like the afflatus of laughing-gas, the poet and a privileged clique proceeded to the house of the Baptist elder, to prolong the night with metaphysical wassail.  From the froth of poetry, they rose to a contemplation of the old classics; Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, rising grandly from their dust, ensphered in vibratory eloquence.

The elder, whose, education had been accomplished simply by a New Testament and three-inch rope, sat, or rather twisted through the rhapsody, as a dunce twists through his Greek roots, and at the first pause, drawing himself erect with the self-complacent air of a man who applies the clincher, ejaculated, with the Western twang:  ‘What do you think of Hi-awa_thy_?’ The professor, giving him one look, to be sure of his sanity, and a second to be sure of his obtusity, answered gravely, above a convulsion of laughter:  ‘Hi-awathy was a genius!’

Athens has since then grown to be some town, with an aristocracy composed of a few old maids, who attain the distinction from being the oldest inhabitants, and a poet of its own.  The latter has immortalized himself by a poem in the Chatterton obsolete style, on ‘Ye Cobwebs in my Attick,’ supposed to be an ’Allegory on my Brain,’ and from having once astonished one of the very elite of the aristocracy by requesting her to lend him her book, ’On the Dogs of Venice.’  Her ladyship assured him that she was not in possession of the volume; but, on his insisting, conducted him to her library, (six shelves, one and a half by four,) where he seized upon a moth-eaten volume, illustrated on the front page by a man of obesity, clad in very flowing robes, and an immense crown, in the act of casting a ring into a black little stream ornamented by six rushes and two swans, with this inscription beneath:  ’Venice wedding the Adriatic through the person of her Doge.’  A wit having suggested to this votary of the muse that he should compose an epic on the royal canine of Venice, he is now zealously devoting himself to the task, as the literary public are respectfully invited to observe.

The Athenians were not long since electrified by the patriotic eloquence of an itinerant Methodist evangelist, who wound up a burst of rhapsodical patriotism with this, climax:  ’If this glorious Union is dissolved, what will become of the American Eagle, that splendid bird with ‘E Pluribus Unum’ in his bill, the shafts of Peace in his talons, and ‘Yankee Doodle’ tied to his tail?’

    One more bon mot, and I leave Athens to the plaudits of an
    appreciative public.

The Presbyterian divine, running his thin fingers through his thin hair, exclaimed, in a thin voice:  ’Brethren! ye are the salts of the earth.’  ‘The salts,’ though as old as the Gospel, have not yet lost their freshness.’

    Exit Athens and fresh salt.

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