it has occurred to me that maybe the best variety to plant would be the ordinary fried oyster.  It seems to be popular, and it has the advantage of growing without a shell.  One of the other commissioners,’ so this terrific blockhead said, ’insisted on trying the experiment with the oyster that produces tripe, so’s to enable the people to catch tripe and oysters when they go a-fishing.  But for my part,’ says he, ’I want either the fried oyster or the kind that grow in pie crust, like they have ’em at the restaurants.’  Actually said that.

“Well, he driveled along for a while, talking the awfulest bosh; and pretty soon he asked me if I was fond of mock-turtle soup.  Said that the commission had discovered the feasibility of adding the mock-turtle to the food-animals of our rivers.  He allowed that he had understood that they could be cultivated best by spawning calves’ heads on forcemeat balls, and that they were in season for the table during the same months of the year that gravy is.  And he said that a strenuous effort ought to be made to have our rivers swarming with this delicious fish.

“And then he talked a whole lot of delirious slush of that kind, and about improving the tadpole crop, and so on, until I—­Wh-wh-what d’you say?  Want me to take my legs off that table and quit?  You don’t want to hear any more news about the fisheries?  Oh, all right; there’s plenty of other papers that’ll be glad to get the intelligence.  Next time you want my views about pisciculture you’ll have to send for me.”

Then the professor aimed again at the spittoon, missed it, rubbed the ragged crown of his forlorn hat with his shining elbow, buttoned up his coat over a shirt-bosom which last saw the washerwoman during the presidency of General Harrison, and sauntered out and down stairs.  The impression that he left was that he would be more available to the Fish Commission as bait than in any other capacity.

Upon another occasion a more forlorn and dismal vagabond, a cripple, too, sauntered into Brown’s grocery-store, where a crowd was sitting around the stove discussing politics.  Taking position upon a nail-keg, he remarked,

“Mr. Brown, you don’t want to buy a first-rate wooden leg, do you?  I’ve got one that I’ve been wearing for two or three years, and I want to sell it.  I’m hard up for money; and although I’m attached to that leg, I’m willing to part with it so’s I kin get the necessaries of life.  Legs are all well enough; they are handy to have around the house, and all that; but a man must attend to his stomach if he has to walk about on the small of his back.  Now, I’m going to make you an offer.  That leg is Fairchild’s patent; steel springs, India-rubber joints, elastic toes and everything, and it’s in better order now than it was when I bought it.  It’d be a comfort to any man.  It’s the most luxurious leg I ever came across.  If bliss ever kin be reached by a man this side of the tomb, it