and polish the bones. It is considered that the cayote, and the obscene bird, and the Indian of the desert, testify their blood kinship with each other in that they live together in the waste. places of the earth on terms of perfect confidence and friendship, while hating all other creatures and yearning to assist at their funerals. He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals, and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery, as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents.

THE HODJA'S HOUSE.

BY S. S. COX.

THE Hodja having built his house to his own satisfaction and that of everybody else-offers it for sale. He makes a bargain, but asks of the purchaser, as a favor, to be allowed to drive a nail on the wall of one of the rooms; the nail to be his own property. This is granted.

The buyer is soon established in the house. Shortly after midnight, the owner hears a knock at his outer door. He descends to inquire:

"Who is there?"

"It is I," says the Hodja; "I wish to tie a string on my nail." Two or three days pass, when again the knock is heard about the same hour. Again the demand is made:

"What is wanting?"

The answer comes: "I pray you, good friend, I should like to untie that string from my property." This performance being repeated several times, compels the purchaser to abandon his purchase for a song.

The moral of which is to make sure of the character of the vender, when you become the vendee.

THE BOY AND THE TORTOISE.

BY BIERCE.

"PERMIT me to help you on in the world, sir," said a boy to a traveling tortoise, placing a glowing coal upon the animal's back.

"Thank you," replied the unconscious beast; "I alone am

responsible for the time of my arrival, and I alone will determine the degree of celerity required. The gait I am going will enable me to keep all my present appointments."

A genial warmth began about this time to pervade his upper crust, and a moment after he was dashing away at a pace comparatively tremendous.

"How about those engagements?" sneered the grinning

urchin.

"I've recollected another one," was the hasty reply.

THE FRIEND OF MY YOUTH.

BY T. B. ALDRICH.

In one of the episodes in his entertaining volume of "Vagabond Adyentures," Mr. Keeler takes the reader with him on a professional cruise in Dr. Spaulding's Floating Palace. This Floating Palace-a sort of Barnum's Museum with a keel-was designed for navigation on Southern and Western rivers, and carried a cargo of complex delights that must have much amazed the simple dwellers on the banks of the Ohio and Mississippi. Here, on board of this dramatical Noah's Ark, the reader finds himself on the pleasantest terms conceivable with negro minstrels, danseuses, apostolic wax-works, moral acrobats, stuffed animals, vocalists, and a certain Governor Dorr.

It was with a thrill of honest pleasure that I came upon this picturesque outcast unexpectedly embalmed, like a fly in amber, in Mr. Keeler's autobiography. There was a time when I was proud to know this Governor Dorr; when I hung upon the rotund music of his lips, listened to his marvelous stories of moving accidents by flood and field, and was melted to the very heart at those rare moments when, in a three-cornered room in the rear of Wall's Drug Store, he would favor me with some of the most lachrymose and sentimental poems that ever came of a despondent poet. At this epoch of my existence, Governor Dorr, with his sarcastic winks, his comic melancholy, his quotations from Shakespeare, and his fearful knowledge of the outside world, was in my eyes the personification of all that was learned, lyrical, romantic and daring. A little later, my boyish admiration was shattered by the discovery that my Admirable Crichton waswell, it is of no use now to mince words-an adventurer and a gambler. With a kind of sigh that is at present a lost art to me, I put him aside with those dethroned idols and collapsed dreams which accumulate on one's hands as one advances in life, and of which I already had a promising collection when I was about twenty. I cast off Governor Dorr, I repeat; but, oddly enough, Governor Dorr never cast me off, but persisted in turning up at intervals of four or five years, in the tender and pathetic character of "the friend of my youth."

As Governor Dorr is the only gentleman in his line of business who ever evinced any interest in me, I intend to make the most of him; and, indeed, among my reputable acquaintances, there is none who deserves to fare better at my hands. My reputable acquaintances have sometimes bored me, and taught me

GOVERNOR DORR.

nothing. Now Governor Dorr, in the ethereal shape of a reminiscence, has not only been a source of great amuse

ment to me at various times, but has taught me by his own funest example that whatever gifts a man may possess, if he have no moral principle he is a failure. Wanting the gift of honesty, Governor Dorr was a gambler and a sharper, and is dead.

I was a schoolboy at Rivermouth, when Governor Dorr swept like a brilliant comet into the narrow arc of my observation.* One day in the summer of 18—, I was going home from school, when I saw, standing in front of Wall's Drug Store a showily dressed person, who seemed to me well

advanced in years-that is to say, twenty-five or thirty. He was the centre of a small circle of idle fellows about town, who were

* "Governor Dorr," I should explain, was a sobriquet, but when or how it attached itself to him, I never knew. His real name I suppress for the sake of some that may bear it, if there are any so unfortunate.

drinking in with obvious relish one of those pre-Raphaelite narratives which I was afterwards destined to swallow with openmouthed wonder. The genial twinkle of the man's blue eyes, the glow of his half-smoked cigar, and the blaze of the diamond on his little finger, all seemed the members of one radiant family. To this day I cannot disassociate a sort of glitter with the memory of my first glimpse of Governor Dorr. He had finished speaking as I joined the group; I had caught only the words, "and that was the last of gallant Jack Martinway," delivered in a singularly mellow barytone voice, when he turned abruptly and disappeared behind the orange and purple jars in Dr. Wall's shop-window.

Who is gallant Jack Martinway, I wondered, and who is this dazzling person that wears his best clothes on a week-day? I took him for some distinguished military hero, and, with a fine feeling for anachronism, immediately connected him with the portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh in Mitchell's Geography—a work I was at that time neglecting with considerable perseverance.

The apparition of so bewildering a figure in our staid, slowgoing little town was likely to cause a sensation. The next day in school I learned all about him. He was Governor Dorr; he had once been a boy in Rivermouth, like us, but had gone off years ago to seek his fortune, and now he had come back immensely wealthy from somewhere-South America or the Chincha Islands, where he was governor-and was going to settle down in his native town and buy the " Janvrin Place "- -an estate which the heirs were too poor to keep, and nobody else rich enough to purchase.

This was appetizing, and after school I wandered up to Wall's Drug Store to take a look at my gilded townsman, of whom I was not a little proud.

I was so dazed at the time, that I do not recollect how it all came about; but Governor Dorr was in the shop, holding a glass of soda-water in one hand and leaning elegantly on the Gothic fountain; I entered with the weak pretence of buying a slatepencil; the Governor spoke to me, and then-I can recall nothing except that, when I recovered from my embarrassment and confusion, I was drinking soda water with the Great Mogul, strangling myself with the lively beverage, and eliciting from him. the laughing advice that I shouldn't drink it while it was boiling.