That kiss awoke the sleeping muse within him.  Blissful visions of the future, and ambitious feelings for the present, started into being.  His first thought was to do something to please the potent little fellow; but happening to glance at his “everlasting terror,” he remembered his promise.  A brilliant idea striking him at that moment, he apostrophized the infant in the touching words:—­

  By by, baby bunting,
  Daddy’s gone a-hunting,
  To get a little rabbit skin
  To wrap the baby bunting in.

One more kiss, and with a little sigh he lays the precious burden down, and departs to spend the day in the woods, according to promise, so as not to be bothering around under foot, and getting in everybody’s way when he ain’t wanted.

As he cannot entirely control circumstances, he is determined to make the best of them, and he mentally blesses the happy thought, or rather inspiration, that suggested the soft rabbit skin as a bed for the baby, and resolves that it alone shall be the object of his day’s search.

* * * * *

POLISHING THE POLICE.

[Illustration]

Doubtless there is much room for improvement in the deportment and speech of our very efficient Municipal Police.  Citizens have frequently to apply to them for information, and it sometimes happens that the answer is couched in language that may be Polish, so far as the querist knows, though, in fact, there is no polish about it.  It is more likely to be COPTIC, as the policeman of the period likes to call himself a “COP.”  If there is a street sensation in progress, and you ask a contemplative policeman the cause of it, matters are not made perfectly clear to you when he replies that it is “only a put-up job to screen a fence” or words to that affect.  If you ask him to explain things more fully he will probably say, “Shoo! fly,” or “you know how it is yourself,” or recommend you to “scratch gravel.”  Such expressions as these are very embarrassing to strangers, and even to citizens whose pathways have not led them through the brambly tracts of police philology.

In view of these facts, the public have reason to be thankful to Justice DOWLING for the reproof administered by him, a few days since, to a policeman who made use of slang in addressing the bench.  The reprehended officer of the law spoke about a prisoner being “turned over,” when he should have said “discharged.”  This gave Mr. DOWLING occasion to pass some severe remarks with regard to the use of slang terms generally, by policemen, and to caution them against addressing persons in any such jargon.  The lesson was a timely one, and we hope that it may prove effective, since we frequently hear perplexed inquirers complaining that their education has been neglected so far as slang is concerned, and lamenting that, when young, they had not devoted themselves rather to the study of the Thieves’ Dictionary than to that of the polite but comparatively useless treatises on their native tongue.