the amusement continues until after
midnight. But it is not amusing. There are several pieces on the bill,
but' the chief one, a drama in five acts, is a poor thing, played by
mediocre actors in the most dismal manner possible. The scenery is
worn and dilapidated and wretched; the play turns on the sufferings of
the poor; there are two or three murders, a suicide, a death from
starvation, and such a glut of horrors that the whole entertertainment
is dismal and depressing to the last degree. Yet the theatre is
usually well patronized, and the audience seems intensely interested.
The blousard loves to see depicted on the stage a degree of misery
more terrible than that which is his daily lot. For the dramas which
depict high life--unless it be the high life of the old days of
beruffled and silk-stockinged cavaliers--he cares very little. And in
his serious modern dramas the hero must be a blousard, the villain a
fine gentleman, the blousard to marry the heroine in the last act, and
the fine gentleman to be sent to the galleys.

WIRT SIKES.

EIGHT HUNDRED MILES IN AN AMBULANCE.

TWO PAPERS.--1.

The United States is the only country in the world that has its
frontier in the middle. The Great American Desert, stretching from the
Canadas to the Gulf in a belt nearly a thousand miles in breadth, is
now the true divide between the East and the West; and as if that were
not enough, it is backed by the long ranges of the Rockies, which,
though they flatten out and break down here and there, have yet quite
enough of "sassy country" to make a very respectable barrier. A
century ago the Alleghanies were the boundaries--now we look upon them
as molehills; then the vast prairies lay in the way, like an endless
sea; then the Mississippi, like Jordan, rolled between. But all this
is now as nothing. We have jumped the old claim of the Alleghanies, we
have crossed the prairies, we have spanned the Mississippi with a
dozen splendid bridges, and now the great lines of railroad make but a
mouthful of the desert, and digest the Rockies as easily as an ostrich
his pebbles and tenpennies. The old fables of magic cars, in which
magicians could annihilate space and time, are now dull and tame. Like
a dream the desert glides by while a sunrise, a sunset, lights up the
measureless waste; we pass some low hills, and the Rockies that loomed
before us are circumvented and flanked; we whirl through a wild canon,
and they are left behind.