged through the sitting-room like a hurricane; he looked under every chair in that room, and then upset them all to see if he mightn’t possibly have overlooked the hat. Then he looked on all the brackets in the parlor, and behind the window curtains, and kicked over the ottoman to look for a hat that he couldn’t have squeezed under a wash-tub. And he kept up a running commentary all the time, which served no purpose except to warn his family when he was coming and give them time to prepare. He looked into the clock and left it stopped and standing crooked. And he would like to know who touched that hat. He looked into his daughter’s work-box, a sweet little shell that “George” gave her, and he emptied it out on the table and wondered what such trumpery was for, and who in thunder hid his hat. “It must be hid,” he said. Peering down with a dark, suspicious look into an odor bottle somewhat larger than a thimble, “for it couldn’t have got so completely out of sight by accident.” If people wouldn’t meddle with his things, he howled, for the benefit of Mrs. Bilderback, whom he heard sneezing as he went past the closet door, he would always know just where to find them, because (looking gloomily behind the kitchen wood-box) he always had one place to put all his things (and he took off the lid of the spice-box), and kept them there. He glared savagely out of the door, in hopes of seeing his hopeful son, but that youthful strategist was out of sight behind his intrenchments. Mr. Bilderback wrathfully resumed his search, and roared, for his daughter’s benefit, that he would spend every cent he had intended to lay out for winter bonnets, in new hats for himself, and then maybe he might be able to find one when he wanted it. Then he opened the door of the oven and looked darkly in, turned all the clothes out of the wash-basket, and strewed them around, wondering “_who_ had hid that hat?” And he pulled the clothes-line off its nail, and got down on his hands and knees to look behind the refrigerator, and wondered “who _had_ hid that hat;” and then he climbed on the back of a chair to look on the top shelf of the cupboard, and sneezed around among old wide-mouthed bottles and pungent paper parcels, and wondered in muffled wrath “who had _hid_ that hat?” And he went down into the cellar and roamed around among rows of stone jars covered with plates and tied up with brown paper, and smelling of pickles and things in all stages of progress; every one of which he looked into, and how he did wonder “who had hid _that_ hat.” And he looked into dark corners and swore when he jammed his head against the corners of swinging shelves, and felt along those shelves and run his fingers into all sorts of bowls, containing all sorts of greasy and sticky stuff, and thumped his head against hams hanging from the rafters, at which he swore anew, and he peered into and felt around in barrels which seemed to have nothing in them but cobwebs and nails; shook boxes which were prolific in dust and startling in rats, and he wondered “who had hid that _hat_?”

And just then loud whoops and shouts came from up stairs, announcing that “here it was.” And old Bilderback went up stairs growling, because the person who hid it hadn’t brought it out before, and saw the entire family pointing out into the back yard, where the hat surmounted Mr. Bilderback’s cane, which was leaning against the fence, “just where you left it, pa,” Miss Bilderback explained, “when we called you into supper, and it has been out there all night.” And Mr. Bilderback, evidently restraining, by a violent effort, an intense desire to bless his daughter with the cane, remarked with a mysterious manner, that “it was mighty singular,” and putting on the hat, he strode away with great dignity; leaving his wife and daughter to re-arrange the house.

MIND READING.

One morning, about the middle of the Spring term, Master Bilderback made his appearance at school with a subdued manner apparent in all his actions, while a cast of sadness mingled with traces of pleasant memories overspread his countenance. It was, in short, that general expression of penitence which people assume after a holiday of more than usual hilarity. His quiet manner astonished the scholars and alarmed his teacher, who feared that it was a portent of some unusual mischief, and kept her eye upon the lad in consequence. He did not appear to be conscious of the surveillance under which he was placed. He bent no pins, he chewed no gum, he fired at the adjacent scholars no projectiles of masticated paper during the morning; no dismal but subdued cat-calls were heard from the vicinity of his seat; no grotesque grimaces made his neighbors laugh with uncounterfeited glee; restful were his feet, and quiet the fingers which were wont to drum on the desk four minutes out of every five. Master Bilderback was either in some deep affliction or he was ill. There was something wrong about him.

It transpired, along toward noon, when Master Bilderback’s spirits began to rise a little, that he had indeed passed under the rod, with his father at the other end of it, during the evening previous. The waters of affliction had gone over his soul, and his back had gone under the sole of his mother’s slipper. It seems they had company at Mr. Bilderback’s that evening, quite a large party, in fact, and the conversation turned on mind reading. The discussion became very spirited, Mr. Bilderback being the leader of the party which avowed its belief in mesmeric influences. The usual arguments of learned length and thundering sound were hurled back and forth, Mr. Bilderback winning especial distinction by the clearness with which he proved that, in certain esthetic conditions of the mental and physical systems, the peculiar psychic forces which always existed in a latent state, were roused into an active condition; and the action of the intellect upon the cerebrum was felt in the cerebellum, and transmitted by mesmeric condition to the candelebra, where the psychomatic transfusion of the occipital parietis made the Ego as cognizant of the mutation and genuflexions of the non-Ego, as though the psychic modifications really impinged upon the same ganglion; and the nerve waves along the ganglia of the two systems, transmuted by a touch of the hand, were, and could only be, identical. And Mr. Bilderback’s party said, “Yes; what could you say to that, now?” And the other party shook their heads and said, “Yes; but that was only a theory, after all; they would like to see the hypothesis demonstrated.” And at that critical juncture, Master Bilderback, who had been an attentive listener, spoke up, in his rough, horrid style, and declared that “that wasn’t nauthin’;” that they tried it at school, an’ he could let the boys hide things and then lead them right to the place where they were hid. The excitement ran high for a few moments, and Master B. was closely catechised, but he never varied from his original story; and they finally determined to try him.

Mr. Tweesdle, a young fellow who dotes on poetry and Miss Bilderback, was the first subject. He announced that he was thinking of a certain object, and by the way he looked at the mind-reader’s sister, everybody thought they knew what it was. But Master Bilderback seized him by the hand, led him out in the hall and up to the hat-rack, followed by the entire company, and reaching his hand into Mr. Tweesdle’s overcoat pocket, drew forth a paper bag containing a pound of sausages, half a dozen eggs, and a couple of rusks, remarking, “There, that’s what you’re thinking of.” And just at that moment he certainly was, although he shook his head in an idiotic manner and laughed feebly, while all the rest of the people never smiled, but only looked at each other and said, “Why, how funny!”

This sad affair cast a gloom over the entire community for a few moments, but the people rallied and demanded another test. There was a general reluctance on the part of the visitors to take a hand in it, and so Mrs. Bilderback was prevailed upon to be a subject in the course of scientific experiments. As soon as she had assumed a pensive expression and announced that her mind was wholly occupied with one subject, to the exclusion of all other terrestrial things, the boy grasped her by the hand, and away they went, sailing up stairs, followed by the entire congregation. The mind-reader marshaled them into a room, and leading his subject straight to the bureau, drew from a small drawer a set of false teeth and a bottle of hair dye. Mrs. Bilderback shrieked, the company looked grave, and some of the ladies declared to each other that well now, they never did.

There was another brief season of gloom, which was dissipated by Mr. Bilderback declaring that as neither of the subjects in the two experiments they had just witnessed had denied the accuracy of the mind-reader’s judgment, he would submit to the test himself. Great applause greeted this determination, and as Mr. Bilderback, with a glance that threatened a massacre if there were any tricks played on him, placed his hand in that of his son, the congregation rose en masse to follow where the mind-reader might lead. Master Bilderback placed his hand against his father’s forehead for a moment; then he placed it against his own and remained for several seconds in a thoughtful posture, and then led his reluctant parent, followed by the company, out of doors, and calling for a lantern, which was provided, they went into the woodshed, where the mind-reader, despite several stealthy nudges from his parent, reached his arm behind a pile of hickory knots, and drew forth a whisky bottle nearly a foot long, flat as a board, and about half full. Then a shadow fell upon the community that not even the cordial good nights that were exchanged at the door could dissipate, and after the footsteps of the last reveler had died away in the distance, Master Bilderback held two separate private seances with his parents, the remarkable manifestations of which occasioned the subdued state of mind and unusual depression of spirits which were so painfully apparent in the young man the following day.

A SAFE BET.

One night, last Winter, old Mr. Balbriggan, who lives out on Columbia Street, had occasion to make a journey out to the woodshed to get the hatchet. It was very dark, and as there was no lantern about the house, Mr. Balbriggan took a kerosene lamp, and shading it very carefully with a big tin pan, started out to the woodshed. The wind was rather uncertain and gusty, and Mr. Balbriggan had some misgivings about his getting out to the shed without accident; and every time the lamp flared, his mind misgave him. “I’ll bet a dollar that lamp’ll blow out,” he muttered when the first gust came, but he shied the tin pan around with great promptness, and the lamp steadied down. There came another gust and a bigger flare, and the chances for the lamp going out improved so decidedly that the old gentleman promptly raised his first stake. “I’ll bet a dollar and a half,” he muttered, “that lamp blows out.” Then the wind lulled a little, and as he hurried on toward the shed it was so quiet that, while he didn’t quite lose all confidence, he began to hedge a little; “I’ll bet fifty cents,” he said, “it’ll go out before I get back.” Another gust and a flare. “I’ll bet two dollars that lamp blows out,” muttered the old gentleman again, chipping a little higher as the chances seemed to grow better; but again he saved the light by the timely interposition of the tin pan. “I’ll bet three dollars,” he cried with great earnestness, as the next gust came, “this lamp’ll blow out;” but there were no takers and the lamp rallied again. But a still stronger gust fairly lifted the flame out of the top of the smoked chimney; and the old gentleman hissed in a hoarse, suppressed whisper, “I’ll bet five dollars this lamp’ll blow out.” But it settled down to work once more, and did very well until Mr. Balbriggan got very close to the woodshed; when the wind rallied and came at the lamp from two or three directions at once, and the old gentleman fairly shouted, “I’ll bet ten dollars this lamp’ll blow----” and just then the door of the woodshed blew violently open, hitting the lamp and the tin pan, knocking them both out of Mr. Balbriggan’s hands, and striking the old gentleman a terrible blow in the face that made him see more lights dancing in the air, for about a second, than even the lamp could send forth. And while he held his nose with one hand and groped around with the other to find where he was, there came from the house door the voice of the eldest juvenile Balbriggan, falling through the darkness like a falling star: “Raise him out, pa, raise him out; make it a hundred dollars; you’ve got a dead sure thing on it!”

THE LAY OF THE COW.

Switch engine Louisa, “B., C. R. & M.,” Was slowing up Front Street about three P. M., When the stoker looked out of the window to say, “There’s a cow going ’cross the t-r-a-c-kay.”

Pensively halted the cow on the track, Burs on her pendent tail, bran on her back; Dreaming of Summer, she seemed not to see The approach of the switch e-n-g-i-n-e.

Once more spake the Stoker, “There she is now,” “Bully,” the engineer quoth, “for the cow.” And reversing his engine he cried, “Shoo! Oh, shoo!” Said the stoker, “Oh, shoo’t the see-oh-doubleyou.”

Shrilly the whistle shrieked for its alarm, And the stoker threw firewood and coals in a swarm; But the cow never heeded, nor thought that her star Was setting at four miles an h-o-u-r.

The switch engine struck her about amidships, And her Summer dreams met with a total eclipse; It mangled her carcase, most shocking to see, And threw her down Front s-t-r-double-e-tea.

Sadly the engineer drew in his head, And “pulled her wide open,” as onward he sped; But the stoker smiled gayly, “Old fellow,” said he, “There’s some cheap porterhouse s-t-a-k-e.”[A]

[A] That isn’t the way to spell porterhouse steak, but the right way wouldn’t rhyme.

YOUNG MR. COFFINBERRY BUYS A DOG.

People lifted their eyes above their mufflers one raw November morning as they walked down Jefferson Street, and smiled and grinned, and laughed even unto hysterical weeping, as they watched the toilsome and uncertain progress of a patient young man who had bought a dog and was leading his property home. It was a nice enough kind of a dog, one of the kind of dogs whose mouth begins back close to the shoulders. It had dreadfully long legs, this dog, with great knobs of knees, and its restless tail had a dejected droop, as though the dog was just heart-broken at the idea of leaving his old home. The young man was leading the dog along with a very long string, one end whereof was tied around the dog’s neck. The only trouble with the dog was that he was young. He had not attained the years of discretion. He couldn’t trot placidly along thinking of things. He couldn’t walk at his master’s heels with a face as solemn as though he expected to be sausage before Thanksgiving Day. He was a nervous, fidgety, inquisitive dog, and he tried to read all the signs, and crawl under all the wagons, and dive between every body’s legs as he went along. And the first thing he knew, he had a contract on hand that was much too big for him, and he was just about crazy over it, for he wasn’t the dog to give up, if he was young, and he stuck to his work like a Trojan. And this was what made people laugh. The young man who was leading him had just lifted his hat to some lady acquaintances who were passing when the dog, looking up, misunderstood the motion and thought his master was going to hit him a diff with that hat. With the natural instinct of self-preservation, the shy, timid young thing dashed between the young man’s legs and ran to the length of his tether; then he gave a terrified howl and darted back in the opposite direction, going outside the young man’s right leg. Then, with a frightened yelp it sprang back between the legs again, circled around and came down outside the left leg. Then it ran rapidly around the young man, dived through his legs again and ran around him once and a half in an opposite direction, and his last maneuver closed the performance, for it wound the dog completely up, with his frightened face laid close against the young man’s knee. Mr. Coffinberry blushed to his ears, and replacing his hat, began the task of extricating himself from the toils that artful dog had cast around him. But the animal’s confidence was not yet entirely restored, for at every movement of Mr. Coffinberry’s hands, he squirmed and writhed and pulled back on the string until he was choked, and coughed and gasped in a manner most terrifying to the people not thoroughly acquainted with the symptoms of hydrophobia, and the young man was naturally as badly frightened, when these paroxysms became very lively, as was the dog itself. It was fifteen minutes before the snarl was disentangled. Then before they had gone half a block further, that dog, after having rushed into and been forcibly, and in some instances rather petulantly, dragged out of every doorway on the line of march, incontinently shot down a cellar grating, where he was immediately clawed and scalped by a cat as big as a soap box, and was also nearly garroted by his master drawing him up out of the cellar by the cord, for all the world as though he was a well bucket. About thirty steps further on, the dog ran between a clergyman’s legs, got frightened and ran around him once and then dived between his master’s legs, then rushed out toward the curb stone, but changing his mind, circled back and scooped in a blushing school teacher, and then gazed upon the mischief he had wrought, with hideous howls. The bystanders thought they never could get out of that entanglement. The minister declared alternatively that “he never did” and moreover that “well he never;” the blushing school teacher remarked “good gracious,” and suggested also, “dear me,” and, furthermore, “well, now;” and the young man said something about the dog being damp, which was highly improbable as the morning was very raw. By dint of a great deal of persuasion and pulling and hauling, however, in which they were greatly assisted by the dog, the unhappy trio were finally separated and went their way, making ineffectual efforts to look unconcerned. Then the dog wrapped himself up around a lamp-post; then he got through the hind wheel of a grocer’s wagon five or six times, back and forth, around a different spoke every time, while his master was talking to the grocer, and the latter drove off before the young man noticed what arrangements his dog had concluded with the wheel, and Jefferson Street was edified by the spectacle of a dog wound up to a wagon wheel and revolving rapidly with it, while a young man of pleasing address ran alongside the wheel and added his agonized appeals to the half-stifled wails of the hanging pup. They got the wagon stopped and got the pup loose, and the young man, wearied with the long struggle, resolutely turned toward the store, and walked rapidly away, the unhappy dog lying prone on his back, gasping and pawing the air, while the boys who witnessed the strange procession made the welkin ring with cries of “Dog’s a chokin! mister, yer dog’s a chokin!” But young Mr. Coffinberry knew that so long as his dog was helplessly sprawled on his back he couldn’t wrap the inhabitants of Burlington up in perspiring, distracted groups, so he kept on the even tenor of his way, and when he finally untied the string from the animal’s neck and turned him loose in the store, there wasn’t so much hair on that dog’s back as would make a tooth brush.

A MODERN GOBLIN.

A dreary, cheerless Christmas Eve. The dead hour of day, when the pale twilight falls over the earth, still and colorless as a shroud. Down the long vistas of deserted streets but here and there the feeble rays of some struggling light gleams through the gray twilight, pale as the glitter of a jewel on the brow of death. Across the dull waste of sky the ghostly clouds fly before a piercing wind, which whirls and tears their edges into fluttering fringes. The gloaming fades slowly and almost imperceptibly into night. Away back from the town, out on the bleak hillsides, the leafless trees toss their bare arms, gaunt shapes against the pallor of the sky, the swaying branches answering their mocking shadows, dancing like specters on the frozen ground; while the withered leaves rustle like very shudders.

The hour, neither light nor darkness, neither day nor night, that, with its weird, indescribable magic, draws you from the cheery grate to press your face against the cold window, and dream out into the gray light, peopled with specters and visions--often grotesque, but never merry--that come trooping from every shadow. Comes a rosy little face, framed in tangled tresses--ah, long, long unfolding years must roll back to take you to the time when the laughing eyes looked into yours; to-night you remember--dear child--the dimpled hands were crossed on the pulseless breast, when you were a boy; and the cheerless winter landscape, the dreary hills of snow, and the leafless forests stretch away, mile after weary mile, between your home and where the Christmas winds sigh plaintive monodies over her little grave. There comes a thoughtful, earnest face, manly and noble; a playmate of your boyhood, a college classmate and friend; the man who stood for your ideal of all that is brave and true, and virtuous and generous. As you look at it, you remember, to-night, that when you saw the real face, so little time ago, it was worn and old and haggard, and stamped with the leprous mark of vice. You shudder at the recollection; but the pleading look of the vision goes to your heart as it fades away; and other faces, long forgotten, crowd before you. One, furrowed with marks of patient suffering and care, with silver bands in the brown hair drawn so smoothly away from the brow, mother-love glistening in the tender eyes, mother-love in the quivering, heart-reaching eloquence of the tremulous lips, mother-love in the caressing gesture of the gentle hands--what wonder that it lingers long, and fades only when you crush the burning tears that blind your eyes and veil the vision from your sight? And comes one sweeter, dearer than all--your heart throbs more quickly as you see a shadow rise in the deepening twilight--a face glowing with blushes and wreathed in smiles; a face that shone into your life like sunshine, in its bright springtime days; a face that has remained constant while everything else has changed--your old heart grows tender and young with dear recollections, and you thank God that although years have set their mark upon this dear vision, it is still yours, loving, faithful, and powerful to bless and charm in every mood and at all times. It is gone; and looming through the deepening shadows another form of familiar presence rises before you. The silvery tones of memory-bells chime like a Christmas choral through the bleak wind shaking so angrily the noisy shutters. It is the milkman, and he jangles all your sweet dreams out of tune, sending the ghosts your retrospect has raised back to the shadowy past. And as your visions disappear, you dismally watch the female vassals of the neighborhood sallying forth in answer to the tinkling summons, bearing all possible manner of squatty tinware and corpulent yellow bowls, in which to receive lawful but attenuated measures of that peculiar aqueous fluid of cerulean hue with which, under the ghastly appellation of “cream,” our best society dilutes its table beverages. And when this amusement ceases to be longer interesting, you leave the draughty window and seek the more congenial companionship of the black, close-shut gas-burner, which out of respect to your conceit and the conventionalities of the Christmas time, we have designated a “cheery fire-place,” with an incipient cold in your otherwise empty head.

For the shadows have beckoned and reached to each other, and joined their giant hands, and danced until the light is frightened away. In heavier volumes rolls the black smoke from every chimney, indicating that the estimable and respectable business men of the city, having left their clerks with orders to save gas and not waste the coal, and to close the store only when the last lingering, possible chance of securing one more belated customer has faded into hopelessness, are now at home, enjoying the unspeakable luxury of heaping the stove with coal their wives have carried in, and driving the other members of the family to madness by monopolizing the privilege of poking the fire. Gas lights twinkle in the streets, for the faithful almanac in the gas company’s office has been mislaid, and they do not know there will be a moon quite late in the morning. A ruddy glow of firelight and lamplight streams out into the gathering darkness when a door is opened, men are hurrying home, their faces averted, and their bodies bowed against the howling wind, or else scudding briskly before it. The city was hurrying home to enjoy its Christmas Eve in the bosom of its several families, and to scold the children and pack them off to bed, if they romped and made too much noise. Everybody knows what city it was, so there is no use wasting time describing it. It was just the same old city, only they had strengthened the little brick house down below the corner where the blacksmith lived, with a coat of whitewash. Just the same old city.

And everybody knows the hill on the street, where it turns to wind up the bluff and go to the rich folks’ houses on top of the long hill that stretches around behind the town like a great horse shoe, and looks down on all the business, and bustle, and noise, and hurry, and work, and fatigue that have made the city so rich and powerful. And just at the time we were speaking about a gentleman was making devious headway up this hill, just as the street leaves the business of the city and goes scrambling up to the quiet and rest on top of the hill. A discouraged looking gentleman, who seemed to have begun his Christmas at the wrong end, and so got nearly through with it before it had really commenced. The gentleman’s Napoleonic head was covered, part of the time, with a glossy silk tile, which art had shaped into the fashionable, uncomfortable cylinder which adorns the caputs of our Best Young Men, but accident, oft recurring, and too many vigorous slappings on and pattings down by the officious but ill-directed zeal of many friends, and too frequent steppings on by the owner as the last means of checking its mad career in a race with the wind, had graced this glossy cylinder with many alternate elevations and depressions, giving it that corrugated effect so attractive, natural, and useful in the washboard and concertina, but very repugnant and ungraceful in the silk hat. The gentleman’s eccentric style of buttoning his overcoat, three holes over the same button, lent an air of abstraction to his general appearance, while his knitted brow told of intense mental conflict and exertion. He made little forays from the sidewalk to the middle of the street, returning to his pathway by devious and angular ways, as though striving to baffle some unseen pursuer. From time to time he made vicious, impulsive, startled clutches at the streaming ends of his necktie, fluttering in the blast, which he regarded with a vague uncertain terror, and, when he had seized them, he laughed in hollow, hysterical accents. The smell of coffee was heard in the distance as he passed, and ever and anon, as the restless earth raised itself in precipitous terraces before him, he lifted his feet high in air and with lofty steps essayed to scale the treacherous mirage. He paused in his circuitous progress to shake hands with the last friendly lamp-post on that thoroughfare, expressing his confidence in that faithful municipal lighthouse as a “goo’role feller,” who was, under any and every possible combination of circumstances, “all ri’.” At times he felt for his hat with both hands, and having secured a firm grip upon its uncertain brim, he removed it from his head with great caution, and swinging it violently in the air, proceeded with great enthusiasm and heartiness to “hurrah for” somebody, but invariably forgot who, when he came to the name, and contented himself with assuring himself that that was “al’ri’,” after which with gravity he felt for his head, found it, and with much deliberation got the hat up on top of it, generally sideways or upside down, and with great physical effort, crushed and pulled it on. At length, having parted company after affectionate and prolonged adieus, with the last friendly lamp-post, the young gentleman loudly announced that he was a “total wr--hic!--creck” and proceeded furthermore to declare that he would not and could not by any means be induced to seek the shelter of his mother’s roof again until smiling morn should hail and deck the hills with gold, and the rosy-fingered hours should herald the coming of the god of day. And singing this true statement in a rich baritone, a kind of a wheelbarrow tone, in fact, possessing more volume and hoarse wheeziness than we would admire in Nilsson’s chest tones, he made a vigorous but ineffectual effort to fall up the hill, and angrily ejaculating, “Ju know who yer pushin’?” he shot over the curbstone with frenzied gestures that seemed to proceed at least from ten pairs of legs, and disappeared in the gloom of the gutter, where he lay, and whence his stertorous breathing startled the nervous passers-by.

