In his sixth year Charlie evinced poetic tendencies.  We have in one of his poems a description of his grandpapa, “a venerable old gentleman with dark eyes, gray hair, noble features, and altogether very generous aspect.”  Here is “a song appropriate to him:” 

  Oh, venerable is our old ancestor—­
        Cloud on his brow,
        Lightning in his eyes,
  His gray hair streaming in the wind. 
        To children ever kind,
        To merit never blind,—­
  Oh, such is our old ancestor,
  With hair that streameth wild.

At the head of this poem is a picture of the old ancestor, consisting of a hat, a head, a walking-stick, one arm and two legs, one of which—­whether the right or left is doubtful, as their origin is concealed by the aforesaid arm—­is much longer than the other, and walking in a contrary direction.  The most wonderful feature of this sketch is the “hair streaming in the wind,” the distance from the poll to the end of the flowing locks being longer than the longest leg.

We cannot conclude without an extract describing a “dreadful accident” which happened to our youthful author; “perhaps,” as he solemnly says, “for a punishment of my sins, or to show me that Death stands ready at the door to snatch my life away:”  “One night papa had been conjuring a penny, and I thought I should like to conjure; so I took a round brass thing with a verse out of the Bible upon it that I brought into bed with me.  I thought it went down papa’s throat, so I put it down my throat, and I was pretty near choked.  I called my nurse, who was in the next room.  She fetched up papa, and then my nurse brought the basin.  Papa beat my back, and I was sick. Lo! there was the counter! Papa said, ‘Good God!’ and my nurse fainted, but soon recovered.  Don’t you think papa was very clever when he beat my back?  Papa then had a long talk afterward with me about it—­a very serious one.”

The above pathetic story is accurately illustrated, but we especially regret that we cannot transfer to these pages some of the marvellous delineations of the animals in the Clifton Zoological Garden.

M.S.D.

WANTED—­A REAL GAINSBOROUGH.

I am an unmarried man of twenty-four.  After that confession it is hardly necessary to add that I am in the habit of thinking a great deal about a person not yet embodied into actual existence—­i.e. my future wife.  I have not yet met her—­she is a purely ideal being—­but at the same time I so often have a vivid conception of her looks, her air, her walk, her tones even, that she seems to be present.  My misery is that I cannot find her in real life.

No one need fancy that I am an imaginative man:  quite the contrary is the fact.  I am a lawyer, and have an office in Bond street.  Every morning at eight o’clock I take the Sixth Avenue horse-cars and ride down to Fourteenth street.  I have a fancy for walking the rest of the way, and toward evening I saunter back homeward along Broadway and Union Square.