there are tears in his voice, so you know the fish must be hurting him.  The idea that a hawk can’t fly over the water of an afternoon without some malicious fish jumping up and trying to bite him!

     If a fish wants to cross the water safely, let him take a
     Fulton ferryboat for it.  There he will find a sign reading: 

“No Peddling or Hawking allowed in this cabin.”  Strange that hawking should be so sternly prohibited on boats which are mainly patronized by Brooklynites chronically afflicted with catarrh!

Never shall it be said that I put my hand to the plow and turned back.  For that matter never shall it be said of me that I put hand to a plow at all, unless a plow should chase me upstairs and into the privacy of my bed-room, and then I should only put hand to it for the purpose of throwing it out of the window.  The beauty of the farmer’s life was never very clear to me.  As for its boasted “independence,” in the part of the country I came from, there was never a farm that was not mortgaged for about all it was worth; never a farmer who was not in debt up to his chin at “the store.”  Contented!  When it rains the farmer grumbles because he can’t hoe or do something else to his crops, and when it does not rain, he grumbles because his crops do not grow.  Hens are the only ones on a farm that are not in a perpetual worry and ferment about “crops:”  they fill theirs with whatever comes along, whether it be an angleworm, a kernel of corn, or a small cobblestone, and give thanks just the same.

THE OUTSIDE DOG IN THE FIGHT

You may sing of your dog, your bottom dog,
Or of any dog that you please,
I go for the dog, the wise old dog,
That knowingly takes his ease,
And, wagging his tail outside the ring,
Keeping always his bone in sight,
Cares not a pin in his wise old head
For either dog in the fight.

Not his is the bone they are fighting for,
And why should my dog sail in,
With nothing to gain but a certain chance
To lose his own precious skin! 
There may be a few, perhaps, who fail
To see it in quite this light,
But when the fur flies I had rather be
The outside dog in the fight.

I know there are dogs—­most generous dogs
Who think it is quite the thing
To take the part of the bottom dog,
And go yelping into the ring. 
I care not a pin what the world may say
In regard to the wrong or right;
My money goes as well as my song,
For the dog that keeps out of the fight!

Mr. Webb, like Charles Lamb and the late Mr. Travers, stammered just enough to give piquancy to his conversation.  To facilitate enunciation he placed a “g” before the letters which it was hard for him to pronounce.  We were talking of the many sad and sudden deaths from pneumonia, bronchitis, etc., during the recent spring season, and then of the insincerity of poets who sighed for death and longed for a summons to depart.  He said in his deliciously slow and stumbling manner:  “I don’t want the ger-pneu-m-mon-ia.  I’m in no ger-hurry to ger-go.”  Mrs. Webb’s drawing-rooms were filled with valuable pictures and bronzes, and her Thursday Evenings at home were a delight to many.