they want? How should a man know anything at all about it? And you won't give more than ten pounds? Very well. Then you may go shopping with it yourself, and see what you'll make of it! I'll have none of your ten pounds, I can tell you-no, sir! No; you've no cause to say that. I don't want to dress the children up like countesses! You often throw that in my teeth, you do; but you know it's false, Caudle; you know it! I only wish to give 'em proper notions of themselves; and what, indeed, can the poor things think, when they see the Briggses, the Browns, and the Smiths - and their fathers don't make the money you do, Caudle when they see them as fine as tulips? Why, they must think themselves nobody. However, the twenty pounds I will have, if I've any; or not a farthing!

No,

No, sir; no I don't want to dress up the children like peacocks and parrots! I only want to make 'em respectable. What do you say? You'll give me fifteen pounds? Caudle, no; not a penny will I take under twenty. If I did, it would seem as if I wanted to waste your money; and I'm sure, when I come to think of it, twenty pounds will hardly do!

CHILLS AND FEVER.

HILLS and fever are entirely unselfish. If a man gets the quinsy, sore throat, or a boil on his back, he is apt to monopolize the entire entertainment; but in the case of chills and fever, all the family may join you. If the one shakes, they may all shake. If the one looks blue around the finger-nails, they may all look blue around the finger-nails.

You begin, without any apparent reason, to feel very tired, awfully tired. You become seriously aware that you have a great many bones, and are convinced that your limbs have a great superfluity of ossification. You begin to yawn, till any chicken, with the gapes would think you were caricaturing the diseases of the barn-yard. You stretch, without any seeming idea as to what you are putting out your hands for. You button up one button of your coat. You walk round the house, and then fasten two buttons. You walk up stairs, and fasten all the buttons. You lie down on the clean white spread, boots and all. Your wife, after criticizing your taste in going to bed with boots on, puts on

you all the blankets she can find; and you shout, "More cover!" She hunts up all the shawls, and piles them up in a woollen pyramid. She gets out two or three old dresses, and puts them on; and you cry, "Give us more cover!" Considerably frightened, she lays her best dresses on the top of the pile. She puts on the top of this the children's clothes, and then gives solidity to the mass by adding two pillows; and through your chattering teeth you exclaim, "More cover!" You feel that you are making the Arctic expedition in search of John Franklin, and that the friendly Esquimaux are rubbing you down with a couple of small icebergs. Your tongue is hailstone, and your nose an icicle. You save a thousand dollars by getting sea-sick, without the experiences and perils of an ocean expedition. You feel as if you must have swallowed something that was going toward Tarshish, when it ought to have been going toward Nineveh. You wonder what has got into you; and make up your mind that it must be more Esquimaux riding up and down, behind ten dogs fastened to sledges.

Suddenly, the climate changes from Arctic to Torrid. Your wife lifts the two pillows; but still you are too hot, and your wife takes off the layer of children's clothes. But by this time you are like a buried Titan, and away fly off from your struggling limbs the tertiary, cretaceous, carboniferous, and calciferous strata of old dresses and new dresses, shawls and blankets. You wonder why a big blanket is called "a comfortable." You want air. You want fans. You have an oven in your head, three cookingstoves under your diaphragm; and if one earns bread by the sweat of his brow, you have shed enough perspiration to buy out several bakeries. You chew ice, and squeeze lemons, and dramatize the ague; and then lie four hours in silence, meditating on the pleasures of life in the country, with fine river prospect.

It may be a recommendation for this physical luxury, to those who like permanency and fixedness, that this is not, like many of the acquisitions of earth, transitory and evanescent. Once get it, and you need have no fear of losing it. It is like the widow's cruse of oil-it never fails. We knew a Western pastor who had it for fifteen years, and we saw him sitting in ecclesiastical council one day taking a chill as naturally as the Heidelberg catechism. He looked as if he were gnashing his teeth at heterodoxy; but he was only chattering because he was chilly.

&

One of the grand moral arguments in favor of the ague is the fact that it clothes one with the exquisite grace of humility. Nothing like the shakes to make a man abhor himself. He would be willing to sell himself for a low price, and take his pay in parsley and onions.

Another thing in favor of this institution is, that when you have it, you are insured for the time being against any disease. We should like to see a man try to get the croup or the mumps at the time this is on him. It monopolizes a man's entire attention. He has no time for anything else. He shakes off everything irrelevant. Who will say that this concentration of a man's attention on one thing is not a valuable mental discipline? He can think of nothing else. It is equal in this respect to a regular course of mathematics. Indeed, the mere matter of counting the shakes gives him a sum in simple addition; and, as he finds his strength being taken away, he goes into subtraction, and tests the rule of three by calculating, if he shakes as hard as this in one attack, how much he will shake in three. By this time he gets into algebra, and finds out that a chill, plus a fever, plus quinine, plus India Cholagogue, plus Ayer's Antidote, plus boneset tea, plus the doctor's bill, is equal to ten fits. But the ague patient rises to still higher mathematics; and, during one of the attacks on the bed, describes with his body an equilateral polygon, and sits up, taking hold of his feet, till he is turned into a hypotenuse, and gets his body so thoroughly mixed up and out of place, that he proves that the rectangle obtained by the diagonals of a quadrilateral inscribed in a circle is equivalent to the sum of the rectangles of the opposite sides; and winds up his mathematical exercises by pons asinorum, and a fever delirium, in which he sees Euclid dancing about with an epicycloid around his neck, and a parallelopipedon on his back, and a whole class of college freshmen hanging on to his coat-tail, Now, if there be such mathematical drill in chills and fever, why not have our colleges and young ladies' seminaries removed from the inland regions, and set the buildings down where they shall have a river front?

But chills and fever would not be well vindicated did we not say that they always make business lively. Not only is the patient very active at times; but there is lively work for druggists, doctors, and, after a while, for enterprising undertakers. For months we made daily pilgrimage to the apothecary. You

want to begin with anti-bilious pills. Then you want a febrifuge. Then you want a tonic. All this failing, you want a physician; then, utterly depressed, you want a minister; and after that you don't know what you want; but before you have been long in the perplexity of not knowing what you want, you have another chill, and then the perplexity is over, for you decide that your want is MORE COVER.

All these wants make lively markets. When you have nothing else to take your attention, you have the buzzing in your ear that comes from large doses of quinine. This noise is like an ocumenical council of bees, and has a poetic and rhythmic effect in reminding you of that delightful refrain,

"How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour!"

Oh that all the world lived in the country, and that every house had a river front!