Letter received by a cotton-broker:

"Flat Town Dec. 30th

"Messrs.

"J—— W—— & Co

"Sir. Gentlemen.

"The shipments from this out the balance of the season will be for more on the count. last year was a short crop and two weeks erly than this season and people sold rite strate a long here last season and the biggest and best farmers this season are holding looking forward to Biger prices I have gathered 80 bales and 15 or 16 more in the field yet to pick so you see when I make my estimate in this county they are a power of cotton on the fields yet to pick and a grate eel in houses not gined up yet, gust act as if those deals were your own shood you close them out gust credit my account with the profitts but dont close them out until you think it has tuch bottom then I want you to by me the same amount but don't by till you think it the rite time and then shood you see a proffit in it Turn it loose without ever consulting me if it clears up cold we will have Kilan frost but it can't hurt here for the crop is made.

"I remain yours very truly."

Another letter to a cotton-broker:

"Messrs. W—— W—— & Co.

"Sir Gents

"I have gust got in form the West and find your letter stating that corn had touched bottom which I do think myself it has, but it has avanced so much now I don't noe that it wood pay me much either way now. had I bin at home I shood of closed out and of Bout the same amount was my Idee. we are from ten days to fully two weeks backwards with our crops owing to our wet weather but that donte say they won't be as much made as was last year while we are backward there are more fertilizers yoused than ware last year and more Acreage our country is in a better condision to make a crop and I expect the west ginerally that way at the same time I am only one neighbourhood. pleas let me hear from you more fully on the matter hoping to hear from you soon I remain

"yours verry truly

"I will act according to your council."

A Georgia merchant received a short time since the following order from a customer: "Mr. B——, please send me $1 worth of coffy and $1 worth of shoogar, some small nales. My wife had a baby last nite, also two padlocks and a monkey rench."

Professor Huxley is credited with the assertion that the primrose is "a corollifloral dicotyledonous exogen, with a monopetalous corolla and a central placenta."

A reporter with a large imagination, writing about the decoration of a church at a fashionable wedding in this city, said that "the church was ensconced in flowers."

A scientific writer defines sneezing as "a phenomenon provoked either by an excitation brought to bear on the nasal membrane or by a sudden shock of the sun's rays on the membranes of the eye. This peripheral irritation is transmitted by the trifacial nerve to the Gasserian ganglion, whence it passes by a commissure to an agglomeration of globules in the medulla oblongata or in the protuberance; from this point, by a series of numerous reflex and complicated acts, it is transformed by the mediation of the spinal cord into a centrifugal excitation which radiates outward by means of the spinal nerves to the expiratory muscles."

The school committee in Massachusetts recommend exercises in English composition in these terms:

"Next to the pleasure that pervades the corridors of the soul when it is entranced by the whiling witchery that presides over it consequent upon the almost divine productions of Mozart, Haydn, and Handel, whether these are executed by magician concert parts in deep and highly matured melody from artistic modulated intonations of the finely cultured human voice, or played by some fairy-fingered musician upon the trembling strings of the harp or piano, comes the charming delight we experience from the mastery of English prose, and the spell-binding wizards of song who by their art of divination through their magic wand, the pen, have transformed scenes hitherto unknown and made them as immortal as those spots of the Orient and mountain haunts of the gods, whether of sunny Italy or of tuneful, heroic Greece."

A farmer's daughter expresses herself in the following terms:

"Dear Miss:

"The energy of the race prompts me to assure you that my request is forbidden, the idea of which I awkwardly nourished, notwithstanding my propensity to reserve. Mr. T will be there—Let me with confidence assure you that him and brothers will be very happy to meet you and brothers. Us girls cannot go, for reasons. The attention of cows claims our assistance this evening.

"Unalterably yours."

