STRABISMUS, OR CROSS-EYE, IN ITS WORST STAGES, CURED IN ONE
    MINUTE.  READ!

    NEWARK, August 14th, 1861.

Dear Doctor:  I write to express my thanks for the great difference you have made in my appearance by your operation on my eye.  I have had a squint, or cross-eye, since birth, and in less than one minute, and with VERY LITTLE PAIN, you have made my eyes perfectly straight and natural.  Having consulted in Europe the greatest Aurists, I, therefore, can testify that your system of restoring the hearing to the deaf is at once scientific, safe and sure; and I confidently recommend all deaf to place themselves under your care.  W.T.

There’s a nut to crack.  Having had a cross-eye cured in one minute, Mr. T. can therefore testify that the system by which he was enabled to see is just the thing to enable the deaf to hear!  But an instant’s reflection convinced us of the true state of the case.  There is an old German song which translated saith: 

  ’I am the Doctor Iron-beer,
  The one who makes the blind to hear,
  The man who makes the deaf to see:—­
  Come with your invalids to me.’

We evidently have a Doctor Iron-beer among us.  ‘He still lives,’ and enables people to outdo the clairvoyants, who read with their fingers, by qualifying his patients to peruse the papers with their auricular organs.

* * * * *

Walter will receive our thanks for the following aesthetic communication:—­

    DEAR CONTINENTAL: 

    Do you know the superb picture of Judith and Holofernes, by
    ALLORI?  Of course.  But the legend?

The painter ALLORI was blessed and cursed with a mistress, one of the most beautiful women in an age of beauty.  He loved her, and she tormented him, until, to set forth his sufferings, he painted la belle dame sans mercy as Judith, holding his own decapitated head by the hair.

    ‘She was more than a match for her lover,’ said a young lady,
    who—­between us—­I think is more beautiful than the ‘Judith.’

    ‘Yes,’ was the answer; ’the engraving proves that she got a-head
    of him.’

Of course it was Holofernally bad.  I once heard a better one on the same subject, of scriptural be-head-edness.  Where is a centaur first mentioned?  John’s head on a charger.  The postage stamp on your lawyer’s bill—­mine especially—­represents the same thing, with the substitution of General Washington for John.  Rarey tamed Cruiser—­I wonder if he could do anything by way of ‘taking down’ this legal ‘charger’ of mine.

  Yours truly,
  WALTER

* * * * *

Much has been written on oysters.  There was a time when England sent nothing else abroad.  ‘The poor Britons—­they are good for something,’ says SALLUST, in ‘The Last Days of Pompeii;’ ‘they produce an oyster.’  In these days, they export no oysters, but in lieu thereof give us plenty of pepper-sauce.  But to the point,—­we mean to the poem,—­for which we are indebted to a Philadelphia contributor:—­