umber of cats, as per invoice..... 127,000
Estimated number dead swellers..... 6,000
-------
Total songsters................ 121,000
Average number octaves per cat..... 12
-------
Total octaves................ 1,452,000

It was a great concert. It lasted three days and nights, or, counting
each night as seven days, twenty-four days altogether, and we could not
go below for provisions. At the end of that time the cook came for'd
shaking up some beans in a hat, and holding a large knife.

"Shipmates," said he, "we have done all that mortals can do. Let us now
draw lots."

We were blindfolded in turn, and drew, but just as the cook was forcing
the fatal black bean upon the fattest man, the concert closed with a
suddenness that waked the man on the lookout. A moment later every
grimalkin relaxed his hold on his neighbors, the column lost its
cohesion and, with 121,000 dull, sickening thuds that beat as one, the
whole business fell to the deck. Then with a wild farewell wail that
feline host sprang spitting into the sea and struck out southward for
the African shore!

The southern extension of Italy, as every schoolboy knows, resembles in
shape an enormous boot. We had drifted within sight of it. The cats in
the fabric had spied it, and their alert imaginations were instantly
affected with a lively sense of the size, weight and probable momentum
of its flung bootjack.

"ON WITH THE DANCE!" A REVIEW

I

THE PRUDE IN LETTERS AND LIFE

It is deserving of remark and censure that American literature is become
shockingly moral. There is not a doubt of it; our writers, if accused,
would make explicit confession that morality is their only
fault--morality in the strict and specific sense. Far be it from me to
disparage and belittle this decent tendency to ignore the largest side
of human nature, and liveliest element of literary interest. It has an
eminence of its own; if it is not great art, it is at least great
folly--a superior sort of folly to which none of the masters of letters
has ever attained. Not Shakspeare, nor Cervantes, nor Goethe, nor
Moliere, nor--no, not even Rabelais--ever achieved that shining pinnacle
of propriety to which the latter-day American has aspired, by turning
his back upon nature's broad and fruitful levels and his eyes upon the
passionate altitudes where, throned upon congenial i