and took his bride a drive into the country.  They stopped beside a pair of bars, where Monsieur hitched his horse, and, taking Lucinda by the hand, led her into Farmer Steele’s orchard, to the foot of his biggest apple-tree.  There she beheld a little mound, at the head and foot of which stood a daily rose-bush shedding its latest wreaths of bloom, and upon the mound itself was laid a board on which she read,

“Here lie the bones of poor Piggy.”

Mrs. Lucinda burst into tears, and Monsieur, picking a bud from the bush, placed it in her hand, and led her tenderly back to the rockaway.

That evening Mrs. Lucinda was telling the affair to old Israel with so much feeling that she did not perceive at all the odd commotion in his face, till, as she repeated the epitaph to him, he burst out with,—­“He didn’t say what become o’ the flesh, did he?”—­and therewith fled through the kitchen-door.  For years afterward Israel would entertain a few favored auditors with his opinion of the matter, screaming till the tears rolled down his cheeks,—­

“That was the beateree of all the weddin’-towers I ever heerd tell on.  Goodness! it’s enough to make the Wanderin’ Jew die o’ larfin’!”

* * * * *

A SOLDIER’S ANCESTRY.

  When Nadir asked a princess for his son,
    And Delhi’s throne required his pedigree,
  He stared upon the messenger as one
    Who should have known his birth of bravery.

  “Go back,” he cried, in undissembled scorn,
    “And bear this answer to your waiting lord:—­
  ’My child is noble! for, though lowly born,
    He is the son and grandson of the Sword!’”

FIBRILIA.

There are not a few timid souls who imagine that England is falling into decay.  Our Cousin John is apt to complain.  He has been accustomed to enlarge upon his debts, his church-rates and poor-rates, his taxes on air, light, motion, “everything, from the ribbons of the bride to the brass nails of the coffin,” upon the wages of his servants both on the land and the water, upon his Irish famine and exodus, and his vast expenses at home and abroad.  And when we consider how small is his homestead, a few islands in a high latitude inferior to those of Japan in size and climate, and how many of his family have left him to better their condition, one might easily conclude that he had passed his meridian, and that his prospects were as cloudy as his atmosphere.

But our Cousin John, with a strong constitution, is in a green old age, and still knows how to manage his property.

Within the last two years he has quietly extinguished sixty millions of his debts in terminable annuities.  He has improved his outlying lands of Scotland and Ireland, ransacked the battle-fields of Europe for bone-dust and the isles of the Pacific for guano, and imported enough to fertilize four millions of acres, and, not content with the produce of his home-farm, imports the present year more than four millions of tons of grain and corn to feed nineteen millions of his people.