The following is probably the longest sentence ever written, containing, as it does, eight hundred words:

"I propose, then, to give your readers some description of this old yet still strange and wild country, that has been settled for three hundred years, and is not yet inhabited—a land of shifting sand and deep mud—a land of noble rivers that rise in swamps and consist merely of chains of shallow lakes, some of them twenty miles long and two miles across, and only twelve feet deep—of wide, sandy plains, covered with solemn-sounding pines—of spots so barren that nothing can be made to grow upon them, and yet with a soil so fertile that if you tickle it with a hoe, it will laugh out an abundant harvest of sugar, cotton, and fruit—a land of oranges, lemons, pomegranates, pineapples, figs, and bananas; whose rivers teem with fish, its forests with game, and its very air with fowl; where everything will grow except apples and wheat; where everything can be found except ice; yet where the people, with a productive soil, a mild climate and beautiful nature, affording every table luxury, live on corn-grist, sweet potatoes, and molasses; where men possessing forty thousand head of cattle never saw a glass of milk in their lives, using the imported article when used at all, and then calling it consecrated milk; where the very effort to milk a cow would probably scare her to death, as well as frighten a whole neighborhood by the unheard of phenomenon; where cabbages grow on the tops of trees, and you may dig bread out of the ground; where, below the frost-line, the castor-oil plant becomes a large tree of several years' growth, and a pumpkin or bean-vine will take root from its trailing branches, and thus spread and live year after year; where cattle do not know what hay is, and refuse it when offered, so that the purchase of a yoke of oxen is not considered valid if the animals will not eat in a stable; and where in the mild winter, when the land grass is dried up, horses and cattle may be seen wading and swimming in the ponds and streams, plunging their heads under water grasses and moss; where many lakes have holes in the bottom and underground communication, so that they will sometimes shrink away to a mere cupful, leaving many square miles of surface uncovered, and then again fill up from below and spread out over their former area; where some of them have outlets in the ocean far from shore, bursting up a perpetual spring of fresh water in the very midst of the briny saltness of the sea; where in times of low water, during a long exhaustive dry season, men have gone under ground in one of these subterranean rivers, from lake to lake, a distance of eight miles; where the ground will sometimes sink and the cavity fill with water, until tall trees, that had stood and sunk upright, will have their topmost branches deeply covered; where rivers will disappear in the earth and rise again, thus forming natural bridges, some of them a mile in breadth; where, instead of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, there are two seasons only—eight months summer, and four months warm weather; where the winter is the dry season, and the summer almost a daily rain; where, in order to take a walk, you first wade through a light sand ankle deep and then get into a mud-puddle, and some of these mud-puddles cover a whole county; where no clay is found fit for brick-making, and people build houses without chimneys; where to make a living is so easy a task, that every one possesses the laziness of ten ordinary men, every one you wish to employ in labor says he is tired and would seem to have been born so; where ague would prevail if the people would take the trouble to shake; where a large orange-tree will bear several thousand oranges—leaves, buds, blossom, half-grown and full-grown fruit, all at once—and every twenty-five feet square of sand will sustain such a tree; where, in many parts, cold weather is an impossibility, and perpetual verdure reigns; where the Everglades are found, covering many large counties with water from one to six feet deep, with a bottom, mud covered, yet underneath solid and firm, from which grasses grow up to the surface—a sea of green, and with islands large and small scattered over the surface, covered with live oaks and dense vegetation; where alligators, or gators as they are called in Florida parlance, possess undoubted aboriginal rights of citizenship, and mosquitoes pay constant visits and are instructive and even penetrating in their attention to strangers."

An Irish paper contained this account of Mrs. Siddons's appearance:

"On Sunday, Mrs. Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking, exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft, and lovely person, for the first time at Smock Alley Theatre in the bewitching, melting, and all tearful character of Isabella. From the repeated panegyrics of the impartial London newspapers, we were taught to expect the sight of a heavenly angel, but how were we supernaturally surprised into almost awful joy at beholding a mortal goddess! The house was crowded with hundreds more than it could hold, with thousands of admiring spectators who went away without a sight. This extraordinary phenomenon of tragic excellence! this star of Melpomene! this comet of the stage! this sun of the firmament of the Muses! this moon of blank verse! this queen and princess of tears! this Donellan of the poisoned dagger! this empress of pistol and dagger! this chaos of Shakespeare! this world of weeping clouds! this Juno commanding aspects! this Terpsichore of the curtains and scenes! this Proserpine of fire and excitement! this Katterfelto of wonders! exceeded expectation, went beyond belief and soared above all the natural powers of description! She was nature itself! She was the most exquisite work of art! She was the very daisy, primrose, tuberose, sweet brier, furze blossom, gilliflower, wall flower, cauliflower, auricula, and rosemary! In short, she was the bouquet of Parnassus! When expectations were so high, it was thought she would be injured by her appearance, but it was the audience who were injured: several fainted before the curtain drew up! When she came to the scene of parting with her wedding ring, ah! what a sight was there! the very fiddlers in the orchestra, albeit unused to melting mood, blubbered like hungry children crying for their bread and butter! and when the bell rang for music between the acts the tears ran from the bassoon players' eyes in such plentiful showers that they choked the finger stops, and making a spout of the instrument poured in such torrents on the first fiddler's book that not seeing the overture was in two sharps, the leader of the band played it in one flat. But the sobs and sighs of the groaning audience and the noise of corks drawn from smelling bottles prevented the mistakes between sharps and flats being heard. One hundred and nine ladies fainted! forty-six went into fits! and ninety-five had strong hysterics. The world will scarcely credit the truth when they are told that fourteen children, five old men, one hundred tailors, and six common councilmen were actually drowned in the inundation of tears that flowed from the galleries, the slips, and the boxes, to increase the briny pond in the pit. The water was three feet deep. An Act of Parliament will certainly be passed against her playing any more!"

