ust before the curtain rose the pig got into a lady's rubber and went
to sleep, and when the performance was over and she went to put on
the shoe, she screamed a little and jumped up on the seat, and said
something about rats, which brought an usher to her assistance, and he
took the Guinea pig and sent it to its owner. For a few minutes there
was almost as much commotion as there would be at a picnic if a boy
should break up a nest of hornets.

FAILURE OF A SOLID INSTITUTION.

We are astonished to see that a Boston dealer in canned goods has
failed. If there is one branch of business that ought to be solid it
is that of canning fruits and things, for there must be the almightiest
profit on it that there is on anything. It must be remembered that the
stuff is canned when it is not salable in its natural state.

If the canners took tomatoes, for instance, when they first came around,
at half a dollar for six, and canned them, there would be some excuse
for charging twenty-five cents for a tin thing full, but they wait until
the vines are so full of tomatoes that the producer will pay the cartage
if you will haul them away, and then the tomatoes are dipped into hot
water so the skin will drop off, and they are chucked into cans that
cost two cents each, and you pay two shillings for them, when you
get hungry for tomatoes. The same way with peas, and peaches, and
everything.

Did you ever try to eat canned peas? They are always old back numbers
that are as hard and tasteless as chips, and are canned after they have
been dried for seed. We bought a can of peas once for two shillings and
couldn't crack them with a nut cracker. But they were not a dead loss,
as we used them the next fall for buck shot. Actually, we shot a coon
with a charge of those peas, and he came down and struck the water, and
died of the cholera morbus the next day.

Talk of canned peaches; in the course of a brilliant career of forty
years we have never seen only six cans of peaches that were worth the
powder to blast them open. A man that will invent a can opener that will
split open one of these pale, sickly, hard hearted canned peaches, that
swim around in a pint of slippery elm juice in a tin can, has got a
fortune. And they have got to canning pumpkin, and charging money for
it.

Why, for a dollar a canning firm can buy pumpkins enough to fill all
the tin cans that they can make in a year, and yet they charge a fellow
twenty cents for