Fortune's taunts,
_Blunt_ is the _sharpest_ of his wants."

Yours sincerely and comically,

SIBTHORP.

P.S.--Let BRYANT call for his Christmas-box.

* * * * *

THE COPPER CAPTAIN.

At the public meeting at Hammersmith for the purpose of taking into
consideration the propriety of lighting the roads, in the midst of a most
animated discussion, Captain Atcherly proposed an adjournment of the said
meeting; which proposition being strongly negatived by a small individual,
Captain Atcherly quietly pointed to an open window, made a slight allusion
to the hardness of the pavement, and finally achieved the exit of the
dissentient by whistling

[Illustration: MY FRIEND AND PITCHER.]

* * * * *

"TAKE CARE OF HIM."

"Take care of him!" That sentence has been my ruin; from my cradle upwards
it has dogged my steps and proved my bane! Fatal injunction! Little did my
parents think of the miseries those four small monosyllables have entailed
upon their hapless son!

My first assertion of infantine existence, that innocent and feeble wail
that claimed the name of life, was met by the command, "Take care of him!
take care of him!" said my mother to the doctor; "Take care of him!" said
the doctor to the nurse; and "Take care of him!" added my delighted father
to every individual of the rejoicing household.

The doctor's care manifested itself in an over-dose of castor oil; the
nurse, in the plenitude of her bounty, nearly parboiled me in an
over-heated bath; my mother drugged me with a villanous decoction of
soothing syrup, which brought on a slumber so sound that the first had
very nearly proved my last; and the entire household dandled me with such
uncommon vigour that I was literally tossed and "Catchee-catchee'd" into a
fit of most violent convulsions. As I persisted in surviving, so did I
become the heir to fresh torments from the ceaseless care of those by whom
I was surrounded. My future symmetry was superinduced by bandaging my
infant limbs until I looked like a miniature mummy. The summer's sun was
too hot and the winter's blast too cold; wet was death, and dry weather
was attended with easterly winds. I was "taken care of." I never breathed
the fresh air of Heaven, but lived in an artificial nursery atmosphere of
sea-coal and logs.

Young limbs are soon broken, and young children will fall, if not taken
care of; consequently upon any instinctiv