Few poems have been more generally admired or paraphrased in the various tongues of earth than that commencing with the lines—

The story is current at the national capital that Mr. Evarts, when Secretary of State, on one occasion, in a jocular crowd of his friends, was desired to condense into prose these immortal verses. Urgently solicited, Mr. Evarts yielded, and wrote as follows:

"Mary, a female, judged to be of the race of man, whose family name is unknown, whether of native or foreign birth, of lofty or lowly lineage, and whose appearance, manners, and mental cultivation are involved in the most profound mystery, which probably will never be fully ascertained unless through the most profound researches of an historian admirably trained in his profession, who shall devote the ablest efforts of his life to the investigation of the subject, uninfluenced by either passion or prejudice, and having only in view the sacred truth, at the same time being utterly regardless of the plaudits or censures of the world, we are informed by one who, it has been stated, at one time while living in that part of the United States of America known as Massachusetts, whose fishermen have frequently been involved in difficulties with the authorities of her Majesty Queen Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Empress of the Indies, whose domains extended over a large share of the habitable globe, thereby endangering the peace which should so happily exist between nations of the same blood and language, had an infant sheep, of which there are many millions of various stocks and qualities now in our country, constantly adding wealth and prosperity to our republic, and enabling us to be entirely independent of all other nations for our supply of wool, now ample for the use of factories already busily employed, and for those which ere long will be constructed in all parts of our land, working both by water and steam power, and in whatever direction the said Mary traveled, this animal, whose fleece was snow-white, even as the lofty mountain-regions in the silent solitudes of eternal winter, as the ethereal vapors which oft float over an autumnal sky, 'darkly, deeply, beautifully blue' or as the lacteal fluid covered with masses of delicate froth, found in the buckets of the rosy dairymaid, whether meandering through the meadows in midsummer, gathering the luscious strawberry, strolling in the woodland paths in search of wild flowers, visiting the church with her uncles, cousins, and aunts, to listen to the inspired words which come from the lips of the minister of the sanctuary, or when retiring to her blissful couch to seek rest and enjoy sweet repose after the cares and labors of the day; in fact, 'everywhere that Mary went' this youthful sheep, influenced doubtless by that affection which is oft so conspicuously manifested by the lower animals in their association with human beings, was ever observed to accompany her."

The following amusing rhyme clipped from an old paper shows to advantage some of the peculiarities of the English language:

SALLY SALTER.

Plodding Changes.—Some of our plodding readers may like to peruse the following curious variations of the well-known line from Gray's "Elegy," "The ploughman homeward plods his weary way":

The weary ploughman homeward plods his way.

The weary ploughman plods his homeward way.

The homeward ploughman plods his weary way.

The homeward ploughman, weary, plods his way.

The homeward, weary, ploughman plods his way.

The weary, homeward ploughman plods his way.

Homeward the weary ploughman plods his way.

Homeward, weary, the ploughman plods his way.

Homeward the ploughman plods his weary way.

Homeward the ploughman, weary, plods his way.

Weary, the homeward ploughman plods his way.

Weary, homeward the ploughman plods his way.

Weary, the ploughman plods his homeward way.

The ploughman plods his homeward, weary way.

The ploughman plods his weary homeward way.

The ploughman homeward, weary, plods his way.

The ploughman, weary, homeward plods his way.

The ploughman, weary, plods his homeward way.

