the city that morning, and I was alone. Waking up from a sound
sleep about midnight, I distinctly heard somebody working on an anvil,
like a blacksmith, 'ching-a-ling! ching-a-ling!' It evidently came from
the drawing-room, and my fears at once told me it was a thief trying to
break into the house. Next I heard some one whistle, like a man calling
a dog, 'wheh! wheh! wheh!' Finally a dog barking, 'woo, woo, wooh!'
Thoroughly alarmed, I sprang to the front-window, and called: 'Police!
thieves!' until I managed to arouse the neighbors. I had the key of the
front-door in my chamber; this I threw down to a police-officer, and in
company with two others he boldly entered the house, lit the gas, and
found--that vivarium full of bull-frogs!

My son banished the frogs and introduced cat-fish, (or, as they call
them in Boston, 'horn-pouts.') One night, my great Angora cat, a cat
born in the Rue de Seine, educated in the best French _Ecole des
chattes_, and brought to this country by my husband, fell a victim to
_la gourmandise_, by falling into the vivarium while fishing for
cat--horn-pout--fish. James found her there in the morning, drowned,
and partially eaten up by those she had hoped to eat. She went into the
_boudoir_ to Pout, and 'had done it.'

That finished the vivarium. I sincerely hope these trials to mothers
will never again become the rage, and that something dry will next tempt
our children's mania for home amusements. CORNELIA.

* * * * *

'The Kansas John Brown Song,' which lately appeared in these columns,
and which we credited to the Kansas _Herald_--following the lead of the
newspaper where we found it--was written by the Rev. William W. Patton,
of Chicago, for the _Tribune_ of that city.

* * * * *

Though so often trampled down by the heel of patriotism, the old serpent
of treason and disunion still keeps lifting his head and hissing
venomously. In New-York, Fernando Wood--that incarnation of Northern
secession--the man who dared to issue a proclamation recommending the
inhabitants of the city of which he was mayor to go off with the South,
is plotting and planning (unpunished, of course) with spirits of kindred
baseness, to build up the old order and reestablish the rule of
corruption. At Washington, all the timid, time-serving, and place-hoping
members of Congress have been holding 'Conservative' meetings, at which
the most insolent or timi