Had the fallen man kept on the uneven tenor of his way a little farther he would have encountered a mysterious being that would have transformed his snores into sounds of deeper intonation. The street, where it turned and led up the hill, was not a cheerful one. On the west side the bluff rises abruptly as a wall, and on the opposite side it sinks away into a dark, gloomy ravine, that has an uncanny look at the best of times, and the sidewalk is provided with a wooden railing, to keep careless or belated passengers from plunging down the hillside. A little stream winds along the ravine, endeavoring, in a despairing kind of way, to find its way to the river, which it never does. It starts, but from the time the city was first settled there has been no record that the little stream ever got clear through; nobody knows what becomes of it, where it goes to; but certain it is, that all trace of it is lost before it gets half-way to any where. But we have naught to do with this forlorn little country brook that comes purling through pleasant meadows, and bubbling over white pebbles, and wrangling around great bowlders, to get bewildered and lost in the entangling mazes of the drains and gutters and sewers and culverts of the city.

Seated on the railing of the sidewalk was an apparition of far less cheerful mien than the gentleman who, when we left him, had just wrapped the curbstone about him and laid down to snore the Christmas hours away. This figure wore a snow-white mantle, much too airy and summery for the season and very decidedly out of style, which fell from his angular shoulders in graceful folds, a portion of its light tissue being folded over his osseous head after the most conventional style of his class. As he swung his legs carelessly to and fro, they struck the lower boards of the railing with a strange rattling sound like muffled castanets, and his manner of whistling “Down Among the Dead Men,” under his breath in that weird, ghostly place, with the bluff rising black and abrupt before him, and the ravine lying deep in impenetrable shadow behind him, had that awful touch of the supernatural in it that would make one’s blood run cold to contemplate. A ghostlier ghost never chose a ghostlier time or place for his ghastly recreations.

He ceased his hollow whistling and stilled his nervous legs as he heard approaching footsteps on the sidewalk, and dropped from his easy perch on the railing as a young man and a lovely maiden came toward him, toiling up the slope down which the December zephyr roared and swept into a fury that would make an Ulster overcoat feel sick. The young man’s arm was wound tenderly about his companion’s shrinking seal-skin cloak, while he hoarsely whispered words into her ears, which were rosy with the exhilarating influence of twenty-eight degrees below zero. The ghost stepped in front of them.

“Excuse my hoarseness,” he said, with a winning smile that extended over the entire width of his finely-chiseled face, “but I had the very disagreeable misfortune to have my throat cut in this exceedingly romantic spot about a half a century since, and my voice has since been affected to such an ex----”

The very wind paused in its noisy bluster to listen to the wild shrieks that were piercing the darkness like acoustic arrows, and the rapid patter of two pairs of Arctic over-shoes that were pounding the bosom of the frosty earth far down the hill, away from the shadow of the bluff, away from the dreadful blackness of the ravine, in the direction of the gleaming street lamps of the city.

The ghost leaned upon the railing and sighed as he said:

“This was not the style of responding to an apology when I dwelt among men. Perhaps my voice, which I have not used before for fifty years, has that in its mouldy accents which is disagreeable, startling, and possibly repulsive, to mortal ears. I will modulate my intonation.”

He paused to observe the figure of a portly man, looming vaguely through the night, as, with many asthmatic puffs, the well-fed citizen essayed to beat up the hill against the wind.

“He looks,” said the specter, musingly, “very much like an honest old settler I used to know, who sold whisky to and stole furs from the Indians, the year after I first came to what is now this city.”

The panting citizen came alongside and was passing by, when the ghost dropped his bony hand noiselessly in the hollow of his arm.

“A thousand pardons, my dear sir,” he began, “but I observe a most extraordinary resemblance in----”

“Oh-H-H-H-h, Lord!”

And again the ghost was alone. As the echoes of the excited and grossly misapplied remark of the citizen died away in the mocking echoes of the dreary solitudes, the ghost walked across the street and carefully examined the face of the bluff, in which direction the portly mortal had made his unceremonious and abrupt exit.

“No,” the specter remarked, after a critical inspection, “it is very evident that he did not plunge through the hill; he certainly ran over its summit. The celerity with which he accomplished this undertaking at his time of life, and in his condition of superfluous flesh too, smacks almost as much of the marvelous to me as I did to him. I would be willing to bet my boots, now,” he added, with a ghastly wink at his bare feet, “that the portly old party can not come here to-morrow noon and get over that hill inside of twenty-five minutes.”

“Passenger travel on this street,” he continued, resuming his station on the sidewalk, “is livelier than it was in my time. As I remember, the two gentlemen who performed the surgical operation on my windpipe, which has so disagreeably affected my voice, had to wait here for me five hours in the cheerless gloom before my other business engagements permitted me to come along and make an involuntary and unwilling third in their interesting little surprise party. And I sat on a stump near this very spot, and watched my lifeless remains nearly two days before the coroner found them and gave them the customary inquest with a fearful and wonderful verdict, followed by Christian burial. Yes, yes, the village has been prosperous since then, and now--but soft, a young man--a lover, too, or I’m no ghost. I will befriend him and he will love me.”

A goodly young man he was indeed, as ghost or girl would wish to see. Torture racked his soul when, at every step, his dainty boots, a size and a half too small, touched the ground. And even the snowy expanse of linen cuffs, weighted with moss-agate sleeve buttons, failed to conceal the fact that his flame-colored kids would not button. Though the piercing wind chilled him to the very marrow, his overcoat was opened and thrown back from his throat to display the blue necktie that graced his paper collar. The elaborate and painful costume betrayed his errand. You might wring bergamot out of the air when he passed along, and there was jockey club on his handkerchief, and his breath smelled a little of sozodont, some of trix, and a great deal of something else. The ghost looked after him, as he passed by, with as much friendly admiring interest as he could throw into his rather open countenance, and then gathering his robe about him followed swiftly and silently at the limping heels of the nice young man, who toiled painfully but very patiently and exquisitely properly up the hill until he reached the summit of the grade, and pausing before a mansion of pretentious appearance, proceeded to investigate the ever changing mysteries of a front gate.

Properly constructed, the front gate is more fearfully and wonderfully made than the architect who designs or the carpenter who builds it. No other created or manufactured thing in the whole wide universe can equal or rival it for original perversity and malignant obstinacy. A patient man, whose soul is melting within him from chronic and exaggerated meekness, will fall from grace and relieve his tortured soul in a burst of giant powder profanity after fifteen minutes’ struggle with a front gate, and then he will shower a tempest of abuse upon the unknown man who contrived such a diabolical and outrageous gate, and he will cease to struggle with it and will climb over the fence and disintegrate his raiment on the pickets, and abrade his cuticle all the way down his back as he slides off, and then his soul will be tossed into a very sirocco of passion and mortification when he sees the dog of the mansion come trotting along and open the gate with a simple push of his nose. Or a woman, full of a woman’s love and yearning tenderness, will take hold of a gate and tug at it, and pull and haul and jerk until she nearly drags the solid posts up by the roots, and when all the blood in her system is boiling in the top of her head, and her eyes are starting from their sockets, and she dissolves in tears of utter, abject wretchedness and rage because she is debarred by virtue of her sex from the ecstatic privilege of swearing at the gate and the pirate who made it, a grinning boy will open the barrier by merely pulling it the other way. Men with real, living ideas, and lofty aspirations, and soaring ambitions, and grand, illimitable thoughts, swelling and groaning and throbbing in heart and brain, have stood before an orthodox front gate and manipulated its fastenings, moving that piece this way and this one that, and all of them the other, until the pot-metal securities have assumed the vexed and perplexing varieties and dimensions of a Chinese puzzle with the delirium tremens or a Centennial election table. And then, when at last with a despairing groan he lets go of it, and raises his hands to heaven to call down its righteous judgment upon the unregenerate mocker who made that gate, it slowly swings open by its own weight, and the distressed Christian discovers to his unspeakable amazement that he has had it open twenty times within the last fifteen minutes. And all these troubles are magnified after night. Hook and staple connect the swinging gate and the immovable post where hook and staple there were none before. The most trifling and ordinary bolt has a way of acquiring a double action after dark, so that whatever is loosed at one end is immediately fastened up as tight as a candidate at the other. Nails, too, appear, driven in the post immediately above the latch, and finally, when all other ties are sundered, lo, a strap hugs the whole structure in its binding embrace. It is a work of ten minutes to find the buckle, and when found it is a knot, tied when the strap was wet, and now firmer in its clinging folds and more intricate in its appalling entanglements than the famous knot which Gordius of Phrygia tied in his chariot harness, a knot which baffled even the sublimest efforts of the Chicago divorce lawyers. Even the simplest form of a gate latch known to man, composed of a round hole in a post into which a stick is thrust athwart the gate, is a snare, a vanity, a vexation of the spirit and a mortification of the flesh; for no living man ever opened a strange gate of this genus that the stick did not come out with a jerk, rasping the abraded knuckles along the rude edges of the pickets.

With a gate which presented, or rather concealed, and successively developed, like masked batteries, all the modern combinations of baffling elements and inventions, the young man has all this time been expostulating. A good young man, for while he has been laboring with that remorseless gate with all the intensity of purpose and earnestness that fires the blood of youth, he has only relieved his impatient swelling soul by saying from time to time that “he _would_ be dad binged,” once or twice varying the tense, as the future suddenly seemed to break upon him with all the fullness of time, to declare that he _was_ “dad binged,” and several times, as though conscious of some degree of uncertainty attending the whole matter, devoutly hoping that, at some indefinite time in the vague hereafter, he _might_ be “dad binged.” Once he passed suddenly to the imperative and passive, appealing to some unknown quantity to “dad bing the dad binged old gate,” a confusion of mood, tense and voice that was absurd, and even the ghost, which stood in the porch of the mansion watching his movements with that all-absorbed interest which visitors from another world display in terrestrial matters, shook his head gravely, as if doubting the advisability of a needless waste of power in dad binging that which was already declared dad binged. But the ghastly visage relaxed in a grim smile, as with one last tremendous effort, the adolescent raised the barrier from its fastenings, hinges and all, and fell forward to the gravel walk with the fiendish gate clasped in his arms, reaching the ground in a rattling chorus which roused all the dogs this side of the moon.

Disengaging himself from the chaos into which the gate had fallen, the young man reached the porch with a halting step, and as he stood near the door, brushing gravel off his clothes with his tattered kids, the ghost gathered his bustle and train about him, slid deftly through the key hole, and flattened himself against the door on the inside. The tinkle of the bell had scarcely sounded in the hall when a light footstep was heard in echo to its clamor, and a beautiful young girl hastened to the door. She opened it, but the ghost stepped before her and faced the smiling, blushing, bowing young man, threw his gaunt arms around his neck, and in a hollow whisper began,

“Darling! I have watched so long for----”

A terrific yell rang through the corridors like almost any other yell would ring under similar circumstances. A rush of hasty feet along the gravel walk, a stumble, a crash and a dismal howl at the site of the fallen gate; then the dying echoes of fleet, pattering footsteps in the distance, and then silence, dispossessed of her curtained throne for one brief moment, resumed her noiseless reign, and the smiling ghost, after a vain effort to dig himself in the ribs, chuckled with dismal jollity and hid his shadowy form in the recesses of the porch.

The young girl stood spell-bound, gazing out in the direction of her vanished lover, and shaking her lovely head in mute, astonished negations, in response to the hurried and excited inquiries of the family, who came swarming into the hall in all possible stages and degrees of amazement and terror, propounding with great volubility all the conundrums which would naturally suggest themselves in consequence of such an astounding and unheralded and unprovoked outburst of human voice.

“I cannot imagine what did ail him,” she said at length, when her stern father, in mild reproof, had laid his heavy hand upon her rounded shoulder, and oscillated her lithe form to and fro until her back hair was in her hands, and the floor was strewn with hairpins and samples of curls, thick as autumnal leaves and one thing and another strew the brooks in Vallambrosa and vicinity. “I opened the door, and before I could say ‘Good evening,’ he opened his mouth to its fullest extent, and with a look of horror, fled from my presence, leaving no token save an amount of noise altogether incommensurate with his size. I can’t imagine what he could have seen to affect him so. I was afraid at first that I hadn’t rubbed the pearl powder out of my eyebrows, but I had.”

Every member of the convention offered a suggestion or an explanation of the mysterious affair, but they were all overruled by paterfamilias, who, venturing the gruff opinion that the young man was in the habit of placing himself exterior to sundry and various decoctions dispensed at those retail drug stores which are, by law, closed on Sundays, and had merely incurred that peculiar form of mental distemper in which the patient keeps a private menagerie on exhibition in his boots, drove his wondering family back to the parlor.

But youth is buoyant. Its sorrows are transient and its tears are April rain, flecked with the sunshine even while they fall; its fears are short lived as its sorrows, and die away when the thought or scene that gave them birth is gone. So he who flew from the hideous shadow that had veiled the fairy figure of his love from his fond gaze, blushed in the darkness at his nervous fancy, and re-arranging his wardrobe, retraced his steps with more of that native grace and innate dignity peculiar to the young man of the nineteenth century, than he had displayed while making his presence seldom. Again he passed the wreck of the demolished gate, and once more he rang the bell, and listened for the echoing footfall, while the attentive specter came and stood demurely at his elbow.

“You horrid boy,” murmured a sweet voice through the keyhole, “I have a great mind not to let you in. What made you act so perfectly ridiculous?”

“Dearest,” the young man said, “it was a foolish, horrible fancy; I will never frighten you again.”

“It was perfectly dreadful,” she replied, “horribly, dreadfully awful. How could you be so perfectly horridly dreadful? But you may come in this time.”

And with coquettish deliberation she opened the door, to see the ghost, bending his smiling gaze upon her colorless face and staring eyes.

“Thank you,” he said, in hollow tones, “since you insist upon it, I will come----”

“Oo-oo-_ee_-E-E-E-E!”

And thump! She dropped to the floor with a velocity and abruptness that even astonished her ghost. Dumb with amazement, her lover stood gazing at her form, lying prone upon the new hall carpet, emitting a series of long-drawn shrieks. He recoiled, as again the members of the family came pouring and buzzing out of their rooms, like hornets from their domicile on a swaying apple tree bough, jarred rudely by the unconscious granger’s towering head. The angry father caught a glimpse of the trembling, half-stupefied, and thoroughly mystified youth, standing near the doorway, appealingly and timorously offering his explanations. The parent, with a few hurried words, disappeared up stairs. Quickly he returned, bearing in his hands a ponderous shot-gun, at the sight of which the young man, without pausing to explain, fled quite as precipitately, and with as little ceremony, as he had sauntered away from the embrace of the ghost.

“Because,” he remarked to the wind, which was vainly trying to keep pace with his flying movements as he cleared the fallen gate with a bound, and waltzed airily down the road, as though tight boots were a vision and an unreal dream, “because the old man appears to be a trifle impatient to-night, and I would not cross him in his sadder moods. He might do that to-night for which to-morrow I might mourn.”

And deftly passing from twelve to fifteen linear feet of solid earth beneath each foot, oft as he raised it from the ground, with swift evasion he transferred himself to healthier climes and more congenial scenes.

The indignant father, meanwhile, had stepped out on the porch, and holding his warlike weapon a-port, peered angrily into the gloom for a glimpse of the flying figure, whose distant, echoing footsteps he could faintly hear.

“Thou art so dear,” he said, “and yet so far.”

To him the silent ghost approached. Standing by his unconscious side, the specter leaned his bony elbow upon the mortal shoulder, resting his hollow cheek upon his attenuated hand. Then, with a graceful motion and an easy gesture, of which a ballet dancer might be proud, he drew aside the lower portion of his drapery, disclosing to view a pair of emaciated shins of which a ballet dancer would most certainly be ashamed. Crossing one of these specimens of anatomical curiosities in front of the other, he rested the bended limb upon the toes, and stood thus for a moment, in that elegant and charming pose so much affected by our best young men at the opera and theater, who place themselves on exhibition for the untaught multitude upon every possible occasion.

For a few brief moments he stood thus, wrapped in admiration of his refined and elegant appearance, then dropping his face and turning it until his breath, if he had any, would have swept the cheek of his unconscious companion, he said:

“Let me entreat you, dear sir, to do nothing rash. Let me implore you to put by your murderous weap----”

Bang! bang! Two loads of death-dealing buckshot perforated the roof of the porch, and the howl of an elderly voice mingled with the crashing, discordant echoes that rose clattering through the darkness. The slam of a door, and the rush and scramble of many feet succeeded, followed by the clanging of locks and bolts; the subdued hubbub of many voices could be heard, detailing in many exaggerated phrases, extravagant narratives, and with a smile of grim amusement playing across his expressive features, like a telegraphic line from one ear to the other, the specter learned, as he listened at the keyhole, that while the master of the house had been standing on the porch, a pale blue light suddenly clove the night, accompanied by a sulphurous smell, in the midst of which appeared, rising out of the ground, a colossal body with five heads, and with hideous gashes yawning in its throats, from which the welling blood flowed down, and splotched and streaked the long white robe with horrible carmine stains. Its many eyes, the patrician said, glared like burning coals, and its hair twined and wreathed itself in fantastic shapes, like living serpents.

The specter assumed a thoughtful look as he listened to these terrible revelations.

“It is barely possible,” he said, “that I am a maligned apparition. From his vivid powers of imagination, and a slight tendency to exaggerated word coloring in narration, one would take this elderly party for one of the gifted prevaricators who deal in political prophecies in the presidential year. I may not be a very handsome ghost, but I do most profoundly believe that this portly Ananias who, I see, is just now leaving the room to learn how his daughter is coming on, has most foully traduced my personal appearance. And while there is no one in this apartment save that comfortable-looking old lady, who has been terrified and mystified into motionless silence, I will quietly step in and settle this vexed question by consulting the pier glass.”

With that graceful, easy manner which is characteristic of a well-bred ghost, he slid through the keyhole, and a moment later, stood singeing his bloodless shins before the blazing grate, while he made a critical inspection of his visage in the mirror. After studying the picture for some moments in silence, he stroked his chin with a complacent air while a smirk of self satisfaction played over his features.

“Any mortal,” he murmured, “who would flee in terror from such a face as that; any man who could detect any thing like an unearthly glare in those hollow eyes; any creature who can find it in his heart to announce the discovery of hair on that head, or find a trace of blood about that figure, from throat to heels, is a lunatic, and should be looked after. Be looked after,” he added, in an absent way, “Looked after. Looked after.”

“And,” he continued, after a few moments’ deliberation, “I should like to be appointed to look after him. He would then have a more faithful conservator than was ever appointed by a county court. I would interest and amuse him, and strive to divert his mind from the troubles which appear to have so disordered his imagination and distorted his vision and faculties of observation. I would keep him in a state of constant mental activity. I would help him around, and I would make myself useful to this family in a variety of ways. For instance, I would make this old gentleman so distrustful of that long walk up the hill after dark that he never would stay down town late at night, and could not be induced to attend lodge, or ‘just step down to the post-office’ after supper. I would imbue his very nature with such an utter abhorrence for dark places that he would never kiss the hired girl behind the cellar door. Never again; ne-ver, ne-ver. I would reform this man, and make this family happy, and this house should resound with manifestations of excitement and exclamations of astonishment, and indications of very dubious merriment, as it were. I see much good in this virtuous and happy project, and I will cultivate the acquaintance of this excellent lady of the mansion, convince her of the necessity of a protector for herself and her family, and carry my plans into operation. I have a conviction that this would be a most comfortable house to haunt.”

He stepped to the side of the matron, and laying his icy fingers against her cheek to arouse her attention, and holding his throat shut with the other hand to prevent his voice escaping prematurely at the aperture which has been previously referred to, said, in a louder voice:

“You will pardon the abruptness of my speech, my dear madam, but I deem it my duty to inform you that it is my firm belief this part of town is haunted. Yes, ma’am, haunted. I shouldn’t be surprised, indeed, if there was a ghost somewhere in this house this very minute. In fact I have every reason for believing----”

Thus far his auditor had preserved such a respectful silence that the speaker believed she was listening with rapt attention, and he fondly hoped that he had at last found a friendly, appreciative gossip who would not interrupt his remarks with ill-timed applause before he was half through. Looking at her face, however, at this moment, the expression of her countenance was such as chilled him with disappointment. She was not splitting the night air with blood-curdling, discordant shrieks, it is true, but it evidently wasn’t her fault. Her eyes had left their sockets and were standing out on her cheek-bones with nothing particular to do except to stare at each other across the top of her nose, each with an expression of blank amazement at seeing the other there. Her mouth was alternately closing with sudden jerks and distending with spasmodic gasps; noiseless, but all the more provoking on that very account. She appeared to be making strenuous efforts to rise, but as every attempt to assume an erect posture brought her closer to the ghost, she sank back helplessly in her chair after every effort, and resumed her dreadful staring and noiseless gasping.

“You had better scream, madame,” said the disgusted ghost. “Pray, do not restrain yourself on my account. It is really painful for me to witness your suffering. If my presence here is distasteful to you, pray have the goodness to intimate the fact in the abrupt and startling manner so much affected by this family. You had better express your emotions, if you have any. If you have through any little passing thrill of excitement, temporarily lost the use of your voice, and find some difficulty in recovering it, perhaps I can assist you.”

