When Burns, with equal force and delicacy, delineates the pure and unsophisticated affection of young, intelligent, and innocent country people, as the most enchanting of human feelings, he gives additional sweetness to the picture by placing his lovers

  “Beneath the milk-white thorn, that scents the evening gale.”

There is something about the tree, which one bred in the country cannot soon forget, and which a visiter learns, perhaps, sooner than any association of placid delight connected with rural scenery.  When, too, the traveller, or the man of the world, after a life spent in other pursuits, returns to the village of his nativity, the old hawthorn is the only playfellow of his boyhood that has not changed.  His seniors are in the grave; his contemporaries are scattered; the hearths at which he found a welcome are in the possession of those who know him not; the roads are altered; the houses rebuilt; and the common trees have grown out of his knowledge:  but be it half a century or more, if man spare the old hawthorn, it is just the same—­not a limb, hardly a twig, has altered from, the picture that memory traces of his early years.—­Library of Entertaining Knowledge.

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TURKISH JOKE.

When the Caliph Haroun el Raschid (who was the friend of the great Charlemagne,) entertained Ebn Oaz at his court in the quality of jester, he desired him one day, in the presence of the Sultana and all her followers, to make an excuse worse than the crime it was intended to extenuate:  the Caliph walked about, waiting for a reply.  Alter a long pause, Ebn Oaz skulked behind the throne, and pinched his highness in the rear.  The rage of the Caliph was unbounded.  “I beg a thousand pardons of your Majesty,” said Ebn Oaz, “but I thought it was her Highness the Sultana.”  This was the excuse worse than the crime; and of course the jester was pardoned.

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FUND AND REFUND.

Disappointment at the theatre is a bad thing:  but the manager returning admission money is worse.  Sheridan, who understood professional feelings on this subject in the most acute degree, was in the habit of saying that he could give words to the chagrin of a conqueror, on seeing the fruit of his victories snatched from him; or the miseries of a broken down minister, turned out in the moment when he thought the cabinet at his mercy; or a felon listening to a long winded sermon from the ordinary; or a debtor just fallen into the claws of a dun; but that he never could find words to express the sensibilities of a manager compelled to disgorge money once taken at his doors. “Fund,” says this experienced ornament of the art of living by one’s wits, “fund is an excellent word; but re-fund is the very worst in the language."Monthly Magazine.