beforehand, and tell me what I was going to say. Of course they are masters of all my knowledge, and a good deal besides; have read all the books I have read, and in later editions; have had all the experiences I have been through,—and more, too. In my private opinion, every mother’s son of them will lie at any time rather than confess ignorance.

I have a kind of dread, rather than hatred, of persons with a large excess of vitality—great feeders, great laughers, great story-tellers, who come sweeping over their company with a huge tidal wave of animal spirits and boisterous merriment. I have pretty good spirits myself, and enjoy a little mild pleasantry, but I am oppressed and extinguished by these great lusty, noisy creatures, and feel as if I were a mute at a funeral when they get into full blast.

I cannot get along much better with those drooping, languid people, whose vitality falls short as much as that of the others is in excess. I have not life enough for two; I wish I had. It is not very enlivening to meet a fellow-creature whose expression and accents say, “You are the hair that breaks the camel’s back of my endurance; you are the last drop that makes my cup of woe run over”; persons whose heads drop on one side like those of toothless infants; whose voices recall the tones in which our old snuffling choir used to wail out the verse of

There is another style which does not captivate me. I recognize an attempt at the grand manner now and then, in persons who are well enough in their way, but of no particular importance, socially or otherwise. Some family tradition of wealth or distinction is apt to be at the bottom of it, and it survives all the advantages that used to set it off: I like family pride as well as my neighbors, and respect the high-born fellow-citizen whose progenitors have not worked in their shirt-sleeves for the last two generations full as much as I ought to. But grandpère oblige; a person with a known grandfather is too distinguished to find it necessary to put on airs. The few Royal Princes I have happened to know were very easy people to get along with, and had not half the social knee-action I have often seen in the collapsed dowagers who lifted their eyebrows at me in my earlier years.

My heart does not warm as it should do toward the persons, not intimates, who are always too glad to see me when we meet by accident, and discover all at once that they have a vast deal to unbosom themselves to me.

There is one blameless person whom I cannot love and have no excuse for hating. It is the innocent fellow-creature, otherwise inoffensive to me, whom I find I have involuntarily joined on turning a corner. I suppose the Mississippi, which was flowing quietly along, minding its own business, hates the Missouri for coming into it all at once with its muddy stream. I suppose the Missouri in like manner hates the Mississippi for diluting with its limpid but insipid current the rich reminiscences of the varied soils through which its own stream has wandered. I will not compare myself to the clear or the turbid current, but I will own that my heart sinks when I find all of a sudden I am in for a corner confluence, and I cease loving my neighbor as myself until I can get away from him.—The Poet at the Breakfast Table.

An Illinois boy was asked to write an essay on Masonry, and here is what he wrote: “King Solomon was a man who lived so many years in the country that he was the whole push. He was an awfully wise man, and one day two women came to him, each holding to the leg of a baby and nearly pulling it in two and each claiming it. And King Solomon wasn’t feeling right good and he said: “Why couldn’t the brat have been twins and stopped this bother?” And then he called for his machete and was going to Weylerize the poor innocent little baby, and give each woman a piece of it, when the real mother of the baby said: ‘Stop, Solomon; stay thy hand. Let the old hag have it. If I can’t have a whole baby I won’t have any.’ Then Solomon told her to take the baby and go home and wash its face, for he knew it was hers. He told the other woman to go chase herself. King Solomon built Solomon’s Temple and was the father of Masons. He had seven hundred wives and three hundred lady friends, and that’s why there are so many Masons in the world. My papa says King Solomon was a warm member and I think he was hot stuff myself. That is all I know about King Solomon.”

G. H. DERBY (“Phœnix,” “Squibob”)

ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPERS

A year or two since, a weekly paper was started in London called the Illustrated News. It was filled with tolerably executed wood-cuts, representing scenes of popular interest; and though perhaps better calculated for the nursery than the reading-room, it took very well in England, where few can read but all can understand pictures, and soon attained immense circulation. As when the inimitable London Punch attained its world-wide celebrity, supported by such writers as Thackeray, Jerrold and Hood, would-be funny men on this side of the Atlantic attempted absurd imitations—the Yankee Doodle, the John Donkey, etc.—which as a matter of course proved miserable failures; so did the success of this illustrated affair inspire our money-loving publishers with hopes of dollars, and soon appeared from Boston, New York and other places pictorial and illustrated newspapers, teeming with execrable and silly effusions, and filled with the most fearful wood engravings, “got up regardless of expense” or anything else; the contemplation of which was enough to make an artist tear his hair and rend his garments. A Yankee named Gleason, of Boston, published the first, we believe, calling it Gleason’s Pictorial (it should have been Gleason’s Pickpocket) and Drawing-Room Companion. In this he presented to his unhappy subscribers views of his house in the country, and his garden, and, for aught we know, of “his ox and his ass, and the stranger within his gates.” A detestable invention for transferring daguerreotypes to plates for engraving, having come into notice about this time, was eagerly seized upon by Gleason for further embellishing his catchpenny publication—duplicates and uncalled-for pictures were easily obtained, and many a man has gazed in horror-stricken astonishment on the likeness of a respected friend as a “Portrait of Monroe Edwards,” or that of his deceased grandmother in the character of “One of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.” They love pictures in Yankeedom; every tin-peddler has one on his wagon, and an itinerant lecturer can always obtain an audience by sticking up a likeness of some unhappy female, with her ribs laid open in an impossible manner, for public inspection, or a hairless gentleman, with the surface of his head laid out in eligible lots duly marked and numbered. The factory girls of Lowell, the professors of Harvard, all bought the new Pictorial. (Professor Webster was reading one when Doctor Parkman called on him on the morning of the murder.) Gleason’s speculation was crowned with success, and he bought himself a new cooking stove, and erected an outbuilding on his estate, with both of which he favored the public in a new wood-cut immediately.

Inspired by his success, old Feejec-Mermaid-Tom-Thumb-Woolly-Horse-Joyce-Heth-Barnum forthwith got out another