he felt angry and misanthropic.  Instead of rising to his feet, he sat doggedly up and began chafing his abraded shin.  The desperate woman raised her white arms heavenward for the final plunge, and the voice of the gale seemed like the dread roaring of the waters in her ears, as down, down, she went—­in imagination—­to a black death among the spectral piles.  She backed a few paces to secure an impetus, cast a last look upon the stony officer, with a wild shriek sprang to the awful verge and came near losing her balance.  Recovering herself with an effort, she turned her face again to the officer, who was clawing about for his missing club.  Having secured it, he started to leave.

In a cosy, vine-embowered cottage near the sounding sea, lives and suffers a blighted female.  Nothing being known of her past history, she is treated by her neighbours with marked respect.  She never speaks of the past, but it has been remarked that whenever the stalwart form of a certain policeman passes her door, her clean, delicate face assumes an expression which can only be described as frozen profanity.  The Strong Young Man of Colusa.

Professor Cramer conducted a side-show in the wake of a horse-opera, and the same sojourned at Colusa.  Enters unto the side show a powerful young man of the Colusa sort, and would see his money’s worth.  Blandly and with conscious pride the Professor directs the young man’s attention to his fine collection of living snakes.  Lithely the blacksnake uncoils in his sight.  Voluminously the bloated boa convolves before him.  All horrent the cobra exalts his hooded head, and the spanning jaws fly open.  Quivers and chitters the tail of the cheerful rattlesnake; silently slips out the forked tongue, and is as silently absorbed.  The fangless adder warps up the leg of the Professor, lays clammy coils about his neck, and pokes a flattened head curiously into his open mouth.  The young man of Colusa is interested; his feelings transcend expression.  Not a syllable breathes he, but with a deep-drawn sigh he turns his broad back upon the astonishing display, and goes thoughtfully forth into his native wild.  Half an hour later might have been seen that brawny Colusan, emerging from an adjacent forest with a strong faggot.

Then this Colusa young man unto the appalled Professor thus:  “Ther ain’t no good place yer in Kerloosy fur fittin’ out serpence to be subtler than all the beasts o’ the field.  Ther’s enmity atween our seed and ther seed, an’ it shell brooze ther head.”  And with a singleness of purpose and a rapt attention to detail that would have done credit to a lean porker garnering the strewn kernels behind a deaf old man who plants his field with corn, he started in upon that reptilian host, and exterminated it with a careful thoroughness of extermination.

The Glad New Year.

A poor brokendown drunkard returned to his dilapidated domicile early on New Year’s morn.  The great bells of the churches were jarring the creamy moonlight which lay above the soggy undercrust of mud and snow.  As he heard their joyous peals, announcing the birth of a new year, his heart smote his old waistcoat like a remorseful sledge-hammer.