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well as I liked Harris himself, sir. Good day, sir, and a pleasant journey."

He was gone. I never felt so stunned, so distressed, so bewildered in my life. But in my soul I was glad he was gone. With all his gentleness of manner and his soft voice, I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye upon me; and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly stood still!

I was bewildered beyond description. I did not doubt his word; I could not question a single item in a statement șo stamped with the earnestness of truth as his; but its dreadful details overpowered me, and threw my thoughts into hopeless confusion. I saw the conductor looking at me. I said, "Who is that man?"

But

"He was a member of Congress once, and a good one. he got caught in a snowdrift in the cars, and like to been starved to death. He got so frost-bitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of something to eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three months afterwards. He is all right now, only he is a monomaniac, and when he gets on that old subject, he never stops till he has eat up that whole car-load of people he talks about. He would have finished the crowd by this time, only he had to get out here. He has got their names as pat as A. B. C. When he gets them all eat up but himself, he always says: 'Then the hour for the usual election for breakfast having arrived, and there being no opposition, I was duly elected, after which, there being no objections offered, I resigned. Thus I am here.'"

I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal.

PIE.

BY C. D. WARNER.

THERE has come over this country within the last generation, as everybody knows, a great wave of condemnation of pie. It has taken the character of a "movement," though we have had no conventions about it, nor is any one, of any of the several sexes among us, running for president against it. It is safe almost anywhere to denounce pie, yet nearly everybody eats it on occasion. A great many people think it savors of a life abroad to speak with horror of pie, although they were very likely the foremost of the Americans in Paris who used to speak with more enthusiasm of the American pie at Madame Busque's than of the Venus of Milo. To talk against pie and still eat it is snobbish, of course; but snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things. To affect dislike of pie is something. We have no statistics on the subject, and cannot tell whether it is gaining or losing in the country at large. Its disappearance in select circles is no test. The amount of writing against it is no more test of its desuetude, than the number of religious tracts distributed in a given district is a criterion of its piety. We are apt to assume that certain regions are substantially free of it. Herbert and I, traveling north one summer, fancied that we could draw in New England a sort of diet line, like the sweeping curves on the isothermal charts, which should show at least the leading pie sections. Journeying towards the White Mountains, we concluded that a line passing through Bellows Falls, and bending a little south on either side, would mark, northward, the region of perpetual pie. In this region pie is to be found at all hours and seasons, and at every meal. I am not sure, however, that pie is not a matter of altitude rather than latitude, as I find that all the hill and country towns of New England are full of those excellent women, the very salt of the housekeeping earth, who would feel ready to sink in mortification through their scoured kitchen floors, if visitors should catch them without a pie in the house. The absence of pie would be more noticed than a scarcity of Bible even. Without it the

housekeepers are as distracted as the boarding-house keeper who declared that if it were not for canned tomato she should have nothing to fly to. Well, in all this great agitation I find Herbert unmoved, a conservative, even to the under-crust. I dare not ask him if he eats pie at breakfast. There are some tests that the dearest friendship may not apply.

ALLMOST enny phool kan prove that the bible aint true: it takes a wize man to beleave it.

JOSH BILLINGS.

BUTTERWICK'S LITTLE GAS BILL.

ANONYMOUS.

DURING one of those few cold snaps which we had last winter the gas meter in Mr. Butterwick's house was frozen. Mr. Butterwick attempted to thaw it out by pouring hot water over it, but after spending an hour upon the effort, he emerged from the contest with the meter with his feet and trousers wet, his hair full of dust and cobwebs, and his temper at fever heat. After study,

A LITTLE GAS BILL.

ing how he should get rid of the ice in the meter, he concluded to use force for the purpose; and so, seizing a hot poker, he jammed it through a vent hole, and stirred it around inside the meter with a considerable amount of vigor. He felt the ice give way, and he heard the wheels buzz around with rather more vehemence than usual. Then he went up-stairs.

He noticed for three or four days that the internal machinery of that meter seemed to be rattling around in a remarkable manner. It could be heard all over the house. But he was pleased to find that it was working again in spite of the cold weather, and he retained his serenity.

About two weeks afterwards his gas bill came. It accused

him of burning, during the quarter, 1,500,000 feet of gas, and it called on him to settle to the extent of nearly $350,000. Before Mr. Butterwick's hair had time to descend after the first shock, he put on his hat and went down to the gas office. He addressed one of the clerks:

"How much gas did you make at the works last quarter?" "Dunno; about a million feet, I reckon."

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'Well, you've charged me in my bill for burning half a million more than you made. I want you to correct it."

"Let's see the bill.

Mm-m-m-this is all right. It's taken off

the meter. That's what the meter says."

"S'pose'n it does; I couldn't have burned more'n you made!" "Can't help that. The meter can't lie."

"Well, but how d' you account for the difference?"

"Dunno; 'tain't our business to go poking and nosing around after scientific truth. We depend on the meter. If that says you burned six million feet, why, you must have burned it, even if we never made a foot of gas out at the works."

"To tell you the honest truth," said Butterwick, "that meter was frozen, and I stirred it up with a poker, and set it whizzing around."

"Price just the same," said the clerk. just like we do for gas."

"We charge for pokers

"You ain't actually going to have the audacity to ask me to pay $350,000 on account of that poker?"

"If it was $700,000 I'd take it with a calmness that would surprise you. Pay up, or we'll turn off your gas."

"Turn it off and be hanged!" exclaimed Butterwick, as he emerged from the office, tearing his bill to fragments. Then he went home, and grasping that too lavish poker, he approached the meter. It had registered another million feet since the bill was made out. It was running up a score of a hundred feet a minute. In a month Butterwick would have owed the gas company more than the United States Government owes its creditors. So he beat the meter into a shapeless mass, tossed it into the street, and turned off the gas inside the cellar.

He is now sitting up at nights writing an essay on "Our Grinding Monopolies," by the light of a kerosene lamp.

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