sides, the river does not
always smell very nicely now that it has so long been unrelieved by rain.
All through the hot day, in fact, civilized northern man finds loafing
very difficult, especially as his Aryan impetuosity is always urging him
to do something active. Cows in this climate are the only true lotus-
eaters. Next to them in enjoyment comes the angler who approaches the
river about eight o'clock, at the time of the "evening rise." He, like
the cow, is knee-deep in water, wading; he listens to the plash of big,
hungry trout, sucking down gnats under the alders; he casts over them,
and if he catches them, who more content than he, as the sky turns from
amber to purple and silvery grey, and the light fades till one cannot
thread the gut through the eye-hole of one of the new-fashioned hooks?
Certainly this man is more blessed than he who is just coming to the ices
at a big, hot London dinner, and knows that his physician has forbidden
him this form of enjoyment. What a struggle in that person's mind! and
how almost predestined is his fall! how sure his repentance next morning!

WESTERN DROLLS.

The death of Mr. "Josh Billings" may have diminished the stock of
harmless pleasures, but can hardly be said to have eclipsed the gaiety of
nations. In this country, at least, however it may have been in the
States, Josh Billings was by no means the favourite or leading American
humorist. If phonetic spelling were universal, much of his fun would
disappear. His place was nearer that of Orpheus C. Kerr than of Artemus
Ward, or of Mark Twain. It has long been the English habit to look for
most of our broad fun across the Atlantic. Americans say we are not a
funny people. A chivalrous and mediaeval French writer, not unfrequently
quoted, once made a kindred remark. We are not at present a boisterously
comic lot of geniuses, and if you see the tears running down the eyes of
a fellow-countryman reading in a railway carriage, if he be writhing with
mirth too powerful for expression, the odds are that he has got hold of a
Yankee book.

In American country newspapers there is usually one column entirely
devoted to facetiae, which appear to have been clipped out of the columns
of other country papers. They live on each other, just as the natives of
the Scilly Islands are feigned to eke out a precarious livelihood by
taking in each other's washing. It is averred that one American journal,
the _Danbury Newsman_,