Structure, like that which to-day links his name
In the Union unending of honour and fame;
And found a new charity just for the care

Of these unhappy women with nothing to wear;
Which, in view of the cash which would daily be claim'd,
The Laying-out Hospital well might be named?
Won't STEWART, or some of our dry-goods importers,
Take a contract for clothing our wives and our daughters?
Or, to furnish the cash to supply those distresses,
And life's pathway strew with shawls, collars, and dresses,
Ere the want of them makes it much rougher and thornier,
Won't someone discover a new California?

Oh, ladies, dear ladies, the next sunny day

Please trundle your hoops just out of Broadway,
From its whirl and its bustle, its fashion and pride,
And the temples of Trade which tower on each side,
To the alleys and lanes, where Misfortune and Guilt
Their children have gather'd, their city have built;
Where Hunger and Vice, like twin beasts of prey,

Have hunted their victims to gloom and despair; Raise the rich, dainty dress, and the fine broider❜d skirt, Pick your delicate way through the dampness and dirt,

Grope through the dark dens, climb the rickety stair
To the garret, where wretches, the young and the old,
Half-starved and half-naked, lie crouch'd from the cold.
See those skeleton limbs, those frost-bitten feet,

All bleeding and bruised by the stones of the street ;
Hear the sharp cry of childhood, the deep groans that swell
From the poor dying creature who writhes on the floor;
Hear the curses that sound like the echoes of Hell,

As you sicken and shudder, and fly from the door!
Then home to your wardrobes, and say—if you dare—
Spoil'd Children of Fashion-you've nothing to wear !

And oh, if perchance there should be a sphere
Where all is made right which so puzzles us here,
Where the glare and the glitter, and tinsel of Time
Fade and die in the light of that region sublime,

Where the soul, disenchanted of flesh and of sense,
Unscreen'd by its trappings, and shows, and pretence,
Must be clothed for the life and the service above
With purity, truth, faith, meekness, and love;
Oh, daughters of Earth! foolish virgins, beware!
Lest in that upper realm you have nothing to wear!

MARRYING for money iz a meaner way tew git it than counterfiting.

Az a ginral thing the man who marrys a woman ov more uppercrust than himself will find the woman more anxious tew preserve the distance between them than tew bring him up tew her grade or go down tew hiz level.

What the world wants iz good examples, not so mutch advice; advice may be wrong, but examples prove themselves.

Pride iz bogus. Adam at one time had a right tew be proud, but he let sin beat him out ov hiz birthright.

A crowing hen and a cackling ruseter are very misfortunate poultry in a family.

Titles are valuable; they make us acquainted with menny persons who otherwise would be lost amung the rubbish.

Peace iz the soft and holy shadder that virtew casts.

Habits are like the wrinkles on a man's brow, if yu will smoothe out the one i will smoothe out the other.

If yu should reduce the wants ov the people ov Nu York city tew aktual necessitys and plain comforts, yu would hav tew dubble the perlice force tew keep them from committing suicide.

It iz a darned sight eazier tew find six men who kan tell exactly how a thing ought tew be did than tew find one who will do it

Thare iz nothing so easy to larn az experience, and nothing so hard to apply.

Thare ain't but phew men who kan stick a white hankerchef into the brest pocket ov their overcoat without letting a little ov it stick out just bi acksident.

JOSH BILLINGS.

Mark Twain.

WRITING A NOVEL.

VICE flourished luxuriantly during the heyday of our "flush times." The saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels, and the jails—unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining region-in any region, for that matter. Is it not so? A crowded police-court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty. Still, there is one other sign; it comes last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the "flush times are at the flood. This is the birth of the "literary" paper. The Weekly Occidental, "devoted to literature," made its appearance in Virginia. All the literary people were engaged to write for it. Mr. F. was to edit it. He was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen, and a man who could say happy things in a crisp, neat way. Once, while editor of the Union, he had disposed of a laboured, incoherent, two-column attack made upon him by a contemporary with a single line, which, at first glance, seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment -viz.: "THE LOGIC OF OUR ADVERSARY RESEMBLES THE PEACE OF GOD," ,"—and left it to the reader's memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and "more different" meaning by supplying for himself, and at his own leisure, the rest of the Scripture -"in that it passeth understanding." He once said of a little, half-starved, wayside community, that had no subsistence except what they could get by preying upon chance passengers who stopped over with them a day when travelling by the overland stage, that in their church service they had altered the Lord's Prayer to read: "Give us this day our daily stranger!"