With a horrible leer he withdrew the drapery from his neck, and leaning back his head disclosed the gaping incision in his respiratory and swallowing apparatus which had compelled him to go into the ghost business. As he had shrewdly conjectured, that startling display developed the full action of the old lady’s dormant vocal powers, and, for the next five minutes, Bedlam was a quiet, sequestered cloister in comparison with that house. For an instant the author of all the uproar paused to smile at the vociferous woman screaming till the chandelier trembled, and pounding a vigorous tattoo on the floor with her aged heels, and then he left the house, merely stopping as he went to look in on the kitchen, and by one genial wink at the servants establish a first-class English opera chorus in that department of the household.

He then passed out into the chill air, and gliding slowly along the gravel walk, paused to contemplate the ruins of the front gate and speculate on the whereabouts of the handsome youth who had so lately enacted the part of a modern Samson, and had torn down the gates to Gaza little on the loved face which parental tyranny would thereafter conceal from his ardent gaze forever.

“It is ever thus,” moralized the ghost; “at once the mightiest and the weakest being in created life, God’s noblest work is the toy of bodiless phantoms. We tear down and we build up; we purpose and we prevent; we do and we undo; we overcome every real difficulty, and surmount every actual obstacle, and at last, when our object is all but accomplished--lo, a shadow terrifies us, and the courage and labor of an hour, a year, or a lifetime, are swept into ruins. At least, _we_ used to do thus. I have left the firm, but the surviving partners carry on the business of life in pretty much the same old style. The world invents a great deal, but it doesn’t improve very much. It is the same old world, after all. It has the locomotive and the telegraph, true; but the men who invented the locomotive and the telegraph loved, feared, hoped and lived pretty much as Cæsar’s couriers and Dido’s sailors used to. Men declaim against the remotest possibility of the spirits of the dead revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and yet my presence affects in the same unpleasant and turbulent manner alike the most skeptical and the most credulous and superstitious. I believe, speaking of spirits, I will go down town to a certain house I wot of, where parties of my friends, the Spiritualists, hold frequent seances, at which they converse familiarly, though ungrammatically, with the spirits of their own deceased friends, and of the illustrious dead. They will be glad to see me, I know, because I am intimately acquainted with some of the parties whom they occasionally summon back to earth, and they will be glad too, because I can correct some of the erroneous ideas they entertain in regard to the present condition of some of these spirits who are constantly writing back, in such execrable English as would make a cultured, intelligent ghost blush, how happy they are, and how glad they are that they died, and how much they know. I am as contented a ghost as one can find under the republic, and I never was glad that I died, and I never write to any of my relatives, and never visit any of them, except,” he added thoughtfully, “my dear haunt.” And he chuckled grimly over his ghastly little joke.

In another moment he was seated comfortably beneath a table which was surrounded by a party of seekers after truth, who were patiently sitting up for the latest returns from the spirit world. The ghost was much touched by the anxiety displayed by a young man in very long hair and green spectacles to hear from his departed uncle. The spirit mails were snowed in, or intercepted by guerrillas, or held for postage, or suffering from some other cause of detention that Christmas Eve; for it seemed as though the young man never would receive so much as a postal card from his deceased relative. The ghost pitied him, and just as the medium, a beautiful young girl of forty-nine summers, was passing into another trance, he crawled out from under the table and bowed pleasantly to the anxious inquirer.

“I think I can allay any anxiety you may feel on account of your departed avuncular relative,” he said; “I have met him several times, and although the peculiar and pressing nature of his engagements elsewhere prevents his attending in person social assemblies on this side of the ground, he is----”

He ceased speaking at this point, for his voice had long been drowned in the uproar of shrieks, and breaking furniture, and crashing glass, as the seance broke up along with the tables and chairs, and the anxious seekers after truth emerged into the night with window sashes hanging round their necks. Foreseeing that there would be trouble if he did not emigrate in order to permit the wanderers to return and resurrect the overturned stove, the messenger from the realm of shadows departed and once more sought his station on the hill. And again he whistled. “Down Among the Dead Men” through his teeth, while he smiled pensively, and communed with his own pleasant thoughts.

“It’s just as I said,” he mused; “had I been that young man’s uncle, whom he so earnestly desired to see, his terror would have been just as great. They rap and call for us, they implore us to come, and when we come they go. And they go very abruptly. Some of those people to-night got out of that room by edging through fissures that would squeeze the very breath out of the leanest ghost I ever saw. Believer or skeptic, it makes no difference. Saul was not more terrified at Samuel’s ghost, which he was so anxious to see, than was the witch who accidentally raised the apparition. But these broken, interrupted interviews with terrified mortals are growing monotonous. I will stay out all night, because it is Christmas Eve and my night out, but I will spend the remaining silent hours in meditation, and let the wicked old world sleep in peace, unless, mayhap, some belated wayfarer should stray this way, when I will revenge myself upon him for the shabby treatment I have received at mortal hands to-night. I will frighten him so that he will not be through screaming when I come here again next Christmas Eve. I have tried to be agreeable to everybody to-night, and everybody has refused to be sociable, and has repulsed my courteous advances with the most hideous shrieks and uproar. And to the next hapless mortal who shall cross my haunt, I will be terrible.”

He ceased speaking, and knotted his face with a series of horrible contortions and hideous grimaces, which he practiced until he acquired one which appeared to satisfy his fastidious taste. This one he exercised several times in order to fix it firmly in his memory, and then, folding his arms, he leaned against the railing and gloomily waited for a customer, as ill-natured and unhappy a ghost as could be found in all the haunts of men or specters.

His ghostship did not have long to wait for a subject, standing there in the gloomy street, with the cold, glittering stars occasionally peeping timidly through the rifted clouds sailing overhead. Before long a heavy footfall was heard ascending the lower part of the hill, and then, as it came nearer, the dismal one could hear the frosty earth creaking under the passenger’s feet at every step he took. A voice which was marked by that peculiar intonation which we so frequently notice in close proximity to a pick or a hod, uttered, in sentences so profusely vaccinated with trilled r’s that it sounded like a high school commencement, a wrathful objurgation upon the wind, as the winter zephyr well nigh lifted the speaker from his feet.

“Growl about that, will you?” muttered the ghost, with savage gleefulness, “I’ll make you wish the wind had blown you into the moon before you get to the top of the hill. I wish he would walk more slowly,” the specter went on, rubbing his fleshless hands in delighted anticipation; “I should like to have a few moments’ quiet enjoyment in contemplating the possible and probable actions of the worst frightened man in America. I have been accused of frightening people before now, but those vile slanders against my considerate and pacific disposition and my reassuring physiognomy will all be retracted and atoned for after to-night. After this man’s experience no man, no living mortal will dare stand up and say that any one was ever frightened prior to this date. Why, there won’t be as much hair left on this individual’s head, in about three minutes, as would make me a switch. All the doctors in America won’t be able to get his eyes back into their proper places. He will howl and yell and shriek and pray to the day of his death. Scared? It isn’t the word. It’s too weak. Whistle, will you?” he continued, apostrophizing the approaching figure, “I’ll make you wish you had a French horn fifteen feet long, with all the keys open and the mouth-piece cracked, to express your feelings through. Why,” he said, arranging his robe and twisting his face into such a blood-curdling awful contortion that it raised a blister on the frozen ground and the very wind turned and blew up hill for dear life; “why, my unsuspicious republican, you’ll be the worst demoralized community in about fifteen seconds that ever disturbed the holy quiet of midnight.”

Stretching out his gaunt arm in a weird, ghostly gesture, the white drapery falling away from it in conventional folds, the specter stepped out to the middle of the sidewalk to confront the coming man. A man of medium size, the new-comer, with bluff square shoulders, twinkling eyes, a nose that had been made of a remnant so that the unfinished end retreated toward the eyes, a mouth puckered up in a melodious whistle, the head covered with an abundance of closely-cut hair of the shade of St. Louis pressed brick; a ragged coat was buttoned close and the wearer carried under his arm a walking-stick of most benevolent aspect, the bulge on the end of which reminded one of an invitation to join the innumerable caravan. His whistle ceased as the ghost loomed up before him, not suddenly cutting off his tune in the middle of the note, but in a long-drawn diminuendo passage, commonly expressive of inexpressible astonishment.

The ghost slowly and impressively waved his extended arm in the direction of the gloomy ravine. The mortal shuffled uneasily toward the middle of the street in an effort to get round the unpleasant obstruction. The specter noiselessly glided before him and still confronted him with outstretched arm and hideous countenance, and both figures regarded each other in silence. The mortal was the first to open the conversation, who, after muttering under his breath, “The saints betune us and har-rum, an’ phwat is he makin’ thim faces at me for?” remarked in a brisk tone:

“Cool avenin’!”

Motionless as a statue, the ghastly figure glowered upon him in its frozen attitude and terrifying gesture.

“Is it Tim Moriarity, as died the year before I kim’ over, I don’ know?”

No reply and no change of posture on the part of the specter.

“Is it the Feenicks boys ye are thin, as kilt aich other the night ov the ball at the creek three years ago come nixt September an’ jist two months lackin’ six weeks after O’Flaherty’s sisther dhrove the cow off the wagon bridge?”

Still the specter maintained its silence and its position.

“Ye’ve a mighty familiar countenince, onyhow,” continued the mortal, who kept up his cautious maneuvering for the weather gauge, in which he was steadily baffled by the ghost. “It seems to me I’ve seen the face av yez somewhare on a tombstone. Yer not livin’ fur around here, mebbe?”

In hollow tones the ghost replied, “I am dead.”

“Did, is it? Oh, the saints rist yer ristless sowl. An’ phwat are ye doin’ out here? Whaire do ye live--I mane, whaire are ye buried?”

“At the top of this hill,” came in the same hollow tones.

“An’ a mighty agreeable place that same is, to be sure,” replied the mortal, in a conciliatory intonation, “shlapin’ undher the grass, wid the cows and pigs browsin’ and rootin’ around all day long an’ kapen’ ye company nights. Born divil that ye air,” he added, in a lower tone, “I wisht wan or the other of us wur thayre now, fur it’s a onpleasant company ye air, anyhow. Well,” he added, aloud and with great cheerfulness, “good night till ye. Be good to yerself.”

“Stay,” uttered the terrible monotone; “come thou with me.”

“Oh-h, the dev--I beg yer par-r-don. I mane I can’t think of it. Luk at the time it is, an’ see the murdherin’ cowld I have in me head already, along ov being out till midnight. The wife and childher’ll be did intirely wid sittin’ up fur me, an’----”

“Follow me!” said the hollow tones of the ghost.

“Oh-h, tundher an’ turf--I mane--I beg yer par-r-don, don’t shpake of it; it’s a married man I am. I can’t sthay; besides, there’s no use--ivery place in town is shut up, and sorra the wan ov me dhrinks av they wasn’t. I wouldn’t taste a dhrop av I lived in lashins ov it; I’m a whole Father Mathew society by myself.”

“Come! Come!! Come!!!” The sepulchral tones boomed out like a bass drum solo.

“Aw-w-w! Millia murther! Go aisy now! Phwat du ye mane, divilin’ the tin sinses out of me to come, whin ye see I want to go? By the mortial gob,” he added, under his breath, “av I thought I cud find anything in yer head to feel it, avick, I’d make ye raisonable wid a welt ov this splinther av a sthick. Whist! ye bloody-minded villin!” he roared, with suddenly increasing courage, as some wakeful Brahma in a neighboring coop startled the night with a stentorian crow, which was shrilly echoed by a bantam and a dozen or more obscure roosters of no particular strain, like the birds that crow at election times, “Do ye hear that? An’ that? An’ that agin? An’ the wan afther that? Scat! ye bloody-minded Banshee, or we’ll crow the rags aff o’ yer beggarly back!”

The ghost gave a hollow laugh, that sounded like water pouring out of a jug.

“You may crow,” he said, more in his easy conversational style and tone than he had been using, “till you split your throats; this is an anniversary night with me, and I won’t go home till morning.”

His uneasy companion’s face fell at this announcement, and he looked like a man who felt that he had prematurely committed himself. But he rallied again.

“A anniver-sary, is it? Do ye have it often?”

“About once a year.”

“Is that all? An’ just think ov yer makin’ so much fuss about that! Kape on yer hat, or what iver ye call it, or ye’ll have a cowld in the head. Good avenin’, agin.”

The ghost mildly protested against his haste. It was Christmas Eve, he said, a season devoted to sociability and good fellowship----

“An’ a foine idee ye have of bein’ sociable, too,” interrupted his auditor; “Christmas is a nice enough saison, but a frayzin’ hillside at midnight, wid the wind blowin’ a jimmycane an’ the thermomether twinty-sivin degrays ferninst Cairo, isn’t the way I’m thinking to be sociable about it, jist.”

“I am delighted to have met you under such----”

“Faix, thin, thayre’s only wan of us that’s feeling so delighted about it.”

“----Favorable and pleasant circumstances. I should never have forgiven myself had I permitted you to pass by without speaking. I must insist----”

“Begorra, thin, it’s too har-r-d ye wad be on yersilf intirely. It’s me that wad give mesilf absolution fur a week av I had gone around the other way an’ never heard ov ye in me life.”

“----On your further acquaintance.”

“Thrue for you, avick, an’ the furdther it is the betther it wud shuit me. An’ the quicker we star-r-t, don’t ye see, the furdther we can make it before mornin’. I know I’ll think betther ov ye whin I can’t see ye. _Good_ avenin’.”

“Stay,” said the specter, detaining him as he sought to hurry by, “I have that to tell you, and that to show you, to-night, which will make you a rich man, and send me back to my narrow resting place----”

“Oh-h-h! hear ’im talk about it!”

“----Never to leave it again until the last dread trump shall summon me.”

“Don’t mintion it, don’t; don’t shpake ov it at all, at all.”

“My tale is brief and sad.”

“An’ have ye a tail, thin?”

“Listen!”

“Shpake!”

“In early life----”

“Phwat’s that?”

“----I plowed the raging main.”

“An’ was ye a Granger, thin?”

“Nay, I was a pirate!”

“Same thing; kape on; it’s frazin’ I am.”

“I steeped my wicked hands in human gore for many years. When my atrocious crimes had amassed me a princely fortune, I repented me of my evil ways.”

“Musha, thin, it war you for knowin’ whin to repint.”

“I bade adieu to my evil companions, and taking my share----”

“Ah, did ye, though? An’ it was a cautious ould reformer ye was, all the same.”

“----of our ill-gotten spoils, I fled west--far to the inland--pursued by the stings of an avenging conscience and a sheriff’s posse.”

“It was thim as stirred up yer conshince.”

“I reached this city in safety and hid my gold, stained with human lives, in yonder deep ravine. Oft as I needed money, I came here by night and got what I wished.”

“Can ye get any ov it now, do ye think?”

“One winter night--a cold, bleak Christmas Eve--returning from such a visit to my hoard, I was waylaid by two men, who suspected my secret, on this very spot----”

“GOOD avenin’!”

“Stay yet one moment. They seized me, hurled me to the ground----”

“Here?”

“On this very spot where now we stand. They----”

“Let’s walk furdther down the hill.”

“Listen. They hurled me to the ground, and, as I struggled for my gold, they--slew me!”

“Phwat!”

“They cut my throat from ear to ear!”

“M-i-l-l-i-a m-u-r-d-t-h-e-r! An’ did it hurt?”

“It haggled some, but----”

“An’ did yez niver git over it?”

“I died!”

“Oh-h-h-h! Bones of the martyrs! GOOD avenin’!”

“Stop a moment. I----”

“Ah yes, shtop a minit. It’s yerself is the pleasant man to be shtoppin’ wid, on a hillside at midnight. Go on, thin, for it’s starvin’ wid the cold I am.”

“I died where I fell; and a coroner’s jury, after due deliberation, returned a verdict, on my lifeless remains, that ‘the alleged deceased came to his probable death in a fit of temporary inanition, induced by the administering of narcotic drug or drugs, by some visitation of Providence to the jury unknown.’”

“Wur that all, alanna? I thought ye said they cut the throat ov ye.”

“They did. But the intelligent citizens who composed the coroner’s jury could not see that that had anything to do with it. Since that time, once a year, on every anniversary of my untimely death, I am forced to leave my grave----”

“Oh, mortial man! don’t shpake ov it at all, an’ us out here in the dark an’ could, and niver a dhrop ov anything to rise the cockles ov me heart wid nearer than town. But kape on.”

“----and haunt this hill. My spirit can not rest in peace until the money which I left concealed from human gaze shall be given into hands fit to be entrusted with wealth.”

“An’ is that all, acushla? Go back to yer den, and dhraw yer stool in to the fire, an’ be comfortable. Show me whare to dig jist, and sorrow light upon me av ye’ll ever have any more nade to wake up an’ worry about another cint as long as ye live--I mane, as long as ye don’t live. Whare’s yer bank? Divil be in me but thare’ll be such a run on it in about ten minits they’ll think thare’s an ould-fashioned American panic broke loose in ghostland, for a truth. Can’t shlape because ye can’t give yer money away! Musha, thin, it’s meself can’t shlape often enough because I haven’t ony to give away, or to kape, ayther. Show me yer threasury, avick; I’m yer oysther.”

“Years ago I might have given it away, had men but known my secret. But the spell laid upon me----”

“A spell ov what?”

“----forbade me to reveal my hidden wealth until I should meet a man going home sober, on Christmas Eve, who would not be afraid of me. The condition was a hard one, for although in my annual hauntings I have met many men plodding up this hill too drunk to be frightened, you are the first sober man I have met on Christmas Eve since the city was an Indian trading post.”

“Ah well then, it’s small blame to them, for it’s gettin’ ready to shwear off New Year’s day they are, the whole jing-bang ov thim. Troth, they do that every year.”

“You did not manifest any fear at my sudden appearance. You were not, apparently, afraid of me; you----”

“Afraid, is it?”

“I merely remarked that you were not afraid of me.”

“Is it me?”

“I said, my quick-tempered friend, that----”

“Is it you?”

“Calm yourself, my bellicose mortal, I simply----”

“Listen to ’im! Hear ’im talk about ony body bein ashkared ov an ould bag o’ bones sthandin’ in the dark makin’ faces! Why, ye consaited old skeleton, is it comin’ to Ameriky to be shkared wid you I’d be, whin we had a ghosht ov our own in the Ould Sod for more nor twinty years? A ghosht that wur worth bein’ shkared ov, too.”

“You surprise me,” said the ghost. “Are you quite certain that your own family was favored with the permanent society of a ghost? You will pardon me for intimating that your appearance and dress do not indicate a station in life that calls for such a condition of things. For I am decidedly under the impression that we are permitted to haunt only aristocratic families, who inhabit large rambling houses, with long gloomy corridors and magnificent bay windows and lofty mansard roofs and heavy mortgages; full of dark corners and convenient hiding places for ghosts, and frequently so uncomfortable and dreary, especially on the occasion of a poor relation’s visit, that no one but a ghost can enjoy living in them. I once knew a most respectable ghost, a specter of a most extraordinarily rugged constitution, who haunted one of these houses, and went to sleep in the spare room one night and was so laid up with the rheumatism that he was unable to get out of his grave----”

“The saints betune us! Don’t mintion it!”

“----for nearly six weeks. I took his place at the mansion during his indisposition. A dreary, frosty place enough, fitted up elegantly with a thousand-dollar piano, a costly mechanic’s lien, Brussels carpets, a chattel mortgage or two, French plate windows, a tax title, and a few similar expensive luxuries. I did not wish to be laid up with the rheumatism, so I took preventives instead of cures. From being frosty and chilly, I made that house the warmest place this side of----”

“Don’t say it, alanna! Skip that!”

“----the equator,” pursued the ghost, quietly. “It soon became the most hospitable mansion on the street. It was full of company all the time, and poor relations came and got square meals and slept in the best beds and were made welcome. You can not imagine how I softened that old fellow’s proud heart. And you must excuse me if I say that you do not appear to belong to that favored class which is honored with hereditary ghosts. A ghost, my unsophisticated friend, is an expensive luxury.”

“Thrue for you, it is, thin. The wan we had was the most expinsive thing we wur ever throubled wid. He kim till the house in me father’s time an’ I dunno how long befoar.”

“Did he look like me?”

“Sorra the wan ov him. He’d ate a rigimint ov yez in a minit. Shouldhers like a sailor an’ a head set on ’im like a bull dog’s. He wur a ghosht now that cud talk to ye about bein’ ashkared ov him.”

“Does he ever annoy--that is, entertain you now?”

“Faix, thin he doesn’t. It isn’t here he cud live at all, at all. It wur in the ould counthry he did be vexin’ us an’ teasin’ the life out ov us from mornin’ till night.”

“Why, did he appear in the daytime, then?”

“It wur grace fur his bones that he did. Be the holy poker, alanna, it wur waitin’ fur him in the dark twinty times a month we was. Catch an Irish ghosht comin’ in the dark. He knowed whin to come.”

“Did you ever try to lay the ghost?”

“Wanst. The byes laid him wid a blackthorn stick, an’ sorra the wan of him throubled us agin fur six weeks afther.”

“I don’t understand. Why did he haunt you? What was----”

“Why did he? For the rint, av coorse. It was the thavin’ ould landlord, bloody end to him. Talk about ghosts! The ould _boddagh Sassenagh_ gev us more throuble in wan day than the whole jing-bang ov such thin-legged spooks as yerself cud make us in a week. Thare was wan time the ould swaddler kim down to Muldoonery’s shebeen--ye knew the Muldoonery’s?”

“The name is familiar, but I can not say that I ever had the honor of the family’s acquaintance.”

“The betther for you thin, for ye died wid a whole head----”

“But my neck was spoiled.”

“Oh-h, by this an’ by that, listen to him! Don’t sphake ov it. The Muldoonerys was me father’s own family. Ould Malachi Muldoonery, wan of the Killatalicks, thim as was own cousins to the O’Slaughtery’s of Killgobbin--ah, thim was the high-toned wans fur ye; when it come to ould families, they lifted the pins, jist. They had a ghosht ov thare own, a rale wan, sphooky enough to frighten a horse from his oats, that wore a long night-shirt like yer own, an’ carried his head undher his arm. Oh, Gog’s blakey, but he wur the boss ghosht. He wur beheaded fur headin’ a rebellyun three hundhred years ago. Ah, tare-an-ouns, the tussle me own uncle, who was an O’Slaughtery, had wid this same ghosht wanst. We heard the sphook thramplin’ up an’ down the hall, fur he always wore a shurt of armor undher his white dhress, an’ me uncle got up an’ wint out, an’ peerin’ down the dark hall, sees him.

