margin, and if any flowers were in the way, he trampled them under his hoofs, and never gave her so much as a pond-lily. But it is very likely he would be eating an onion or a wild carrot, when suddenly he would give her such a smack upon the lips that the turtles would drop from the logs like so many dead weights, and sink to the bottom. Some how or other he managed to divulge the matrimonial plot, while she would hearken with a pleased air, and look into his grassy eyes with somewhat of the satisfaction of true love. On the morrow they were married. In the course of time the feeble wail of their infants was heard like mice in a granary. None of your robust babies, that fling their arms about, and spring up and down on the nurse's palm, catching their breath with extacy. They rolled their leaden eyes in the direction of pap, and sucked with no courage. Cutting teeth put a great many of them into their little graves, where Nature would yet vindicate herself, for the parents would go and sob, as if the affliction were too cruel, and they would put up a small red sand-stone scratched upon with the baby's name. It is a fact that many families were large, and the breed did not show any disposition to run out. This indicates to us the curse of being the first originator of any evil, physical or moral. The thistle and noxious weed will propagate themselves for ever, and the very thoughts we think beget the eternal children of their folly. It was lamentable to see a whole community so far in regone missness, for there was not a man among them of intellectual brightness; and the head of their principal justice was a conic head, betwixt the circumference of a cocoa-nut and the bulb of a cucumber. The fact is, that disease also had much to do in producing such a condition of things. Fever-and-ague riots among the ditches and green ponds, and the inhabitants are never without it any more than they are without tobacco. It is as periodical in all its goings as the sun, visiting some every other day, others weekly, and when it does come, shakes them with such a convulsive heartiness as a setter dog shakes a well-conditioned rat, who not expecting it, dies squealing like a young pig, with a brief, spit-fire resistance. You will often go into a house and find several generations shaking simultaneously. The grand-father wagging his little bald head in the midst of the fit, the mother of the family with a pale blotch in each cheek, the grown-up boys sitting around the room on stools, cold as ice-bergs, cracking the floor with their heels with the rapidity of a Crow-dancer, and the young children chattering away as if a dozen pistols were getting ready, and making the whole cottage resound with the clicking of their teeth. Indeed, the activity of their lives consists in this. Were it not for this, they would sleep the whole time, and never get any grasses cut, nor corn planted, nor fodder gathered into barns; for their very psalm-tunes languish, unless the chorister is a-shaking, and the minister of the parish cannot preach without it, nor picture to his pale green-faced congregation the pangs of hell and the terrors of the damned. If ever you hear a winnowing-machine, or the sound of flails, or the heave-ho! of a house-raising, rest assured the workmen have got the fever

and-ague; and I guess that makes the bull-frogs so spry, for they look too dropsical and bloated to indulge in gymnastic exercises. Human life is little shortened. A dozen old people are often found, in a sort of sickly decrepitude, squatted down on the brink of a ditch, whose united ages would make up nine hundred and sixty years, and most of them have had four paralytic strokes without killing them, and have had their hand shaking like an aspen-leaf over the pit of their stomach for years. Funerals at this settlement are very triste and lugubrious; the dead burying the dead, the women drowned in tears, and the bell tolling with a faint dingdong, as if the sexton would never toll it again. They carry the dead man to the misty grave-yard, dig a hole in the moist earth, throw a few bogs over him, and leave him to a repose scarcely more dead and unbroken than that of his mortal career. Here rests upon the lap of earth the head of the first enervate forefather who settled down in this region of stagnant waters, and in this dank and dismal hollow, where epitaph is dumb, and poetry brings no flowers to sanctify the tomb, will be gathered in GoD's own good time the living-dead men who now compose the population of LAZY LANE.

A man of strong energy would take almost a single step from the aforesaid ridiculous elements to the sublimer sceneries of Vermont. There a new life unfolds its vitality at every step; a new character is fitted like a garment upon men and beast; the very pores of plants suck in the air as it were with a freer lung; while the sun itself, which cannot get through the dripping fogs of Lazy Lane, nor dry up those dismal ditches, nor stop the throats of the bloodan'-oons, and left-handed prediction of owls, the sun comes resting like a crown on the loftiest mountain-tops, and fills the beautiful vallies full of beams. Here is but a repetition of beauty in a thousand hills and corresponding vales. I mean of general Beauty, for its forms are varied beyond all description; at sun rise, at noonday, at midnight; in summer, in autumn, in freezing winter; as much as a noble countenance is varied by the sentiments of a noble soul. You have seen one landscape thus changing in the lights and shadows, suddenly touched and retouched by a magical pencil, covered entirely with gloom, to be tinged again in all its edges with excessive light, developed with the insensible swiftness of clouds which roll in brightness, turning the spectator into the poet, and begetting thoughts which I am vainly trying to express. Imagine a great many landscapes, each whole and perfect in its own variety, comprehended from the loftiest summit in a grand unity, as the eye of a great soul is able, from its elevation, to bind together many sovereign elements into one vast SUBLIME. You see a great many rivers pouring down from one channel to another, to mingle themselves with THE RIVER, and a great many lakes, each the mirror of its own beautiful shores; water-falls gushing over the brim of one basin to replenish another; streams which are but a silver thread as well as a voluptuous volume; village terraces which have the look of landscape-gardening, with their pierc

ing spires and small temples of GOD, far-spreading slopes grazed upon by innumerable fat herds; great fields, where the golden wheat waveth like a wave of the sea, gold and silver and deep green commixt as in the figures of a great kaleidoscope; while in the far distance, mountain swells beyond mountain, in an interminable chain, covered in all their outline by the beautiful blue sky! A cool bath and Cologne-water are not more refreshing than to rise out of such a dog-hole as Lazy Lane to this commanding country, in which are the quintessence of subtile character and stronghold of Yankee-Doodledom. But I guess I'll wait till my next chapter, before I give you a picture of the true Green Mountain boys.

