Wake, Lady! wake!  She wakes! she wakes! 
  Through the green mead her course she takes;
  And now her lover’s arms enfold
  A prize more precious far than gold,
    Blushing like morning’s ray;
  Now mount thy palfrey, Maiden kind! 
  Nor pause to cast one look behind,
  But swifter than the viewless wind,
    Away! away!

Ibid.

* * * * *

THE GATHERER

“A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” 
SHAKSPEARE.

* * * * *

FILTHY WATER.

If the unhappy victims of mud-juice had constant access to the solar microscope, and there was occasionally in London a little sunshine to set off the animated bedevilments which are crowded into the composition, and could see thousands of animals, generated in filth, and living in the highest spirits and the greatest abundance, in the stuff destined for their stomachs, they would go mad.  Boiled down in tea (for which, in the midst of starvation, a cockney pays five hundred per cent. beyond its value, and a tax of five hundred per cent. more than that,) these centipedes, toads, small alligators, large worms, white bait, snails, caterpillars, maggots, eels, minnows, weeds, moss, offal in detachments, gas-juice, vinegar lees, tallow droppings, galls, particles of dead men, women, children, horses, and dogs, train-oil, copper, dye-stuff, soot, and dead fish, are all, according to the chemistry of the washerwomen, neutralized, mollified, clarified, and rectified—­but this we doubt; and if any of the unhappy persons who imbibe nastiness fourteen times a week, under the idea that it is good and wholesome because it is hot, will take the trouble to look at the agreeable deposit in the bottom of the “slop-basin,” they will find that independent of all the muddy, fishy, oily, gaseous, animal and vegetable stuff, introduced into their stomachs under the guise of that most poisonous of all herbs, tea, they are in the habit of swallowing mud, earth, stones, sand, and gravel, in quantities sufficient to establish in less than three months spaces of land as big as Cornish freeholds in their insides.—­John Bull.

* * * * *

NAPOLEON.

While Napoleon was a subaltern in the army, a Russian officer remarked, with much self-sufficiency, “That his country fought for glory and the French for gain.”—­“You are perfectly right,” answered Napoleon; “every one fights for that which he does not possess.”

INA.

* * * * *

FORBIDDEN FRUIT.