“‘Arrah!’ sez me uncle.

“‘Sorra the word’ sez the ghosht.

“‘Are ye thaire?’ sez me uncle.

“The ghosht stopped walkin’ and screwed on his head like the head ov a cane.

“‘An’ phwat av I am?’ sez he.

“‘Come out o’ that, thin, ye bladdherhang,’ sez me uncle.

“‘I won’t, thin,’ sez the ghosht.

“‘Ye’d betther,’ sez me uncle.

“‘I hadn’t thin,’ sez the ghosht.

“‘Do ye know what this is, ye omadhawn?’ sez me uncle, balancin’ his blackthorn.

“‘None o’ yer chaff,’ sez the ghosht.

“‘I wont lave a whole bone in yer carkidge,’ says he.

“‘I hwat!’ sez the ghosht.

“‘I wont!’ sez he.

“‘Yer a liar!’ sez he.

“‘Is it me?’ sez he.

“‘Show me yer head!’ sez he.

“‘Whoop!’ sez he.

“‘Hurroo!’ sez he.

“Whack! wint the blackthorn, and wid that the whole house was roused wid a bellerin’ an’ roarin’ that wud shame the bulls ov Bashan. It was me uncle, an’ they found him out dures tied to the gate-posht wid a bed-cord half a mile long and knotted up that way that it tuk thim till after daylight to ontie him, for sorra the knot cud they cut. Oh, heavy heart go wid the ghosht that tied him out in the cowld that a-way. An’ afther they got him untied he died.”

“Immediately?” asked the specter.

“Och, the divil, no; about twenty-sivin years afther. But this isn’t tellin’ me about that famous bank ov yours?”

“True,” said the specter “we are losing time. To you, who have kept sober Christmas Eve, and have scorned to desecrate and profane the sacred memories of the season----”

“Tower ov ivory!” whispered the exile of Killatalick, “av that isn’t purty good for an ould cut-throat ov a pirate!”

“----and have shown the integrity of your moral being----”

“An phwat’s thim, I wondher?”

“----in that you feel no fear of visitants from the spirit world, to you I commit gold won by dishonest means, but which at last reaches honest hands that will devote it to worthy purposes. Come with me, and do as I tell you.”

Crossing himself with an energy and rapidity that indicated a slight lack of confidence in the moral standing of his guide, the descendant of the Muldoonerys of Killgobbin followed his ghostly leader down the hillside into the hollow and along the course of the bewildered and frozen brook, until they paused before an irregular wall of rock, long ago cut down by the action of the water. As they stood before this rude wall, the specter turned to his companion.

“If,” he said solemnly, “you do not feel as though you could maintain the strictest silence, and not utter a word or an exclamation, no matter what wonders you may see, do not follow me farther. The charm which opens the care of my hidden wealth to your eyes, closes it in destruction on any violation of the spell under which I am held. Are you ready? On your life now, do not utter a sound.”

The ghost touched the rock with his bony hand. It yawned like a door, and in the cavern behind the gloomy entrance they crept, crouching, along a narrow passage until the roof arched and they stood erect. An open chest lay at their feet; glittering jewels sparkled like stars in the gloom; precious stones in the mysterious coffer gleamed till their rays pierced the shadowy pall of the cavern with a pale, tremulous light. At a silent motion from the specter, the mortal, trembling with excitement and eagerness, bent down and seized the chest. Once, twice, thrice, he strained every muscle, and tugged until it seemed as though his eyes were bursting from their sockets, but the glittering fortune seemed immovable. He set every nerve for one tremendous effort; he braced his feet firmly and once more grasped the handles of the coffer. It moves! The ransom of an empire is his!

“’S’matter ’ith you fellers? Hic! Watchu doin’? Hey?”

The blinding light, and the deafening crash that followed lasted scarce the duration of the lightning’s flash, and all was darkness and silence. When the gray light of morning quenched the beams of the paling stars, the exile woke to consciousness to find himself lying outside the spell-bound cavern, with the unbroken rock looming cold and pitiless beside him, and his dream of wealth was gone. A faint odor of stale whisky kissed the wintry zephyrs, and a shattered bottle in the near distance lay like a mournful memory of his happy dreams. When the unhappy man’s friends discovered him, they took in all the conditions of the cheerless bivouac, and when in the cozy surroundings of his home he told his marvelous narrative, they were skeptical enough to declare that they believed all the story about the ghost and the cavern and the money chest was only the inspiration of that bottle before it was broken, and that the exile of Killgobbin saw the light and heard the crash when he staggered over the edge of the wall and broke his head. But he still believes that if the young fellow who went into camp on the hillside at the opening of this story had not finished his sleep and broke in upon them in such an untimely manner, he would never again have done a harder day’s work than cutting off coupons from government bonds.

The rest of us know that this is true. And if any young man doubts the truth of this veracious chronicle, he can easily verify its statements by keeping sober next Christmas Eve, and patrolling the quiet streets until he meets the ghost. And if he doesn’t see the specter, he will at least enjoy the singular sensation of going home sober Christmas Eve, a thing of much greater rarity and wonder to most of “the boys” than an interview with a Moneyed Ghost.

MIDDLERIB’S PICNIC.

“It isn’t age that makes people grow old,” Mr. Middlerib remarked to his family as they were gathered at the breakfast table. “It is incessant application; it is unending, incessant work and worry. The mind, the body, all the faculties, mental and physical, are kept on the alert without rest or recreation, until outraged nature rises in rebellion against the slavery to which it is subjected, and deluded man, with all the aches and tremor of senility in his young joints, awakes to find that he has lived his three score years and ten in half his allotted number of days.” And with this sage remark Mr. Middlerib leaned back in his chair and regarded his family with the air of a man who has just imparted a volume of information that would stagger the average comprehension.

“That’s what ailed these spring chickens, I reckon,” suggested Master Middlerib, struggling with a wing that was supplied with the latest improved fish-plate joints; “wore themselves out trying to lay ten years’ eggs in five.”

Mr. Middlerib gazed at the boy in a meaning manner, and the young gentleman immediately elevated one of his elbows until it was as high as his head, and held his guard up while he warily regarded his parent’s disengaged hand. But the usual consequences did not follow, and Mr. Middlerib proceeded to announce that he would shake off the sordid cares of business, and free himself from the shackles of commercial servitude, and enjoy a picnic with his family and a few chosen friends. And immediately upon this, the family loosed their tongues and talked all together, and as loud and fast as possible for twenty-five minutes. Then, Mr. Middlerib, smiling benignly upon the scene of pleasure which his announcement had created, went off to his office. When he returned, Miss Middlerib had a list made out of the people they would invite. It embraced one hundred and fifteen names, not including alternates, and Mr. Middlerib’s jaw fell as he gazed at the catalogue.

“Daughter, dear,” he remarked, as soon as he could command his feelings, “do you take me for Calvary Mission Sunday-school, that you have included the census of this city in our picnic?”

Then explanations were demanded, and it appeared that Mr. Middlerib’s idea had been to take a couple of big wagons, furnished with temporary seats, and have a decidedly rustic, old-fashioned picnic, of an exclusively family nature. And Miss Middlerib sat down and blotted out an even hundred names with tears, after which Mr. Middlerib gazed upon the revised and corrected list, expunged edition, and pronounced it good. Then they fixed upon the day, which was settled after much wrangling and profound discussion. Mr. M. went out and looked at the sky, and noted the direction of the wind, and watched the movements of the chimney swallows with a critical and scientific eye, and came in and announced that it would not rain for five days, and they would have the picnic just two days before the rain. And from the hour of that announcement the Middlerib family and their invited relations did nothing but bake, and roast, and stew, and iron clothes, and declare they were tired to death and would be glad when it was all over and done with. It is a somewhat remarkable fact that all people who make up their minds to go to a picnic, always do say that they will be glad when it is over, and act as though they were going merely as an act of self-denial and a mortification of the flesh.

But when the day finally rolled around, as days will roll, the excitement was at its height. The sun struggled to his place at the usual hour, as soon as he was called, and his broad, red face had a terribly wild and dissipated look as he glared through the bank of clouds that curtained his getting up place, as though he had been tearing around all night, and had never had his boots off, and had only got up to collar the water pitcher. No wonder the whole party lost confidence in such a sun the moment they looked at him. He looked too much like a prodigal sun, just before he got starved into reform, rather than a smiling, cheery picnic sun. And the Middleribs took turns going out singly and in small groups to look at him, and revile his unpromising appearance, and after each observation they would return to the house and ask each other in tones somewhat tinged with a tender melancholy, “Well, what do you think of it?” And the questioned one would stifle a sigh and reply “I don’t know, do you?”

There is no scene in all this wide world of pathos more pathetic than a group of anxious mortals, on the morn of a picnic, trying to delude each other into the belief that when the sky is covered with heavy black clouds, 800 feet thick, and a damp scud is driving through the air, and the sun is only half visible occasionally through a thin cloud that is waiting to be patched up to the standard thickness and density, it is going to be a very fine day indeed. So the Middleribs looked at the coppery old sun, and the dismal clouds, and tried to look cheerful, and said encouragingly that “Oh, it never rained when the clouds came up that way;” and, “See, it is all clear over in the east;” and, “It often rains very heavily in town when there doesn’t a drop of water fall at Prospect Hill.” And thus, with many encouraging remarks of similar import, they awaited the gathering of the party, and the human beings finally climbed into one wagon, put the baskets and the boys in the other, and drove away, giggling and howling with well dissembled glee.

The happy party, although they well knew that it would not rain, had taken the precaution nevertheless to take a large assortment of shawls and umbrellas. They were a quarter of a mile from town when it began to thunder some, but as it didn’t thunder in the direction of Prospect Hill, distant some three miles, they went on, confident that it wasn’t raining, and wouldn’t, and couldn’t rain at Prospect Hill. They were half a mile from town when the cloud that all the rest of the clouds had been waiting for came up and remorselessly sat down on the last, solitary lingering patch of blue that broke the monotony of the leaden sky, but the party pressed on, confident that they would find blue sky when they got to Prospect Hill. They were a mile from town when old Aquarius pulled the bottom out of the rain wagon and began the entertainment. It was a grand success. The curtain hadn’t been up ten minutes before all the standing room in the house was taken up and the box office was closed. The Middlerib party having gone early, and secured front seats, were able to see everything. They expressed their pleasure by loud shrieks, and howls, and wails. They tore umbrellas, that had been furtively placed in the wagon, out of their lurking places, and shot them up with such abruptness that the hats in the wagon were knocked out into the road. Then the wagon stopped and people crawled out and waded around after hats, and came piling back into the wagon, with their feet loaded with mud. The umbrellas got into each other’s way, and from the points of the ribs streams of dirty water trickled down shuddering backs, and stained immaculate dresses, and took the independence out of glossy shirt fronts. And the picnic party turned homeward, but still the Middleribs did not lose heart. They smiled through their tears, and Miss Middlerib, beautiful in her grief, still advocated going on and having the picnic in a barn, and wept when they refused her. It rained harder every rod of the way back. Then when they got everybody and every thing into the house, the heart-rending discovery was made that the boys had taken the rubber blanket which was to have covered the baskets in case of rain, and spread it over themselves when the moisture gathered, and consequently the edibles were in a state of dampness.

Then the clouds broke, and the sun came out, and smiling nature stood around looking as pleasant as though it had never played a mean trick on a happy picnic party in its life; and the Middleribs hung themselves out in the sun to dry, and tried to play croquet in the wet grass, and kept up their spirits as well as they knew how, and were not cross if they did get wet. If smiling nature had only given them a show, or even half a chance, they would have got along all right. They were bound to have the picnic party anyhow, so they kept all the relations at the house, and when dinner time came, the grass was dry and they set the table out under the trees and made it look as picnicky as possible. It clouded up a little when they were setting the table, but nobody thought it looked very threatening. The soaked things had been dried as carefully as possible, and the table looked beautiful when they gathered around it. And just about the time they got their plates filled and declared that they were glad they came back, and that this was ever so much better than Prospect Hill, a forty acre cloud came and stood right over the table, and then and there went all to pieces.

That was what spoiled the picnic.

The pleasure-seekers grabbed whatever they could reach and broke for the house, uttering wild shrieks of dismay. They crowded into the hall, which wasn’t half big enough, and there they stood on each other’s trains, and trod on each other’s corns, and poured coffee down each other’s backs, and jabbed forks into one another’s arms. When one frantic looking woman would rush in and set a plate of cake down on the floor while she dived out into the rain with a woman’s anxiety to recover some more provisions from the dripping wreck, a forlorn looking man would immediately step on that plate of cake, and stand there gazing wonderingly and apprehensively at the shrieking crowd around him, pointing their forks and fingers at him and at his feet, and yelling, in a deafening chorus, something as utterly unintelligible as “shouting proverbs.” And when the man, in a vain effort to do something in compliance with the shrieking which was evidently intended for him, stepped off the cake and stood in a huge dish of baked beans for a change, the wail of consternation that went up from the congregation fairly rent the bending skies. And when Uncle Steve, who had found Aunt Carrie’s baby out under the deserted table, maintaining an unequal struggle with half of a huckleberry pie and a whole thunder-storm, came tearing in with the hapless infant, and, dashing through the crowd, deposited it on top of a pile of hard-boiled eggs, Miss Middlerib fainted, and the youngest gentleman cousin was driven into a spasm of jealousy because he couldn’t walk over a row of cold meats and lobster salad to get to her, and had to endure the misery of seeing the oldest and ugliest bachelor uncle carry her drooping form to a sofa, and lay her down tenderly, with her classic head in a nest of cream tarts and her dainty feet on Sadie’s Jenny Lind cake. And when Mrs. Middlerib looked out of the window, and saw the dog Heedle with his fore paws in the lemonade bucket, growling at Cousin John, who was trying to drive him out of it, she expressed a willingness to die right there. And when they were startled by some unearthly sounds and muffled shrieks, that even rose above the human babel in the hall, and found that the cat had got its poor head jammed tighter than wax in the mouth of the jar that contained the cream, everybody just sat on the plate of things nearest him, and gasped, “What next?” while Cousin David lifted cat and jar by the tail of the former, and carried them out to be broken apart. And when old Mr. Rubelkins lost his teeth in the coffee pot, half the people in the hall began to lose heart, and one discouraged young cousin said he half wished that they had put the picnic off a day. And finally, when the uproar was at its height, the door-bell rang, and the aunt nearest the door opened it, and there stood the Hon. Mrs. J. C. P. R. Le Von Blatheringford and her daughter, the richest and most stylish people in the neighborhood, arrayed like fashion-plates, making their first formal call. While they stood gazing in mute bewilderment at the scene of ruin and devastation and chaos before them, Mrs. Middlerib just got behind the door and pounded her head against the wall; while Miss Middlerib, springing from her sofa, ran to her room, leaving a trail of Jenny Lind cake and cream tarts behind her, as the fragments dropped from her back hair and heels. And the rest of the company, staring at the guests with their mouths full of assorted provisions, and their hearts full of bitter disappointment, mumbled, in hospitable chorus, “Wup pin,” which, had their mouths been empty, would have been rendered, “Walk in.”

This blow settled the picnic. Gloom hung over the house the rest of the day. Mr. Middlerib decided, after the company had departed, that the easiest and cheapest way to clean the hall would be to turn the river through it. And that night, when they were assembled at a comfortless tea-table--Master Middlerib having been sent to bed so sick that they didn’t think his toe-nails would be able to hold down till morning--Mr. Middlerib said:

“It isn’t the steady, honest, ambitious devotion to business that makes men old. Labor is a law of our nature. We are happiest and most content when we are busiest. It is the healthful labor of the day that brings the sweet, refreshing repose of the night. Pleasure flies us when we seek her; she comes to us when we least regard her calls. Remember what I have always said, and find your pleasure in your daily work--in the regular routine of daily life, and its duties and useful avocations--and age will only come upon you slowly, and youth will linger in your hearts and on your faces long years after the allotted days of youth are past. The next time you want to have a picnic, remember how often I have warned you against them.”

MASTER BILDERBACK’S POULTRY YARD.

If there was anything she abominated more than one thing, Mrs. Bilderback used to say with some warmth, it was another, and that was chickens. And she resolutely protested against keeping any of them about the place. She wanted to keep a few flowers this year, and she wasn’t going to be mortified again as she was last Summer, by having every woman who called at that house smile at the forest of bare stalks and scraggy branches that stood for the collection of house plants that she and her daughter tried to raise for ornaments to the place, but which were really of no use except to fill the crops of a lot of long-legged, hungry chickens. And for a long time the good lady held out stoutly against the chicken proposition, but was at last over-argued and over-persuaded and gave her unwilling consent for Master Bilderback to keep three dozen chickens, the party of the second part binding himself to keep the table supplied with fresh eggs and spring chickens, and to keep all hens, roosters, and all young chickens of unknown sex, but of sufficient physical development to scratch, out of the front yard and away from the flower beds. This contract Master Bilderback placed himself under heavy bonds to carry out, by saying, “honest injun,” “’pon nonnor,” and “’cross my heart,” and having solemnly repeated this awful and impressive formula, he went sedately out of the room and immediately threw himself down on a verbena bed, where he pounded the ground with his heels in the ecstasy of his joy. In due time the new hen-house was completed, and Mr. Bilderback, breathing maledictions on the wretches who pulled the pickets off his front fence for kindling wood, had that important boundary repaired before he noticed that the apertures in the fence corresponded to certain neat looking improvements on the hennery. The house was stocked rather slowly, for it was part of the contract which Mrs. Bilderback had drawn that the party of the second part should purchase his own stock. It was noticeable that Master Bilderback’s taste ran greatly toward gamey looking roosters, and as the perches in the hennery became more and more populated, the outlook for fresh eggs and spring chickens became very discouraging indeed. The first fowl the poulterer brought home was a gaunt Hamburg with one eye and a game leg, but beautifully spangled, which interesting bird, Master Bilderback informed his sister, was the worst pill in the box and had lost his eye while fighting a cow. The next day he traded a pocketful of marbles for a little bantam that crowed twenty-four hours a day, could slip through a season crack in a warped board, and could dig a hole in the middle of a flower bed that you could bury a calf in. There wasn’t a moment’s silence about the house after the bantam’s arrival, for when he was not fighting the Hamburg, which was only when that valiant but prudent bird got up on top of the house and hid behind a chimney, he was wandering through the house trying his voice in the different rooms, or standing on the front porch issuing proclamations of defiance to all roosters to whom these presents might come, greeting. A day or two after the bantam’s arrival Master Bilderback traded his knife for a Black Spanish rooster with a broken wing. The Spaniard when put in the coop proceeded at once to clean out the disheartened Hamburg, who fought on the tactics which had so often proved of so great value to him, and amazed his furious antagonist by the briskness with which he got out of the coop, up on to the barn, and perched himself on the restless and uncertain weather-cock. The Spaniard and the bantam then had it until neither of them could stand, when the pacific Hamburg improved the opportunity to come down and partake of the first square meal he had eaten since the new boarders had come to the house. Two days later, Master Bilderback brought home a vile looking white rooster with no tail feathers, his comb shaved off close to the head, and spurs as long as your thumb, a vile plebeian of a rooster without a line of pedigree, of no particular strain, except a strain that made his very eyes turn red when he growled, which he had bought for an old base ball club. But the nameless stranger amazed the proprietor of the hennery by waltzing into the establishment with a terrific rooster oath, and following it up by kicking the bantam clear out of his mind, jerking the wattles off the Spaniard, and chasing the persecuted Hamburg half-way up the side of the house. This was the last addition made to the happy family for some time, Mr. Bilderback declaring that he was not going to have his premises turned into a cock-pit, and Master Bilderback was sternly forbidden to arrange any more meetings in the alley, with other boys and their birds. But a few days afterward, when Master Bilderback came home from school, it was evident that he had made a trade. He had some other boy’s shabby old hat on his head, and there wasn’t a lead pencil, piece of string, pistol cartridge, top, fish-hook, chalk line, marble, dime novel, or street car ticket in his pockets, and he had a new rooster, the crowning glory of the vast collection of fowls that were to furnish forth his mother’s table with fresh eggs and spring chickens. It was a Shanghai; young one, Master Bilderback said, as he prepared to untie its legs and wings and introduce it to its new home; hadn’t got his growth yet, but he was “a buster.” And Mrs. Bilderback thought he was. When he was untied he stood up and flapped one of his wings in his proprietor’s face, until that young gentleman was ready to “cross his heart,” that somebody had hit him with a clapboard. And before he had recovered from the effects of this blow the noble bird kicked him under the chin and darted off toward the front yard, with prodigious strides. He uttered a most awful croak as he neared Mrs. Bilderback, who was trying to get out of his way, and in a vain attempt to fly over her, he struck her on the head, just abaft her ear with his heel, gently dropping her; “grassed the old lady,” Master Bilderback afterward explained to his sister, “like a shot.” The wretched bird paused as he passed the sitting-room window, which was just about on a level with his head when he stooped, to look in and make some unintelligible remark in a guttural tone of language, and snatching up a new tidy that Miss Bilderback was at work upon, swallowed it and passed on. Wherever he trod, he smashed a house plant, and whenever he croaked, he threw somebody into a fit. He met Mr. Bilderback as he suddenly turned the corner of the house, ran against the old gentleman with a wild kind of a crow that sounded like a steamboat whistle with a bad cold, and as he trampled over that good man’s prostrate form, he plucked off his necktie and swallowed it. Then the “buster” wheeled around and straddled into the sitting-room window, and before they could head him out of the house he swallowed two spools of cotton, a tack hammer, a set of false teeth belonging to Mrs. Bilderback, a cake of toilet soap, a shoe buttoner, a ball of yarn, an arctic over-shoe, and finally choked on a photograph album which flew open when it was about half-way down. The bird when last heard from was still at large roaming around South Hill, but Master Bilderback’s hennery is empty and lonesome, because his parents are, from some unaccountable reason, bitterly prejudiced against keeping chickens.

A SUNDAY IDYL.

