gentleman referred to has, by virtue of his official position, the run of the Bar.

CONDENSED CONGRESS.

SENATE.

MR. MORRILL expressed his views upon what he is pleased, for MORRILL is mirthful in his heavy way, to designate the reduction of taxes. He said that we had been for some time in a state of peace, and our expenses were not so large as they had been. Therefore he thought we might leave direct taxation alone. To be sure he was not prepared to suggest any specific reductions in direct taxation. But, doubtless, they would be made some day or other. In the meantime let us pile on the tariff. This was his notion of reducing taxation. Let the importers and the consumers who don't like it—

Learn how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong.

Then the Senate betook itself to considering an appropriation for educating the colored infant. Mr. WILSON strongly approved it, not only on account of the colored infant, for whose education he did not in a general way feel any particular solicitude, inasmuch as the less educated he was, the likelier he would be to give his voice and vote to him, (Mr. WILSON,) and his like; but also because the appropriation would provide for a number of the supernumerary female school-teachers of Massachusetts, who had become a great trial to him, and particularly to his colleague, Mr. SUMNER.

Mr. SUMNER said "that's school," and explained that he believed he was venerated by the women of Massachusetts, but that their reverence for him was too great to allow them to approach him with importunities. Nevertheless, he was in favor of the bill, as tending to break down the accursed spirit of caste, and to disseminate throughout the South the three or more R's which he had so often had the honor of reverberating throughout the Senate.

Mr. YATES approved of the bill. It was his general principle to vote for any thing that looked to the disbursement of money. He was particularly in favor of this measure, because he wanted an uniform education for every body. He didn't want any body else to know more than himself, and he didn't want to know more than any body else. (Voices—You don't.) Take spelling. There was only one correct method of spelling—the one that he pursued. And yet he had never found any other person who agreed with him in it. Evidently, this was not right. He demanded that the children of the country should be taught to spell on proper principles, so that his works might be intelligible to posterity, as they were not to his contemporaries.

Of course Mr. SUMNER seized the occasion to quote crowds of authorities on education, which debilitated the Senate to a dissolution.

HOUSE.

Mr. LYNCH wanted to revive American commerce in behalf of the ship-builders of Maine. If he were a judge, as a celebrated namesake of his once was, he would do it by hanging a majority of members of the House he had the honor of addressing. In default of that he wanted them to legislate sensibly upon it.

Of course nobody paid any attention to the suggestion. The House did itself credit by refusing one land-grab, out of a thousand or so submitted.

Mr. BUTLER actually produced again his bill to annex San Domingo, and refused to be comforted, because every body laughed.

Then came up the Tariff. COVODE said he supposed it would be admitted that he had as little regard for the right and wrong of the thing as any body. But this thing had really gone so far that any man with any regard for his re-election must protest. Nobody but SCHENCK and KELLEY cared about the tariff. Every body cared about the taxes.

SCHENCK could not regard COVODE with any other sentiment than disgust. He wanted a duty upon foreign oysters. The oyster of Long Island and the oyster of New-Jersey ought not to be trodden down by the pauper oysters of Europe.

OUR PORTFOLIO.

Personal advertisements having reference to the matrimonial exigencies of divers widows, old maids, and bachelors, are not without their influence upon the sympathies of the age. Particular attention has been recently directed toward an announcement made in a Cleveland paper to the effect that "Two widow ladies, strangers in Cleveland, wish to form the acquaintance of a limited number of gentlemen with a view to happy results. Please address in confidence,—."

One involuntarily regrets that a prospect thus bounded by an horizon of "happy results" should have been confined to a "limited number of gentlemen".

There is nothing so calculated to impair the usefulness of what purports to be a purely benevolent enterprise, as its selfishness. If a widow, or any number of widows, really possess the means of realizing "happy results" with a "limited number of gentlemen," they should either remove the limitation themselves, or make known the secret to those who would be less sparing of the joys which it is capable of communicating. A quack who peddles a valuable remedy upon which he may have stumbled, and yet refuses to disclose its ingredients for the benefit of the whole medical fraternity, violates the esprit du corps of the profession, and is by general consent deemed a fit person to be kicked out of it. Therefore, if any widows or single ladies in Cleveland have knowledge of any "happy results" which they advertise to share with a limited number of gentlemen, we shall deem them unworthy of their sex, unless they explain the process by which these results are attained, for the benefit of those who are fast verging toward the autumnal stage of maidenhood.

