“I’ll take a circuit around, and come out about the lower end of your mot,”* said I to my companion. “You remain here; lie down flat, and I’ll warrant the old doe and her fawns will be found retracing their steps.” [*] Mot is the name given small clumps of trees or woods, found scattered […]

In 1837, after the capture of Santa Anna, by General Samuel Houston and his little Spartan band, which event settled the war, and something like tranquillity being restored to Texas, several of us adventurers formed a small hunting party, and took to the woods, in a circuitous tour up and across the Sabine, and so […]

Three Irishmen, green as the Isle that per-duced ’em, but full of sin, and fond of the crater, broke into a country store down in Maine, one night last week, and after striking a light, they lit upon a large demijohn, having the suspicious look of a whiskey holder. One held the light, while another […]

A few weeks ago, during a passage from Gotham to Boston, on the ” Empire State,” one of the most elegant and swift steamers that ever man’s ingenuity put upon the waters, I met a well-known joker from the Quaker city, on his first trip “down East.” After mutually examining and eulogising the external appearance […]

Magrundy says, in his work on Grub, that a Frenchman will “frigazee” apair of old boots and make a respectable soup out of an ancient chapeau;but our friend Perriwinkle affirms that the French ain’t “nowhere,”after a feat he saw in the kitchen arrangement of a “cheap boardinghouse” in the North End:–the landlady made a chowder […]

I’m going to state to you the remarkable adventures of a very remarkable man, who went to market to get a leg of mutton for his Sunday dinner. I have heard, or read somewhere or other, almost similar stories; whether they were real or imaginary, I am unable to say; but I can vouch for […]

We all love, worship and adore that everlasting deity– money. The poor feel its want, the rich know its power. Virtue falls before its corrupting and seductive influence. Honor is tainted by it. Pride, pomp and power, are but the creatures of money, and which corrupt hearts and enslaved souls wield to the great annoyance–yea, […]

I used to like dogs–a puppy love that I got bravely over, since once upon a time, when a Dutch bottier, in the city of Charleston, S. C., put an end to my poor Sue,–the prettiest and most devoted female bull terrier specimen of the canine race you ever did see, I guess. My Sue […]

“I don’t see what in sin’s become of them dahlias I set out this Spring,” said Tapehorn, a retired slop-shop merchant, to his wife, one morning a month ago, as he hunted in vain among the weeds and grass of his garden, to see where or when his two-dollars-a-piece dahlia roots were going to appear. […]

It is somewhat curious that more embarrassments, and queer contre temps do not take place in the routine of human affairs, when we find so many persons floating about of one and the same name. It must be shocking to be named John Brown, troublesome to be called John Thompson, but who can begin to […]

“Well, squire, as I wer’ tellin’ on ye, when I went around pedlin’ notions, I met many queer folks; some on ’em so darn’d preoud and sassy, they wouldn’t let a feller look at ’em; a-n-d ‘d shut their doors and gates, bang into a feller’s face, jest as ef a Yankee pedler was a […]

A retrospective view of some ten or fifteen years, brings up a wonderful “heap of notions,” which at their birth made quite a different sensation from that which their “bare remembrance” would seem to sanction now. The statement made in a “morning paper” before us, of a fine horse being actually scared stone and instantaneously […]

Of all the public lecturers of our time and place, none have attracted more attention from the press, and consequently the people, than RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Lecturing has become quite a fashionable science–and now, instead of using the old style phrases for illustrating facts, we call travelling preachers perambulating showmen, and floating politicians, lecturers. As […]

There is no end to the humbug in life. About half we say, and more than half we do, is tinged with humbug. “My Dear Sir,” we say, when we address a letter to a fellow we have never seen, and if seen, perhaps don’t care a continental cent for him; dear sir! what a […]

Fortunes are made–very readily, it is said, in our large cities, by Hotel keeping. It does look money-making business to a great many people, who stop in a large hotel a day or two, and perhaps, after eating about two meals out of six–walking in quietly and walking out quietly–no fuss, no feathers, find themselves […]

Old Gunter was going home t’other night with a very heavy “turkey on”–about a forty-four pounder. Gunter accused the pavements of being icy, and down he came– kerchug! A “young lady” coming along, fidgetting and finiking, she made a very sudden and opposite ricochet, on seeing Gunter feeling the ground, and making abortive attempts to […]

City-bred people have a pious horror of the country in winter, and no great regard for country visitors at any time, however much they may “let on” to the contrary. In rushing hot weather, when the bricks and mortar, the stagnated, oven-like air of the crowded city threatens to bake, parboil, or give the “citizens” […]

In the village of Washington, Fayette Co., Ohio, there was a transient sort of a personage, a kind of floating farmer, named Hinkle,–Jacob Hinkle,–commonly called Old Jake Hinkle. Jake was, originally, a Dutchman, a Pennsylvania, Lancaster County Dutchman; and that was about as Dutch as Holland and Sour Krout could well make a human “critter.” […]

In fifty years the steam engine will be as old a notion, and as queer aninvention, as the press Ben. Franklin worked is now. In fifty years,copper-plate, steel-plate, lithography, and other fine engravings, willbe multiplied for a mere song, in a beautiful manner, by the nowinfantile art of Daguerreotyping. A passage to California will then […]

Some years ago, there lived, dragged and toiled, in one of our “Middle States,” or Southern cities, and old lady, named Landon, the widow of a lost sea captain; and as a dernier resort, occurring in many such cases, with a family of children to provide for,–the father and husband cut off from life and […]