You see, the tenor had got kind of abstracted, or restless, or something during the long prayer, and was thinking about the European war, or the wheat corner last week, or something, and so when the minister gave out hymn 231, on page 67, and the chorister whispered them to sing the music on page 117, it all came in on the tenor like a volley, and as he had only the playing of the symphony in which to make the necessary combination of time, hymn and page, he came to the front just a little bit disorganized, and his fingers sticking between every leaf in the book. And the choir hadn’t faced the footlights half a minute before the congregation more than half suspected something was wrong. For you see, the soprano, in attempting to answer the frenzied whisper of the tenor in regard to the page, lost the first two or three words of the opening line herself, and that left the alto to start off alone, for the basso was so profoundly engaged in watching the tenor and wondering what ailed him, that he forgot to sing. The music wasn’t written for an alto solo, and consequently there wasn’t very much variety to that part, and after singing nearly through the first line alone, and receiving neither applause nor bouquets for one of the finest contralto efforts a Burlington or any other audience ever listened to, the alto stopped and looked reproachfully at the soprano, who had just plunged the tenor’s soul into a gulf of dark despair by leaving him to find his way out of the labyrinth of tunes and pages and hymns into which his own heedlessness had led him, by giving him a frantic shake of her head, which unsettled the new spring bonnet (just the sweetest duck of a Normandy), to that extent that every woman in the congregation noticed it. All this time the organist was doing nobly, and the alto, recovering her spirits, sang another bar, which, for sweetness and tenacious adherence to the same note, all the way through, couldn’t be beat in America. By this time the bass had risen to the emergency and sang two deep guttural notes, with profound expression, but as those of the congregation sitting nearest the choir could distinctly hear him sing “Ho, ho!” to the proper music, it was painfully evident that the basso had the correct tune, but was running wild on the words. At this point the soprano got her time and started off with a couple of confident notes, high and clear as a bird song, and the congregation, inspired with an over-ready confidence, broke out on the last word of the verse with a discordant roar that rattled the globes on the big chandelier, and as the verse closed with this triumphant outbreak, an expression of calm, restful satisfaction was observed to steal over the top of the pastor’s head, which was all that could be seen of him, as he bowed himself behind the pulpit.

The organist played an intricate and beautiful interlude without a tremor or a false note; not an uncertain touch to indicate that there was a particle of excitement in the choir, or that anything had gone wrong.

The choir didn’t exactly appear to catch the organist’s reassuring steadiness, for the basso led off the second verse by himself, and his deep-toned “Ho, ho!” was so perceptible throughout the sanctuary that several people started, and looked down under the seats for a man, and one irreverent sinner, near the door, thrust a felt hat into his mouth and slid out. The soprano got orders and started out only three or four words behind time, but she hadn’t reached the first siding before she collided with a woman in the audience, running wild and trying to carry a new tune to the old words. And then, to make it worse, the soprano handed her book to the tenor, and pointed him to the tune on page 117 and the words on page 67, and if that unhappy man didn’t get his orders mixed, and struck out on schedule time, with the tune on page 67 and the words on page 117, and in less than ten words ditched himself so badly that he was laid out for the rest of the verse, and then he lost his place, handed the book back to the soprano, took the one she had, and held it upside down, and no living man could tell from his face what he was thinking of or trying to say. Meanwhile the soprano, when the books were so abruptly changed on her, did just what might have been expected, and telescoped two tunes and sets of words into each other with disastrous effect. The alto was running smoothly along, passenger time, for the several wrecks gave her the track, so far as it was clear, all to herself. The basso, who had slipped an eccentric and was only working one side, was rumbling cautiously along, clear off his own time, flagging himself every mile of the way, and asking for orders every time he got a chance. The pastor’s head was observed to tremble with emotion, and the people sitting nearest the pulpit say they could indistinctly hear sounds from behind it that resembled the syllables “Te, he!” As the organist pulled and crowded and encouraged them along toward the closing line, it looked as though public confidence might soon be restored and the panic abated, but alas, as even the demoralized tenor rallied, and came in with the full quartette on the last line, a misguided man in the audience suddenly thought he recognized in the distracted tune an old, familiar acquaintance, and broke out in a joyous howl on something entirely different that inspired every singing man and woman in the congregation with the same idea, and the hymn was finished in a terrific discord of sixty-nine different tunes, and the rent and mangled melody flapped and fluttered around the sacred edifice like a new kind of delirium tremens, and all the wrecking cars on the line were started for the scene at once.

The pastor deserves more praise than can be crowded into these pages for pronouncing the benediction in clear, even tones, without even the ghost of a smile on his placid countenance.

RUPERTINO’S PANORAMA.

Our first view is leaving New York harbor. This is a beautiful picture. See the mighty vessel, spreading her snowy wings to the gale, glide through the water like a thing of life. There is nothing to hinder her, and nothing in that fact to make a fuss about. But if the water was to glide through her, it would be time for reflection on the brevity of one’s life insurance policy. The noble ship is freighted with precious human souls, bright hopes, happy anticipations, hides, salt meat and highwines.

This is a view of the Bourse in Paris, a twin institution to the Burlington Board of Trade. The man in the background, trying to hang himself on a lamp-post, is a member of the Bourse. He has just been Boursted. He has been operating in corn. If you will hold a bottle or small tumbler to your mouth and look steadily at this picture, you will see how they usually operate in corn at the Exchanges.

This is a view in Egypt. The great city of Cairo. It is named after Cairo, Illinois. Cairo is on the river Nile. Cairo never struck ile that we know of, but we do know that Cairo seen Nile. We do not know, history does not tell us, what there was so important in this event, but we know it is commemorated by monuments erected all over America. You can’t go into a cemetery in the United States without seeing one or more monuments erected to the memory of Cairo C. Nile. He was probably the inventor of a cooking-stove, as some reference is usually made to the kitchen fire.

This is a view of the Seine. This is the favorite place for the Parisians to shuffle off their mortal coil. The volatile Frenchman gets himself full of elan (you know what that is) and jumps off one of these arched bridges, the Pont Noof or the Pont de Jena, down by the Shong de Mar. The zhong darmay, which is French for river police, fishes the victim out; the coroner pronounces him incurably inseine, his property is confiscated, and his insurance policy declared void, so as to spoil his wife’s chances of marrying again. Such is the grasp of an iron despotism upon the wretched slaves of down-trodden Europe. (Applause)

Here is a view in London of the old Bucking’em palace. This is an exterior view. Inside there are several keno banks, some chuckaluck tables and a faro bank, and the nobility are in there bucking the tiger. King Richard came out of that palace once, cleaned out, after a run of bad luck. He remarked to a friend, “So much for bucking ’em.” The quotation has passed into history.

A panoramic view of Scotland. The gentleman in the peculiar position in the foreground is scratching his back against a mile post and remarking, “God bless the gude Duke of Argyle.” The children in Scotland are taught that the Duke of Argyle made the world. This is an error.

We stand among the antiquities of Rome--Rome that stood on her seven hills, like James Robinson in his famous eight-horse bareback act. This is Trajan’s Column--his spinal column. This is the Arch of Titus. When he put up that arch he was Titus a brick. This is the place where the Roman mobs used to collect and the police went Forum. Here is the Coliseum. There is the bloody sand of the arena; there is the spot where “the dying gladiator” lied. “I see before me the dying gladiator lie.” Some calm and temperate Roman ought to have cast the scoundrel’s lies in his teeth. The Romans were very depraved, wicked people, and the entire civilized world yet suffers from the effects of their malicious iniquity. They invented the Latin grammar, Nepos, Cicero and Virgil, and hurled upon the boys of succeeding ages a language containing ten rules to every word, and twenty exceptions to every rule. This is a statue of a noble Roman, Julius Cæsar. He was named after the Fourth of July and President Grant.

We stand in Greece. “The isles of Greece! The isles of Greece!” Probably the poet referred to goose grease. The Greeks were an ancient people. They wrote their letters in cipher, and schoolboys of to-day sigh for hours over their letters. Here are the ruins of the temple of Jupiter O’Lympus, erected to him by the ancient Greeks, thus proving that the Irish nation sprang from these ancient heroes. Here is an ancient theater. It is closed now for repairs; has been closed for a few thousand years, and the actors have gone off to their Summer resort, at Hades on the Styx.

Behold buried Pompeii. The city was entombed in an eruption that hadn’t been equaled since Job got well. The gentleman in a military position at the gate, dressed in a full suit of bones, is not only a charming specimen of anatomy, but was a brave sentinel, who was covered up with ashes before he could run. He would have been 1,795 years old to-morrow if he had run and kept on living. It appears, however, that he is dead. The fact is not substantiated by any direct evidence, as no witnesses can be found who saw him die, and his will, therefore, has not been probated. But it is generally believed that he is dead. Weep not for him, friends. He was a heathen, and has gone to a place where he is probably used to volcanoes by this time.

This building, the venerable pile that rises before you, is 27,000 years old. It originally cost $850, and took ten men nearly all Summer to build it. It was whitewashed nearly 4,000 years ago, but received no later repairs. The room on the right as you enter the hall on the first floor, is the Torture Room. It is called the County Treasurer’s office, and is where people go and mortgage their farms and homes for taxes. The room opposite is the County Insane Asylum. The juries are confined there while on duty, and the local debating societies also meet there. This court-house was built many ages before Burlington was settled. The massive walls are engraved with the names of eminent men who have served on the juries. A grim and imposing antiquity frowns upon us as we enter the Judgment Hall up stairs. The benches and desks are made of wood taken from the decks of the ark. The tobacco quids in the corners were piled there so long ago that people had not begun to remember anything. The wood-box is a pre-Adamic creation. It is modeled after the megatherium. The only man living who knows any thing about the early history of the court-house is dead.

MIDDLERIB’S DOG.

Mr. Middlerib used to be a devoted dog fancier. About three years ago he owned a beautiful hound pup about five months old. It was considered an ornament to the neighborhood. A hound pup at that age is an object of surprising beauty, under any circumstances; but when you consider that Mr. Middlerib had raised his pup on scientific principles (boiled beef and rice), you can readily imagine what a canine divinity it was. Gaunt legs, longer than your grandfather’s stories, and the hind ones so crooked that the dog sticks his foot into everything in the yard every time he tries to scratch his ear; sides look as though he had swallowed an old hoopskirt, and the springs showed through; more ribs under his hide than there are spots on it; tail as long as the dog, and two inches across the big end and tapering down like a marlinspike, so lean you can count every joint in it, and so hard that you couldn’t scratch it with a diamond--has every appearance of having been made ten years before the dog was, and then hung out to bleach in the rain and dry in the sun until the dog came along; ears soft as a kid glove, and about the size and appearance of a blacksmith’s apron--bear every evidence of being considered by all other dogs in the precinct as dreadful nice things to chew. Beautiful eyes; open twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes of the day; scare every woman into fits that looks into the back yard after dark. Sweet mouth, opens on a hinge at the back of his head, and is never shut unless there is something in it. That’s the best picture of a growing hound, one of this kind with liver colored spots, that we can draw, and Mr. Middlerib’s was just like that, only more so. His principal characteristic was a tendency to lunch. He was fond of nibbling little things around the house. Split his face one Sunday while the folks were at church, and shut it down over a whole ham. Liked to peek at odd bones and scraps, and one Monday morning he ate two tablecloths, a flannel shirt, a big roller towel, half a dozen clothes pins and thirteen linear yards of clothes-line, before the washing had been hung out half an hour. Fond of eggs, too, and knows every hen by sight in the neighborhood, and sets off on a friendly call every time he hears a cackle. Mrs. M. wants to sell him, but Middlerib says gold couldn’t buy him. So he stays, and eggs are as scarce in that ward as ever.

Well, one night, Mrs. M. had made something by pulverizing a lot of very hot potatoes. We believe it was yeast. Any how, it was necessary that it should cool very presently, and after some misgivings relative to the dog and his weakness, which were dispelled by Middlerib’s indignant defense of that sagacious animal, the dish containing the fiery compound was placed on the outer edge of a window sill, to cool in the night air.

Then the family resumed their occupation of hearing Middlerib explain the causes that led to the recent revolution in politics.

Such a weird, unearthly, piercing wail hadn’t been heard since Dresseldorf learned to play the clarionet. It seemed to come out of the ground, out of the sky, out of the air around them, and for an instant the frightened Middleribs gazed at each other with white, terror-blanched faces. Then they rushed to the door and looked out. A gaunt, ghostly form, with liver colored spots and a mouth full of red hot potato yeast thrashed wildly up and down the yard, splitting the darkness with terrific yells at every jump. It was Middlerib’s dog; and it was apparently feeling uneasy. It dashed madly around in short circles and screamed “Police,” and scraped its jaws with its paws, and wept and rubbed its chops along the cold ground, and swore and howled for water, and pawed the earth and sang psalms, and in several ways expressed its disapprobation of potato yeast as a diet. Finally, the dog wedged himself in between the fence and the ash-barrel, and told all about it, how it happened and what it felt like, and how he liked it as far as he’d got. He never slept a wink that night. He was too anxious to get his narrative completed and see the proofs of it. Neither did anybody in the neighborhood sleep, either. And every time a water pitcher would crash down into the yard, or a boot-jack bang against the fence or an andiron plunge madly into the ash-barrel, the dog would laugh in mocking tones, and go on with his testimony. About midnight a vigilance committee waited on Mr. Middlerib, but he wouldn’t come out, and they couldn’t stand the noise long enough to break in the door. The dog finished his statement about sunrise, when the committee rose. The family ate baker’s bread the next day, and Middlerib so far yielded to Mrs. M.’s entreaties as to say that if any man will make a fair offer, he might sell an undivided third of the dog.

A BOY’S DAY AT HOME.

Master Bilderback had been home all day, confined to the house and barn by the rain, and excited by the prospect of unlimited fun during the long vacation. He was a blessing to his mother and sister, and his affectionate parent caught her death of cold by running around after him in one stocking foot, searching out the tender places in his nature and anatomy with a four and a half slipper. He tied one end of his sister’s ball of crochet cotton to the fly-wheel of the sewing-machine and the other around the tail of the cat, and by the time his mother had sewed half-way down one of the long seams in Mr. Bilderback’s new shirt, all but a few yards of that cotton was a chaotic mass about that fly-wheel and shaft, and the cat was waltzing in and out of the kitchen, sprawling along backward, tail straight as a poker, fur up and eyes aflame, snowling, and spitting, and swearing like mad, and Mrs. Bilderback and her daughter climbed upon the table and shrieked till the windows rattled, while Master Bilderback, hid behind the clothes-horse in the kitchen, lay down on his back and laughed a wicked gurgling kind of a laugh. Then he went out and jammed a potato into the nose of the chain pump and the hired girl went out and pumped till her arms ached clear down to her heels, and then told Mrs. Bilderback the cistern had sprung a leak and was dry as a bone. And then Mrs. Bilderback, declaring she knew better, went out and turned the wheel till her head swam and she gave up, and Miss Bilderback went out and turned till she cried, and then Master Bilderback, rather than go to the neighbor’s for water, went out and fixed the pump and came in to be praised, and was duly praised with the slipper, for he had been watched. He put an old last year’s fire-cracker in the kitchen stove; he insured a steady run of strange visitors for about two hours, to the great amazement of his mother and sister, by pinning a placard on the porch step, plainly seen from the street, but invisible from the front door, “Man wanted to drive carriage; $35.00 a month and board.” Mrs. Bilderback drew a sigh of relief when she heard Mr. B.’s step in the hall, and informed her son that as soon as his father came in he should be duly informed of all that had been going on. A most impressive silence followed this remark, and the trio in the sitting-room listened to Mr. Bilderback’s heavy breathing as he divested himself of his wet boots, and prepared to assume his slippers. Master Bilderback’s face wore an expression of the deepest concern.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a shout of astonishment and terror, followed by a howl of intense agony, and there was a clattering as of a runaway crockery wagon in the hall. The affrighted family rushed to the door, and beheld Mr. Bilderback cleaving the shadows with wild gestures and frantic gyrations. “Take it off,” he shouted, and made a grab at his own foot, but, missing it, went on with his war-dance. “Water!” he shrieked, and started up stairs, three at a step, and turning, came back in a single stride, “Oh, I’m stabbed!” he cried, and sank to the floor and held his right leg high above his head; then he rose to his feet with a bound and screamed for the boot-jack, and held his foot out toward his terrified family. “Oh, bring me the arnica!” he yelled, and with one despairing effort he reached his slipper and got it off, and with a groan as deep as a well and hollow as a drum, sank into a chair and clasped his foot in both hands. “Look out for the scorpion,” he whispered hoarsely, “I’m a dead man.”

Master Bilderback was by this time out in the woodshed, rolling in the kindling in an ecstasy of glee, and pausing from time to time to explain to the son of a neighbor, who had dropped in to see if there was any innocent sport going on in which he could share, “Oh, Bill, Bill,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe; some time to-day, some how or Other, a big blue wasp got into the old man’s slipper, and when he come home and put it on--oh, Bill, you don’t know!”

WHY MR. BOSTWICK MOVED.

Young Mr. Bostwick has moved. He liked the house he has been living in well enough, and Mrs. Bostwick fairly cried her eyes out when they left it, because it had a bay window and blinds with slats that you could turn so that you could see anybody in the street and nobody could see you. But old Mr. Glasford, the landlord, was very deaf, and it was on account of this infirmity that his tenant left the house. Mrs. Bostwick said she couldn’t see what Mr. Glasford’s deafness had to do with the house, but her husband only looked worried and said it made a good deal of difference with a man’s peace of mind, when he had something he wanted to whisper, and had to whisper it to a man who couldn’t hear anything if he went into a boiler factory. Mrs. Bostwick didn’t understand what difference it made anyhow, but then she wasn’t down town that terrible Wednesday, when old Mr. Glasford went into the store where her husband was selling a lovely young divinity from Denmark a dress pattern off a piece of Centennial percale. Mr. Bostwick saw the old gentleman coming and felt very nervous. Eager to anticipate the demand which he knew the old man was going to make, he dashed toward him with an abruptness that astonished the fair customer who had just lost herself in admiration of Bostwick’s diamond pin, and the fact, just confidentially imparted to her, that he was not a clerk but the silent partner, holding about $475,000 worth of stock in the concern, and that he just worked from pure love of employment. Mr. Bostwick checked the old gentleman about ten feet away from his customer, and leaning over the counter so as to get as close range on his ear as possible, whispered hoarsely that “it wouldn’t be convenient to pay that rent to-day.”

“Hey?” shouted the old man, looking at Bostwick’s agitated face in some alarm, “why, why, wha’s the matter? ’S happened?”

Mr. Bostwick made a futile effort to catch hold of the old man’s ear, intending to pour his explanation into it as one pours water into a funnel, but his landlord briskly dodged and waved Bostwick away with an expression of considerable apprehension. Mr. Bostwick groaned and endeavored to explain to the old gentleman in a manner that would convey to the pretty customer and the others in the store the idea that he was refusing to give the old party credit, and at the same time let old Glasford know that he was bankrupt.

“Can’t do it!” he shouted.

“Can’t do what?” inquired the mystified old gentleman in those stentorian tones so popular with deaf people.

“Can’t help you!” shouted Bostwick, in tones the sternness of which contrasted ludicrously with the sheepish expression of his countenance. “Can’t do anything for you!”

The old man looked at Bostwick in helpless wonder and then at the door, with his mind half made up to run away, under the impression that the young man was crazy. He finally stared at him in open-mouthed amazement and speechless bewilderment.

“Oh, Moses,” thought Bostwick, “he’s mad as a hornet, he’ll break out in a minute; I know he will.” Then he tried him again, in a voice like a steam whistle.

“I can’t do anything for you!”

The old man’s mouth opened still wider, and his eyes stood around on his cheek-bones in their amazement.

“Who asked ye to do anything for me?” he finally gasped. “What is it ye can’t do?”

Bostwick groaned, and in a fit of desperation he broke down, and gave it up.

“I can’t pay that rent to-day!” he shrieked, and the pretty customer was so shocked that she dropped her parasol, fan and paper of gum drops.

“What went to-day?” asked the old man, waving Bostwick off with his stick.

Here the proprietor officiously interposed to cover Bostwick’s confusion, speaking in the highest key he could assume.

“Rent! Rent! House rent, you know! He says he can’t pay his house rent to-day!”

“Rent day?” echoed old Glasford, “yes, oh yes, that’s past, two weeks ago; first of the month.”

“Yes,” shrieked Mr. Bostwick, while the store full of customers and his fellow clerks stood around and smiled, “I know it, but I can’t pay it to-day; haven’t got a cent!”

“Oh!” exclaimed the old man, with a gleam of intelligence passing over his face, “I don’t care about that; that isn’t what I come for. I come to tell you if your wife wanted that front room down stairs papered, to go ahead and have it done, and I’d allow it.”

The pretty customer wouldn’t have a word to say to the discomfited Mr. Bostwick when he went back, and the old man told the proprietor as he went out of the door that he believed that young man was just about half crazy, and the clerks were all so pleasant that Bostwick nearly went mad every time he was reminded of his unfortunate precipitancy, and that is the way he became convinced that it was altogether lighter than vanity to rent of a deaf man.

SPECIAL PROVIDENCES.

There was wailing and woe in Burlingtown, For every other day The humid showers came tumbling down, As they had come to stay.

There was water enough in the land to spare; And men who were wont to pray, When they looked in the cellar each morn would swear And wrathfully turn away.

All out on South Hill they pumped and pumped From morn till dewy eve, But their every effort the storm king trumped, And laughed him in his sleeve,

Till the South Hill man his spirit was broke, And he sate him down on his hill. “Though I pump till my back cries out,” he spoke, “My cellar still keeps its fill.”

“Now lithe and listen, good pump of mine, If ever I touch thee more, May never again the bright sun shine As it shone in the days of yore.”

Then he took his pump and he hung it up Where it might not taunt his sight, And he drowned his grief in the poisonous cup Which “moveth itself aright.”

And he vowed him that if the immortal gods Would hold up their rain for a while, He’d build him a cellar and take the odds-- On top of his domicile.

“For what was the use,” he grimly said, “Of a cellar in the ground, Into the which, if you went for bread, You were pretty sure to be drowned?”

“I hate the cellar; oh winds of the south, Thy rains, as hard as I can; I wish I could strike them both with a drouth,” Exclaimed the South Hill man.

He lifted his eyes to the city road A coming figure to scan, And a wild fierce light in his optics glowed When they fell on the hated gas man.

He carried his book and his railway lamp, And wore a sinister frown; And he sought out the meter in cellars damp, And he noted the figures down.

And whether a man burned much or small, Or how often the gas man came, Or whether they turned on the gas at all, The meter just counted the same.

