balloon, boys!"—Macbeth.

TOURS, FIFTH WEEK Of THE REPUBLIC, 1870.

DEAR PUNCHINELLO: To all men of lofty ambition I would recommend a balloon excursion. The higher you get, the smaller and more insignificant do earthly things appear. A balloon is the best pulpit imaginable from which to preach a sermon upon the littleness of mundane realities, first—because no one can hear you, and your congregation cannot therefore be held responsible for indifference to your teaching; and second—because at that height you are fully impressed with the truth of what you say.

Aspirations of whatever kind, all longings and emotions of the "Excelsior" order, all appeals to "look aloft," come handier when you can "do" them in an aerial car.

You will pardon this philosophic digression in respect to the peculiar feelings of a man who has just been "up in a balloon." Our air-ship had been anchored in the Champ de Mars two days, waiting for a fair wind. An hour before we started, a Yorkshireman, who had evidently never seen such a creation before, annoyed me with incessant questions as to what it was. His large, wondering, stupid eyes never ceased gazing at the monster as it tugged heavily at the stake which held it. "Na' wha' maun that be?" he exclaimed, starting back as it gave a very violent jerk. I could stand it no longer, and thus broke forth:—

"See here, my good fellow, you've got plenty of cheek to be bothering me with your confounded ridiculous questions; and so I'll answer you once for all. What you see tied fast there is called a balloon, and it's only a French method of drawing Englishmen's teeth." He left me—I trust not in anger; but that was the last I saw of the Yorkshireman.

We got off, (M. GODARD and I) about four o'clock P.M., and ascended steadily till Paris, with its rim of fortifications, looked more like the crater of a volcano than anything else. I brought out my opera-glass as we moved in the direction of Versailles, and reconnoitred the situation. In a field adjoining the palace I saw an object that looked like a post driven into the ground, and capped with a large-sized clam-shell. GODARD levelled his glass and examined it. His lip curled proudly with scorn as he said:—

"That is the butcher himself, WILLIAM of Prussia. The clam-like appearance you notice is due to the baldness of his head."

I only said: "Can it be possible?" and we moved on. How my blood throbbed as we cavorted through the blue depths of heaven! I was far from feeling blue myself, and GODARD said that if anything I was green. The bearings of the remark did not strike me at the time, as a cannon-ball from the direction of Versailles whirled within twenty feet of the balloon and lifted the right flank (a military expression) of my moustache into your subscriber's eye, notwithstanding it was waxed with LOUVET'S best, warranted to keep each hair en règle, even in the worst gales. From that moment I renounced LOUVET. Following the cannon-shot came a miscellaneous assortment of small projectiles, which had the effect of creating some excitement among the atmospheric animalculae, but failed to disturb the serenity of M. GODARD or myself. When about ten miles from Blois I detected what I supposed was a large vein of chalk-pits. It was very white, and apparently motionless. My companion expressed his surprise at the difficulty I had in distinguishing objects correctly, and seemed to lose patience.

"Bigarre, you no know zat? It ees ze dirty Proosien linen vashed out, and hoong zere to dry!"

I told him in Arabic that he needn't get his back up; but he understood me not, and continued playing with the cats which we were transporting to Tours to protect the Commissary stores from the ravages of the rats that the Prussians had despatched to eat up the provisions of the garrison. Towards night I began to have a queer sensation in the stomach. It wasn't like sea-sickness, nor like the feeling produced by swinging. If a man just recovering from the effects of his first cigar were offered a bowl of hot goose-grease for supper, I suppose he would have felt as I felt. At the moment a queer twinge took me; I ejaculated: "Oh! Lord!"

"Vat ees de matter?" inquired GODARD. If the man had had any other nationality, I might have talked sense to him; but he was a Frenchman, so I said:—

"Do you love me?"

"Do I loves you?"

"Yes!" I roared frantically, "do you love me?"

"Begaire I dunno, but I zinks so."

"Then," said I, dimly discerning a chance of relief from my suffering, "throw me out as ballast."

"Oh, horrible! horrible! Mon Dieu! vat a man!"

I turned my sickly gaze upon him and saw that he was deadly pale, and that the perspiration stood out in great drops upon his forehead. The explanation was plain enough—he took me for a maniac. I would have protested and moved the previous question, but taking a small phial from his pocket he broke off the head and threw the contents in my face. Ten seconds later I was totally oblivious, and upon recovering found myself in this place, where such strange things are going on that my fingers prick to write them.

DICK TINTO.

AN EX-MONSTER.

It is a bad day for monarchs. Boston has, for several weeks, had upon Exhibition His Marine Majesty the Whale. The captive was shown for the ridiculously small sum of two shillings, and great was the gathering to gaze upon the spouter, who would have come just in time to attend the political caucuses, only he happens to be dead, and cannot spout any more, albeit his jaw is still tremendous. His defunct condition renders it unnecessary to feed him upon JONAHS, which is lucky for a good many superfluous voyagers upon the Ship of State. If the King of All the Fishes can draw such crowds at a quarter a head, what a chance is there for our friend LOUIS NAPOLEON! If he will but make an Exhibition of himself in this country, we promise him full houses, and a greater fortune than that which he has lost.

THE MICROSCOPIC MAN.

umps have a great deal to answer for. Of course we refer to phrenological bumps, from which, possibly, the powerful adjective "bumptious" is derived, it being applicable to a person whose conflicting bumps keep him continually on the rampage.