It may well be doubted whether the thought ever occurred to ADAM that one day or other a hen would be charged with the care and custody of a brood of goslings. The pastimes of Eden were perhaps not favorable to vaticinations in the line of Natural History, but in the progress of the world since those most primitive times, men have come to contemplate the spectacle of that familiar barn-yard fowl made wretched by the aquatic propensities of her supposed offspring, without a particle of astonishment. The wicked and unfeeling even go so far as to seek amusement in her misery. Her "ducklings" and other symptoms of maternal agony at beholding the feathered darlings tempting the dangers of a neighboring duck-pond, do not move their stony breasts. On the contrary, they decidedly relish that sort of thing, and greet with positive hilarity the efforts of some sympathizing rooster to cheer her. Fie, upon such natures! If they must have an outlet for their ribaldry, let them take PUNCHINELLO'S advice and select such instances as that recently furnished in Sacramento, where a hen took charge of a nest of kittens, and resolutely maintained it against the parent cat. Here the case was different. The hen had become a trespasser. She had no business with kittens. There was no hypothesis by which she could claim them as her own. Kittens are not hereditary in the family of fowls, and she knew it. It was an usurpation without any pretext of justification. What would become of us if such a precedent could be extended to the genus Mammalia? Hundreds of rapacious old maids would be seizing all sorts and all sizes of babies from agonized mothers, and asserting for themselves the hallowed duties of maternity. Our infant days would have been days of ceaseless motion. We should have been shuttle-cocked from maiden to mother and from mother to maiden after a fashion calculated to defeat the wise purposes of ipecac and paregoric, and to frighten our natural curls into a state of painful perpendicularity. The mere presentment of such a possibility, carries its refutation, and puts the aggressions of this Sacramento hen in the category of outrages which all society is banded to suppress. If you must laugh, O generation of scoffers, make your jokes and gibes the instrument of protecting the altars of all such feline households as may be thus assailed.

Flag and Rag.

What is the difference between a railroad danger signal and a lost pocket-handkerchief?

The one is a red flag, the other is a fled rag.

SOCIAL SCIENCE.

Lecturer. "THERE IS A CUMULATIVE APPROXIMATIVENESS, SO TO SPEAK, A PERIOD WHEN THE RECALCITRANT CORPUSCLES BEGIN TO "—

Stenographer. "CON-FOUND THE FELLOW! I KNEW HE'D BREAK MY PENCIL WITH HIS INFERNAL JAW-SMASHERS!"

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE.

[BY ATLANTIC CABLE.]

ROME.

Being uneasy about our agent's course at the Vatican, I have come over to Rome to see about it. He is an Irishman, with a little of Father TOM in him, and has got into a "controversy" with his Holiness about infallibility. Our African bishop (otherwise PHELIM BURKE) insists that PUNCHINELLO is infallible! The Pope says this is ridiculous! Father PHELIM replies that "there are two that can play that same game." I found them in the midst of this when ANTONELLI ushered me into the Papal presence. PIUS was up on his feet, talking Latin like a crack student of the Propaganda. PHELIM had his sleeves rolled up. ANTONELLI, with a "Pax vobiscum" got the two contending powers quieted down; and, after a proper salutation from me, we began our talk. His Holiness is not much on English. Says he, "I speak vat-I-can English." Had he said non possumus to it, it would have been better. However, PHELIM translated him; so we got on.

"Your Holiness enjoys, I hope, a good constitution?"

"The constitutio de fide is, indeed, very good. Catholics must every where subscribe to it."

"Dr. DÕLLINGER, I trust, don't disturb your appetite?" "Anathema maranatha!" which means (said PHELIM,) "Oh no, I never mention him." Whereupon PHELIM, who had breakfasted on gin-and-milk, began to hum that tune. I at once trod upon his toe, and he stopped.

"On the whole, what does your Holiness think of the prospect?"

"From this window, it is very fine. But I'm getting a little dim-sighted.

"Don't you see that crowd of people coming up?"

"No I don't—it's only a herd of cattle from the Campagna."

"Take my glass. There, now; don't you see, I am right?"

"Yes," and the old man crossed himself, "It is so; I was mistaken."

"Thrue for you!" gobbled out PHELIM; "we've got to make a note of that! PUNCHINELLO never made the likes of a mistake!"

"But, what's in your glass? I see strange men there. GARIBALDI, and MAZZINI, and HYACINTHE, STROSSMEYER, DÕLLINGER, DUPANLOUP, and CUMMING, all together! I see a troop of schoolmasters; a larger one of newspaper-venders; and a whole army of colporteurs, each with a bag of Bibles on his back! And, what do I see? They enter ST. PETER'S; they leave the door wide open. Did I hear it? They are singing LUTHER'S Hymn!"

The old man fell now into his seat, and I took the glass from him. "Only one of his attacks," said ANTONELLI. "He is not quite so strong as he was." "Thrue again," said PHELIM. With that sense of propriety for which your representative has over been distinguished, I took PHELIM by the arm and retired.

Poor Pius! He means well, and if we only had him for a while out West, where I came from, we might make something sensible out of him yet. But, when a man will live so far away from the Rocky Mountains as away over here, what can be expected? We can't civilize the whole world at once.

Father PHELIM, by the way, is to be proposed as the new King of Spain. His father's uncle's second cousin by the mother's side partook of a good deal of BOURBON. That's reason enough, you know especially as they only want a King LOG.

FRANCE.

Those infernal machines, so called, with—which the Emperor was supposed to be about to be blown up, turn out to have been pewter plates. Out of one of them the bottom had been cut, and the edges rolled up; and this gave rise to a terrible suspicion. Two thousand people have been arrested in consequence.

That Press Ass has been at his blunders again. He telegraphed to me that a conspiracy was afloat to enact a kind of petticoat government. He meant to tell me some gossip about Madame PATTI-CAUX. Then he wanted me to believe that the "smaller catechism" talked about at Rome was the catechizing of SMALLEY of the Tribune, concerning GUSTAVE FLOURENS. That man never will learn. PRIME.