table head of the house ending in ogs would
no doubt have chided her severely, could he have been prevailed upon to
remain in town a day or two for that purpose.

As it is, the constables have had a sad time of it, running hither and
thither, and all they can do is to declare the man of business most
emphatically, a "hen knee high"--by which some persons imagine them to
imply that, in fact, he is n. e. i.--by which again the very classical
phrase non est inventus, is supposed to be understood. In the meantime
the young gentlemen, one and all, are somewhat less piously inclined
than before, while the landlady purchases a shilling's worth of the
Indian rubber, and very carefully obliterates the pencil memorandum that
some fool has made in her great family Bible, on the broad margin of the
Proverbs of Solomon.

THE ANGEL OF THE ODD

AN EXTRAVAGANZA.

IT was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an unusually
hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic _truffe_ formed not the least
important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room, with my feet
upon the fender, and at my elbow a small table which I had rolled up
to the fire, and upon which were some apologies for dessert, with some
miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit and _liqueur_. In the morning I
had been reading Glover's "Leonidas," Wilkie's "Epigoniad," Lamartine's
"Pilgrimage," Barlow's "Columbiad," Tuckermann's "Sicily," and
Griswold's "Curiosities"; I am willing to confess, therefore, that I now
felt a little stupid. I made effort to arouse myself by aid of frequent
Lafitte, and, all failing, I betook myself to a stray newspaper in
despair. Having carefully perused the column of "houses to let," and
the column of "dogs lost," and then the two columns of "wives and
apprentices runaway," I attacked with great resolution the editorial
matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a
syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read
it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result.
I was about throwing away, in disgust,

"This folio of four pages, happy work
Which not even critics criticise,"

when I felt my attention somewhat aroused by the paragraph which
follows:

"The avenues to death are numerous and strange. A London paper mentions
the decease of a person from a singular cause. He was playing at 'puff
the dart,' which is played with a long needle inserted in s