ILLUSTRATIONS.

    A Scene in Paradise
    “Ah, my Friends, Look Down Into That Burning Lake!”
    An Intrusive Nigger
    At the Telephone
    Behind the Scenes
    Bossing the Pillow
    “Do not Pass me by!”
    Drummers Trying to Pray
    “Get Thee to a Nunnery!”
    “Happy New Year, Mum!”
    Hiawasamantha, the Dusky Daughter of the Golden West
    “I Want to be an Angel”
    It Looked Like an old Dripping Pan
    “It is F-f-four Sizes too Big!”
    John McCullough Killing a Texas Steer
    “Just as I am”
    “Keno!”
    Martindale Climbs a Pole
    “Me Long Lost Duke!”
    Mystery of a Woman’s Clothes
    New Way of Taking Seidlitz Powders
    No More Apples for the Minister
    “Oh, That Will be all Right”
    “Pa Grabbed Her by the Polonaise”
    “Sard,” and the Greek Slave
    Sacred Memories
    Slippery Oysters
    Swallow-Tails on the Climb
    The Lady of the Seventh Ward
    The Old Back Number Girl
    The Old Man Tries His Hand
    The Resorter
    The Rotund Urso
    The Sexton in all His Glory
    The Startled Cat
    The Tenor Arrayed in all His Glory
    The Wandering Oyster
    “Thereby Hangs a Tail.” 
    “This is too Allfired Much!”
    “Too Late, Pa, I Die at the Hand of an Assassin!”
    Turning the Proper Dingus
    “Yell, or go Down!”

PECK’S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.

THE NEW COAL STOVE.

We never had a coal stove around the house until last Saturday.  Have always used pine slabs and pieces of our neighbor’s fence.  They burn well, too, but the fence got all burned up, and the neighbor said he wouldn’t build a new one, so we went down to Jones’ and got a coal stove.

After supper we took a piece of ice and rubbed our hands warm, and went in where that stove was, resolved to make her draw and burn if it took all the pine fence in the first Ward.  Our better-half threw a quilt over her, and shiveringly remarked that she never knew what real solid comfort was until she got a coal stove.

Stung by the sarcasm in her remark, we turned every dingus on the stove that was movable, or looked like it had anything to do with the draft, and pretty soon the stove began to heave up heat.  It was not long before she stuttered like the new Silsby steamer.  Talk about your heat!  In ten minutes that room was as much worse than a Turkish bath as Hades is hotter than Liverman’s ice-house.  The perspiration fairly fried out of a tin water cooler in the next room.  We opened the doors, and snow began to melt as far up Vine street as Hanscombe’s house, and people all round the neighborhood put on linen clothes.  And we couldn’t stop the confounded thing.

We forgot what Jones told us about the dampers, and she kept a biling.  The only thing we could do was to go to bed, and leave the thing to burn the house up if it wanted to.  We stood off with a pole and turned the damper every way, and at every turn she just sent out heat enough to roast an ox.  We went to bed, supposing that the coal would eventually burn out, but about 12 o’clock the whole family had to get up and sit on the fence.