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.

Bumps 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