*

I was very much interested in this story, very much indeed, and so I
jostled the long-haired man--who was about falling asleep--and asked him
if anything was done to this wicked SLUKER.

He looked at me reproachfully. "What's the matter with you, my friend?"
he said, in the same melancholy voice. "Don't you know who I am? I write
for the _Ledger_, and whenever 'I draw a vail, etc.,' that ends it, that
does!"

As we stepped from the steamer to the landing, I observed a youth of
about six summers dressed in the most elaborately agonizing manner. He
had two Schutzenfest targets in his cuffs; in one hand he held an
enormous cane, in the other a cigar, and through an eyeglass he gazed at
the ankles on the gang-plank with an air of patient weariness with this
slow old world that was very touching.

"Where," I exclaimed as I surveyed this show-card of a fast generation,
"O! where have our _children_ vanished? Take from childhood the
sparkling water of its purity--the sugar of its innocent affections--its
ardent but refreshing spirits--and what, ah! what have we left?"

"Nothing," said the melancholy voice at my elbow. "Absolutely nothing
save the mint and the straw!"

And he was right, my dear PUNCHINELLO, he was right.

SAGINAW DODD.

* * * * *

"SOLEMN SILENCE."

Perhaps very few persons--and especially very few members of the
Republican party--are aware that a monument to ABRAHAM LINCOLN has at
last been completed, and that it has been placed on the site allotted
for it in Union Square. It is very creditable to the Republican Party
that they exercised such control over their feelings when the day for
unveiling the LINCOLN Monument arrived. Some parties might have made a
demonstration on the occasion of post-mortuary honors being accorded to
a leader whom they professed to worship while he lived, and whom they
demi-deified after his death. No such extravagant folly can be laid at
the door of the Republican Party. "Let bygones be bygones" is their
motto. They allowed their "sham ABRAHAM," in heroic bronze, to be
hoisted on to his pedestal in Union Square in solitude and silence. That
was commendable. A live ass is better than a dead lion; and so the
Republican Party, who consider themselves very much alive, went to look
after their daily thistles and left their dead lion in charge of a
policeman.

* * * * *

THE PLAYS AND SHOWS.

LOTTA is lith