Of all such persons, the one with microscopes in his bumps for eyes is the most bumptious. He is continually detecting pernicious particles in everything that he eats and drinks. One such will seize a pepper-castor, invert it over his mashed turnips, spank it as if it were a child, and then, peering at the dark particles with which the succulent heap of vegetable matter is dusted, proceed to deliver a lecture upon the poisons that we swallow with our daily food. He sees iron-filings in the pepper. Also particles of the tail-feathers of Spanish flies. He will tell you that if you continue to use pepper like that for a long duration—say seventy or eighty years—you will have iron enough in your stomach, from the filings, to make a ten-pound dumb-bell, and blistering stuff sufficient from the Spanish fly to draw all the interest of the National Debt. If the pepper happens to belong to the Cayenne persuasion, he magnifies it into a hod of bricks. It is his hod way of accounting for it. Keep using it daily for half-a-century, says he, and see if you don't wake up some fine morning and find yourself a brick chimney stuck up on the roof of a house for bats to live in. It will be a just judgment on you; and small will be to you the consolation should some poetical friend pen an epigrammatical threnody to your memory, telling in "In Memoriam" stanzas how you "went up like a thousand of bricks."

"Beef?" says the microscopic man, probing the meat with a pencil of light that beams from his right eye (the other being closed for concentration purposes), "Beef, sir?—not a bit of the bos taurus about it, sir. Horse, donkey, mule, zebra—what you will, but not a single fibre of ox. Did you ever see the fibres of beef run in a direction due north and south, like these? If you did I should like to know it, sir. I inspected this meat raw, sir, to-day, on the butcher's stall, and the minute ova perceptible in it were those of the horse gad-fly, not the ox gad-fly, sir. Yes, begad, sir, and I'm prepared to maintain the fact upon oath, sir."

Porter and other malt liquors are favorite subjects for the analysis of the microscopic man. As you are placidly enjoying your pint of GUINNESS'S brown stout, he will look at you for minutes with a compassionate smile. Then, suddenly plunging into his favorite horror knee-deep, he will ask you if you know what becomes of all the ends of smoked-out cigars. Of course you submit that little boys pick them up and smoke them to everlasting annihilation. "Pshaw! sir," exclaims the microscopic person; "there is a man in the City of Dublin, sir—I believe he is a baronet now, but will not force that as a fact—and he made an enormous fortune by going about the streets at early dawn and picking up all the cigar-stumps he could find, and they were not few, as you may suppose, in that smokingest of cities. He used to furnish these by the ton to old GUINNESS, who used them for giving color and body to his famous 'Stout.' Body?—I should think so rather!—but only think where the body came from! Just recall to mind the filthiest gutter that ever you saw in your life, with the numerous ends of cigars that you perfectly remember having observed sweltering in it, and then take another pull at your GUINNESS, sir, and I wish you joy of it, sir!"

Once we remember to have heard the subject of the possibility of lizards snakes, frogs, and other cheerful reptiles having resided for indefinite periods in the stomachs of human subjects, discussed in the presence of the microscopic man. A lady of the party was skeptical on the subject, dwelling especially upon the impossibility of any person swallowing a reptile unawares. "Observe those water-cresses of which you have been partaking so freely, madam," said the microscopic man. "Beneath each leaf I discern ova of things that it might horrify you to enumerate in full. Suffice it to say, then, for the present, that on the leaves of this small sprig culled by me at random from the cluster, are to be detected the germs of the trigonocephalus contortrix, than which, when fully developed, no more deadly reptile wriggles upon earth. See this minute agglomeration of yellowish specks on the stalk of the cress. These are the eggs of the lacerta horrida, a lizard that within the large warts with which its epidermis is studded secretes a poison of the most virulent character. Others, too, I discern, but they are too disagreeable to dwell upon—not to speak of one having them dwell inside one, instead—ha! ha! Now, remember that all these germs are hatched by gentle warmth. No degree of temperature that we know of is more gentle than that of the human stom—"

At this point the lady fainted, and the microscopic man was thrown promptly out of the window by her husband, who has since been presented by a committee of grateful citizens with a gold-mounted cane, as a mark of consideration for his services in ridding the world of a monster.

"GREEK MEETS GREEK."

A FINE OLD LADY.

In this day of monetary papyrus, it is pleasing to read of an ancient matron in Lafayette, Ind., who, at the age of eighty-nine, has gone to her reward, leaving no property save a $20 gold piece. For several years, she has been reserving this honest coin to pay her funeral expenses; and one cannot help surmising that she must have been distantly related to the late Old Bullion BENTON. "No National Bank nonsense at my tomb!" said she; "no grimed and greasy currency for my undertaker! I will have a specie-paying funeral or none at all." As we have the precedent of a great many Old Ladies in the Cabinet, we are rather sorry that it is too late to invite this clear-headed dame to take a chair in Washington.

A MODEST REQUEST.

Disbursing Agent of Political Organization [to Delegation on biz.]: "AH! GENTLEMEN, YOU REPRESENT THE----"

Spokesman. "YES; WE WANT $200. I'M THE KNOCK-'EM-DOWN CLUB, AND HE'S THE TARGET COMPANY."

THE WRONG "DUMMIE."

Gatling (our countryman, you know) has invented a Battery Gun. They have been trying this gun over at Shoeburyness (how is that, for a name?) in England, to see whether they had not better order a few, in time for the next war. It seems that they conducted their experiments by firing at "dummies, representing men." (Oh, if they had only had some of our American Dummies there, who Represent Men so inadequately.) There were 136 of these simulacra, "99 of whom," says the report "would have been killed." That is, if it had been possible to kill them. In fact, they would have been killed four or five times over. "Kilt intirely."

We shall always feel that a great opportunity was here lost of ridding the country of certain nuisances, who, if anything at all, are worse than dummies, and deserve not four only, but four hundred balls in them, "forty-two one-hundredths of an inch in diameter," or even larger. There are so many,