Cobwebs from an Empty Skull

'Ah!' panted the hare; 'how very fortunate! I feel quite safe here, for you dislike dogs quite as much as I do.'

'Your security, my small friend,' replied the wolf, 'depends not upon those points in which you and I agree, but upon those in which I and the dog differ.'

'Then you mean to eat me?' inquired the timorous puss.

'No-o-o,' drawled the wolf, reflectively, 'I should not like to promise that; I mean to eat a part of you. There may be a tuft of fur, and a toe-nail or two, left for you to go on with. I am hungry, but I am not hoggish.'

'The distinction is too fine for me,' said the hare, scratching her head.

'That, my friend, is because you have not made a practice of hare-splitting. I have.'

CXIV.

'Oyster at home?' inquired a monkey, rapping at the closed shell.

There was no reply. Dropping the knocker, he laid hold of the bell-handle, ringing a loud peal, but without effect.

'Hum, hum!' he mused, with a look of disappointment, 'gone to the sea side, I suppose.'

So he turned away, thinking he would call again later in the season; but he had not proceeded far before he conceived a brilliant idea. Perhaps there had been a suicide!-or a murder! He would go back and force the door. By way of doing so he obtained a large stone, and smashed in the roof. There had been no murder to justify such audacity, so he committed one.

The funeral was gorgeous. There were mute oysters with wands, drunken oysters with scarves and hat- bands, a sable hearse with hearth-dusters on it, a swindling undertaker's bill, and all the accessories of a first-rate churchyard circus-everything necessary but the corpse. That had been disposed of by the monkey, and the undertaker meanly withheld the use of his own.

MORAL.-A lamb foaled in March makes the best pork when his horns have attained the length of an inch.

CXV.

'Pray walk into my parlour,' said the spider to the fly.
'That is not quite original,' the latter made reply.
'If that's the way you plagiarize, your fame will be a fib-
But I'll walk into your parlour, while I pitch into your crib.
But before I cross your threshold, sir, if I may make so free,
Pray let me introduce to you my friend, 'the wicked flea.''
'How do you?' says the spider, as his welcome he extends;

''How doth the busy little bee,' and all our other friends?'
'Quite well, I think, and quite unchanged,' the flea said; 'though I learn,
In certain quarters well informed, 'tis feared 'the worm will turn.''
'Humph!' said the fly; 'I do not understand this talk-not I!'
'It is 'classical allusion,'' said the spider to the fly.

CXVI.

A polar bear navigating the mid-sea upon the mortal part of a late lamented walrus, soliloquized, in substance, as follows:

'Such liberty of action as I am afflicted with is enough to embarrass any bear that ever bore. I can remain passive, and starve; or I can devour my ship, and drown. I am really unable to decide.'

So he sat down to think it over. He considered the question in all its aspects, until he grew quite thin; turned it over and over in his mind until he was too weak to sit up; meditated upon it with a constantly decreasing pulse, a rapidly failing respiration. But he could not make up his mind, and finally expired without having come to a decision.

It appears to me he might almost as well have chosen starvation, at a venture.

CXVII.

 A sword-fish having penetrated seven or eight feet into the bottom of a ship, under the impression that he was quarrelling with a whale, was unable to draw out of the fight. The sailors annoyed him a good deal, by pounding with handspikes upon that portion of his horn inside; but he bore it as bravely as he could, putting the best possible face upon the matter, until he saw a shark swimming by, of whom he inquired the probable destination of the ship.

' Italy, I think,' said the other, grinning. 'I have private reasons for believing her cargo consists mainly of consumptives.'

'Ah!' exclaimed the captive; ' Italy, delightful clime of the cerulean orange-the rosy olive! Land of the night-blooming Jesuit, and the fragrant laszarone! It would be heavenly to run down gondolas in the streets of Venice! I must go to Italy.'

'Indeed you must,' said the shark, darting suddenly aft, where he had caught the gleam of shotted canvas through the blue waters.

But it was fated to be otherwise: some days afterwards the ship and fish passed over a sunken rock which almost grazed the keel. Then the two parted company, with mutual expressions of tender regard, and a report which could be traced by those on board to no trustworthy source.

The foregoing fable shows that a man of good behaviour need not care for money, and vice versâ.

CXVIII.

A facetious old cat seeing her kitten sleeping in a bath tub, went down into the cellar and turned on the hot water. (For the convenience of the bathers the bath was arranged in that way; you had to undress, and then go down to the cellar to let on the wet.) No sooner did the kitten remark the unfamiliar sensation, than he departed thence with a willingness quite creditable in one who was not a professional acrobat, and met his mother on the kitchen stairs.

'Aha! my steaming hearty!' cried the elder grimalkin; 'I coveted you when I saw the cook put you in the dinner-pot. If I have a weakness, it is hare-hare nicely dressed, and partially boiled.'