....  We like a liar-a thoroughly conscientious, industrious, and ingenious liar.  Not your ordinary prevaricator, who skirts along the coast of truth, keeping ever within sight of the headlands and promontories of probability-whose excursions are limited to short, fair-weather reaches into the ocean of imagination, and who paddles for port as if the devil were after him whenever a capful of wind threatens a storm of exposure; but a bold, sea-going liar, who spurns a continent, striking straight out for blue water, with his eyes fixed upon the horizon of boundless mendacity.

We have found such a one, and our hat is at half-mast in token of profound esteem and conscious inferiority.  This person gravely tells us that at the burning of the Archiepiscopal Palace at Bourges, among other valuable manuscripts destroyed was the original death-warrant of Jesus Christ, signed at Jerusalem by one Capel, and dated U. C. 783.  Not only so, but he kindly favours us with a literal translation of it!

One cannot help warming up to a man who can lie like that.  Talk about Chatterton’s Rowley deception, Macpherson’s Ossian fraud, or Locke’s moon hoax!  Compared with this tremendous fib they are as but the stilly whisper of a hearth-stone cricket to the shrill trumpeting of a wounded elephant-the piping of a sick cocksparrow to the brazen clang of a donkey in love!

....  For the memory of the late John Ridd, of Illinois, we entertain the liveliest contempt.  Mr. Ridd recently despatched himself with a firearm for the following reasons, set forth in a letter that he left behind.

“Two years ago I discovered that I was worthless.  My great failings are insincerity of character and sly ugliness.  Any one who watched me a little while would discover my unenviable nature.”

Now, it is not that Mr. Ridd was worthless that we hold his memory in reprobation; nor that he was insincere, nor sly, nor ugly.  It is because possessing these qualities he was fool enough to think they disqualified him for the duties of life, or stood in the way of his being an ornament to society and an honour to his country.

...."About the first of next month,” says a pious contemporary, “we shall discontinue the publication of our paper in this city, and shall remove our office and fixtures to—­, where we hope for a blessing upon our work, and a share of advertising patronage.”

A numerous editorial staff of intelligent jackasses will accompany the caravan.  In imagination we behold them now, trudging gravely along behind the moving office fixtures, their goggle eyes cast down in Christian meditation, their horizontal ears flopping solemnly in unison with their measured tread.  Ever and anon the leader halts, uprolls the speculative eye, arrests the oscillation of the ears, laying them rigidly back along the neck, exalts the conscious tail, drops the lank jaw, and warbles a psalm of praise that shakes the blind hills from their eternal repose.  His companions take up the parable in turn, “and the echoes, huddling in affright, like Odin’s hounds,” go baying down the valleys and clamouring amongst the pines, like a legion of invisible fiends after a strange cat.  Then again all is hush, and tramp, and sanctity, and flop, and holy meditation!  And so the pilgrimage is accomplished.  Selah!  Hee-haw!