pread its roseate hues over her still elegant features.

Lowndes seized his baggage, and, with a "good evening, madam, good
evening, gentlemen," was about to leave the institution, when the lady
arrested him with:

"Stop, if you please, sir; this is General Lowndes, I believe?"

"General Lowndes, madam, at your service," said he, with a dignified
bow.

According to all accounts, just then, there was a very sudden rising
about the fire-place, and a twinkling of chairs, as if they had all just
been _struck_ with the idea that there was a stranger about!

"Keep your seats, gentlemen," said the General; "I don't wish to disturb
any of you, as I'm about to leave."

"General Lowndes," said the widow, "any friend of Mr. Pinckney is
welcome to my house. Though we are full, I can make room for _you_,
sir."

The General stopped, and the widow and he became first-rate friends,
when they became better acquainted.

Cigar Smoke

Few persons can readily conceive of the amount of cigars consumed in
this country, daily, to say little or nothing of the yearly smokers. The
growing passion for the noxious weed is truly any thing but pleasantly
contemplative. A boy commences smoking at ten or a dozen years old, and
by the time he should be "of age," he is, in various hot-house developed
faculties, quite advanced in years! And street smoking, too, has
increased, at a rate, within a year past, that bids fair to make the
Puritan breezes of our evenings as redolent of "smoke and smell," as
meets one's nasal organic faculties upon paying a pop visit to New York.
There is but one idea of useful import that we can advance in favor of
smoking, to any great extent, in our city: consumption and asthmatic
disorders generally are more prevalent here than in other and more
southern climates, and for the protection of the lungs, cigar smoking,
to a moderate extent, may be useful, as well as pleasurable; but an
indiscriminate "looseness" in smoking is not only a dead waste of much
ready money, but injurious to the eyes, teeth, breath, taste, smell, and
all other senses.

An Everlasting Tall Duel

After all the vicissitudes, ups and downs of a soldier's life,
especially in such a campaign as that in Mexico, there is a great deal
of music mixed up with the misery, fun with the fuss and feathers, and
incident enough to last a man the balance of a long lifetime.

While camped at Camargo, the officers and privates of the Ohio vol