Years after found me inside college walls—­but colleges in the West, be it remembered, sometimes include preparatory departments, into which, by the courtesy of the teachers, many young men are admitted who would hardly make a respectable figure in the poorest country school, but who by dint of honest toil finally do themselves great credit.

I ‘happened in’ on a number of such, one evening, whose affinities had drawn them together with a view to forming a debating society, to be made exclusively of their own kind.  I listened with much interest and pleasure to the preliminaries of organization, and smiled, when they were about to ’choose a question,’ to see them bring out the same old coaches mentioned in the beginning of this article; when one of their number arose, evidently dissatisfied with the old beaten track, and seemed bent on opening a new vein.  He was a good, honest, patient fellow, but his weakness in expressing himself was, that, although his delivery was very slow, he didn’t know how he was going to end his sentences when he began them.  ’Mr. President,’ said he, ’how would this do?  Suppose a punkin seed sprouts in one man’s garden, and the vine grows through the fence, and bears a punkin on another man’s ground—­now—­(a long pause)—­the question is—­whose punkin—­does it belong to?’ The poor fellow subsided, as might be supposed, amid a roar of voices and a crash of boots.

There is a legal axiom which would settle the pumpkin-vine query—­that of cujus est solum ejus est usque ad coelum—­’ownership in the soil confers possession of everything even as high as heaven.’  Our friends in Dixie seem determined to prove that they have also fee simple in their soil downwards as far as the other place, and by the last advices were digging their own graves to an extent which will soon bring them to the utmost limit of their property!

* * * * *

Does the reader remember Poor Pillicoddy, and the mariner who was ever expected to turn up again?  Not less eccentric, as it seems to us, is the re-apparition chronicled in the following story by a friend:—­

    TURNING UP AGAIN!

    ’You were all through that Mexican war, and out with Walker in
    Niggerawger.—­Well, what do you think ’bout Niggerawger?  Kind of
    a cuss’d ‘skeeter hole, ain’t it?’

’Tain’t so much ’skeeters as ’tis snaiks, scorpiums and the like,’ answered the gray-moustached corporal.  ’It’s hot in them countries as a Dutch oven on a big bake; and going through them parts, man’s got to move purty d——­d lively to git ahead of the yaller fever; it’s right onto his tracks the hull time.’

    ‘Did you git that gash over your nose out there?’