?"

"I sold for ninety cents."

"Ninety cents!" exclaimed the neighbour. "Surely you didn't sell for
that?"

"I certainly did. I tried to get ninety-two, but ninety was the
highest offer I could obtain."

"Ninety cents! Why, what has come over you, Ashburn. Wheat is
selling for a dollar and twenty cents. I've just sold five hundred
bushels for that."

"Impossible!" ejaculated the farmer.

"Not at all impossible. Don't you know that by the last arrival from
England have come accounts of a bad harvest, and that wheat has
taken a sudden rise?"

"No, I don't know any such a thing," returned the astonished
Ashburn.

"Well, it's so. Where is your newspaper?--Haven't you read it? I got
mine on Friday evening, and saw the news. Early on Saturday morning
I found two or three speculators ready to buy up all the wheat they
could get at old prices; but they didn't make many operations. One
fellow who pretended to be a fancy sportsman, thrust himself into my
way, but, even if I had not know of a rise in the price of wheat, I
should have suspected it as soon as I saw him, for I read, last
week, of just such a looking chap as him having got ahead of some
ignorant country farmers by buying up their produce, on a sudden
rise of the market, at price much below its real value."

"Good day!" said Ashburn, suddenly applying his whip to the flank of
his horse; and away dashed homeward at a full gallop.

The farmer never sat down to make a regular calculation of what he
had lost by stopping his news paper; but it required no formality of
pencil and paper to arrive at this. A difference of thirty cents on
each bushel, made, for a thousand bushels, the important sum of
three hundred dollars, and this fact his mind instantly saw.

By the next mail, he enclosed two dollars to the publishers of the
"Post," and re-ordered the paper. He will, doubtless, think a good
while, and retrench at a good many points, before he orders an other
discontinuance.

HUNTING UP A TESTIMONIAL.

"DOCTOR," said a man with a thin, sallow countenance, pale lips, and
leaden eyes, coming up to the counter of a drug-store in Baltimore,
some ten years ago--"Doctor, I've been reading your advertisement
about the 'UNIVERSAL RESTORER, AND BALSAM OF LIFE,' and if that Mr.
John Johnson's testimony is to be relied on, it ought to suit my
case, for, in describing his own sufferings, he has exactly
described mine. But I've spent so much money in medicine,