The drawing-rooms now are ablaze,
          And music is shrieking away;
        Terpsichore governs the hour,
          And fashion was never so gay! 
        An arm round a tapering waist—­
          How closely and fondly it clings! 
        So they waltz, and they waltz, and they waltz—­
          And that’s what they do at the Springs!

        In short—­as it goes in the world—­
          They eat, and they drink, and they sleep;
        They talk, and they walk, and they woo;
          They sigh, and they laugh, and they weep;
        They read, and they ride, and they dance
          (With other remarkable things): 
        They pray, and they play, and they PAY—­
          And that’s what they do at the Springs!

THE SEA.

BY EVA L. OGDEN.

        She was rich and of high degree;
        A poor and unknown artist he. 
        “Paint me,” she said, “a view of the sea.” 
        So he painted the sea as it looked the day
        That Aphrodite arose from its spray;
        And it broke, as she gazed in its face the while
        Into its countless-dimpled smile. 
        “What a pokey stupid picture,” said she;
        “I don’t believe he can paint the sea!”

        Then he painted a raging, tossing sea,
        Storming, with fierce and sudden shock,
        Wild cries, and writhing tongues of foam,
        A towering, mighty fastness-rock. 
        In its sides above those leaping crests,
        The thronging sea-birds built their nests. 
        “What a disagreeable daub!” said she;
        “Why it isn’t anything like the sea!”

Then he painted a stretch of hot, brown sand,
With a big hotel on either hand,
And a handsome pavilion for the band,—­
Not a sign of the water to be seen
Except one faint little streak of green. 
“What a perfectly exquisite picture,” said she;
“It’s the very image of the sea.”

          
                                          —­Century Magazine.

A TALE OF A NOSE.

BY CHARLES F. ADAMS.

’Twas a hard case, that which happened in Lynn. 
Haven’t heard of it, eh?  Well, then, to begin,
There’s a Jew down there whom they call “Old Mose,”
Who travels about, and buys old clothes.

    Now Mose—­which the same is short for Moses—­
    Had one of the biggest kind of noses: 
    It had a sort of an instep in it,
    And he fed it with snuff about once a minute.

    One day he got in a bit of a row
    With a German chap who had kissed his frau,
    And, trying to punch him a la Mace,
    Had his nose cut off close up to his face.