So the man of South Hill, when he saw him come, Supposing that he had come th-- Rough ignorance, said, in tones full glum, “You cut off my gas last month.”

The gas man he winked, and eke as he wunk, He shook his head knowinglee, And, as though he something suspiciously thunk, “We’ll look at the meter,” said he.

Then he opened the door of the cellar so damp, And he stepped where the pump log had been, And he went out of sight, with his book and his lamp, As the water he tumbled in.

“Oh, help!” loud he shrieked as his noddle came up, “Hubbulubbulup!” as his noddle went down, While the man of South Hill on the cellar door sill, Was the happiest man in the town.

Splash! Splash! Blubbulup! in the cellar he heard, And he hugged himself close in his glee; And whenever the gas man would sputter a word, “Oh, catch hold of the meter!” cried he.

And he shut down the doors, and he locked them up tight, And into the well threw the key, And, “Providence always and ever is right: Rains and cellars are useful,” said he.

MR. BARINGER’S HOUSE-CLEANING.

You see, Mr. Baringer has only been keeping house about a year, and they took the carpets up this Spring for their first general house-cleaning. Mrs. Baringer’s mother was there, because she said Olivia was a mere child at such things, and she didn’t believe that Aristarchus was much better, and it was better to have some one around who could manage. The young people, however, felt very confident that they had, by numerous consultations and many well-laid plans, reduced house-cleaning to a perfect science, a system that had never yet been attained by any other housekeepers, and they were all impatient to get at work and clean the whole house, from garret to cellar, and have all the pictures back on the walls and carpets nailed down again before dark. They were disgusted at the way other people cleaned house, and Olivia thought it was perfectly wonderful how Aristarchus could have such beautifully lucid and systematic ideas on matters of which most men, and she would say most women as well, were so deplorably stupid and ignorant.

The stirring notes of the alarm clock dragged Mr. Baringer out of bed at 3:15 A. M., and he thought he felt intolerably sleepy for five o’clock, but he didn’t look at the clock until he was dressed, and then he was too mad to swear. He merely woke Mrs. Baringer up to tell her that he’d bet a thousand dollars some stupid had changed the alarm after he set it and then he flopped down on a lounge to sleep till daylight. He awoke at half-past seven o’clock, the hour at which, by their prearranged system and calculations, the two up-stairs bed-room carpets were to have been beaten and ready to put down as soon as the floors were dry. Then the kitchen fire went out twice, and they finally sat down to breakfast at half-past eight o’clock, Mrs. Baringer’s mother beguiling the time during that matin meal by asking Olivia if she minded how she used to be half through her house-cleaning by nine o’clock in the morning. But Mr. Baringer bore up very well under it, and immediately after breakfast, he took up the bed-room carpets. It was slow work, jerking the tacks out one at a time. Some times they flew up into his face; some times he pulled the head off and left the tack in the floor; and when they got to be rather thickly scattered around the room he put his knee down on one occasionally and talked in a fragmentary manner about certain mill privileges in connection with housekeeping which Mrs. Baringer couldn’t understand. At last he noticed that by lifting up the edge of the carpet, a gentle pull would bring up half a dozen tacks in rapid succession. Happy thought. He rose to his feet, grasped the bound edge of the carpet in both hands, gave a mighty lift and a tremendous pull--k-r-r-r-r-r-t! and when the dust settled a little, Mrs. Baringer and her mother were discovered standing in the door, looking in speechless horror at Mr. Baringer, who stood like an image of despair, holding a carpet with a fringe in one hand, and a long line of carpet binding in the other.

“How _did_ you do it?” shrieked Mrs. Baringer.

“How _ever_ did you do it?” echoed Mrs. Baringer’s mother.

Then they both said something about the general incapacity of a man, and Mr. Baringer endeavored to explain that in going across the room for the tack hammer he had caught his foot in the edge of the carpet, with the result as above. And at the conclusion of his explanation, Mrs. Baringer’s mother gave a sniff that blew dust out of the carpet, and there was a general expression of incredulity on the faces of the congregation.

It was a long time before they got the carpets down in the yard, and on the line. Then Mr. Baringer approached and smote the first carpet with a long stick, and the next instant he was feeling his way out of a dense cloud of dust, coughing, sneezing and snorting, and wildly gasping for air. He went around on the other side, and as he aimed a terrific swipe at the carpet, he struck the clothes-prop, and his nerveless arm stung and tingled to his neck, while his wail was heard down to the city building. Then he got at it again, and found that his stick was too light, and he took another one. A few strokes sufficed to convince him that it was too heavy, and he took a lath. That broke in two at the first blow, and he tried an apple switch, but it was too limber. He finally gave up the idea of beating any more, and called to Mrs. Baringer that the carpet was ready to be shaken. Mrs. Baringer, with her head in an apron, came out. They gathered the carpet, and Mr. Baringer got the start of her and shook a roll clear down to her hands, exploding in a loud snap and a volcano of dust in her face. Then she dropped the carpet and sneezed and protested.

“You shook too quick, deary,” she said.

“But you said you were ready, sweety,” replied Mr. Baringer.

“But you shouldn’t be so rough, lovey,” she protested.

“Well, I have to shake hard to get the dust out, ducky,” he insisted.

“Well, you needn’t be so cross about it, deary,” she said.

“Oh well,” he said, “you must expect hard work house-cleaning days, and you mustn’t lose your temper, sweety.”

“It isn’t me that gets cross and jerks people around, lovey,” she said, “it’s you.”

“I never jerked you around,” he retorted.

“Why, Aristarchus Baringer!” exclaimed his wife, making very large eyes at him and speaking in tones of the greatest amazement, “and maybe you didn’t tear the carpet up stairs, either.”

“I wish your old carpet was in Halifax,” he said, savagely. “Pick up that end; let’s get through with it. This is sweet work for a dry goods salesman, anyhow! Ready?”

“No,” she snapped, “I ain’t ready. Now wait. There. Hold on now; don’t be in such a hurry. Now!”

And the next instant the carpet was snapped out of her hands, and it did seem as though her fingers had gone with it, while Mr. Baringer, pretending not to know that it had fallen from her fingers, kept on shaking violently at his end, filling the air with dust and grit. At this juncture Mrs. Baringer’s mother, who had been a quiet spectator of the carpet shaking scene, approached and called him to desist. Then she gathered up the vacant end of the carpet.

“Aristarchus,” she said kindly but firmly, “Olivia is not strong enough for such work.”

Then she added:

“Have you got a good hold, Aristarchus?”

And Mr. Baringer said he had.

“Don’t let go then, Aristarchus. Ready.”

They lifted their arms high in the air and Mr. Baringer is undecided yet which part of him started first. He walked up the whole length of that carpet on his hands and then he fell over the edge and banged along the walk on his hands and knees until he reached the front fence, through which he plunged his head, and would have gone on through but for his shoulder catching against the gate post. The carpets did not go down that day, and a big Irishman was engaged to come and welt the fuzz off them, Mr. Baringer having privately and with some asperity informed his wife that he would rather live, sleep, and eat in dirt up to his eyes, than ever again to sweep, beat, or shake the lightest carpet ever trodden by the foot of man.

AN AUTUMNAL REVERIE.

“Oh dreamy haze: veiling the murmuring river that stretches away like a silver thread under a mosquito bar, winding in wooded nooks and creeping through low lying islands where the balmy breeze is redolent with the odor of dead leaves and dead fish. Oh lovely haze; what dreams of soulful tenderness its name recalls. Oh, musty hays in the street car; oh, hays that used to be full of bumble bees; oh, hazel nuts on another man’s farm with a big dog hid in the patch. Away; these memories are too painful.

“Afar, the hillsides glitter in gold and scarlet, and the sumach bushes, climbing the slope with their nodding plumes, look like a new express wagon coming down Division Street. The mellow air brings into the city the rustle of fallen leaves piled deep on winding cow-paths, threading through quiet dells and winding along the side of purling brooks. It brings an odor of something old. Because it blows over the cheese factory.

“How faint and far off every sound. The ghosts of the dead Summer flowers sigh in every breeze, and the phantom of the cow that butted the freight train tinkles her drowsy bell afar. And in muffled tenderness, as a falling star might drop on a feather bed, we hear the teamster’s cheery call, ‘G’up! ye lop-eared spavin, ’r I’ll lam the hair off ye with a dray pin.’ And the muffled creak of the wood wagon falls plaintively on the ear. Eight dollars a cord, and only cut three feet long at that, and piled so loosely that when you go to measure it you can throw a felt hat through the pile any place and never touch a stick.

“List to the plaintive piping of the quail in the stubble. Ah, quail on toast, and the plaintive piping of the anxious waiter for seventy-five cents. Avaunt, dull dotard, take thy black shadow from the fairy scene. (This remark was addressed to the waiter, and not to the quail on toast.)

“Why, in these dreamy dark autumnal days--we don’t know what kind of a day a dark day is, but we wanted another word that begins with d and could only think of dark and another one, and the other one wouldn’t do at all; these kind of days then, bring with them a sad--a sad--sad something, we knew what it was when we started out, but stopping to explain about that dark knocked it clear out of our head; sad--it isn’t saddle, nor Sadducee, nor--ah yes, now we have it. These dreamy days, that come like a tender poem, veiled in the delicate drapery that hangs over the distant landscape, bring with them----”

At this critical juncture a man with a business-like look in his eye burst into the sanctum, slapped his hat down on the paste-cup, banged a sample case on the ink-stand, and proceeded to remark in one long unpunctuated sentence, “Good morning not a word my dear fellow I know the value of an editor’s time I wish you just to glance at this prospectus of the most valuable work that has ever been issued from the American press it is the American Centennial Portrait Gallery and you will observe contains exquisite steel engravings full page of all the Presidents with the autograph of each one appended and complete biographical sketches. Observe that engraving of Washington through this glass if you please bank note engraving not more perfect not a single line crosses or becomes merged into another one what expression what fidelity to nature what marvelous portraiture what minute attention to detail. Notice the folds in the cloak and the exquisitely penciled pattern of the ruffles at the wrists. And so with Adams and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe and Jackson and all the rest of them with biographical sketches compiled from the best authorities with facts incidents and reminiscences never before published--a book that no American of intelligence should be without a book without a rival in its field of patriotic biographical excellence. In different styles of binding--$3.00, $3.50 and $4.25. Now, sir, shall I have your name right here?”

We felt all around the room before we could catch our breath, and when we regained it we told him we didn’t believe we could put $4.25 worth of signature anywhere that morning, and, after a struggle of fifteen or twenty minutes with him, we got him close enough to the stairway to push him over the railing and heard him reach the ground floor and disappear into the street and around the corner with the long introductory sentence of his prospectus trailing after him like the dribbling shower of a runaway street sprinkler. And we went on with the dreamy, sad, sweet reverie:

“The tender song of a day whose wordless beauties haunt the mystic scene; the dreamy, vague, imperfect memories that bring----”

A man with a black coat and a high hat came softly into the sanctum, and after he laid a flat oil cloth case on the table, he lifted his hat off with both hands and said, speaking in soft and distressingly deliberate tones, and articulating with awful distinctness and precision:

“Ah--is the editor in?”

We imparted the desired information, and the deliberate man went on,

“I have taken the liberty to call on a matter of some importance to yourself, as well as to the great masses of the American people. I have here the artist’s proof of a new ker-romo entitled ‘Columbia.’ It is a centennial allegory, and is designed by Mr. Alfred Reynolds Vincenzo Fitzdaub, one of the most eminent artists of America, at immense outlay of time, labor and money. The tube colors used on the original painting alone cost seven dollars and a half, while the can-vas, when prepared and stretched for the pict-ewer, was worth nearly doub-bel that sum. Here you see, we have in the foreground Columbia, her sandaled feet resting upon the broking canning to signify that war is no more. At her right hand sits the American eagil, ger-rasping the olive ber-ranch of peace in his talents, and lifting his wings as though pluming himself for fe-light. Here on the left we have the artisin in working-dress, the statesman, the teacher, the farmer, the sai-leure, repperesenting the various callings, and here rushes a train of cars, while in the background an old-fashioned stage coach is disappearing, illustrative of the perrogeress of the past hundred years. The original painting is valued at $2,500, but these ker-romos we supply for $18 a piece, mounted ready for framing. No man of culture or artistic taste can afford to be without this ker-romo. The eye of a connoisseur can not distinguish it ferrom an oil painting. Observe the transparency of the atmosphere; notice the soft natural blending of the high light and middle tint into the hazy shadows of the backger-round, and the bold effects of the heavy cul-louds that overshadow the past, where the dim edges are silvered with the sunlight that ber-reaks ferrom the veil of the few-chewer. And here, you observe, is a blank tablet at the right of the figewer of Columbia, for a family record. Only eighteen dollars. They will be ready for delivery about the first of Jewen, and if I may have the pleasure of seeing your signature in this book, just here, it will cost you but the trifling sum of eighteen dollars, and establish more fully the reputation you have already acquired as a man of culture and refined taste.”

We got rid of him after a heated session of about half an hour, and he went away, mourning over the depravity of a man who had acquired a reputation for culture and refined taste under false pretenses. Then we resumed:

“Over the distant hills, hushed in the misty haze that hangs like a veil of peace over the motionless landscape, the fleecy clouds, like drifting air-ships on the broad expanse of melting blue, bring the sweet----”

A man with a mahogany box came in and sat down, and talked as he opened it, and displayed a variety of phials and boxes.

“The profession of literature, my dear sir,” he said, “is of all others under the ban of the fell destroyer, dyspepsia, and it is especially in the Spring of the year that literary workers suffer most keenly from its dreadful effects. An ounce of prevention, etc.--you know the old saying. Now I can see by your heavy eyes that you are at this moment suffering from headache. This ‘Centennial Cordial and American Indian Aboriginal Invigorator’ is one of the latest and most valuable discoveries in the world of medical science, and has positively no equal for the cure of jaundice and all manner of liver disorders, headache, indigestion, want of appetite, dyspepsia, bilious, remittent and intermittent fevers, ague, giddiness of the head, rheumatic affections, poverty or impurity of the blood, salt rheum, teething, cholera morbus, croup, ophthalmia, asthma, hay fever, sea-sickness, diphtheria, catarrh, toothache, sleeplessness, gray hair, pimples, tan and freckles, kleptomania, emotional insanity, growing pains, stone bruise, rattlesnake bites, jimjams, katzenjammer, tight boots, bad breath, warts, soft corns, old clothes, tailor’s bills, spring fever and all other ills to which human flesh is heir. Compounded purely of herbs and the finest cologne spirits, and selling at the ridiculously low price of $1.75 per bottle. Now sir, let me----”

And we let him out of the door and he went away, after marking us for the tomb in a few short weeks. And then we tried to get back to our reverie.

“The sweet days come and go, in hallowed rhythmic cadences, like the half forgotten chords of some tender, sobbing nocturne, while they bring the----”

“No, sir, this is not the tobacco factory; it’s the next building up the street.--Thank heaven, he’s gone.”

“----bring the sad yearning of a restless heart, that reaches out amid the hectic flushes of the dying year, as it would clasp the----”

“No ma’am, we don’t want to buy ‘The Centennial Gift Book for Young Ladies;’ no, we have no young lady friends; we have no friends of any kind; we have no sisters, or brothers, or relations, we have no money, we have no literary taste, we have no desire to read anything; we can’t read, and we don’t know anybody who can.”

“----amid the hectic flushes of the dying year, as it would clasp----”

“Have no use for a fly trap, sir; don’t keep house; ain’t married; don’t expect to be; haven’t seen a fly in Iowa for a thousand years.”

“----the hectic flushes of the dying year, as though----”

“No, no, no! this is not the barber-shop. No, we don’t know where the barber-shop is; there is none in this block; there are no barbers in Burlington; the nearest barber-shop is at the North Pole. No, sir, you needn’t apologize, we are _not_ annoyed. _Good_ afternoon, sir.”

“----amid the dying flushes of the hectic year whose pulses throb so faintly that----”

“No, we don’t want any ‘Wonderful Saponifier and Dirt Eradicator for the Toilet and Laundry.’ No, we have no family, and we never wash; never heard of such a thing as a bath; don’t want to be clean; never shave, never clean our nails, and have on the same shirt we wore the day we were born. No, sir. Yes, sir. _Good_ afternoon.”

“----amid the flying dushes of the pulsing year whose hectics faint so throbly that----”

“Yes, sir, this is _The Hawkeye_ office. No, sir, we do not buy sand; no, we have no old clothes to exchange for tin ware; no, we don’t want any superior stove blacking. _Good_ afternoon, sir.”

“----amid the dusting fishes of the throbling hectics whose painted ear is throoming in the gulch, so faintly fleam the glib and----”

[Note by the editor. We entered the office at this point and found the writer of the above in convulsions. From the ravings of his delirium we gathered that he was trying to write something nice, and was tormented by innumerable interruptions. Medical assistants were summoned, and we were told to keep the young man’s head cool and he would get well. So we cut it off and had it packed in ice. It weighed two and a half ounces. The young man is doing finely, and will not need it again this year.]

INFANTILE SCINTILLATIONS.

Ah yes, we do love children. We fairly dote on them, and enjoy and admire their sweet, innocent ways, from the dear little cloudy-faced, bare-legged cherubs that swear and throw stones at you as you go past Happy Hollow, to the sweet-faced but pampered angel that sits in the golden lap of luxury and breaks the mirrors and your head with pa’s cane. It was purely our love for the little innocents that induced us to comply with the urgent request of many parents, and open a department in _The Hawkeye_ for the smart sayings of precocious children.

Mrs. H--y B--k, of North Hill, has a sweet little rosebud, of four bright Summers, who came into the house and lisped, “Ma, Ith tho theepy.”

“What makes you sleepy?” asked Rosebud’s mother.

“I don’t know,” murmured the child.

Strange yearning after the incomprehensible in an infant heart. Could any of the children of an older growth have made a better answer?

Then there is little Freddy L----, out on West Hill. Although he is but three years old, he put his father’s watch in the shaving mug, filled the mug out of a kerosene lamp, and set the mixture in the oven to dry, where it presently dried--soon after the hired girl made up the breakfast fire--with such abruptness that three of the stoveplates haven’t been found since. After the excitement had subsided, his mother took him on her lap and said:

“Freddy, did you put papa’s watch and the mug full of oil in the oven?”

And the dear child, opening wide his innocent eyes, and smiling in tender confidence in her face, said placidly:

“No, ma’am, ’deed I didn’t.”

Sweet, cautious instinct of an untried heart. Could any of us get out of it any better than that? Who can tell what vague, uncertain dreams of congressional honors float through that busy little mind?

Johnnie K---- is a charming little cherub of four bright Springs. One day he poured the ink into the globe where the gold-fish were, submerging them instantaneously in total eclipse; then he put the Bible in the fire, threw a bronze paper-weight through the looking-glass, broke four eggs in his sister’s new hat, and wound up his artless sport by throwing the cat down the cistern. His mother, discovering all this mischief, suspected who was the author, and sought her son.

“Johnnie,” she said, sadly, “Why did you act so naughty?”

“I didn’t,” he persisted. “Deed, muzzy, it was ze cat!”

Sweet child! Does it need the prescience of a prophet to see that he will some day make an excellent witness in a great scandal case?

Then there is another sweet little tid-toddler out on Seventh Street. The other day one of his parents, the female one, put him to sleep and laid him in his little crib, and then she ran over the street to ask Mrs. Muldoon how she washed flannels, and got to talking about the last funeral, and the mission circle, and the new preacher, and forgot all about the baby, and when she went home there that dear little blessed was, flat on his back, with his little crib lying on top of him, and he yelling like a scalded pig.

Ah, the wild, weird, ventures and dreams of child life. Try it, gray-haired man; see if you can fall out of bed and flop your bedstead, slats, springs, mattress and all, on top of you as you land on the floor. You can not do it, but the tid-toddler of three sweet Summers--ah, well, who shall say how their untried instinct shames the lore and knowledge of our elder years.

SETTLING UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

Strangers visiting the beautiful city of Burlington have not failed to notice that one of the handsomest young men they meet is very bald, and they fall into the usual error of attributing this premature baldness to dissipation. But such is not the case. This young man, one of the most exemplary Bible-class scholars in the city, went to a Baptist sociable out on West Hill one night about two years ago. He escorted three charming girls, with angelic countenances and human appetites, out to the refreshment table, let them eat all they wanted, and then found he had left his pocket-book at home, and a deaf man that he had never seen before at the cashier’s desk. The young man, with his face aflame, bent down and said softly,

“I am ashamed to say I have no change with----”

“Hey?” shouted the cashier.

“I regret to say,” the young man repeated on a little louder key, “that I have unfortunately come away without any change to----”

“Change two?” chirped the old man, “Oh, yes, I can change five if you want it.”

“No,” the young man explained in a terrible, penetrating whisper, for half a dozen people were crowding up behind him, impatient to pay their bills and get away, “I don’t want any change, because----”

“Oh, don’t want no change?” the deaf man cried, gleefully. “’Bleeged to ye, ’bleeged to ye. ’Taint often we get such generous donations. Pass over your bill.”

“No, no,” the young man explained, “I have no funds----”

“Oh, yes, plenty of fun,” the deaf man replied, growing tired of the conversation and noticing the long line of people waiting with money in their hands, “but I haven’t got time to talk about it now. Settle and move on.”

“But,” the young man gasped out, “I have no money----”

“Go Monday?” queried the deaf cashier. “I don’t care when you go; you must pay and let these other people come up.”

“I have no money!” the mortified young man shouted, ready to sink into the earth, while the people all around him, and especially the three girls he had treated, were giggling and chuckling audibly.

“Owe money?” the cashier said, “of course you do; $2.75.”

“I can’t pay!” the youth screamed, and by turning his pocket inside out and yelling his poverty to the heavens, he finally made the deaf man understand. And then he had to shriek his full name three times, while his ears fairly rang with the half-stifled laughter that was breaking out all around him; and he had to scream out where he worked, and roar when he would pay, and he couldn’t get the deaf man to understand him until some of the church members came up to see what the uproar was, and recognizing their young friend, made it all right with the cashier. And the young man went out into the night and clubbed himself, and shred his locks away until he was bald as an egg.

HAWK-EYETEMS.

SOMEBODY told Billinger that stamps were not required on notes, and Billinger, overjoyed, asked the crowd to drink, and said he pitied old Gunnybags who had been trying for six months to get the stamps on a note he holds against Billinger. Billinger says he knew he would get the law on the old gouge if he held on long enough.