It is well known that the letter e is used more than any other letter in the English alphabet. Each of the following verses contains every letter of the alphabet except the letter e:

Northampton (England) Courier.

Here is the result of a rhyming punster's efforts:

And here is a zoölogical romance, by C. F. Adams, inspired by an unusual flow of animal spirits:

—Detroit Free Press.

While upon the subject of puns, we might quote the following, clipped from the "Graphic":

"On being consulted about it Spikes says that Uncle Sam aunticipates the transfer of the Indian Bureau to some mother department, and if this should father improve the condition of the children of the forest, in sondry ways, by cousin them to be more comfortable, it would be a niece arrangement and daughter be made." We are inclined, in nephew instances, to agree with the gramma, but not the spelling.

The "Graphic" is also responsible for the following English stanza transformed into Russian, said to have been found in a room after it had been vacated by Alexis while in this country. It is introduced as an example of how "she can be oddly wrote":

The following clever paraphrase of the old rhythmic story of "Jack's House" is a good illustration of the scope and flexibility of our language, and suggests the fact that tautological errors of writing need seldom be committed.

Care should be taken in writing for the young, or they may get a wholly different meaning from the language than that intended. The Bishop of Hereford was examining a school-class one day, and, among other things, asked what an average was. Several boys pleaded ignorance, but one at last replied, "It is what a hen lays on." This answer puzzled the bishop not a little; but the boy persisted in it, stating that he had read it in his little book of facts. He was then told to bring the little book, and, on doing so, he pointed triumphantly to a paragraph commencing, "The domestic hen lays on an average fifty eggs each year."

If English is "wrote" as she is often "spoke" by the ignorant and careless, she would bear little resemblance to the original Queen's English. A listener wrote out a short conversation heard the other day between two pupils of a high-school, and here is the phonetic result:

Here, as they took different streets, their conversation ceased.

A writer in the "School-boy Magazine" has gathered together the following dictionary words as defined by certain small people:

• Bed-time—Shut eye time.
• Dust—Mud with the juice squeezed out.
• Fan—A thing to brush warm off with.
• Fins—A fish's wings.
• Ice—Water that staid out in the cold and went to sleep.
• Monkey—A very small boy with a tail.
• Nest-Egg—The egg that the old hen measures by, to make new ones.
• Pig—A hog's little boy.
• Salt—What makes your potato taste bad when you don't put any on.
• Snoring—Letting off sleep.
• Stars—The moon's eggs.
• Wakefulness—Eyes all the time coming unbuttoned.

The following specimens from scholars' examinations in making sentences to illustrate the definitions of words, found in their small dictionaries, will have a familiar sound to some of our readers:

• Frantic = Wild: I picked a bouquet of frantic flowers.
• Retorted = Returned: We retorted home at six o'clock.
• Summoned = Called: I summoned to see Mary last week.
• Athletic = Strong: The vinegar was too athletic to be used.
• Poignant = Sharp: My knife is very poignant.
• Ordinances = Rules: We learned the ordinances for finding the greatest common divisor.
• Turbid = Muddy: The road was so turbid that we stuck fast in the mud.
• Tandem = One behind another: The scholars sit tandem in school.
• Akimbo = With a crook: I saw a dog with an akimbo in his tail.
• Atonement = Satisfaction: There is no atonement in boat-riding in a cold day.
• Composure = Calmness: The composure of the day was remarkable.

We have the authority of the late Dr. Hart as to the genuineness of the following extracts, taken from the papers of a class seeking admission into a high-school, to which had been given a list of words for their meanings and applications:

• Fabulous—Full of threads: Silk is fabulous.
• Accession—The act of eating a great deal: John got very sick after dinner by accession.
• Atonement—A small insect: Queen Mab was pulled by atonements.
• Develop—To swallow up: God sent a whale to develop Jonah.
• Circumference—Distance through the middle: Distance around the middle of the outside.
• Mobility—Belonging to the people: The mobility of St. Louis has greatly increased.
• Adequate—A land animal: An elephant is an adequate.
• Gregarious—Pertaining to idols: The Sandwich-Islanders are gregarious.
• Fluctuation—Coming in great numbers: There was a great fluctuation of immigrants.
• Alternate—Not ternate.
• Intrinsic—Not trinsic: weak, feeble: He was a very intrinsic old man.
• Subservient—One opposed to the upholding of servants.