time, but looking after their government, and watching that them fellers as we gives offices to, doos their duty, and gives themselves no airs?’ ’But I sometimes think, sir, that your fences might be in more thorough repair, and your roads in better order, if less time was spent in politics.’  ’The Lord! to see how little you knows of a free country?  Why, what’s the smoothness of a road put against the freedom of a free-born American?  And what does a broken zig-zag signify, comparable to knowing that the men what we have been pleased to send up to Congress, speaks handsome and straight, as we chooses they should?’ ’It is from a sense of duty, then, that you all go to the liquor store to read the papers?’ ’To be sure it is, and he’d be no true-born American as didn’t.  I don’t say that the father of a family should always be after liquor, but I do say that I’d rather have my son drunk three times in a week, than not to look after the affairs of his country,’”

Hogs.

“Immense droves of hogs were continually arriving from the country by the road that led to most of our favourite walks; they were often fed and lodged in the prettiest valleys, and worse still, were slaughtered beside the prettiest streams.  Another evil threatened us from the same quarter, that was yet heavier.  Our cottage had an ample piazza, (a luxury almost universal in the country houses of America,) which, shaded by a group of acacias, made a delightful sitting-room; from this favourite spot we one day perceived symptoms of building in a field close to it; with much anxiety we hastened to the spot, and asked what building was to be erected there. ‘’Tis to be a slaughter-house for hogs,’ was the dreadful reply.  As there were several gentlemen’s houses in the neighbourhood, I asked if such an erection might not be indicted as a nuisance.  ‘A what?’ ’A nuisance,’ I repeated, and explained what I meant.  ‘No, no,’ was the reply, ’that may do very well for your tyrannical country, where a rich man’s nose is more thought of than a poor man’s mouth; but hogs be profitable produce here, and we be too free for such a law as that, I guess.’”

* * * * *

THE BELL ROCK LIGHT HOUSE.

On the 9th ult., about 10 P.M., a large herring-gull struck one of the south-eastern mullions of the Bell Rock Light House with such force, that two of the polished plates of glass, measuring about two feet square, and a quarter of an inch in thickness, were shivered to pieces and scattered over the floor in a thousand atoms, to the great alarm of the keeper on watch, and the other two inmates of the house, who rushed instantly to the light room.  It fortunately happened, that although one of the red-shaded sides of the reflector-frame was passing in its revolution at the moment, the pieces of broken glass were so minute, that no injury was done to the red glass.  The gull was found to measure five feet between the tips of the wings.  In his gullet was found a large herring, and in its throat a piece of plate-glass, of about one inch in length.—­(From No.  I. of the Nautical Magazine, a work of clever execution, great promise, and extraordinary cheapness.)