Financial.

Our French editor thinks that the Imperial revenues ought to be doubled at once, on the ground of the too evident Income-pittance of the Emperor.

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[Illustration:  AN EXCURSION.

Fanny.  “ISN’T IT TOO BAD, FRANK; WE SHALL GET BACK TO TOWN LONG BEFORE DARK.”

(Fact is, Fanny has a thick shawl, and it would be so nice to share it with Frank.)]

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OUR PORTFOLIO.

DEAR PUNCHINELLO:  I see you have been at the White Sulphur Springs; but you forgot to tell us what we were all dying to hear about the waters.  Several friends had suggested that I should go to some watering place where I could get nothing else but water to drink, or to some spring where I couldn’t get “sprung.”  I tried the White Sulphur, and while there learned some facts that may be useful to others who seek them for a similar purpose.

These springs differ from the European springs in that they were not discovered by the Romans.  The Latin conquerors never roamed so far, and it was perhaps a good thing for them that they didn’t, Sulphur water could not have agreed with Romans any more than it agrees with Yankees who take whiskey with it.  I was asked if I would like to analyse the water, (as everything here is done by analysis under the eye of the resident physician.) My analysis was done entirely under the nose.

I raised a glass of the enchanted fluid to my lips:  but my nose said very positively, “Don’t do it,” and I didn’t.  I told my conductor I had analyzed it, and he seemed not a little astonished at the rapidity and simplicity of the method.  He asked me if I would be kind enough to write out a statement of the result after the manner of Dr. HAYES, Prof.  ROGERS, and others who have examined these waters and testified that they would cure everything but hydrophobia.  I told him I would, and retiring to my room, wrote as follows: 

“Sulphur water contains mineral properties of a sulphuric character, owing to the fact that the water runs over beds of sulphur.  Nobody has ever seen these beds, but they are supposed to constitute the cooler portions of those dominions corresponding to the Christian location of Purgatory.  Sinners, preliminary to being plunged into the fiery furnace, are laid out on these beds and wrapped in damp sheets by chambermaids regularly attached to the establishment.  This is meant to increase the torture of their subsequent sufferings, and there can be no doubt that it succeeds.  Herein we have also an explanation of the reason of these waters coming to the surface of the earth—­it is to give patients and other miserables who drink them a foretaste of future horrors.  Passing from this branch of the subject to the analysis proper, I find that fifty thousand grains of sulphur water divided, into one hundred parts, contains,