everal kinds of politics; and
have seen them give tone and grandeur to the Four-legged Girl, the
Siamese Twins, the Great Egyptian Sword Swallower, and the Old Original
Jacobs. Whenever somebody is to lecture on a subject not of general
interest, I know that my venerated Remains of the Old Red Sandstone
Period will be on the platform; whenever a lecturer is to appear whom
nobody has heard of before, nor will be likely to seek to see, I know
that the real benevolence of my old friends will be taken advantage
of, and that they will be on the platform (and in the bills) as
an advertisement; and whenever any new and obnoxious deviltry in
philosophy, morals, or politics is to be sprung upon the people, I know
perfectly well that these intrepid old heroes will be on the platform
too, in the interest of full and free discussion, and to crush down all
narrower and less generous souls with the solid dead weight of
their awful respectability. And let us all remember that while these
inveterate and imperishable presiders (if you please) appear on the
platform every night in the year as regularly as the volunteered piano
from Steinway's or Chickering's, and have bolstered up and given tone to
a deal of questionable merit and obscure emptiness in their time,
they have also diversified this inconsequential service by occasional
powerful uplifting and upholding of great progressive ideas which
smaller men feared to meddle with or countenance.

OUR PRECIOUS LUNATIC

[From the Buffalo Express, Saturday, May 14, 1870.]

New YORK, May 10.

The Richardson-McFarland jury had been out one hour and fifty minutes.
A breathless silence brooded over court and auditory--a silence and
a stillness so absolute, notwithstanding the vast multitude of human
beings packed together there, that when some one far away among the
throng under the northeast balcony cleared his throat with a smothered
little cough it startled everybody uncomfortably, so distinctly did it
grate upon the pulseless air. At that imposing moment the bang of a
door was heard, then the shuffle of approaching feet, and then a sort
of surging and swaying disorder among the heads at the entrance from
the jury-room told them that the Twelve were coming. Presently all was
silent again, and the foreman of the jury rose and said:

"Your Honor and Gentleman: We, the jury charged with the duty of
determining whether the prisoner at t