Oh!  Extravagance saileth ’mid glitter and show,
As if fortune’s rich tide never ebbed in its flow;
But see her at night when her gold-light is spent,
When her anchor is lost, and her silken sails rent;
When the wave of destruction her shatter’d side drinks,
And the billows—­ha! ha!—­laugh and shout as she sinks. 
No! give us Content, as life’s channel we steer. 
While our Pilot is Caution, there’s little to fear.

—­Charles Swain.

* * * * *

LAUGHING IN THE SLEEVE.—­A writer in Notes and Queries gives an instance of Curry’s wit, introduced after a defeat in a conversational contest with Lady Morgan.  “It was the fashion then for ladies to wear very short sleeves; and Lady Morgan, albeit not a young woman, with true provincial exaggeration, wore none—­a mere strap over her shoulders.  Curry was walking away from her little coterie, when she called out, ’Ah! come back, Mr. Curry, and acknowledge that you are fairly beaten.’  ‘At any rate,’ said he, turning round, ’I have this consolation, you can’t laugh at me in your sleeve!”

* * * * *

An antiquarian discovery has just been made in Kremusch, near Treplitz, in Bohemia.  Some twelve feet below the surface of the earth, a tomb, with six bodies in it, was found.  It contained, besides, a gold chain about a yard and a half long, three gold ear-rings, two gold balls of the size of a walnut, a gold medallion with a cameo representing a Roman Emperor, and an iron plate, thickly silvered, on each side of which is engraved a reindeer, with a hawk on its hind quarters.  The workmanship of the different objects, which evidently belong to the ante-Christian era, is remarkable for its neatness.

* * * * *

DEATH.

  “Death is a road our dearest friends have gone;
  Why, with such leaders, fear to say ‘Lead on?’
  Its gate repels, lest it too soon be tried;
  But turns in balm on the immortal side. 
  Mothers have pass’d it; fathers; children:  men,
  Whose like we look not to behold again;
  Women, that smiled away their loving breath.—­
  Soft is the traveling on the road of Death. 
  But guilt has passed it?  Men not fit to die? 
  Oh, hush—­for He that made us all, is by. 
  Human were all; all men; all born of mothers;
  All our own selves, in the worn-out shape of others;
  Our used, and oh! be sure, not to be ill-used brothers.”

—­Leigh Hunt.

* * * * *

So perfect were the Egyptians in the manufacture of perfumes that some of their ancient ointment, preserved in an alabaster vase, in the museum of Alnwick, still retains a powerful odor, though it must be within 2,000 and 3,000 years old.