a divine creature—the daughter—and on a previous visit I had fallen in love with her to the fullest extent of my ability. Alas! as Meredith says,

“What’s that chune, Jen?” queried the mother.

“Why, that’s Martha,” returned my inamorata.

“Oh!” rejoined her mother, “from Faust.”

“Yes,” said the sweet lips I had so longed to kiss.

It may not be a source of satisfaction to the reader to know that that girl ultimately married a hatter with seven fingers, but it is to me. He uses her head now to block his hats on, and sometimes in my sanguine mood, I feel that those seven fingers occasionally agitate her phosphorescent locks.

If then, as some one holds, men lose their hearts through their eyes, and lovely woman theirs through their ears, alas for the blood circulator of Sarah Hodges. I am not acquainted with the lady, but can imagine her as something soft and airy, whose presence is like a zephyr, whose cheek rivals the blush on a peach, not forgetting, either, that—

Mr. E. E. Kelley, of the Boston and Albany postal car, had a letter for Sarah pass through his hands the other day, and he showed the envelope to a newspaper man—that industrious striver to make the whole world kin. The superscription the missive bore was unique and touching, calculated, in fact, to make captive the gently throbbing heart of our fair manipulator of the mystic key, though it occurs to me that her correspondent evinces a greater affection for his dear Uncle Sam than for the object of his dreams. It is none of my business, of course, but I would presume to say to my gentle sister, on the plea of more numerous years and greater experience, that as she goes on living out the sweet existence for which Leigh Hunt sighed in vain—“A lodge in some vast wilderness“—Chelsea is the wilderness of the East, and it seems she lodges there—I would suggest, I say, that she remember the tenable ground taken by brusque King Henry, that he who can rhyme himself into woman’s affection, can generally reason himself out again. The superscription referred to was as follows:

A number of colored men sent a telegram from Providence one day, and while waiting for an answer seated themselves in the broad window seat with their backs to the street. It was at the time of the Modoc excitement, and one of the messengers slyly placarded on the window the legend, on the back of a blank, “Imported Modocs.” Everybody who came along stopped and read the placard, looked in, saw the point, and moved on with spirit gently moved. Quite a knot gathered at times until the hilarity became sufficient to attract the attention of the manager, when he at once removed the cause of their merriment (the card, not the darkies). In point of fact, nothing could remove them until they got their answer, which was late in the afternoon. They were so much engaged in discussing the ethics peculiar to the Ethiopian mind, that they were oblivious to the merriment of which they were the object, and will probably go down to their grave innocent of ever having personated the scalp lifting savages of the lava beds.

On Nassau Street, one afternoon, several men and boys were examining a lot of twenty-five cent books displayed on a temporary counter outside the door. Presently a clerk of the Bowery persuasion appeared on the scene and bellowed, “Annything on the board for twenty-five cents, annything on the board for