unanswerably logical. Invited to dine with the judge at the village tavern after church, he said to the other with the frankness of a gentleman, "I would gladly know what you thought of my sermon." 66 "I thought it," answered the great man, one of the ablest arguments I ever heardprecise in the statement of premises, clear in method, irresistible in logic, every way, indeed, a masterly discourse. If the pulpit has many such proficients in logic as yourself, the bar will have to look to its laurels." without it. When I was a boy, I was whipped to school-and, when there, the lessons were whipped into me. Many a scholar have I seen the whip make of a dull fellow. As I grew up, circumstances whipped me into employment and responsibilities. I was married, had children and means; but death and misfortune whipped all off-and now fate whips me alone round the world. "Tis all to the crack of a whip. You are all scourged by the driver Time. He drives you at a gallop along the road of life, whether you will or not. You may whip the devil around the stump, but the devil will repay every lash tenfold. Here we go! All to the crack of a whip! Patience, patience! Better be whipped by poverty, disgrace, bereavement, ay, madness, in this world, than by the fiends of hell in the next. Here we go! All to the crack of a whip!" And, suiting the action to the word, the crazy "It would be affectation in me," responded the preacher, "not to acknowledge the gratification your praise affords me. You will not refuse me liberty to say that there is no living man whose approval I should value more highly; and it pleases me the more that I had supposed your views of the character of God to differ radically from my own." "How?" cried the jurist. "Do I understand philosopher went on his way. you? The character of God?" "Why-yes sir-my topic, you know, was the sovereignty of God." "I beg your pardon a thousand times!" said the other; "I thought all the while you were speaking of the devil!" A FRENCH HUSBAND.-Apropos of the conjugal relation in France, Figaro tells this horrible anecdote: "Madame X. was dying. "Her husband and sister were seated at the bedside. "The sister wept. "The husband, motionless, his head bowed down, his eyes fixed on vacancy, seemed absorbed in grief. "All at once, without throwing off the lethargy in which he was wrapt, he addressed the sister of his wife: "Marguerite,' said he, 'do you know the address of Madame -?' "No; why do you ask?" "O, nothing; 'twas only that I was thinking over the list of people to be invited to the funeral, and I did't wish to forget her."" CRACK OF THE WHIP.-A Cincinnati paper tells a story of a crazy vagabond who recently figured in one of the streets of that city, to the amusement of the passers-by. There was no symptom of intoxication about him, and we suspect that he was only mad "nor-norwest;" for there is a good deal of the Hamlet vein in his rhapsody. As he approached several gentlemen, he cracked a large wagon-whip which he held, and cut a few antics, exciting a laugh in the crowd, whereupon he exclaimed, "Do not laugh, gentlemen; everything goes to the crack of a whip. The world would stand still HOW TO COOK A BEAN.-Buy a bean, bathe it well, put it in twelve quarts of stenched river water (if you haven't got a river, better buy one, as they are handy to have), bile it six hours by an avoirdupois clock, take it out and wipe it thoroughly dry with a soft towel-an old shirt wont answer-lay it on its northeast side, about two degrees sow-sow-westerly; bore a hole gently in each end, abstract the "innards" very quietly without mussing very much; then stuff one end with soft biled rice, and the other end with rice biled soft; the end that pints towards Jersey City should, in all instances, except in cases of extreme hemorrhage, be stuffed first; then take the Coney Island side of the shell off gently; then the Williamsburg carefully, so the Williamsburg people wont know it, then sweeten with salt, and it will taste so much like rice, you'd never dream it was a bean. AN EGG STORY.-A lady once told the following to a friend of ours, saying, "I do assure you it's a fact! You know how fond my Brother B- is of eggs? Well, he was driving me once, in his buggy, to —, and we stopped at the little public house on the way for lunch. B- said he believed he'd lunch on hard-boiled eggs, if they had enough; and he sat by the window, eating them, and throwing the shells out of the window. At last I got tired of waiting, and said, 'My dear B-, are you going to sit there all day, calling for more eggs? Do let's go.' And when we got into our conveyance, as he turned it around he drove one wheel over the pile of egg-shells, and it was so high, my dear, that we were actually upset!" MONSTER TO PRETTY GIRL.