day
That a wonderful king came riding that way;
Said he, to the man in the tub, "How d'ye do?
I'm Great Alexander; now, pray, who are you?"

O, yes, to be clean you must rub, you must rub!
Though he lived and he slept and ate in a tub,
This singular man, in towns where he halted,
History tells us was greatly exalted.

He rose in his tub: "I am Diogenes."
"Dear me," quoth the king, who'd been over the seas,
"I've heard of you often; now, what can I do
To aid such a wise individual as you?"

Could one expect manners, I ask, as I rub,
From a man quite content to live in a tub?
"Get out of my sunlight," growled Diogenes
To this affable king who'd been o'er the seas.

MAY E. STONE.

THE LITTLE GOLD MINERS OF THE SIERRAS.

Their mother had died crossing the plains, and their father had had
a leg broken by a wagon wheel passing over it as they descended
the Sierras, and he was for a long time after reaching the mines
miserable, lame and poor.

The eldest boy, Jim Keene, as I remember him, was a bright little
fellow, but wild as an Indian and full of mischief. The next eldest
child, Madge, was a girl of ten, her father's favorite, and she was
wild enough too. The youngest was Stumps. Poor, timid, starved Little
Stumps! I never knew his real name. But he was the baby, and hardly
yet out of petticoats. And he was very short in the legs, very short
in the body, very short in the arms and neck; and so he was called
Stumps because he looked it. In fact he seemed to have stopped
growing entirely. Oh, you don't know how hard the old Plains were on
everybody, when we crossed them in ox-wagons, and it took more than
half a year to make the journey. The little children, those that did
not die, turned brown like the Indians, in that long, dreadful journey
of seven months, and stopped growing for a time.

For the first month or two after reaching the Sierras, old Mr. Keene
limped about among the mines trying to learn the mystery of finding
gold, and the art of digging. But at last, having grown strong enough,
he went to work for wages, to get bread for his half-wild little ones,
for they were destitute indeed.

Things seemed to move on well, then. Madge cooked the simple meals,
and Little Stumps clung to her dress with his little pinched brown
hand wherever she went, while Jim whooped it over the hills and chased
jack-rabbits as if he were a greyhound. He would climb trees, too,
like a