in forwarding the
stipulated articles, it is needless to say that when they arrived the
subject had "limbered up," and the cartman found it necessary to imitate
his example, and drive back a sadder man.

Five days came and went, and still Karl Konstant Kain lingered above
ground, viewing the shadows go up and down on the pine box destined for
his remains (a standing menace of this character now occupied one corner
of his apartment), and realizing that his symptoms grew hourly worse. His
old friends, the doctors, feeling some anxiety, came to examine into the
matter, but after a careful diagnosis of the patient, they left with very
marked abridgments of countenance and their pills. Under the
circumstances, they felt that pills would only hasten the sad event. And,
indeed, their prognostications seemed not ill-founded. Six hours later, a
fearful coma seized his struggling anatomy and held it fast, and in a few
minutes, at farthest, the last mournful rites would be in order. The pulse
had become quite motionless, the suppressed breathing grew momentarily
fainter,--and, aha! hold a light, nurse.

What a moral is pointed in that much quoted sentiment referring to the
"fate of men and empires." 'Twas but a drop of water trickling from the
rain-drenched roof, and yet it had power to call a human being to life.

K. K. Kain, Esq., now sat bolt upright in his straw-bed and
demanded--shall we write it--would it be politic--in a word, would it be
accepted as true? In such an emergency there is no alternative left to the
undissembling chronicler of fact, nor do we seek one. K. Konstant Kain
demanded gruel, and indeed from this moment conceived such an attachment
for gruel, that it was with difficulty that their separation could be
accomplished for any considerable portion of his waking moments. Nor can
it be denied that gruel aided his convalescence and his complexion as
nothing else but tolerably regular doses of Blooming Cereus could have
done. (This joke is paid for, and on that ground it is hoped there will
be no objection to it.) In two weeks, time gruel stood him on his two legs
and bade him "view, the landscape o'er." In three it had brought its
magician's art to bear on his sunken cheeks, and converted the yellow rose
of Texas into a lively peach bloom. And in the short space of one month it
had so far rehabilitated his battered hulk, that he was enabled to receive
a deputation of citizens with a purse of Mexican coin, and