-" If you'll give me a kiss, my dear, I'll stop the car for you." Mr. Luckless attempts to enter an omnibus in a graceful manner, and the result is before us. The visit of Professor Agassiz and corps of assistants to the Valley of the Amazon has recently directed especial attention to the great tropical river and country which it drains. Prior to this visit, we had known the stream only as one of several vast arteries of the Southern Continent; but of the countries which they watered and threaded, we knew but little. Not that exploration was wanting, of the Orinoco, Rio de la Plata, the Tocantins, the St. Francisco, the Parana, etc., for the sections made commercially accessible by these waters were not only well settled, but were, many years since, brought into close commercial relations with this country. Still, it was true, and is now true, that of the South American republics we have but a meagre popular knowledge; and to-day nine-tenths of our people know less of New Grenada, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Buenos Ayres, Paraguay, Uruguay, than of any minor state in Europe. With Brazil and Chili we are more familiar, owing to their exceeding great commercial importance; but, of these, it must also be added, we have only a general impression, gained from newspaper correspondence rather than from books and reports. That this is the case is to be regretted, since, from the direction now being given to commerce, it is evident that, with Brazil, in particular, we are to assume close and important relations, and our commerce needs but careful laws to resume its former sway. The Amazon River, whose natural and physical history Agassiz sought to investigate, is by far the largest and longest stream of fresh water on the globe, the distance from Tabatingo to the sea being eighteen hundred miles. From Tabatingo, west, it forms the northern boundary of Peru for a distance of eight degrees. Several of its tributaries-as the Madeira, Purus, Japura, Negro, Tapajoz, Xinqu, etc. are larger than the Ohio, and more navigable as regards depth of water and surface. It literally is an almost endless inland lake, so wide apart are its banks and so prodigious its volume of water. Lying almost directly under the equator, and flowing through a veritable valley, it is lined with forests of such limitless extent and density of growth as to amaze the most calculating mind. When all other sources of supply shall fail, the Brazilian forests will supply the world with timber, lumber and wood for every conceivable want. Agassiz advances the theory that what is now regarded as the "valley" once was a lake to which our own Lake Superior was but a suggestion. Nor does he consider the geologic era a distant one, when the lake, bursting its barriers on the east, emptied its volume into the ocean, and gave up to dry land" an alluvium so rich as to produce the densest forest which the globe has borne since the carboniferous era. That barrier, he thinks, was many miles out in what is now the ocean-so heavily has the sea-current encroached upon the continent. Be this theory or fact, it is true that the Amazon drains a valley of surpassing richness and of immense extent-that it is navigable from the sea to the Andes-that its forest supply is inexhaustible; and if North American enterprise does not render it tributary to North American wealth, it will not be because of any impracticability of commerce with that torrid region. It is certain that the Portuguese-the present possessors of the empire-as early as 1710, had a fair knowledge of the Amazons; but the information gathered by their government, from various expeditions undertaken on a grand scale, was long withheld from the rest of the world, through the jealous policy which ruled in their colonial affairs. From the foundation of Para by Caldeira, in 1615, to the settlement of the boundary-line between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions, Peru and Brazil, in 1781-'91, numbers of these expeditions were in succession undertaken. The largest was the one commanded by Pedro Texeira in 1637-'9, who ascended the river to Quito, by way of the Napo, a distance of about twenty-eight hundred miles, with forty-five canoes and nine hundred men, and returned to Para without any great misadventure by the same route. The success of this remarkable undertaking amply proved, at that early date, the facility of the river navigation, the practicability of the country, and the good disposition of the aboriginal inhabitants. The river, however, was first discovered by the Spaniards, the mouth having been visited by Pinzon in 1500, and nearly the whole course of the river navigated by Orellana in 1541-22. The voyage of the latter was one of the most remarkable on record. Orellana was a lieutenant of Gonzalo Pizarro, Governor of Quito, and accompanied the latter in an adventurous journey which he undertook across the easternmost chain of the