PETER FUNK'S

BY HARRY FRANCO.

REVENGE.

WALKING down Broadway a few mornings since, I discovered a man stationed opposite a store which had a small red flag hanging at the door, with a large muslin banner, impended from a tall staff, which he held, on which was inscribed this strange device: 'BEWARE OF MOCK AUCTIONS!' Upon inquiry, I learned that this was intended as a caution to Peter Funk, and a warning to strangers not to part with their money without getting its full value in return. Upon farther inquiry, I learned that this ingenious and benevolent enterprise had been suggested by His Honor the Mayor, who in many other ways has entitled himself to the gratitude of our citizens.

I had often heard of Peter Funk, but had never seen the gentleman, and having a curiosity that way, determined to make the acquaintance of so noted a person. I accordingly entered the store, and saw a person dressed in very good style, with a satin scarf and gold chain, standing behind a counter, with a small hammer in his hand. He was a young man, with an air of the most entire selfsatisfaction, and nothing seemed to give him any uneasiness excepting the 'Beware!' on the side-walk, which not only kept bidders from entering the store, but caused a crowd of gaping idlers and ragged news-boys to collect around his door. He had watches, chains and other trinkets, which he seemed anxious to sell to the highest bidder, but nobody would bid.

In one of the pauses of his continuous and commingled exhortations to the crowd 'to walk in and secure a great bargain,' I asked him if he was a regularly-licensed auctioneer, and was told that he was, and that furthermore, he had always conducted his business in the most honorable manner, and could produce first-rate recommendations from his last employer. This might be true or it might not, but Mr. Funk impressed me with the idea that he was an ill-used gentleman. If Mr. Funk enjoyed any immunities to commit crime, like Mr. Nobody, and other personages who are often spoken of but never seen, it would be very just in our civic Aristides to warn the public against his malpractices. But Mr. Funk assured me that he was amenable to the laws, like any other merchant, and that he would n't grumble at paying the penalty of any crime of which he might be convicted; and he thought it a little peculiar, to say the least of it, that he should be selected out from among the fraternity of tradesmen, to be victimized. However,' said Mr. Funk, thrusting his hammer into his coat-pocket, 'walk into my back office, Mister, and if I don't make your hair stand on eend I'm a demijohn, and no mistake!'

This was making rather free with a stranger; but there was some

thing in the gentleman's manner which interested me, and I followed him, through a small door in the partition, into his den, which was ornamented by an engraving of a lady in a satin gown, that, viewed at a certain distance, looked like a white horse rearing on his hind legs. There were two or three choice works of art beside, including a French snuff-box with a highly objectionable picture in the inside of the cover, indicative of Mr. Funk's taste in such matters. Having lighted a cigar and offered me one, which he assured me was a 'splendid regalia, and no mistake,' he seated himself in his arm-chair and unfolded the following stupendous plan for revenging his own wrongs, and at the same time doing a good turn to his fellow citizens.

'My legal adviser,' said Mr. Funk, 'tells me I can recover immense damages from the mayor, for injury to my business, by his bewaring strangers from my store; but,' continued Mr. Funk, as he knocked the ashes from the end of his cigar with his jewelled little finger, in a manner which Prince Albert might be proud of, 'I have thought of a plan which knocks that into all sorts of cocked hats. But wait a bit; there's a countryman.'

The countryman only put one foot into the store and immediately withdrew it; so Mr. Funk at once resumed his seat and his cigar, and went on:

Here's my progammy,' said Mr. Funk; 'I am getting up some 'Bewares' myself, and a most immense sensation I'll produce with them, I assure you. First, I will have a large banner carried by a Kentucky giant opposite the City Hall, with this inscription in bloody red letters: BEWARE OF LAWYERS!'

Then

'Opposite Trinity church, at the head of Wall-street, I will station another, to be carried by a lame individual, with this inscription in gilt letters: Beware of FANCY STOCKS!' At the corner of ParkPlace and Broadway I'll have a flashy gentleman carrying a blackand-white banner with this motto: 'BEWARE OF BLACKLEGS!' I'll have a flying regiment of boys with pink silk flags bearing this inscription: LADIES, BEWARE OF FRENCH MILLINERY AND FANCY GOODS!' and these shall run up and down Broadway every day between twelve and two, and whenever they see a carriage full of ladies, they shall keep flapping the flags in their faces.

.

'Another banner shall be stationed opposite the hotels and coffeehouses, with this inscription in blue capitals: BEWARE OF COCKTAILS AND BRANDY SMASHERS!'

'Opposite the publishers' shops I will have a young woman in a night-cap, holding a banner with these words in gamboge: To READERS: BEWARE OF TRASH!'

I confessed to Mr. Funk that I was struck with the novelty of his plan, and hoped he would not lay himself open to a prosecution for libel; and I cautioned him to be very careful not to insinuate any thing against our free institutions.'

'Perhaps you mean the House of Detention?' said Mr. Funk, inquiringly. I then explained to him what I did mean, and to my great surprise found that his mind had been so much affected by the