We expected great things of the Occidental. Of course it could not get along without an original novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl into the work the full strength of the company. Mrs. F. was an able romancist of the ineffable school-I know no other name to apply to a school whose heroes are all dainty and all perfect. She wrote the opening chapter, and introduced a lovely

blonde simpleton who talked nothing but pearls and poetry, and who was virtuous to the verge of eccentricity. She also introduced a young French Duke of aggravated refinement, in love with the blonde. Mr. F. followed next week, with a brilliant lawyer, who set about getting the Duke's estates into trouble, and a sparkling young lady of high society, who fell to fascinating the Duke and impairing the appetite of the blonde. Mr. D., a dark and bloody editor of one of the dailies, followed Mr. F., the third week, introducing a mysterious Rosicrucian, who transmuted metals, held consultations with the devil in a cave at dead of night, and cast the horoscope of the several heroes and heroines in such a way as to provide plenty of trouble for their future careers, and breed a solemn and awful public interest in the novel. He also introduced a cloaked and masked melodramatic miscreant, put him on a salary, and set him on the midnight track of the Duke with a poisoned dagger. He also created an Irish coachman, with a rich brogue, and placed him in the service of the society-young-lady, with an ulterior mission to carry billets-doux to the Duke.

Now what does

About this time there arrived in Virginia a dissolute stranger, with a literary turn of mind-rather seedy he was, but very quiet and unassuming; almost diffident, indeed. He was so gentle, and his manners were so pleasing and kindly, whether he was sober or intoxicated, that he made friends of all who came in contact with him. He applied for literary work, offered conclusive evidence that he wielded an easy and practised pen, and so Mr. F. engaged him at once to help write the novel. His chapter was to follow Mr. D.'s, and mine was to come next. this fellow do but go off and get drunk, and then proceed to his quarters and set to work, with his imagination in a state of chaos, and that chaos in a condition of extravagant activity. The result may be guessed. He scanned the chapters of his predecessors, found plenty of heroes and heroines already created, and was satisfied with them; he decided to introduce no more; with all the confidence that whisky inspires, and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then launched himself lovingly into his work; he married the coachman to the society-young-lady, for the sake of the scandal; married the Duke to the blonde's step

mother, for the sake of the sensation; stopped the desperado's salary; created a misunderstanding between the devil and the Rosicrucian; threw the Duke's property into the wicked lawyer's hands; made the lawyer's upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to delirium tremens, thence to suicide; broke the coachman's neck; let his widow succumb to contumely, neglect, poverty, and consumption; caused the blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on the bank with the customary note pinned to them, forgiving the Duke, and hoping he would be happy; revealed to the Duke, by means of the usual strawberry-mark on left arm, that he had married his own long-lost mother and destroyed his long-lost sister; instituted the proper and necessary suicide of the Duke and the Duchess in order to compass poetical justice; opened the earth and let the Rosicrucian through, accompanied with the accustomed smoke and thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the promise that in the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he would take up the surviving character of the novel and tell what became of the devil!

It read with singular smoothness, and with a "dead" earnestness that was funny enough to suffocate a body. But there was war when it came in. The other novelists were furious. The mild stranger, not yet more than half sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of vituperation, meek and bewildered, looking from one to another of his assailants, and wondering what he could have done to invoke such a storm. When a lull came at last, he said his say gently and appealingly-said he did not rightly remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried to do the best he could, and knew his object had been to make the novel not only pleasant and plausible, but instructive, and—

The bombardment began again. The novelists assailed his ill-chosen adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and ridicule. And so the siege went on. Every time the stranger tried to appease the enemy he only made matters worse. Finally he offered to rewrite the chapter. This arrested hostilities. The indignation gradually quieted down, peace reigned again, and the sufferer retired in safety and got him to his own citadel.

But on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk again. And again his imagination went mad. He led the