are
hungry it is pleasant to eat--that honesty is the best policy; all
greater thoughts are undefined and vast to our poor childish brains. We
see but dimly through the mists that roll around our time-girt isle of
life, and only hear the distant surging of the great sea beyond.

ON CATS AND DOGS.

What I've suffered from them this morning no tongue can tell. It
began with Gustavus Adolphus. Gustavus Adolphus (they call him "Gusty"
down-stairs for short) is a very good sort of dog when he is in the
middle of a large field or on a fairly extensive common, but I won't
have him indoors. He means well, but this house is not his size. He
stretches himself, and over go two chairs and a what-not. He wags his
tail, and the room looks as if a devastating army had marched through
it. He breathes, and it puts the fire out.

At dinner-time he creeps in under the table, lies there for awhile, and
then gets up suddenly; the first intimation we have of his movements
being given by the table, which appears animated by a desire to turn
somersaults. We all clutch at it frantically and endeavor to maintain
it in a horizontal position; whereupon his struggles, he being under
the impression that some wicked conspiracy is being hatched against him,
become fearful, and the final picture presented is generally that of
an overturned table and a smashed-up dinner sandwiched between two
sprawling layers of infuriated men and women.

He came in this morning in his usual style, which he appears to have
founded on that of an American cyclone, and the first thing he did was
to sweep my coffee-cup off the table with his tail, sending the contents
full into the middle of my waistcoat.

I rose from my chair hurriedly and remarking "----," approached him at a
rapid rate. He preceded me in the direction of the door. At the door he
met Eliza coming in with eggs. Eliza observed "Ugh!" and sat down on the
floor, the eggs took up different positions about the carpet, where they
spread themselves out, and Gustavus Adolphus left the room. I called
after him, strongly advising him to go straight downstairs and not let
me see him again for the next hour or so; and he seeming to agree with
me, dodged the coal-scoop and went, while I returned, dried myself and
finished breakfast. I made sure that he had gone in to the yard, but
when I looked into the passage ten minutes later he was sitting at the
top of the stairs. I ordered him down at once, but he only