e in Texas. But what was his horror to find, the
first week of his hanging up in Bexar, that an agent of the firm of
Peabody, Grab, Catchem & Co., _was there!_ The Doctor _stepped_ to
Galveston; on the way he accidentally _met_ a travelling agent of
Peabody, Grab, Catchem & Co. The Doctor took the _Sabine_ slide for
Tampico; there he found the "black vomit." He up and off again, for
Mobile; his nervous system was much worked up and his pocket-book sadly
depleted! There were two alternatives--change his name, size and
profession, and live in a swamp; _or settle with the firm of Peabody,
Grab, Catchem & Co_. Dr. Pendleton St. Clair Smith chose the latter; he
sought and soon found in Mobile, a veritable _agent_, duly authorized to
receive and forward funds for Peabody, Grab, Catchem & Co., and hunt up
and down--fugitives from the printer! The Doctor paid up--felt better,
and learned the moral fact that delinquent subscribers are no longer to
be the printers' ghosts.

Ambition.

A person never thinks so meanly of ambition as when walking through a
grave-yard.--To see men who have filled the world with their glory for
half a century or more, reduced to a six foot mudhole, gives pride a
shock which requires a long stay in a city to counteract.--The gentlemen
who are now "spoken of for the Presidency," will in less than a century,
have their bones carted away to make room for a street sewer. Queer
creature that man--well, he is.

Way the Women Fixed the Tale-Bearer.

"I dunno where I heer'd it, but I know it's true. I expected it long
ago. I told Jones it'd come out so."

"Why, Uncle Josh, you don't pretend to say that Miller's wife has run
off with Bob Tape, Yardstick's clark, do you?"

"Yes, I do, too; hain't it been the talk of the neighborhood for a year
past, that Miller's wife and that feller--Bob Tape, were a leetle too
thick?"

"Well, Uncle Josh," says his neighbor Brown, "I don't recollect anybody
saying anything about it, but you, and for my part, I don't believe a
word of it."

"Why, hain't Miller's wife gone?" says Uncle Josh.

"I don't know--is she?" says Brown.

"Be sure she is; I went over to the store this morning, the fust thing,
to see if Bob Tape was about--he wasn't there--they said he'd gone to
Boston on business for old Yardstick. O, ho! says I, and then I started
for Heeltap's shop; we had allers said how things would turn out. He was
out, but seein' me go to his shop, he cam