hour of the Earthquake shock!
--What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once----
All at once, and nothing first----
Just as bubbles do when they burst.

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Logic is logic. That's all I say.

* * * * *

A certain learned professor in New York has a wife and family, but,
professor-like, his thoughts are always with his books.

One evening his wife, who had been out for some hours, returned to find
the house remarkably quiet. She had left the children playing about, but
now they were nowhere to be seen.

She demanded to be told what had become of them, and the professor
explained that, as they had made a good deal of noise, he had put them
to bed without waiting for her or calling a maid.

"I hope they gave you no trouble," she said.

"No," replied the professor, "with the exception of the one in the cot
here. He objected a good deal to my undressing him and putting him to
bed."

The wife went to inspect the cot.

"Why," she exclaimed, "that's little Johnny Green, from next door."

FIVE LIVES

Five mites of monads dwelt in a round drop
That twinkled on a leaf by a pool in the sun.
To the naked eye they lived invisible;
Specks, for a world of whom the empty shell
Of a mustard-seed had been a hollow sky.

One was a meditative monad, called a sage;
And, shrinking all his mind within, he thought:
"Tradition, handed down for hours and hours,
Tells that our globe, this quivering crystal world,
Is slowly dying. What if, seconds hence
When I am very old, yon shimmering doom
Comes drawing down and down, till all things end?"
Then with a wizen smirk he proudly felt
No other mote of God had ever gained
Such giant grasp of universal truth.

One was a transcendental monad; thin
And long and slim of mind; and thus he mused:
"Oh, vast, unfathomable monad-souls!
Made in the image"--a hoarse frog croaks from the pool,
"Hark! 'twas some god, voicing his glorious thought
In thunder music. Yea, we hear their voice,
And we may guess their minds from ours, their work.
Some taste they have like ours, some tendency
To wriggle about, and munch a trace of scum."
He floated up on a pin-point bubble of gas