AN EX-MONSTER.

It is a bad day for monarchs.  Boston has, for several weeks, had upon Exhibition His Marine Majesty the Whale.  The captive was shown for the ridiculously small sum of two shillings, and great was the gathering to gaze upon the spouter, who would have come just in time to attend the political caucuses, only he happens to be dead, and cannot spout any more, albeit his jaw is still tremendous.  His defunct condition renders it unnecessary to feed him upon JONAHS, which is lucky for a good many superfluous voyagers upon the Ship of State.  If the King of All the Fishes can draw such crowds at a quarter a head, what a chance is there for our friend LOUIS NAPOLEON!  If he will but make an Exhibition of himself in this country, we promise him full houses, and a greater fortune than that which he has lost.

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THE MICROSCOPIC MAN.

Bumps have a great deal to answer for.  Of course we refer to phrenological bumps, from which, possibly, the powerful adjective “bumptious” is derived, it being applicable to a person whose conflicting bumps keep him continually on the rampage.

Of all such persons, the one with microscopes in his bumps for eyes is the most bumptious.  He is continually detecting pernicious particles in everything that he eats and drinks.  One such will seize a pepper-castor, invert it over his mashed turnips, spank it as if it were a child, and then, peering at the dark particles with which the succulent heap of vegetable matter is dusted, proceed to deliver a lecture upon the poisons that we swallow with our daily food.  He sees iron-filings in the pepper.  Also particles of the tail-feathers of Spanish flies.  He will tell you that if you continue to use pepper like that for a long duration—­say seventy or eighty years—­you will have iron enough in your stomach, from the filings, to make a ten-pound dumb-bell, and blistering stuff sufficient from the Spanish fly to draw all the interest of the National Debt.  If the pepper happens to belong to the Cayenne persuasion, he magnifies it into a hod of bricks.  It is his hod way of accounting for it.  Keep using it daily for half-a-century, says he, and see if you don’t wake up some fine morning and find yourself a brick chimney stuck up on the roof of a house for bats to live in.  It will be a just judgment on you; and small will be to you the consolation should some poetical friend pen an epigrammatical threnody to your memory, telling in “In Memoriam” stanzas how you “went up like a thousand of bricks.”

“Beef?” says the microscopic man, probing the meat with a pencil of light that beams from his right eye (the other being closed for concentration purposes), “Beef, sir?—­not a bit of the bos taurus about it, sir.  Horse, donkey, mule, zebra—­what you will, but not a single fibre of ox.  Did you ever see the fibres of beef run in a direction due north and south, like these?  If you did I should like to know it, sir.  I inspected this meat raw, sir, to-day, on the butcher’s stall, and the minute ova perceptible in it were those of the horse gad-fly, not the ox gad-fly, sir.  Yes, begad, sir, and I’m prepared to maintain the fact upon oath, sir.”