* * * * *

“PULL out, Bill!” shrieked an engineer’s son to one of his playmates, a brakeman’s boy, who was in imminent danger of getting smashed by his mother, who was coming after him, “Git on the main line and give her steam! Here comes the switch engine!” But before the juvenile could get in motion, she had him by the ear, and he was laid up with a hot box.

* * * * *

A NORTH HILL man refused to give his boy thirty-five cents to go to the minstrels, because the entertainment was demoralizing and vulgar in its nature. He then bought a quarter’s worth of chewing tobacco, went home and read the _Weekly Moral Guide and Guardian_, and spit all over the front of the stove, and made the parlor smell so much like a stale bar-room that the baby had three whisky fits before ten o’clock.

* * * * *

A YOUNG editor out in Floyd County, gushing over his first, asks, “Did you ever watch a dear little baby waking from its morning nap?” N-not exactly; but we have watched a dear little baby’s fond pa gliding up and down the fireless room, trying to induce the dear little baby to take a morning nap, at 2:15 A. M.--pressing offers but no takers--which was about as much fun as it can be to see the baby wake.

* * * * *

A MAN out on Summer Street has eight daughters, and when they cleaned house last Spring, the woman raked 9,724 quids of chewing gum down from the window casings, chair backs, door panels and sofa backs, the accumulation of the past Winter. And this does not include the wads which the man, at various times sat down on and carried away on the tails of his coat, for which no accurate returns have been made.

* * * * *

OLD Middlerib came home one night and ordered a light lunch before going to bed. “Just a mouthful of tea and a bit of bread,” he explained. “Do you want just plain bread?” asked Mrs. M., with reference to the presence or absence of butter. And the old reprobate said he would take one piece plain, and the other with a looped overskirt, shirred down the gores with the same, and held in place with knife pleatings of grape jelly. He got the heel of the loaf.

* * * * *

EVERYBODY thought it was a match, and so did he, and so did she. One evening at a croquet party she hit her pet corn a whack with the mallet that sounded like a torpedo, and he--he laughed. “We meet as strangers,” she wrote on her cuff and showed it to him. “Think of me as no more,” he whispered huskily, and when the game was ended he rushed down to the Mississippi[B] and drowned[C].

[B] Saloon. [C] Sorrow.

* * * * *

“I WOULDN’T be such a Christian as you are, John,” said his wife, as she stood in the doorway, dressed for church. “You could go with me very well, if you wanted to.” “How can I?” he half sobbed. “There’s the wood to be split, and the coal to be shoveled over to the other side of the cellar, the baby to be dressed, and no dishes washed for dinner yet.” “Ah, I didn’t think of that,” she murmured thoughtfully, and, giving her new cloak a fresh hitch aft, sailed out alone.

* * * * *

ONE night last Summer a tired, discouraged man out on North Hill went home and flung himself down on a lounge, and said “he wished he were dead, dead, dead.” In two hours he was writhing in a premature and unseasonable attack of cholera morbus, and howled, and prayed, and sweat, and had four doctors in the house, and drank a quart of medicine, and had mustard plasters smeared all over him, and wept, and said he wasn’t half tended to, and he believed they would like to see him die.

* * * * *

“ARE the children safe?” asks the _Christian Union_. Quite safe, we assure you. They are up in the garret, playing hotel fire. Jimmie is the clerk, and is trying to slide down the water pipe to the ground, Willie is a guest, hanging to the window sill and waiting for the flames to reach his hands before he tries to drop to the shed roof, two stories below, and Tom is a heroic fireman, and has tied his fishing line around the baby’s body, and is letting it down to the ground. Oh, yes, the children are all right: just finish your call and don’t fret about the children.

* * * * *

“RENTS,” said Mr. Middlerib, with a sigh of not unmixed satisfaction, “are coming down. Yesterday morning I tore the back of my coat on the woodshed door, last night I snagged the foundation of my trousers on a nail in a store box, and this morning I fell down on the frozen sidewalk and split the knee of the same trousers clear across. Rents are certainly getting lower.” “Yes,” responded Mrs. Middlerib, looking across toward the busy figure at the sewing-machine, “and seamstresses are getting hired.” Mr. Middlerib looked up at his quiet spouse in vague astonishment, as if for explanation, but she looked sublimely unconscious, and the good man went off down town with his napkin tucked under his chin, wondering all the way to the office if she meant it or if it was only his interpretation.

* * * * *

“A MERCIFUL man,” tenderly remarked a Ninth Street man one bitter cold January morning, “is merciful to his beast,” and he called the dog in out of the snow, gave him his breakfast in a soup plate, and laid a piece of carpet down behind the kitchen stove for him to snooze on. Then the man went down town, and the neighbors watched his wife shovel snow-paths to the woodshed, cistern, stable, and front gate, and then do an hour’s work cleaning off the sidewalk.

* * * * *

WHO does not love a faithful, honest dog, man’s faithful friend? And yet who is there, stretching out in the shade for a quiet afternoon nap, who has had man’s faithful friend come panting up, and, in an excess of honest affection, lay a great broad, hot tongue over one’s cheek, from chin to eyebrow, that does not get up and seize man’s faithful friend by the tail and one ear and try to throw him across a prairie fifteen miles wide?

* * * * *

THE New York _Herald_ says: “Bake your ripe pear in a tart, and eat it with brandy and cream.” We’ll do it. Here, Alvaretto, bake us that ripe pear in a tart and dress it with brandy and cream. What! the pear eaten? Well then, the tart crust and the trimmings. The tart gone! Is it possible? Then the brandy and cream. Amazement! no cream? Ah, well then, we must not neglect good advice. Bring what is left of the recipe.

* * * * *

A MONKEY that can say “papa” and “mamma” and “Brazil” is going to the Paris exposition. America can send a donkey that can say, “Haw--yaas, dweadful baw; somebody wing faw the pwopwietah.”

* * * * *

THEY have just found the skin of another Dane nailed to the oaken door of an old, old church in England. The skin isn’t entire, only scraps of it remaining under the broad flat heads of the nails. It was a pleasant way the Danes had of destroying the beauty of their criminals--they skinned them and then nailed the skin to a church door. History does not tell us how the unfortunate victim employed himself during the operation, but it is quite likely that, having nothing else to do, he was into some deviltry.

* * * * *

OLD Mr. Troph went into the parlor the other night at the witching hour of 11.45 and found the room unlighted and his daughter and a dear friend, one of the dual form of garmenture variety, occupying the tete-a-tete in the corner. “Evangeline,” the old man said sternly, “this is scandalous.” “Yes, papa,” she answered sweetly, “it is candleless because times are so hard and lights cost so much that Ferdinand and I said we would try and get along with the starlight.” And the old gentleman turned about in speechless amazement and tried to walk out of the room through a panel in the wall paper.

* * * * *

A WOMAN out on North Hill, being counted out the other morning, after a debate on the question, “Who shall arise and build the fire?” got up and split her husband’s wooden leg into kindling wood, and broiled his steak with it. It made him so mad that he got hold of her false teeth and bit the dog with them. She cried until she had a fit of hysterics, and then flipped out his glass eye and climbed upon the bed post and waxed the glaring eye to the ceiling with a quid of chewing gum. Then he took her wisp of false hair and tied it to a stick, and began whitewashing the kitchen with it. Then she started off to obtain a divorce, but Judge Newman decided that he couldn’t grant a divorce unless there were two parties to the suit, and there was hardly enough left of them to make one.

* * * * *

“YOU don’t look at all well,” a venerable gobbler out in a North Hill poultry yard remarked to a melancholy-looking young rooster, a short time before Thanksgiving day. “No,” was the reply, “I have reason to look solemn: I expect to die necks tweak.” The gobbler smiled grimly and pondered over the uncertainty of poultric life as he slowly swallowed a two-inch bolt head.

* * * * *

MRS. MIDDLERIB paused to take a final survey of the table before she called the ladies out to tea. She started as her eyes fell upon the plate of lemon tarts. There were five where there had been nine. She sought her only son and put him in the witness box. He objected to her putting her own construction upon his answers, and was subjected to the usual punishment for contumaciousness. And the next “composition day” at school, Master Middlerib amazed his teacher by reading, as the title of his essay, “The Lost Tarts, and why They can Never be Recovered.”

* * * * *

SWEET, gushing, artless girl! She came home just before the Christmas holidays. She went away from Burlington one September; went to England first; spent the Winter in Italy; sauntered through Germany in the Spring, came back to America and trifled away the Summer at Saratoga, Long Branch and the White Mountains; previous to this trip she had been away to school five years, and when she jumped out of the palace car into her father’s arms, she said, impulsively, “Oh, Paw, Paw, deah, deah Paw, thay’s no place like home!” And Paw’s face was a study as he replied, “Well, no; no; reckon not; must be quite a novelty to ye.”

* * * * *

THE worst thing we have seen about Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the only stain on an otherwise irreproachable character, is that he is the inventor of that parlor aggravation known as the hand stereoscope; a vexatious contrivance for which the pictures are always too large to be crammed into the springs or too small to stay in them, of which the slide is always shoved off the end of the stick in the vain efforts of the observer to find a focus, and of which the glasses always make you see the picture so double that it gives you the headache and finally compels you to peep over the top in order to gain the information necessary to make some intelligent remark about the jumble you have been staring at.

* * * * *

A YOUNG man out on North Hill bought a parrot some months ago, and in anticipation of the fact that he was going to be married and go to the Centennial, he secretly taught the parrot to say, “Welcome, thrice welcome home,” every time anybody opened the front door, thinking what a delightful surprise it would be to his young wife to be thus cheerfully welcomed home on their return. But while they were on their tour, the nervous woman who was left in charge of the house taught the parrot a new remark, as a protection against burglars; and when the young people came home on the night train and let themselves in at the hall door with a latch key, they were shocked and appalled by a terrific shout of “Thieves! thieves! Police! police! Here Bull! here Bull! Scatter, ye son of a thief, or I’ll tear your heart out!” Next day the parrot died, and the young wife now says she wouldn’t stay alone in that house, not for a divorce.

* * * * *

A BURLINGTON naturalist last Sunday, while investigating the causes and effects of the poison of a wasp sting, nobly determined to make of himself a martyr to science, and accordingly handed his thumb to an impatient insect he had caged in a bottle. The wasp entered into the martyr business with a great deal of spirit, and backed up to the thumb with an abruptness which took the scientist by surprise. He was so deeply absorbed in the study of remedies that he forgot to make any notes of the other points in connection with stings, but his wife wrote a paragraph in his note-book, for the benefit of science, to the effect that the primary effect of a wasp sting is abrupt, blasphemous and terrific profanity, followed by an intense desire, fairly amounting to a mania, for ammonia, camphor and raw brandy.

* * * * *

ONE day, just after King Solomon had written a column of solid nonpareil wise and moral proverbs, he took his eldest son by the elbow, led him down the back stairs of the palace, through the back yard, past the woodshed, out into the alley, backed him up behind Ahithophel’s wood-pile, looked warily around to see that no one was listening, and whispered into the young man’s ear, “My son, a little office in a spread-eagle life insurance company is better than a cart-load of preferred stock in the Ophir mines.” And then the monarch threw his head on one side, drew in his chin, shut one eye, and gazed at his offspring in silence. Three years afterward, when the Great Hebraic Consolidated Stormy Jordan Life Assurance Company, of which that intelligent young prince was president, went into bankruptcy, the young man was able to let his father, who was a little short at the time, have 275,000 shekels for ninety days, on his simple note of hand.

* * * * *

THEY were very pretty, and there was apparently five or six years difference in their ages. As the train pulled up at Bussey, the younger girl blushed, flattened her nose nervously against the window, and drew back in joyous smiles as a young man came dashing into the car, shook hands tenderly and cordially, insisted on carrying her valise, magazine, little paper bundle, and would probably have carried herself had she permitted him. The passengers smiled as she left the car, and the murmur went rippling through the coach, “They’re engaged.” The other girl sat looking nervously out of the window, and once or twice gathered her parcels together as though she would leave the car, yet seemed to be expecting some one. At last he came. He bulged in at the door like a house on fire, looked along the seats until his manly gaze fell on her upturned, expectant face, roared, “Come on! I’ve been waiting for you on the platform for fifteen minutes!” grabbed her basket, and strode out of the car, while she followed with a little valise, a band-box, a paper bag full of lunch, a bird-cage, a glass jar of jelly, and an extra shawl. And a crusty-looking old bachelor, in the farther end of the car, croaked out, in unison with the indignant looks of the passengers, “They’re married!”

* * * * *

MR. and Mrs. Bilderback were walking slowly home from church one Sunday, when they met a young lady of singular beauty and sweetness of countenance, who was quite lame. And Mrs. Bilderback turning to her husband, said, “Did you ever notice what a sweet, uncomplaining look of resignation rests like a halo on the faces of young girls who are so sadly afflicted as the lady who just passed us?” And old Bilderback said that indeed he had, and he begged his wife to observe him very closely, and notice what a sweet, uncomplaining expression of peaceful and holy resignation spread itself over his face, like a halo, or like a lump of butter on a hot buckwheat cake, at such times as his corns tried him unusually bad. And she only remarked casually that when they got home she would hang a halo around his irreverent head that would make what little hair there was left on it think the millennium was a million years farther away than ever.

* * * * *

“THEY had a rather odd race out at the old Acme ball grounds yesterday,” Trotters remarked to Ponsonby when they met yesterday morning. “Jones rode his little calico pony around the block, and Brown rolled an empty flour barrel the same distance, even start, for $10.” “Jones beat him, of course?” said Ponsonby. “Brown was a fool to make such a match.” “Don’t be too sure,” rejoined Trotters, “when they reached the outcome, the barrel head; blowed if it didn’t.” Ponsonby stared, then slowly smiled, giggled, and finally guffawed. “Good enough,” he said. “I’ll get that off to Mrs. Ponsonby.” So when he went home he told her all about it. “Well,” said she, “that’s just about as much sense as I supposed that precious Brown of yours has. I’m glad he lost his money.” “Go slow,” yelled the delighted Ponsonby, who doesn’t often have a chance to sell his wife, “go slow! By George, Samantha, Brown beat!” And Mrs. Ponsonby stared and said he must think she was as big a fool as Brown. “No,” said he, hastily correcting himself, “no, that wasn’t just the way of it, the barrel beat, that’s it! The barrel beat; Brown led, did, for a fact, by Jove.” And Mrs. Ponsonby scornfully told him to go out to the woodshed and see if he could find any sticks that would go into the kitchen stove--she couldn’t. And Ponsonby confidentially told the gentleman who saws his wood an inch and a half too long for every stove in the house that you might as well tell a joke to a sawbuck as to his wife, for she hadn’t as much conception of genuine humor as a cow.

* * * * *

ONE bright May morning, when the building season was at its busiest, a careless mason dropped a half brick from the second story of a building out on Jefferson Street, on which he was at work. Leaning over the wall and glancing downward, he discovered a respectable citizen with his silk hat scrunched over his eyes and ears, rising from a recumbent posture. The mason, in tones of some apprehension, asked: “Did that brick hit any one down there?” The citizen, with great difficulty extricating himself from the glove-fitting extinguisher, replied, with considerable wrath: “Yes, sir, it did; it hit me.” “That’s right,” exclaimed the mason, in tones of undisguised admiration. “Noble man! I would rather have wasted a thousand bricks than had you tell me a lie about it.”

* * * * *

THE papers in this country are quite generally publishing the following _mot_ of Talleyrand’s, which is read with the greatest enjoyment by all classes of newspaper readers:

It is said that the notorious M. De Manbreuil, whose name of Marquis d’Orvault came so scandalously before the public a few years past, proposed to have Napoleon assassinated, and that the Abbe de Prade was in favor of the scheme, and discussed its execution with Talleyrand, and that the following words passed:

“Combien vous faut-il?”

“Dix millions.”

“Dix millions?” said Talleyrand, “mais ce n’est rein pour debarrasser la France d’un el fileau.”

This is pretty good, but it reminds us of a much better one, though it may be somewhat old, which was related to us by Rev. Jasper C. Romilly, formerly of this city, about himself. Mr. Romilly, whose distinguishing personal characteristic was an immense black beard, was for some years a missionary at Ugobogo, in Farther India, and on one occasion he dined with the Bugaboo of that province. When the wine and walnuts were brought in the Bugaboo said:

“Marcharikai hoi-to-po ke-tee nomkidom?”

“Jabbero pompety doodle de wonk klonk kobberee jam,” replied Mr. Romilly.

“Yowk?” exclaimed the potentate, “chickero boobery hong dong choi-ke-ree yang ste’ boi.”

This was, indeed, too good to keep.

* * * * *

WOMAN is a natural traveler. It is a study to see her start off on a trip by herself. She comes down to the depot in an express wagon three hours before train time. She insists on sitting on her trunk, out on the platform, to keep it from being stolen. She picks up her reticule, fan, parasol, lunch basket, small pot with a house plant in it, shawl, paper bag of candy, bouquet (she never travels without one), small tumbler and extra veil, and chases hysterically after every switch engine that goes by, under the impression that it is her train. Her voice trembles as she presents herself at the restaurant and tries to buy a ticket, and she knocks with the handle of her parasol on the door of the old disused tool-house in vain hopes that the baggage man will come out and check her trunk. She asks every body in the depot and on the platform when her train will start, and where it will stand, and, looking straight at the great clock, asks: “What time is it now?” She sees, with terror, the baggage man shy her trunk into a car where two men are smoking, instead of locking it up by itself in a large strong, brown car with “Bad order, shops,” chalked on the side, which she has long ago determined to be the baggage car as the only safe one in sight. Although the first at the depot, she is the last to get her ticket; and once on the cars, she sits, to the end of her journey, in an agony of apprehension that she has got on the wrong train and will be landed at some strange station, put in a close carriage, drugged, and murdered, and to every last male passenger who walks down the aisle she stands up and presents her ticket, which she invariably carries in her hand. She finally recognizes her waiting friends on the platform, leaves the car in a burst of gratitude, and the train is ten miles away before she remembers that her reticule, fan, parasol, lunch basket, verbena, shawl, candy, tumbler, veil and bouquet, are on the car seat where she left them, or at the depot in Peoria, for the life of her she can’t tell which.

* * * * *

HOW often a little careless action, a thoughtless word, a restless gesture, brings a flood of thoughts surging into the soul, that almost tear away the veil of mystery that hangs between to-day and to-morrow, and give us vague and hasty glimpses into the dark uncertain future. When you see a man come out of a drug store, for instance, with a “prescription carefully compounded,” in his hand, and dash away at break-neck speed, and then see the pharmacist come to the door carrying an uncorked bottle, and smell at it earnestly with one nostril, gaze anxiously down the street after the man, smell at it long and intensely with the other nostril, stare wildly up the street after the man, and then sniff at it once or twice with both nostrils, read the prescription over, and retire into the medicine shop with a gloomy brow and sad shakes of the head, how many things you begin to think about then, as it might be.

* * * * *

“MY son,” said a pious father out on South Hill to his hopeful son, “you did not saw any wood for the kitchen stove yesterday, as I told you to, you left the back gate open and let the cow get out, you cut off eighteen feet from the clothes-line to make a lasso, you stoned Mr. Robinson’s pet dog and lamed it, you put a hard-shell turtle in the hired girl’s bed, you tied a strange dog to Mr. Jacobson’s door-bell, you painted red and green stripes on the legs of old Mrs. Polaby’s white pony, and hung your sister’s bustle out in the front window. Now, what am I--what can I do to you for such conduct?” “Are all the counties heard from?” asked the candidate. The father replied sternly, “No trifling, sir; no, I have yet several reports to receive from others of the neighbors.” “Then,” replied the boy, “you will not be justified in proceeding to extreme measures until the official count is in.” Shortly afterward the election was thrown into the house, and before half the votes were canvassed, it was evident, from the peculiar intonation of the applause, that the boy was badly beaten.

* * * * *

PASSING by one of the city schools one day we listened to the scholars singing, “Oh how I love my teacher dear.” There was one boy, with a voice like a tornado, who was so enthusiastic that he emphasized every other word and roared, “Oh _how_ I _love_ my _teach_-er _dear_,” with a vim that left no possible doubt of his affection. Ten minutes afterward that boy had been stood up on the floor for putting shoemaker’s wax on his teacher’s chair, got three demerit marks for drawing a picture of her with red chalk on the back of an atlas, been well shaken for putting a bent pin in another boy’s chair, scolded for whistling out loud, sentenced to stay after school for drawing ink mustaches on his face and blacking the end of another boy’s nose, and soundly whipped for slapping three hundred and thirty-nine spit balls up against the ceiling, and throwing one big one into a girl’s ear. You can’t believe half a boy says when he sings.

* * * * *

“WHO dem, Cassius?” a visiting freedman from Keokuk asked a friend the other day, as a Masonic lodge, in funeral procession, passed by.

“Dey’s de Free and Expected Masons.”

“’Mazin’ what?”

“Why, mason nuffin, jest on’y Masons.”

“Sho! How long dey bin free?”

“Oh, gory, long time. Spects ever since de mancipation proclamation, anyhow. Some on ’em was free before den.”

“Dat so? Went off to Canada, mos’ likely?”

“Spect so.”

“Who’s done expectin’ of ’em?”

“Nobody; jest expectin’ demselves. Dey’s on’y jest Free and Expected Masons, dat’s all.”

“Sho! Well, I’d jest like to know what dar is ’mazin’ about ’em an’ I’d done be satisfied.”

* * * * *

OH, the artless prattle of an innocent childhood! How the sweet music of their hearts and voices calms the wild yearnings of the sorrow-crowned years of maturity. At a happy home in Burlington the other evening, where the family was gathered around the tea-table entertaining unexpected guests, the fond mother said to the youngest darling, “Weedie, darling; be careful; you mustn’t spill the berries on the table-cloth.” “’Taint a table-cloth,” promptly responded darling, “it’s a sheet.” And late at night, when the company had gone away, and that sweet child was standing with its head nearly where its feet ought to be, catching with its tear-blinded eyes occasional glimpses of a fleeting slipper that fluttered in the air in eccentric gyrations, one could see how early in the stormy years of this brief life, one may begin to suffer for the truth.

* * * * *

WHEN you see a young man sitting in a parlor, with the ugliest six year old boy that ever frightened himself in the mirror clambering over his knees, jerking his white tie out of knot, mussing his white vest, kicking his shins, feeling in all his pockets for nickles, bombarding him from time to time with various bits of light furniture and _bijouterie_, calling him names at the top of his fiendish lungs and yelling incessantly for him to come out in the yard and play, while the unresisting victim smiles all the time like the cover of a comic almanac, you may safely bet--although there isn’t a sign of a girl apparent in a radius of 10,000 miles--you can bet your bottom dollar that howling boy has a sister who is primping in a room not twenty feet away, and that the young man doesn’t come there just for the fun of playing with her brother.

