was filling it, I heard footsteps on the lower stairs that closely resembled father’s. John’s hat was about half full, and when I put it on his head, it sunk so far as to require both his hands to keep it above his eyes. We met father on the garret stairs, when John boldly looked up into his face, (with corn pouring down over both ears,) and gravely exclaimed: “Mr. Branch, I aint got no corn.” Father uplifted the hat, and down went about two quarts of horse corn on poor John’s head. I crawled between father’s legs, and was at the bottom of two pairs of stairs in about two strides, and away I flew to the woods, about two miles distant, and did not return for two days, fearing that father would murder me for stealing corn so soon after my rope and fishing-line, and theatrical operations. When I next saw John, he complained of a sore back and legs, and declared that father grabbed and wrenched a handful of his posterior pants clean off, and tore hair enough from his skull to render it slightly bald. I trembled at this intelligence, but I got cold and hungry, and went home to take my licking, but my step-mother was ill, and she ardently plead my cause, and father forgave me.

(To be continued.)

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Stephen H. Branch’s Farewell to his Country.

[From the New York Daily Times, of 1856.]

Although I have traveled all over the globe, and have no desire to rove again, yet I am constrained to forever leave my beloved country. You may not mourn over my departure, but I leave you with painful emotions and apprehensions. I would linger, and toil, and die among you, but your fanaticism drives me to foreign skies. The noble deeds of my father and his sires are inscribed on the civil and military archives of Rhode Island, whose virtues I would imitate and consecrate to the glory of my whole country; but your reckless tendency towards disunion, with all its horrors, forces me to abjure my native land, and the hallowed tomb erected by my lamented father for the eternal repose of his immediate posterity. Go on, then, ye fanatics and devils of all sections, to your hearts’ content, in your apostacy to the living and departed patriots of your distracted and divided country. Stop not until your wives and children run wild through streets and fields of blood, and this whole land is a pile of bleeding and burning ruins. Go on ye incarnate fiends in your bloody enterprise, until the mounds of your fathers are divested of their fragrant verdure, and are trampled by foreign marauders, who wildly gloat over your impending suicide. An irresistible horde of demagogues and vampires, and fanatics and lunatics, are at the throats of the American patriots, and threaten them with strangulation and utter annihilation. Go on, then, ye demons of hell, and tear to fragments the glorious Constitution that was created by Washington, Greene, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Warren, Franklin, Adams, Lafayette and Kosciusko, and nobly defended by Jackson, Perry, Taylor, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Harrison, Grogan, Decatur, (and the living Scott), whose sighs and tears, and expiring energies, were consecrated to its eternal duration. Go on, then, ye slimy vultures, in your ruthless desecration of their graves, until despotic soldiers line our streets and frontiers, and stab the patriots who breathe the enchanting word of liberty. Go on, I say, in your inhuman sacrilege, but I will fly to Switzerland, in whose deep mountain glades I will strive to efface that I was born and reared among the gang of consummate fools and knaves who now level their rifles at the race of noble birds that have graced the American skies for nearly a hundred years. Go on, then, ye dastard traitors, in your bloody demolition, but I will go and live and die in the land of William Tell, whose fair posterity evince a purer fidelity to their remotest ancestors, than those pernicious monsters whose infernal madness will soon surrender the bones of Washington and Jackson to the despots of Europe, whose shafts they foiled, until they went down, with tottering footsteps, into their immortal graves. Farewell, then, ye crazy parricides—farewell, ye Burrs and Arnolds—and when you have consigned your deluded countrymen to all the horrors of anarchy and eternal despotism, think of the humble admonitions of one who, rather than behold the downfall of his beautiful and glorious country, sought peace, and succor, and a mausoleum in the mountains of Switzerland, once traversed by William Tell and his gallant archers, who created a love of liberty that has survived the flight of centuries, and which can never be subdued by foes without, nor fools within, her borders. In my voluntary exile, I will implore God to visit you with His displeasure, through the withering curses of your children, and their posterity to the remotest age, for destroying the liberties of their country, which you should bequeathe to them as they came to you from your illustrious fathers, whose sacred and silent ashes you dare not visit and contemplate at this fearful crisis, amid the pure and tranquil solitudes of the patriotic dead lest the memory of their heroic deeds and sacrifice should remind you of your hellish treason, and paralyze your hearts, and smite your worthless bodies to the dust, and consign your pallid livers to undying torture. Although these admonitions are inscribed in tones of burning scorn, yet they emanate from a bosom that glows with love for my bewildered countrymen. And my last request is, that every patriotic father will gather his little flock around him at evening shades, and read this parting admonition in a clear and feeling voice, and then kneel before the God of nations, and implore Him to preserve their liberties, with a blessing on the humble author of this production, in his unhappy seclusion in a distant land. I would write more, but gushing tears blind my vision, and swell my heart with dying emotions.

Affectionately,

Stephen H. Branch.

New York, May 30, 1856.

c12

[From the New York Times, of 1855.]

Stephen H. Branch on Worms,—The Vermicular Theory of Greatness.—Subdued Sea-Serpents—Alligators Outdone—Look out for a Rise in the price of Vermifuges.

To the Editor of the New York Daily Times:

Some men donate or construct public and private institutions for the public applause while living, while others write the sunny side of their lives from motives of fame and accumulation. I shall leave both sides of my career for the historian after I have departed for the spirit land.

Since my return from Europe, with the Brandon Register, with little Georgy Matsell recorded therein, (as having been baptised and received into the Church in 1811, which corresponds with his own oath before the Police Committee, that he was born in 1811—stick a pin here,)—I have been violently assailed by journals in the Matsell interest, published on the Five Points, who attack me for sins committed while I had a superabundance of mischievous worms in youth and early manhood, and while I was scattering wild oats rather profusely over my father’s field.

No man lives who would not gladly efface every oat he sowed during the fervors and exhilerations of boyhood and early manhood. But the deliberate perjury of full-grown manhood can only be effaced through long years of retired and tearful contrition. By unceasing