Things are sadly changed, now, with regard to poor JACK.  Every day we read of outrageous assaults upon him with marline-spikes and other perverted marine stores, by brutal skippers and flagitious mates, whose proper end would be the yard-arm and the rope’s end.  All belaying-pin and no pay has made JACK a dull boy.  His windpipe refuses to furnish the whilom exhilarating tooraloo for his hornpipe.  Silent are the “yarns” with which he used to while away the time when off his watch and huddling under the lee of the capstan with his messmates.  And then, when he comes ashore, it is only to be devoured by the sharks that lie in wait for him and drag him away bodily to their obscene “boarding-house” dens.

Once on a time JACK, when in dock, used to make holiday of it on Sunday.  He looked as gay as a tobacconist’s sign when rigged out in his best blue for a lark ashore, where he was occasionally to be seen on horseback with a row of his jovial messmates, all of them sitting with their backs to the horse’s head, and the sternmost of them steering the bewildered animal by his tail.  Now there seems to be a movement to cut off from JACK even the holiday to which he is surely entitled.  The captain of a bark, lying at San Francisco, has lately stopped wages, to the amount of sixty-five dollars, from a seaman, because the latter refused to assist in discharging cargo on Sunday.  Blue has, in one sense, always been JACK’s favorite color; but if this sort of thing goes on much further, he must become bluer than ever, and his cheerless condition will be such that he will not have a cheer left to shake the welkin with when he helps to man the yards.

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Postal.

Frankly speaking, can Senator REVEL’s letters be called Blackmail?

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Propagandism.

Ancient Rome was saved by a proper goose; modern Rome by a proper gander.

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The Sheriff’s party tell us that they are always “watch"ful in the interest of the tax-payers.  So they should be, for don’t they own the most “repeaters”?

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The Plays and Shows.

HAMLET—­WITH A YELLOW WIG.

The poet—­his name is of no consequence—­has defined the evening as

“The close of the day when the HAMLET is still.”

Evidently he was a bucolic, and not a metropolitan poet.  Otherwise he would have remembered that the close of the day, or, to speak with mathematical accuracy, the hour of eight P.M., is precisely the time when the HAMLET of a well-regulated theatrical community begins to make himself vocally prominent.  A few nights since, we had no less than three HAMLETS propounding at the same time the unnecessary question, whether to be or not to be is the correct thing.  The serious HAMLET of the eagle eye, and the burlesque HAMLET of the vulpine nose, are with us yet; but the rival of the latter, the HAMLET of the taurine neck, has gone to Boston, where his wiggish peculiarity will he better appreciated than it was in this Democratic city.