Freedom of action is one of the greatest boons enjoyed by mankind in modern days.  Its rate of progress is encouraging, especially since the Liberal Club of this city has taken it under its protection.  It is a very significant association, is the Liberal Club; rather iconoclastic, to be sure, but only a little ahead of the times, perhaps, in that respect; Some of our cherished forms of speech have already been rendered obsolete by the Liberal Club.  It used to be such a clincher to say, when one wanted to enforce a point by indicating an impossibility, “I will eat my boots unless”—­etc., etc.  That clincher has gone to the place whither good clinchers go, forever.  At a late meeting of the Liberal Club, Professor VAN DER WEYDE contributed to the evening collation a pudding made of an old boot.  The pudding was garnished with the wooden pegs that had kept the boot together, sole and body, while it walked the earth.  The boot-jack with which the original source of the pudding used to be pulled off was also exhibited, and excited great interest.  It is the intention, of the Professor to subject this implement to some process by which it will be resolved into farina, or sawdust, and then to make a Jack Pudding of it.  Many of the ladies and gentlemen present partook of the boot pudding, and pronounced it excellent.  One lady, (a member of Sorosis, we believe,) said that she thought it tasted like a pear.  The Professor assured her, however, that he had used but one boot in making it, not a pair.  Altogether, the pudding was a success.  Freedom of action had been vindicated, and the absurd prejudice that had hitherto prevented men from utilizing their old boots as food, except in extreme cases, was shattered with one blow.

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PANOPLY FOR OUR POLICE.

PUNCHINELLO felicitates the Municipal Police Force on the magnificent new shields with which the manly breasts of its members are decorated.  Nevertheless, PUNCHINELLO considers it sheer mockery to call that a shield by which nothing is shielded.  A buckle might as well be called a buckler as the policeman’s badge a shield.  Already our noble skirmishers of the side-walk are fully provided for the offensive, and, considering the risks run by them from the roughs, the toughs and the gruffs, it is high time that they were furnished with something in the defensive line.  Curb-chain undershirts have been suggested, but an objection to their use is that links of them are apt to be carried into the interior anatomy by pistol bullets, thus introducing a surplus of iron into the blood,—­an accession which is apt to steel the heart of the officer thus experimented on, and so render him deaf to the cries of innocence in distress.  PUNCHINELLO suggests, then, that the policeman’s shield should be a shield.  Let it be made sufficiently large to cover the most vulnerable portion of the person, as shown in the annexed design.  If made of gong-metal, so much the better, as the