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[Illustration: A CAPITAL HINT FOR OUR STATIONARY STREET MUSICIANS, IF
THEY WANT TO MAKE MONEY. ]

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THE LEAVEN OF LEAVENWORTH.

The great West has long been famous for the loose, untrammelled freedom
with which its inhabitants treat everything and everybody. Breadth, no
less than length, is a striking feature of Western settlements, and that
this element is conspicuous in the journalism of those singular abodes,
no less than in the social life of their inhabitants, generally, is
evidenced in the following advertisement cut from "_The Times_"--a paper
published at Leavenworth, Kansas:

"NOTICE TO DRIVERS OF FAST STOCK.--Hold your horses and do not drive so
fast. All gay and festive cusses caught driving faster than ordinary
gait in the city, will be brought before Judge Vaughan, for instance--the
fine is $20.

H. A. ROBERTSON, City Marshal."

The City Marshal of Leavenworth is clearly a pot-companion of the first
(whiskey and) water. He declines to address his fellow-citizens in the
commonplace terms usually recognised in more prosaic communities. To
adopt his own style of phraseology, ROBERTSON is clearly a "gay and
festive cuss." He is a specimen brick from Kansas, and doubtless always
carries one in his hat. The expression "ordinary gait," as applied to
driving in Kansas, where everybody owns "fast stock," is rather
equivocal in these quieter latitudes to be sure, but we may guess that,
at Leavenworth, a man who rides or drives at a pace of twenty miles an
hour, is liable, "for instance," to a fine of $20, or just one dollar
per mile. Kansas maybe a very nice place to live in, for some people,
but we would hardly recommend Mr. ROBERT BONNER to emigrate thither, and
so risk the probability of being advertised as a "gay and festive cuss."

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SHIP AHOY!

Of all public performers, there are none who "draw" better than the
gymnasts who risk their necks by attempting hazardous feats. The fool
who attaches himself by the heels to the car of an ascending balloon is
sure to have thousands of feeble-minded females waving handkerchiefs at
him. BLONDIN, the great French tomfool, brought more people to Niagara
Falls to see him, possibly, add a new Fall to the prospect, than ever
the Falls themselves did. And when another donkey announces that he is
going to stand upon his head on the point of a church spire, that church