elonged to one of my family who was a sea-captain.
This box was very heavy, and firmly bound with iron, and was secured
by two massive locks. Calling my wife, I told her of the contents of
the tin case, which I then placed in the box, and, having shut down
the heavy lid, I doubly locked it.

"This key," said I, putting it in my pocket, "I shall throw into the
river when I go out this afternoon."

My wife watched me eagerly, with a pallid and firm, set countenance,
but upon which I could see the faint glimmer of returning happiness.

"Wouldn't it be well," she said, "to secure it still further by
sealing-wax and pieces of tape?"

"No," said I. "I do not believe that any one will attempt to tamper
with our prosperity. And now, my dear," I continued, in an
impressive voice, "no one but you, and, in the course of time, our
son, shall know that this manuscript exists. When I am dead, those
who survive me may, if they see fit, cause this box to be split open
and the story published. The reputation it may give my name cannot
harm me then."

THE LADY, OR THE TIGER?

In the very olden time there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose
ideas, though somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness
of distant Latin neighbors, were still large, florid, and
untrammelled, as became the half of him which was barbaric. He was a
man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible
that, at his will, he turned his varied fancies into facts. He was
greatly given to self-communing; and when he and himself agreed upon
anything, the thing was done. When every member of his domestic and
political systems moved smoothly in its appointed course, his nature
was bland and genial; but whenever there was a little hitch, and
some of his orbs got out of their orbits, he was blander and more
genial still, for nothing pleased him so much as to make the crooked
straight, and crush down uneven places.

Among the borrowed notions by which his barbarism had become
semified was that of the public arena, in which, by exhibitions of
manly and beastly valor, the minds of his subjects were refined and
cultured.

But even here the exuberant and barbaric fancy asserted itself. The
arena of the king was built not to give the people an opportunity of
hearing the rhapsodies of dying gladiators, nor to enable them to
view the inevitable conclusion of a conflict between religious
opinions and hungry jaws, but for purposes far better