crowd began to disperse. Knots of gossips lingered here and there near the place, indulging in vain surmises as to who the invisible gunners could be.

There was no more noise that night, but many a timid person lay awake, expecting a renewal of the mysterious cannonading. The Oldest Inhabitant refused to go to bed on any terms, but persisted in sitting up in a rocking-chair, with his hat and mittens on, until daybreak.

I thought I should never get to sleep. The moment I drifted off in a doze I fell to laughing, and woke myself up. But towards morning slumber overtook me, and I had a series of disagreeable dreams, in one of which I was waited upon by the

ghost of Silas Trefethen with an exorbitant bill for the use of his guns. In another, I was dragged before a court-martial, and sentenced by Sailor Ben, in a frizzled wig and three-cornered cocked hat, to be shot to death by Bailey's Battery-a sentence which Sailor Ben was about to execute with his own hand, when I suddenly opened my eyes and found the sunshine lying pleasantly across my face. I tell you I was glad!

That unaccountable fascination which leads the guilty to hover about the spot where his crime was committed, drew me down to the wharf as soon as I was dressed. Phil Adams, Jack Harris and others of the conspirators were already there, examining with a mingled feeling of curiosity and apprehension the havoc accomplished by the battery.

The fence was badly shattered, and the ground ploughed up for several yards round the place where the guns formerly layformerly lay, for now they were scattered every which way. There was scarcely a gun that hadn't burst. Here was one ripped open from muzzle to breech, and there was another with its mouth blown into the shape of a trumpet. Three of the guns had disappeared bodily, but on looking over the edge of the wharf we saw them standing on end in the tide-mud. They had popped overboard in their excitement.

"I tell you what, fellows," whispered Phil Adams, "It is lucky we didn't try to touch 'em off with punk. They'd have blown us all to flinders."

The destruction of Bailey's Battery was not, unfortunately, the only catastrophe. A fragment of one of the cannon had carried away the chimney of Sailor Ben's cabin. He was very mad at first, but having prepared the fuse himself, he didn't dare complain openly.

"I'd have taken a reef in the blessed stove-pipe," said the Admiral, gazing ruefully at the smashed chimney, "if I had known as how the flag-ship was agoin' to be under fire."

The next day he rigged out an iron funnel, which, being in sections, could be detached and taken in at a moment's notice. On the whole, I think he was resigned to the demolition of his brick chimney. The stove-pipe was a great deal more shipshape.

The town was not so easily appeased. The selectmen determined to make an example of the guilty parties, and offered a reward for their arrest, holding out a promise of pardon to any one of the offenders who would furnish information against the rest. But there were no faint hearts among the Centipedes. Suspicion rested for a while on several persons on the soldiers at the fort; on a crazy fellow, known about town as "BottleNose;" and at last on Sailor Ben.

"Shiver my timbers!" cried the deeply injured individual, "Do you suppose, sir, as I have lived to sixty years, an' aint got no more sense than to go for to blaze away at my own upper riggin'? It doesn't stand to reason."

It certainly did not seem probable that Mr. Watson would maliciously knock over his own chimney, and Lawyer Hackett, who had the case in hand, bowed himself out of the Admiral's cabin, convinced that the right man had not been discovered.

People living by the sea are always more or less superstitious. Stories of spectre ships and mysterious beacons, that lure vessels out of their course and wreck them on unknown reefs, were among the stock legends of Rivermouth; and not a few people in the town were ready to attribute the firing of those guns to some supernatural agency. The Oldest Inhabitant remembered that when he was a boy a dim-looking sort of schooner hove to in the offing one foggy afternoon, fired off a single gun, that didn't make any report, and then crumbled to nothing, spar, mast and hull, like a piece of burnt paper.

The authorities, however, were of the opinion that human hands had something to do with the explosion, and they resorted to deep-laid stratagems to get hold of the said hands. One of their traps came very near catching us. They artfully caused an old brass field-piece to be left on a wharf near the scene of our late operations. Nothing in the world but the lack of money to buy powder saved us from falling into the clutches of the two watchmen, who lay secreted for a week in a neighboring sail-loft.

It was many a day before the midnight bombardment ceased to be the town - talk. The trick was so audacious, and on so grand a scale, that nobody thought for an instant of connecting us lads with it. Suspicion, at length, grew weary of lighting on the wrong person, and as conjecture-like the physicians in the epitaph--was in vain, the Rivermouthians gave up the idea of finding out who had astonished them.

They never did find out, and never will, unless they read this veracious history. If the selectmen are still disposed to punish the malefactors, I can supply Lawyer Hackett with evidence enough to convict Pepper Whitcomb, Phil Adams, Charley Marden and the other honorable members of the Centipede Club. But, really, I don't think it would pay now.

THE LEGEND OF MIMIR.

BY ROBERT JONES BURDETTE.

QOBERT JONES BURDETTE was born at Greenesborough, Pa., July 30, 1844. His family removed to Illinois, where he received an education in the Peoria public schools, and where he enlisted for the war in 1862. Some years after his return he became associate editor of the Burlington Hawkeye, with which his name is identified. He is well known as a humorous lecturer and author.

It is a beautiful legend of the Norse land. Amilias was the village blacksmith, and under the spreading chestnut treekjn, his village smithophjken stood. He the hot iron gehammered and sjhod horses for

fifty cents all round please. He made tin hjelmets for the gjodds,and stove pjipe trousers for the hjeroes.

Mimir was a rival blacksmith. He didn't go in very much for defensive armor, but he was lightning on twoedged Bjswords and cut-andslash svjcutlassssses. He made

chyjeese knives for the gjodds, and he made the great Bjsvsstnsen, an Arkansaw toothpick that would make a free incision clear into the transverse semi-colon of a cast-iron Ichthyosaurus, and never turn its edge. That was the kind of a Bhjairpin Mimir said he was.

One day Amilias made an impenetrable suit of armor for a second-class gjodd, and put it on himself to test it, and boastfully

inserted a card in the Svensska Norderbjravisk jkanaheldesplvtdenskgorodovusaken, saying that he was wearing a suit of home-made, best chilled Norway merino underwear, that would nick the unnumbered saw teeth in the pot metal cutlery of the iron-mongery over the way. That, Amilias remarked to his friend Bjohnn Bjrobinssson, was the kind of a Bdjucckk he was.

When Mimir spelled out the card next morning, he said, "Bjjj!" and went to work with a charcoal furnace, a cold anvil, and the new isomorphic process, and in a little while he came down-street with a sjword, that glittered like a dollar-store diamond, and met Amilias down by the new opera-house. Amilias buttoned on his new Bjarmor and said:

"If you have no hereafter use for your chyjeese kjnife, strike.” Mimir spat on his hands, whirled his skjword above his head and fetched Amilias a swipe that seemed to miss everything except the empty air, through which it softly whistled. Amilias smiled, and said "go on," adding that it "seemed to him he felt a general sense of cold iron somewhere in the neighborhood, but he hadn't been hit."

"Shake yourself," said Mimir.

Amilias shook himself, and immediately fell into halves, the most neatly divided man that ever went beside himself.

"That's where the boiler-maker was away off in his diagnosis," said Mimir, as he went back to his shop to put up the price of cutlery 65 per cent. in all lines, with an unlimited advance on special orders.

Thus do we learn that a good action is never thrown away, and that kind words and patient love will overcome the harshest

natures.