Poor Algrieve, he is a man under the table, and he knows it. He has tried to be somebody in his way, but has failed sadly in all his efforts. It is said that Algrieve always had a constitutional aversion to legitimate and continued labor, but has a passion for making strikes and securing positions that afford liberal pay for little work. Thinking a profession too monotonous and plodding, he never took the trouble to acquire one. As to honest manual toil, that was an expedient he never so much as dreamed of. In early life he was so unfortunate as to secure an appointment to a clerkship in the Assembly, and after that he haunted the State Legislature for five or six winters in hot pursuit of another place, but his claims failing to be recognized, he relapsed into the natural belief that his party was in league to proscribe him. After making a large number of political ventures of a more ambitious order, and with the same mortifying results, he abandoned that field and took to speculation in patent rights. He vended a wonderful churn-dash, circulated a marvellous flatiron, and expatiated through the country on the latest improvement in the line of a washing machine. But these operations somehow afforded him but transient relief, and left him always involved still more largely in debt. At different times in his life he had also been a horse dealer, a dry-goods merchant, a saloon keeper, the proprietor of a tenpin alley, and managed to grow poorer in all these various occupations. The last I saw of him he was reduced to peddling books in a small way, carrying his whole stock in a new market basket. He was very importunate in his appeals to customers to purchase, putting it upon the ground that he had been unfortunate and had a claim to their charity. I happened to see him in the office of the popular hotel in Podgeville, when he was more than usually clamorous for patronage. He accosted nearly every man in the room with a dull, uninteresting volume in his hand, and for which he asked a respectable price. At last he set down his basket, and commenced a kind of snivelling harangue to his little audience. Mr. Algrieve opened by saying: 'Gentlemen, you'll pardon me for thrusting myself upon your attention; but it is hard to have the world turned against ye, and to work like a slave all your life to get something to fall back on in old age, and then have to die poor at last! I hope none of you have ever known what it is to be born unlucky; to never undertake anything but turned out a failure, and to meet disappointment where you deserved success. I am such a man!' Here Mr. Algrieve produced a fragmentary pocket handkerchief for the ostensible purpose of absorbing an expected tear, but really to give his remark a tragic effect. He continued: