TUSHMAKER'S TOOTHPULLER. BY GEORGE H. DERBY. GE EORGE H. DERBY, the first of the great modern humorists, who made his pseudonym of "John Phoenix" a household word, was born in Norfolk County, Mass., in 1824, of an old Salem family. He was graduated at West Point (where his peculiar gift frequently showed itself) in 1846, and he saw active service as Captain of Engineers in the Mexican War. He was wounded at Cerro Gordo, and at the conclusion of the war he was stationed in California. It was here that he published (first in the San Diego Herald) the humorous pieces which won him immediate celebrity throughout the country. He was sunstruck while building lighthouses on the Florida coast; softening of the brain ensued, and he died in an insane asylum at New York in 1861. DR. TUSHMAKER was never regularly bred as a physician or surgeon, but he possessed naturally a strong mechanical genius and a fine appetite; and finding his teeth of great service in gratifying the latter propensity, he concluded that he could do more good in the world, and create more real happiness therein, by putting the teeth of its inhabitants in good order, than in any other way; so Tushmaker became a dentist. He was the man that first invented the method of placing small cog-wheels in the back teeth for the more perfect mastication of food, and he claimed to be the original discoverer of that method of filling cavities with a kind of putty, which, becoming hard directly, causes the tooth to ache so grievously that it has to be pulled, thereby giving the dentist two successive fees for the same job. Tushmaker was one day seated in his office, in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, when a stout old fellow, named Byles, presented himself to have a back tooth drawn. The dentist seated his patient in the chair of torture, and, opening his mouth, discovered there an enormous tooth, on the right hand side, about as large, as he afterwards expressed it," as a small Polyglot Bible." I shall have trouble with this tooth, thought Tushmaker, but he clapped on his heaviest forceps, and pulled. It didn't come. Then he tried the turn-screw, exerting his utmost strength, but the tooth wouldn't stir. "Go away from here," said Tushmaker to Byles, "and return in a week, and I'll draw that tooth for you, or know the reason why." Byles got up, clapped a handkerchief to his jaw, and put forth. Then the dentist went to work, and in three days he invented an instrument which he was confident would pull anything. It was a combination of the lever, pully, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge and screw. The cast He ings were made, and the machine put up in TUSHMAKER'S WONDERFUL TOOTH PULLER. He turned the lever clear round with a sudden jerk, and snapped old Byles's head clean and clear from his shoulders, leaving a space of four inches between the severed parts! They had a post-mortem examination-the roots of the tooth were found extending down the right side, through the right leg, and turning up in two prongs under the sole of the right foot! "No wonder," said Tushmaker, "he raised his right leg." The jury thought so too, but they found the roots much decayed; and five sur geons swearing that mortification would have ensued in a few months, Tushmaker was cleared on a verdict of "justifiable homicide." He was a little shy of that instrument for some time afterward; but one day an old lady, feeble and flaccid, came in to have a tooth drawn, and thinking it would come out very easy, Tushmaker concluded, just by way of variety, to try the machine. He did so, and at the first turn drew the old lady's skeleton completely and entirely from her body, leaving her a mass of quivering jelly in her chair! Tushmaker took her home in a pillowcase. She lived seven years after that, and they called her the "India-Rubber Woman." She had suffered terribly with the rheumatism, but after this occurrence, never had a pain in her bones. The dentist kept them in a glass case. After this, the machine was sold to the contractor of the Boston Custom-house, and it was found that a child of three years of age could, by a single turn of the screw, raise a stone weighing twenty-three tons. Smaller ones were made on the same principle, and sold to the keepers of hotels and restaurants. They were used for boning turkies. There is no moral to this story whatever, and it is possible that the circumstances may have become slightly exaggerated. Of course, there can be no doubt of the truth of the main incidents. THE TOMB OF ADAM. BY MARK TWAIN. THE Greek Chapel is the most roomy, the richest and the showiest chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Its altar, like that of all the Greek churches, is a lofty screen that extends clear across the chapel, and is gorgeous with gilding and pictures. The numerous lamps that hang before it are of gold and silver, and cost great sums. But the feature of the place is a short column that rises from the middle of the marble pavement of the chapel, and marks the exact centre of the earth. To satisfy himself that this spot was really the centre of the earth, a skeptic once paid well for the privilege of ascending to the dome of the church, to see if the sun gave him a shadow at He came down perfectly convinced. The day was very noon. cloudy, and the sun threw no shadows at all; but the man was satisfied that if the sun had come out and made shadows, it could not have made any for him. Proofs like these are not to be set aside by the idle tongues of cavilers. To such as are not bigoted, and are willing to be convinced, they carry a conviction that nothing can ever shake. If even greater proofs than those I have mentioned are wanted, to satisfy the headstrong and foolish that this is the genuine centre of the earth, they are here. The greatest of them lies in the fact that from under this very column was taken the dust from which Adam was made. This can surely be regarded in the light of a settler. It is not likely that the original first man would have been made from an inferior quality of earth, when it was entirely convenient to get first quality from the world's centre. This will strike any reflecting mind forcibly. That Adam was formed of dirt procured in this very WWW spot, is amply prov THE GRAVE OF A RELATIVE. en by the fact that in six thousand years no man has ever been able to prove that the dirt was not procured here whereof he was made. It is a singular circumstance that right under the roof of this same great church, and not far away from that illustrious column, Adam himself, the father of the human race, lies buried. There is no question that he is actually buried in the grave which is pointed out as his-there can be none-because it has never yet been proven that that grave is not the grave in which he is buried. The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home and friends and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation! True, a distant one, but still a relation. The unerring instinct of nature thrilled its recognition. The fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depths, and I gave way to tumultuous emotion. I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears. I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor dead relative. Let him who would sneer at my emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his taste in my journeyings through Holy Land. Noble old man-he did not live to see me he did not live to see his child. And I—I—alas, I did not live to see him. Weighed down by sorrow and disappointment, he died before I was born -six thousand brief summers before I was born. to bear it with fortitude. Let us trust that he is better off where he is. Let us take comfort in the thought that his loss is our eternal gain. But let us try REV. CREAM CHEESE AND THE NEW LIVERY. A LETTER FROM MRS. POTIPHAR TO MISS CAROLINE PETTITOES. GEC BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. EORGE WM. CURTIS was born at Providence, R I., February 24, 1824, but his father removed to New York when the son was fifteen, and he spent the next year in a counting-house. In 1842 he became a member of the famous Brook Farm community. Four years later he went to Europe and the East, and on his return published his two books of travel-"Nile Notes of a Howadji," and "The Howadji in Syria," shortly after followed by a book of American summer travel and sojourn, "Lotus Eating." This was originally printed in the New York Tribune, on which he was for a while a writer. He became editor of Putnam's Magazine, and lost his whole private fortune in the effort to save its creditors when it failed. Then he devoted himself to popular lecturing, and achieved almost unrivaled success. At the time of the Kansas troubles, he threw himself ardently into politics on the side of the Republican party, then forming, and he has ever since continued an active, influential and conscientious member of that organization, lending his whole strength to reform within it, and struggling to keep it to its original ideals. For twenty years his services as editor of Harper's Weekly have been inestimable in this direction. He has written every month the essays of the Easy Chair in Harper's Magazine, and he is the author of "Trumps: a Novel." "The Potiphar Papers," in which his humorous gift is chiefly shown, are a series of sketches and stories scourging the follies of New York society in 1854. "Prue and I," a book of romantic essays, is one of the loveliest books in the language. MY DEAR CAROLINE:-Lent NEW YORK, April. came so frightfully early this came year, that I was very much afraid my new bonnet, à l'Impératrice, |