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BOY THE DESTROYER.

BY C. D. WARNER.

THE power of a boy is, to me, something fearful. Consider what he can do! You buy and set out a choice pear-tree; you enrich the earth for it, you train and trim it, and vanquish the borer, and watch its slow growth. At length it rewards your care by producing two or three pears, which you cut up and divide in the family, declaring the flavor of the bit you eat to be something extraordinary. The next year, the little tree blossoms full, and sets well; and in the autumn has on its slender, drooping limbs half a bushel of fruit, daily growing more delicious in the sun. You show it to your friends, reading to them the French name, which you can never remember, on the label; and you take an honest pride in the successful fruit of long care. That night your pears shall be required of you by a boy! Along comes an irresponsible

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BOY THE DESTROYER.

urchin, who has not been growing much longer than the tree, with not twenty-five cents' worth of clothing on him, and in five minutes takes off every pear, and retires into safe obscurity. In five minutes the remorseless boy has undone your work of years, and with the easy nonchalance, I doubt not, of any agent of fate, in whose path nothing is sacred or safe.

And it is not of much consequence. The boy goes on his way,

-to Congress, or to State-prison: in either place he will be accused of stealing, perhaps wrongfully. You learn, in time, that it is better to have had pears and lost them, than not to have had pears at all. You come to know that the least (and rarest) part of the pleasure of raising fruit is the vulgar eating it. You recall your delight in conversing with the nurseryman, and looking at his illustrated catalogues, where all the pears are drawn perfect in form, and of extra size, and at that exact moment between ripeness and decay which it is so impossible to hit in practice. Fruit cannot be raised on this earth to taste as you imagine those pears would taste. For years you have this pleasure, unalloyed by any disenchanting reality. How you watch the tender twigs in spring, and the freshly forming bark, hovering about the healthy growing tree with your pruning-knife many a sunny morning! That is happiness. Then, if you know it, you are drinking the very wine of life; and when the sweet juices of the earth mount the limbs, and flow down the tender stem, ripening and reddening the pendent fruit, you feel that you somehow stand at the source of things, and have no unimportant share in the processes of Nature. Enter, at this moment, boy the destroyer, whose office is that of preserver as well; for, though he removes the fruit from your sight, it remains in your memory immortally ripe and desirable. The gardener needs all these consolations of a high philosophy.

MAN waz kreated a little lower than the angells, and he haz been a gitting a little lower ever since.

JOSH BILLINGS.

493

CARDINAL

THE TYPE-WRITER.

BY ROBERT J. BURDETTE.

"Beneath the sliding rule of men entirely great The type-writer is greater than the sword." OLDGOLD

"Who swored, my lord?"

CARDINAL

"The man who received the type-writer letter;
The printers who set up the copy;

Whole words spelled in the space of one small m,
With all the letters piled on top of one another,
Like to a Chinese sentence standing on its head.
What sense is there in this?" Rgw? GHops ffl dww d¶"
And yet I know it means "the horse fell dead."
In all the lexicons we use there's no such word
As "kbfitMa)I$n¶;" yet full well I know
It stands in this man's note for "information;"
I have so learned the tangled language of the thing.
That all its jargon is writ plain for me;

But solely do I fear that learning it,

I have made a hopeless wreck of temperate speech,
And lost my front-pew standing in the synagogue.
See, all around this line of consonants

Scarred with lost capitals, the proof-reader has drawn
His awful circle with the pencil blue;

Stand off: while on this correspondent's head

I launch the cuss of our Composing Room.

(The cuss.)

Dog gone the billy be dog goned man of thumbs,
The diddledy dag goned chalky fingered loon

Y gum; 'gaul; od rabbit; jeeminy pelt!
Gad zooks; odd beddikins; by Venus' glove;
By Mars his gauntlet; by the river side;
Sweet by and by, and bo oh, baby by—”

(At this point the caitiff slowly withers away.)

HIGH-HANDED OUTRAGE AT UTICA.

BY ARTEMUS WARD.

IN the Faul of 1856 I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.

The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.

1 day, as I was givin' a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile, what was my skorn & disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord's Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and

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him as hard as he cood.

"What under the son are you abowt?" cried I.

Sez he, "What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?" & he hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed. Sez I, "You egrejus ass, that air's a wax figger-a representashun of the false 'Postle."

Sez he, "That's all very well fur you to say, but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can't show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!" with which observashun he kaved in Judassis' hed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.

AT NIAGARA.

BY W. D. HOWELLS.

OUR friends returned by the shore of the Canadian rapids, having traversed the island by a path through the heart of the woods, and now drew slowly near the Falls again. All parts of the prodigious pageant have an eternal novelty, and they beheld the ever-varying effect of that constant sublimity with the sense of discoverers, or, rather, of people whose great fortune it is to see

AT NIAGARA.

the marvel in its beginning, and new from the creating Hand. The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this illusion, while in the cavernous precipices of the shores, dark with evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night seemed to linger. There was a wild fluttering of their nerves, a rapture with an under-consciousness of pain, the exaltation of peril and escape, when they came to the three little isles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond another, far into the furious channel. Three pretty suspensionbridges connect them now with the larger island, and under each of these flounders a huge rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the fall. The Three Sisters are mere fragments of wilderness, clumps of vine-tangled woods, planted upon masses

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