Dear PUNCH,—­Have you seen the con.  I made the other day?  I transcribe it for you:—­

  “Though Wealth’s neglect and Folly’s taunt
    Conspire to distress the poor,
  Pray can you tell me why sharp want
    Can ne’er approach the pauper’s door”

D’Orsay has rhymed the following answer:—­

“The merest child might wonder how The pauper e’er sharp wants can know, When, spite of cruel Fortune’s taunts, Blunt is the sharpest of his wants.”

Yours sincerely and comically,

SIBTHORP.

P.S.—­Let BRYANT call for his Christmas-box.

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THE COPPER CAPTAIN.

At the public meeting at Hammersmith for the purpose of taking into consideration the propriety of lighting the roads, in the midst of a most animated discussion, Captain Atcherly proposed an adjournment of the said meeting; which proposition being strongly negatived by a small individual, Captain Atcherly quietly pointed to an open window, made a slight allusion to the hardness of the pavement, and finally achieved the exit of the dissentient by whistling

[Illustration:  MY FRIEND AND PITCHER.]

* * * * *

“TAKE CARE OF HIM.”

“Take care of him!” That sentence has been my ruin; from my cradle upwards it has dogged my steps and proved my bane!  Fatal injunction!  Little did my parents think of the miseries those four small monosyllables have entailed upon their hapless son!

My first assertion of infantine existence, that innocent and feeble wail that claimed the name of life, was met by the command, “Take care of him! take care of him!” said my mother to the doctor; “Take care of him!” said the doctor to the nurse; and “Take care of him!” added my delighted father to every individual of the rejoicing household.

The doctor’s care manifested itself in an over-dose of castor oil; the nurse, in the plenitude of her bounty, nearly parboiled me in an over-heated bath; my mother drugged me with a villanous decoction of soothing syrup, which brought on a slumber so sound that the first had very nearly proved my last; and the entire household dandled me with such uncommon vigour that I was literally tossed and “Catchee-catchee’d” into a fit of most violent convulsions.  As I persisted in surviving, so did I become the heir to fresh torments from the ceaseless care of those by whom I was surrounded.  My future symmetry was superinduced by bandaging my infant limbs until I looked like a miniature mummy.  The summer’s sun was too hot and the winter’s blast too cold; wet was death, and dry weather was attended with easterly winds.  I was “taken care of.”  I never breathed the fresh air of Heaven, but lived in an artificial nursery atmosphere of sea-coal and logs.