He would stretch put his empty hands to bless,
  Or lift them both to pray;
But alack! to lighten man’s distress,
  They moved no other way.

A famine came! but his heart was still
  As hard as his pride was high;
And the starving poor but throng’d his door
  To curse him and to die.

At length from the crowd rose a clamour so loud,
  That a cruel plot laid he;
He open’d one of his granaries wide,
  And bade them enter free.

In they rush’d—­the maid and the sire. 
  And the child that could barely run—­
Then he clos’d the barn, and set it on fire. 
  And burnt them every one!

And loud he laugh’d at each terrible shriek,
  And cried to his archer-train,
“The merry mice!—­how shrill they squeak!—­
  They are fond of the bishop’s grain!”

But mark, what an awful judgment soon,
  On the cruel bishop fell;
With so many mice his palace swarm’d,
  That in it he could not dwell.

They gnaw’d the arras above and beneath,
  They eat each savoury dish up;
And shortly their sacrilegious teeth
  Began to nibble the bishop!

He flew to his castle of Ehrenfels,
  By the side of the Rhine so fair;
But they found the road to his new abode,
  And came in legions there.

He built him, in haste, a tower tall
  In the tide, for his better assurance;
But they swam the river, and scal’d the wall,
  And worried him past endurance.

One morning his skeleton there was seen,
  By a load of flesh the lighter;
They had picked his bones uncommonly clean,
  And eaten his very mitre!

Such was the end of the bishop of Mentz,
  And oft at the midnight hour,
He comes in the shape of a fog so dense,
  And sits on his old “Mouse-Tower.”

C.K.W.

* * * * *

PRUSSIC ACID.

(For the Mirror.)

The circumstance of Montgomery’s recent suicide in Newgate, has led me to send you the following remarks upon the nature and properties of that most violent poison, Prussic acid, with which the unfortunate man terminated his existence.

Were we to consider the constituent parts and properties of the most common things we are in the habit of daily using, and their poisonous and destructive natures, we should recoil at the deadly potion, and shrink from the loathsome draught we are about to take.  That which we consider the most delicious and exhilarating portion of our common beverage, porter, contains carbonic acid gas, commonly known by the “spirit,” and which the poor miners dread with the utmost horror, like the Arabian does the destructive blast of the simoon.  Oxalic acid, so much the fear of those accustomed to the medicine—­Epsom salts, is made from that useful article, sugar, by uniting with it a smaller portion, more than it has