hrow'd off for--I wonder if there ain't some thing the matter with
him--he 'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow." And he ketched Dan'l by
the nap of the neck, and lifted him up and says, "Why, blame my cats, if
he don't weigh five pound!" and turned him upside down, and he belched
out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was
the maddest man--he set the frog down and took out after that feller,
but he never ketched him. And--

(Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got
up to see what was wanted.) And turning to me as he moved away, he said:
"Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy--I an't going to be
gone a second."

But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history
of the enterprising vagabond _Jim_ Smiley would be likely to afford me
much information concerning the Rev. _Leonidas W._ Smiley, and so I
started away.

At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me
and recommenced:

"Well, this-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no
tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and--"

"Oh, hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!" I muttered, good-naturedly, and
bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.

FITZ HUGH LUDLOW. (BORN, 1836--DIED, 1870.)

* * * * *

BEN THIRLWALL'S SCHOOLDAYS.

My name is Ben Thirlwall, and I am the son of rich but honest parents. I
never had a wish ungratified until I was twelve years of age. My wish
then was to stay on a two-year-old colt which had never been broken. He
did not coincide with me, and a vast revelation of the resistances to
individual will of which the universe is capable, also of a terrestrial
horizon, bottom upward, burst upon me during the brief space which I
spent in flying over his head. Picked up senseless, I was carried to the
bosom of my family on a wheelbarrow, and awoke to the consciousness that
my parents had decided on sending me to a boarding-school,--a remedy to
this day sovereign in the opinion of all well-regulated parents for all
tangential aberrations from the back of a colt or the laws of society.

The principal's name was Barker; and my only clue to his character
consisted in overhearing that he was an excellent disciplinarian. I was
afraid to ask what that meant, but on reflection concluded it to be a
geographical distinction, and, associating him with Mesopotamia or
Beloochistan, exp