fill! He will be apt to wear cotton socks next winter, and keep away from church collection days. Another one sat on top of a brandy bottle, reading "Baxter's Call to the Unconverted," while his partner lay dead at his feet, evidently forced to close doors by the failure of Ketchum & Son, of New York! Six others were trying to hang one that looked like a Copperhead, to the corner of a match-safe; but as they were drunk and he sober, it was not safe to bet on his being dangled. They ate the beef, drank the blood and whiskey, drilled the plate full of holes, and on the centre-table organized a Son of Malta lodge, using a five-cent shin-plaster for blanket in the act entitled "The Elevation.of Man."

Another red-bellied leader of the Miss Keeter family had a battalion of drunken bummers on the edge of a spittoon watching him jam a fur overcoat into his left ear. He acted foolishfoolish enough for a brigadier-general or member

of congress. A little cuss with black legs, crimson stomach, and double-jointed bill, was vomiting in a satin slipper, while his wife, a sickly-looking lady of her tribe, was gnawing at the bed-post, thinking it a bologna. Another one, evidently an old maid, sat under the sofa milking the cat, while her sister was crowding a pair of woollen drawers into her waterfall, singing in a subdued strain

"Come rest in this bosom!"

We have applied for a season ticket-front

seat.

Another one, with a certificate of marriage >ver his head in the shape of a welt the size of a candle-mould, was dancing a fandango with two mosquito virgins on watch crystal, while a deacon in one of their churches sat playing old sledge with a corkscrew, to see which should go for a gin cocktail. An artistic delegate was standing on his head in a champagne tumbler,

one hind leg run through his under jaw, while with the other he was pointing out the road to Richmond to a lot of skeets still drunker than himself, who were sitting dog-fashion on the pillow. We should say it was a gay partyquitely so!

Talk about shows, concerts, dog-fights, amputations, circuses, negro funerals, draw-poker, sparking, or other amusements, there is nothing to be compared to a flock of mosquitoes on a bender. If you don't believe it, fix them up with a piece of beefsteak soaked in whiskey, and laugh your sides sore at the antics the drunken warblers cut,

CHAPTER IV.

MY MILKMAID MIRANDA.

LOVED a milkmaid, Miranda by cog

nomen, and she was the quickest milkist

that ever squatted garter-holders under the dripping eaves of a patient bovine on a day of rain, and sich. She was handsome. Her mother was a handsome cuss, and her father was a blessing in disguise, with mien like an angel and hair colored like a New Jersey barn.

Miranda lived in New England. Her paternal pap engineered a country store, kept blooded geese, sold potatoes by the pound, kept cheese

rinds for rat-trap bait, blackened pins and sold them for fish-hooks, furnished steam for a Puritan prayer-meeting, cultivated a duck pond, and taught his nose to blush on apple brandy. He'd take the screws out of his mother's coffin and sell them for money to put on the church contribution-plate, and he never missed attending communion in order to get a free lunch at the expense of never mind who!

But Miranda wan't like him. She milked the cows and strained the milk. I used to help her. We were both boys-that is, I was a boy, then. I was green, but pure. Ditto Miran. She was tall. She was long for this world. She was fat as a toothpick. She had a neck like a bottle of Worcester sauce. She was slim as the salary of a country minister, or the wardrobe of a country editor washing-day. And didn't I sling love into her lap? You bet! And didn't she sling milk into her little twelve-quart tin pail, while I used to stand and hold the drooping backbone con