* * * * *

IT was at the sociable. Young Mr. Sophthed, who reads poetry oh, _so_ divinely, and is oh, _so_ nice, stepped on her dress as she was hurrying across the room. K-r-r-rt! R’p! R’p! how it tore and jerked, and how Mr. Sophthed looked as though he would die. “Oh, dear, no, Mr. Sophthed,” she sweetly said, smiling till she looked like a seraph who had got down here by mistake, “it’s of no consequence, I assure you, it doesn’t make a particle of difference, at all.” Just twenty-five minutes later, her husband, helping her into the street car, mussed her ruffle. “Goodness gracious me!” she snapped out, “go way and let me alone; you’ll tear me to pieces if you keep on.” And she flopped down on the seat so hard that everything rattled, and the frightened driver, ejaculating, “There goes that brake chain again,” crawled under the car with his lantern to see how badly it had given way.

* * * * *

ART has its votaries even amid the untaught children of the wilderness. A few days ago a savage Indian painted his own face, went into an emigrant wagon that was sketched, by himself, out on the prairie after dark, and drew a woman from under the canvas and sculptor.

* * * * *

MRS. J. C. MCWHELTER, who lives out on Ninth Street, worked three weeks building a rookery out of cracked geodes, and threw the whole pile away in fifteen minutes yesterday afternoon, bombarding a neighbor who said her baby’s hair was red enough to heat its catnip tea on.

* * * * *

AN enraptured Burlington lover, hearing his sweetheart sigh dejectedly the other evening, rapturously administered a quartette of kisses and exclaimed, “You’re mine, now, in spite of fate!” “And why?” she asked. “Because,” he said, “four of a kind beats ace high.” But she believes to this day that he played a cold deck on her.

* * * * *

“ALL flesh is grass,” as the reaping machine said when it chawed up the harvest hand.

* * * * *

A MAN may carry a load of guilt concealed in his tortured soul for years, and hide it with a veneering of hollow, heartless, deceitful smiles, but it doesn’t take five minutes for the thoughtless world to observe and understand the one-shouldered gait of a man whose larboard suspender button has parted.

* * * * *

THE other day a public reader, while entertaining an audience with a masterly rendition of an extract from “Macbeth,” dropped his false teeth out, but he went right on with the soliloquy, “Ig gish a daggag ash I see befog me? Cug, leg me glug ghee!” And then the audience got up and howled and threw all the chairs out of the window and sent out for somebody to come in and hold them while they hollered.

* * * * *

A SOUTH HILL man complained to old Dibbs, the other day, that his house was infested with chimney swallows, but old Dibbs says he is ready to bet fifty dollars that the man swallows twice as much as the chimney does.

* * * * *

A YOUNG native poet, who is writing a “song of olden Rome,” asks us to give him a rhyme for Romulus. A dozen, if he wants them:

“If o’er that wall you leap, oh dunce, The lightning stroke would harm you less” But Remus laughed and leaped; at once His head was punched by Romulus.

* * * * *

A FELLOW never appreciates the tender beauty of a sister’s love half so much as when he makes her get out of the big rocking chair, and let him have the morning paper, while she goes off and leans up against the end of the bureau and feeds her starving intellect on the household receipts at the back of Jayne’s family almanac. A brother’s love is like pure gold. It’s dreadfully hard to find, and when you find it, it’s very apt to be pyrites.

* * * * *

“DID you never,” asked a transcendental young lady just three weeks from Vassar, of the West Hill young man, “Did you never feel a vague, unrestful yearning after the beyond? a wild, strange, impulsive longing and reaching out after the unattainable?” And the West Hill man said he often had, last Summer, at such times as he was trying to scratch a square inch full of hives, right between his shoulder blades, and just out of reach of any thing.

* * * * *

A BENEVOLENT clergyman recently helped a profane Burlington inebriate out of the gutter, and gently rebuking him reminded him that the “wages of sin is death.” “I know ’t,” replied the erring one, “but I’ve worked so much over time, and the shop is so far in arrears to me that I’ll never get half that’s comin’ to me any how.” And he went off to work right along on the same old job.

* * * * *

THE tramp has his revenge on society after all. If they refuse his request for a square meal at any house, he lurks around the vicinity with threatening glances until nightfall, when he skulks rapidly away with the cheering, comforting knowledge that while he is snoring all the hours of that long Summer night away under a haystack, every being in that house will sit bolt upright in bed all night, frightened by the wind, terrified by the rustling of the leaves, scared into fits when even the dog barks, and fairly bounced out of bed every time the clock strikes, while a nightmare of burglarious tramps fills every drowsy moment with awakening terrors. No wonder that tramps always look happy and contented.

* * * * *

OLD Mr. Balbriggan is very much pleased with a gentleman whom he has engaged to saw wood. “When he piles the wood,” said old Balbriggan to his friend, “if one stick projects beyond the others, he pounds it in with the ax.” “He’s a slouch,” replied Bifelstone, “you should see my wood sawyer. When he gets the wood all piled he takes off the rough projecting ends with a hand saw.” “He couldn’t pile wood for me,” broke in old Mr. Pilkinghorn, “my sawyer piles the wood carefully, then goes over the ends with a jack plane, sand-papers them down and puts on a coat of varnish before he ever thinks of asking for his pay.” And then they all went in after a big drink before Throckmorton could tell how his wood sawyer silver-plated all the ends of the wood and nailed a handle on every stick to pick it up by. Because, you see, Throckmorton is such a liar, and they all know it.

* * * * *

A WEST HILL minister picked up a frozen wasp on the sidewalk, and with a view to advancing the interests of science, he carried it in the house and held it by the tail while he warmed its ears over a lamp chimney. His object was to see if wasps froze to death, or merely lay dormant during the Winter. He is of the opinion that they merely lie dormant, and the dormantest kind at that, and when they revive, he says, the tail thaws out first, for while this one’s head, right over the lamp, was so stiff and cold it could not wink, its probe worked with such inconceivable rapidity that the minister couldn’t gasp fast enough to keep up with it. He threw the vicious thing down the lamp chimney, and said he didn’t want to have any more truck with a dormant wasp, at which his wife burst into tears and asked how he, a minister of the gospel, could use such language, right before the children, too.

* * * * *

WHEN a man accustoms himself to owning a dog, and turning around at every corner to look up and down street for him, and whistle him out of stairways, or yell at him to stop his fooling with other dogs and come along, or make dashes into a crowd of earnest and excited dogs who are holding a caucus and have each other by the ear, and especially his dog--that man is a slave to a habit that he will never break. It will cling to him, we believe, after he gets to heaven, for most men who love dogs are pretty sure of going to heaven. We once saw an old settler standing at the Barrett House corner, peering up and down street, and stooping down to look under the hacks, and “wondering where he could be,” and whistling and growing impatient, and scolding and calling, “Hyuh, Turk! yuh! yuh! yuh!” until every dog in Burlington was sitting around the Barrett House corner, patiently pounding the snow with his tail and mentally resolving to lay for Turk if he ever came. Presently a young man came along and, greeting the anxious dog hunter as his “Father,” asked what he was waiting there for? The old settler said he had lost Turk somewhere right around there, and couldn’t see hide nor hair of him, and couldn’t imagine where he had gone to. “Turk!” roared his dutiful son, “Turk! Suffering Moses! And him dead eight years ago!” And he hustled the old man away before he could begin to whistle up any more ghosts.

* * * * *

THE balmy breath of Spring is so entwined with the fragrance of new onions that a man has to grip his nose with a spring clothes-pin every time he stoops to pluck a violet.

* * * * *

A GIFTED contributor sends us a poem beginning “Open the doors to the children.” You’d better, if you don’t want all the paint kicked off the panels.

* * * * *

THERE is nothing that tends to destroy popular sympathy for the working classes so much as the habit a bricklayer has of dropping bits of mortar from the top of a five-story wall into the eye of the wondering man who stands under the lofty scaffolding and looks up.

* * * * *

A PORCELAIN-LINED kettle in a berry-stricken neighborhood is the nearest approach to perpetual motion that has yet been realized. Its incessant motion is only rivaled by the slow, steady growth of the sugar bill.

* * * * *

ONE of the discoveries made by the latest arctic explorers is that the length of the polar night is one hundred and forty-two days. What a heavenly place that would be in which to tell a man with a bill to call around day after to-morrow and get his money.

* * * * *

A FASHION journal says “white velvet dresses give a roundness to the figure.” They give an awful lankness to the figures on a hundred dollar bill.

* * * * *

_Multum in parvo_: Iowa tramp, to lady of the house: “Please, missus, won’t you give me something to drink? I’m so hungry I don’t know where I’ll stay to-night.”

* * * * *

AN eminent New York jurist, who has retired from the bench, always shakes hands with his friends by turning around and passing his right hand behind his back. It is supposed the peculiar habit was contracted during his active professional life.

* * * * *

CARDS of invitation in Utah, issued by a young lady and her mother, always present the compliments of “Miss Smith and the Mrs. Smiths.”

* * * * *

WE are told by a Russian traveler that the summit of Mt. Hood is a single sharp peak of lava. White or Balaclava?

* * * * *

A SCIENTIFIC gentleman sends us an elaborate treatise on “the healthiness of lemons.” They may be dreadfully healthy, but they are terribly soured in their dispositions.

* * * * *

A RISING young tenor of Burlington has a neck eight inches long, and it gives him an immense power over his voice; enables him to throat a long ways. (Tra, la, la!)

* * * * *

THE whale is the sulkiest of all fishes. He is the worst pouter in the business.

* * * * *

ABOUT the oldest little game of draw we know of was played when Joshua razed Jericho, and the fellows of the city wished they hadn’t stayed in.

* * * * *

YOUR landlord is probably the finest example of filial affection and duty you ever met. He is unremitting in his attention to and care of his pay rents.

* * * * *

“WAS it her brother?” is the title of a new novel. We think not. It is our impression that the large gentlemen in a plaid coat, who was kicking him down stairs and calling for the dog, was her brother.

* * * * *

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S strongest hold upon the American people is the fact that he never wore a box coat and a plug hat.

* * * * *

HISTORY says, “Cæsar had his Brutus.” But somehow or other we always had the impression that Brutus rather had Cæsar.

* * * * *

BY some wicked and unpardonable error, the case of the photographs of editors on exhibition at the Centennial got misplaced, and was exhibited in a frame labeled “Native woods of the United States.”

* * * * *

NATURE’S effort to maintain equilibrium is never better set forth than in the instinctive struggles of a man with one suspender to carry both shoulders even.

* * * * *

ON account of the Turco-Russian war and the failure of the American cabbage crop last year, nearly all the genuine imported Turkish tobacco used in this country this Summer will have to be made out of plaintain weed.

* * * * *

THE day after Christmas, father and mother no longer come sneaking in at the back door with mysterious looking bundles. No, indeedy. Mother is gliding around with the expression of a Christian martyr with the toothache, because she didn’t get what she expected, and father is sitting around, holding his breath till the bills come in.

* * * * *

YOU can utilize your cake of maple sugar, if you find there is too much sand in it to make molasses of, by putting it in a neat frame of card-board, or some kind of fancy work, in bright colors, and hanging it up against the wall to light matches on. It never wears out.

* * * * *

FLIES are made for some good and useful purpose after all. If it wasn’t for the busy flies, men with their never dying souls to save and lots of work to do, would lie down after dinner and sleep till six o’clock every day.

* * * * *

A NASHVILLE bank robber burrowed under a street for five days, and at length came up in the coal vault of a beer saloon, three doors away from the bank, and bit himself in eleven places with the most uncompromising dog he ever tried to conciliate. The next time he attempts any mining operations he will take a practical engineer along.

* * * * *

IT was intensely hot in Salt Lake City last Summer, and one night about 1,820 linear feet of prickly heat broke out on the infant backs in Brigham Young’s nursery. The eruption hasn’t been equaled since Mt. Vesuvius cooled off.

* * * * *

IT is in the merry month of Spring that a tree peddler comes around and talks you to death, and sells you a plum tree that bears fruit so bitter that it poisons every curculio that tastes it, and some cherry trees that send up one hundred and fifty sprouts to the square inch and will lift the house off its foundations in two years’ growth, and some apple trees that neither sprout, blossom, nor bear fruit, and some blackberry bushes that spread all over a ten-acre lot the first season, and some gooseberry bushes that have thorns on a foot long, and never have anything else, and some peach trees that break out in bloom from the ground to the tip of the topmost branch five days after they are put in the ground and die as dead as a flint the sixth day, and a climbing rose tree that turns out to be wild ivy and poisons every soul about the house before the Summer is over.

* * * * *

WHEN the late Governor of the Persian province of Fars retired from office, the Government officials put him in the stocks and pounded the soles of his feet until he disgorged $300,000 of crooked salary. If the Government of the United States would adopt that system, five hundred million pairs of crutches would carry the population of the republic to and from its daily labor. And if we knew where we could get hold of a man who would give down like the late worthy Governor of Fars, we would gather him by the ankles, stand him on his head, and welt the soles of his feet until his backbone went through the top of his head and stuck nine inches in the ground.

* * * * *

THERE is a junior in the Burlington high school who, when his father cuffs his scholastic ears for leaving the wheelbarrow standing athwart the front gate, can go out to the woodshed and swear in French, grumble in German, threaten to run away and be a pirate in good classic Greek, and blubber in honest United States.

* * * * *

ONE day last Winter a young lady broke through the ice of a deep skating pond near Toronto, and a young man rescued her at the risk of his own life. As the half drowned girl was recovering consciousness, her agonized father arrived on the spot. Taking one of her cold, white hands in one of his own, he reached out the other for the hand of her rescuer, but the young man, realizing his danger, with one frightened glance broke for the woods, and was soon lost to view. He has not been heard of since, and it is supposed that he is traveling in the United States under the false and hollow name of Smith.

* * * * *

WE haven’t given the subject enough study to speak very confidently upon it, but we rather believe, when the end of the world comes, and the last trump calls all mankind together, that the man who died with rheumatism will lie still a long time, and will feel the small of his back, and rub his knees slowly and thoughtfully a great many times, before he finally groans and makes up his mind to get up. And, as like as not, by the time he gets on his feet everybody else will be gone.

* * * * *

MAN--What power of nature has he not subdued? What climate has he not trodden under foot? What arctic rigor and tropical heat, what polar snows and equatorial sunstrokes has he not laughed to scorn? He has tamed the elements, he has made the ocean his highway, he has made fire and water, earth and air, his servants, and bent beneath his all-subduing yoke even the wild lightnings to be his messenger. And yet he can not, arching himself upon the back of his head and on his heels, scoop with his eager palm, cracker crumbs from the irritating sheet with a sufficient degree of success to insure himself a good night’s sleep. He can not, he can not--oh, might of the giant, it kaint be did!

* * * * *

A WOMAN will take the smallest drawer in a bureau for her own private use, and will pack away in it bright bits of boxes, of all shades and sizes, dainty fragments of ribbon, and scraps of lace, foamy ruffles, velvet things for the neck, bundles of old love-letters, pieces of jewelry, handkerchiefs, fans, things that no man knows the name of, all sorts of fresh-looking, bright little traps that you couldn’t catalogue in a column, and any hour of the day or night she can go to that drawer and pick up any article she wants without disturbing any thing else. Whereas a man, having the biggest, deepest and widest drawer assigned to him, will chuck into it three socks, a collar-box, an old necktie, two handkerchiefs, a pipe and a pair of suspenders, and to save his soul he can’t shut that drawer without leaving more ends of things sticking out than there are things in it, and it always looks as though it had been packed with a hydraulic press.

* * * * *

ONE day a young man of respectable appearance attracted considerable attention on Third Street, while crossing over to the Barrett House. He stopped in the middle of the street and yelled, and danced up and down on one leg, while he held the other out and kicked, like the can-can lady on the bulletin boards. The bystanders thought he was crazy, and threw stones and mud at him, and knocked him down and choked him, and held him still, while he never ceased to shriek, “Snake up my leg! Snake up my leg!” Then they reached up and pulled a small roll of bills out of his trousers leg, and let him up, when he raised his hands to heaven and swore he would never carry money in a hip pocket again, hole or no hole.

* * * * *

IT was on a bright April morning that Mr. Alanson Bodley, who lives out on Summer Street, stepped out of the house in a tender frame of mind, singing softly to himself, “Oh had I the wings of a dove, I’d fly, Away from----” Just then the hired girl threw the bed-room carpet out of the window, and as its dusty folds enveloped Mr. Bodley, and threw his struggling form down stairs, he was heard to exclaim in muffled tones, “If I get out of this, if I don’t cut the raw heart out of the bloody-minded assassin that slung that carpet, strike me dead!” Thus, too often, the tenderer influences that bring into life and being our higher and noble emotions and transcendental longings, are warped and distorted by the stern realities of life, like a wet boot behind the kitchen stove.

* * * * *

THEY had the awfulest time up at Jerome Cavendish’s house, on West Hill, one evening, and Mrs. Cavendish went into hysterics, and Miss Cavendish fainted, and young George Cavendish grabbed his hat and ran out of the house, and old Cavendish raved and ramped around like a crazy man, all just because they had waffles for tea, and Miss Cavendish found a--“oh! _ow! ow!!_ OO-OO-OO!!! EE-E-E-E!!!” hard-baked beetle in a waffle. Oh, it was terrible! It was awful! It was too awful! Too awful! Two waffle!

* * * * *

ONE day last Spring a sweet-faced woman, with a smile like an angel and a voice softer and sweeter than the sound of flutes upon the water, was walking up Fifth Street. She was walking very slowly, enjoying the cool, soft air, and the delicious shade of those maple trees just below Division Street. Her languid motions were the perfection of grace, and she was the admiration of every pair of eyes on the street, when suddenly she threw her parasol over the steeple of the church, screamed till she rattled the windows in the parsonage, jumped up as high as the fence three times, and whooped and shrieked, and wailed, and howled, and kicked until everybody thought she had suddenly become insane. But when they ran up and caught hold of her and poured water on her head and $15 bonnet, and shook her until she quit screaming and began to talk, they found that one of those green worms, about an inch long, had dropped from the maple leaves and slid down her back. And they didn’t wonder that she yelled and made a fuss about it.

* * * * *

SOME years ago a public-spirited citizen of Burlington died, and left, by his will, $175,000 to found an orphan asylum; and his sons and daughters, and nieces and nephews, and cousins, and brothers and sisters, and all his wife’s relations, contested the will, and fought and wrangled and called each other names, and told hard stories about each other, and proved up wonderful claims, and hired lawyers by the acre, and kept the fight up manfully until quite lately, when it transpired that the man only had $35 in the whole wide world when he died, and owed that to his grocer, and was in debt about $300 beside, and that the coffin he was buried in hadn’t been paid for yet. And it was sad to see those claimants standing around the streets with gripsacks in their hands trying to get out of town, with a lawyer and a capias lurking behind every corner.

* * * * *

A PAIR of deaf mutes were married in Monroe, Georgia, three years ago, and now it is more fun than a circus to see them quarrel and make faces at each other with their fingers.

* * * * *

IT IS a remarkable coincidence, and shows the beneficent watchcare which a kind Providence exercises over mankind, that the advertisements of new and infallible cholera mixtures should appear in the city papers just about the time watermelons come in.

* * * * *

WHEN a man, coming down to breakfast half awake, with his uncertain feet shod in a pair of slip-shod slippers, steps on a spool on the first step, he is generally wide-awake enough by the time he tries to break the last step to have a very vivid and not entirely incorrect idea of the power and indestructible force generated by the Keely motor. But that isn’t what he talks about when he goes into the breakfast room and the folks ask him what made such a noise in the hall?

* * * * *

AT a charity ball in New York one lady wore diamonds valued at $85,000, and another belle wore a $23,000 dress, and so all the way down to the poor people, whose clothes didn’t cost more than $1,800. The net proceeds of the ball, which were to be devoted to charitable purposes, amounted to $11.25, which the door-keeper and ticket-seller spent for hot drinks.

* * * * *

TWO young ladies of Tama County have finished a quilt containing 10,696 pieces, and the local paper proudly asks if anybody in Iowa can beat that? We haven’t anything in Burlington like that in the quilt line, but Caspar Cruger, up on Eighth Street, fell down the plank walk steps leading down to Valley Street, one morning, and ran 10,697 pine slivers into his back and legs, and a Tama man than he was when he got up you never saw.

* * * * *

ANOTHER “wild boy” has made his startling and erratic appearance in Texas, but since the fact has become generally known that the first time a stranger takes a drink of Texas whisky he goes out on the prairie and looks for a clean place to have a fit, public confidence in Texas “wild boys” has been sadly shaken.

* * * * *

THE Massachusetts papers are discussing the question, “May Cousins Marry?” We should hope so. We don’t see why a cousin hasn’t as good a right to marry as a brother or an uncle or a son or sister. They all get used to cousin’ after they marry, anyhow.

* * * * *

ABDEL MOULK KAHN, the eldest son of the Emir of Bokhara, has made a pilgrimage to Mecca, in accordance with the Mohammedan custom. In this country it is customary for the Moulk Kahns to Mecca pilgrimage to the nearest river just before milking time.

* * * * *

A BURLINGTON man, who is a monomaniac on the subject of roller skates, and who spent ninety-two days in the rink during the past season, and got more falls than he has hairs on his head, and got himself stuck so full of slivers that he wears through his clothes like a nutmeg grater, calls himself a “hard rinker,” and consequently he is haunted by traveling agents of temperance societies.

* * * * *

JOHN THOMPSON, of Muscatine, ran away from home with a circus three years ago, and now he is posted on the bill boards of his native town as “Giovanni Tiompeonatti, the Inimitable and Unapproachable Grand Double Flying Trapeze and Philo Protean Prestiditateurean Athleto-Acrobat.” Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

* * * * *

STEEL ropes are being introduced into the British navy in place of the clumsy hemp hawsers. They had better enlist a few good government contractors from America. They’ll steal ropes, swabs, tar buckets, marlin-spikes, capstan bars, or anything else that isn’t nailed down and under guard.

* * * * *

THE French know how to cook an egg three hundred and sixty-five different ways, and yet, if it is a little bilious to begin with, the strongest combination of all these ways won’t make a very eggy egg of it.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.