Andes, down into the sweltering valley of the Napo, in search of the land of El Dorado, or the Gilded King. They started with three hundred soldiers and four thousand Indian porters; but, arrived on the banks of one of the tributaries of the Napo, their followers were so greatly decreased in number by disease and hunger, and the remainder so much weakened, that Pizarro was obliged to despatch Orellana with fifty men, in a vessel they had built, to the Napo, in search of provisions. It can be imagined by those acquainted with the Amazons country how fruitless this errand would be in the wilderness of forest where Orellana and his followers found themselves when they reached the Napo, and how strong their disinclination would be to return against the currents and rapids which they had descended. The idea then seized them to commit themselves to the chances of the stream, although ignorant whither it would lead them. So onward they went. From Napo they emerged into the main Amazons, and, after many and various adventures with the Indians on its banks, reached the Atlantic, eight months from the date of their entering the great river.* Another remarkable voyage was accomplished in a similar manner, by a Spaniard named Lopez d'Aguirre, from Cusco, in Peru, down the Ucayali, a branch of the Amazons flowing from the south, and therefore from an opposite direction to that of the Napo. An account of this journey was sent by D'Aguirre, in a letter to the King of Spain, from which Humboldt has given an extract in his It was during this voyage that the nation of female warriors was said to have been met with; a report which gave rise to the Portuguese name of the river, Amazonas. It is now pretty well known that this is a mere fable, originating in the love of the marvellous which distinguished the early Spanish adventurers, and impaired the credibility of their narratives. narrative. As it is a good specimen of the quaintness of style and looseness of statement exhibited by these early narrators of adventures in South America, we give a translation of it: "We constructed rafts, and, leaving behind our horses and baggage, sailed down the river (the Ucayali) with great risk, until we found ourselves in a gulf of fresh water. In this river Maranon we continued more than ten months and a half, down to its mouth where it falls into the sea. We made one hundred days' journey, and travelled fifteen hundred leagues. It is a great and fearful stream, has eighty leagues of fresh water at its mouth, vast shoals, and eight hundred leagues of wilderness without any kind of inhabitants, as your majesty will see from the true The most complete account thus far published, of the river, is that given by Von Martius in the third volume of Spix and Martius's travels. These most accomplished travellers were eleven months in the country-namely, from July, 1819, to June, 1820-and ascended the river to the frontiers of the Brazilian territory. The accounts they have given of the geography, ethnology, botany, history and statistics of the Amazons region are the most complete that have yet been given to the world. Their narrative was not published until 1831. Professor Bates spent in all nearly eleven years in the Amazon country-a year and a half at and around Para; three and a half years on the Lower Amazon, with headquar and correct narrative of the journey which we have made. It has more than six thousand islands. God knows how we came out of this fearful sea!" Many expeditions were undertaken in the course of the eighteenth century; in fact, the crossing of the continent, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, by way of the Amazons, seems to have become, by this time, a common occurrence. The only voyage, however, which yielded much scientific information to the European public was that of the French astronomer, La Condamine, in 1743-24. This account disagrees with that of Acunna, the historiographer of Texeira's expedition, who accompanied him in 1639, on his return voyage from Quito. Acunna speaks of a very numerous population on the banks of the Amazons, ters at the Santarem, about four hundred miles from the ocean; and four years and a half on the Upper Amazon, with headquarters at Ega, fourteen hundred miles from Para, making excursions up the confluent streams and into the interior. This lengthy stay, and his extended observations on the natural history of the region, contributed to produce a volume of permanent interest, not only upon the subject mentioned, but upon the people, government, Indian tribes, trade, etc., of that wonderful forest world. Of the impression first made upon the traveller by the gigantic flora of those forests, he writes: "On leaving the town (Para), we walked along a straight, suburban road, constructed above the level of the surrounding land. It had low, swampy grounds on each |