“It must be the late dinner.  There are all sorts of threatening shadows around, and but one light; that is a war flame.  Let me sleep.  To-morrow the gaping thousands will ask a sign.  It may come, but it shall be hoisted on the Rhine, and, helpless tide waiters, we cannot tell from which side it shall come.  Ah!  ’Uneasy sits the man on the ministerial bench,’ as SHAKESPEARE would say to-day, for the crown that he spoke of is an ornament in the tower.”

REPORTER

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Magnetic

Polish soldiers should choose the needle gun.  The needle is always true to the Pole.

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[Illustration:  A CAPITAL HINT FOR OUR STATIONARY STREET MUSICIANS, IF THEY WANT TO MAKE MONEY. ]

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THE LEAVEN OF LEAVENWORTH.

The great West has long been famous for the loose, untrammelled freedom with which its inhabitants treat everything and everybody.  Breadth, no less than length, is a striking feature of Western settlements, and that this element is conspicuous in the journalism of those singular abodes, no less than in the social life of their inhabitants, generally, is evidenced in the following advertisement cut from “The Times”—­a paper published at Leavenworth, Kansas: 

“NOTICE TO DRIVERS OF FAST STOCK.—­Hold your horses and do not drive so fast.  All gay and festive cusses caught driving faster than ordinary gait in the city, will be brought before Judge Vaughan, for instance—­the fine is $20.

H. A. ROBERTSON, City Marshal.”

The City Marshal of Leavenworth is clearly a pot-companion of the first (whiskey and) water.  He declines to address his fellow-citizens in the commonplace terms usually recognised in more prosaic communities.  To adopt his own style of phraseology, ROBERTSON is clearly a “gay and festive cuss.”  He is a specimen brick from Kansas, and doubtless always carries one in his hat.  The expression “ordinary gait,” as applied to driving in Kansas, where everybody owns “fast stock,” is rather equivocal in these quieter latitudes to be sure, but we may guess that, at Leavenworth, a man who rides or drives at a pace of twenty miles an hour, is liable, “for instance,” to a fine of $20, or just one dollar per mile.  Kansas maybe a very nice place to live in, for some people, but we would hardly recommend Mr. ROBERT BONNER to emigrate thither, and so risk the probability of being advertised as a “gay and festive cuss.”

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SHIP AHOY!