For this, we spare you,
      O dauntless HALL!  Once having breathed that air
        So pure, so fresh, so rare! 
      And caught the wildness of the Esquimaux,
        We declare you
      Unfit to live where beans and lettuce grow! 
        Leave delving to the little pitiful mole,
        Great soul! 
        And now, then, for the Pole!

[Footnote *:  Captain BENT, of Cincinnati, originator of the new theory of Polar Currents.]

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[Illustration:  FINANCIAL RELIEF

MR. BUMBLE BOUTWELL TO MRS. CORNEY FISH. (See Oliver Twist.) “THE GREAT PRINCIPLE OF FINANCIAL RELIEF IS TO GIVE THE BUSINESS MEN EXACTLY WHAT THEY DON’T WANT:  THEN THEY GET TIRED OF COMING.”]

* * * * *

CONDENSED CONGRESS.

SENATE.

MR. SUMNER said he was the friend of the oppressed.  That, as was well known, was his regular business.  Unfortunately, the Fifteenth Amendment had rendered the colored man incapable of being hereafter regarded as an oppressed creature.  He was sorry, but it could not be helped.  He was therefore forced to go down the chromatic scale of creation and find another class of clients.  He found them in cattle.  HOMER had sung about the ox-eyed Juno, and WALTER WHITMAN about bob veal.  COWPER had remarked that he would not number in his list of friends the man who needlessly set foot upon a cow.  He mentioned these things merely to show that railway companies had no right to starve cattle.  He proposed an amendment to the Constitution, to provide that a dinner of at least three courses should be given to cows daily.  Mr. DRAKE was heartily in favor of the proposition.  He had got his feet in a web, so to speak, by paddling in the political waters of Missouri, and some people had gone so far as to call him “quack.”  He demanded redress.

Mr. WILSON didn’t see the use of all this legislation to protect animals.  Animals had no votes, although he admitted a partial exception, in that every bull, it had its ballot.  But he had something practical.  Here was a jolly job, the Pacific Railway grant.  There was a good deal more in it than they had made out of any other GRANT.  Mr. THURMAN’S suggestion, that this land ought to be occupied by actual settlers, he scorned.  “Actual settlers” were of a great deal more use to him in Massachusetts, where they could vote for him, than in the territories, where that boon would not be extended to them.  It was much better that they should be occupied by imaginary settlers, who could pay and not vote.  Actual “settlings” were the dregs of humanity.

The Georgia bill came up, as it does every day with much more regularity than luncheon.  The Senate has succeeded in muddling it to that degree of unintelligibility that nobody has the slightest notion what it provides.  It is, therefore, in a condition to give rise to infinite debate.  After several senators had said enough for a foundation for thirty columns each in the Globe, they let it go for the present.  The present was the one promised by Senator WILSON in return for the Pacific Railway grab grant.