Don’t judge a man by his clothes. Can you tell what the circus is going to be like by looking at the Italian sunset pictures on the fence? Do you value the turkey for its plumage? And isn’t the skin of the mink the most, and, indeed, the only valuable part of him? There be men, fair to look upon, who wander up and down this country, and sit in the coolest places on the hotel piazzas, who are arrayed in fine linen and cardinal socks, and who have to hold their hand over their scarf-pin when they want to see the moonlight, who, unassisted and unprompted, do not possess the discretion to come in when it rains, and don’t know enough to punch a hole in the snow with an umbrella--new, soft snow at that, without any crust on it. Now and then, son, before you are as old as Methuselah, you will meet a man who wears a hat that is worth twice as much as the head it covers. On the other hand, don’t fall into the error of believing that all the goodness, and honesty, and intelligence in the world goes about in shreds and patches. We have seen the tramp dressed in worse rags than you could rake out of the family rag-bag, and more dirt and hair on him than would suffice to protect a horse, who would step up to the front door and demand three kinds of cake, half an apple pie, and then steal every moveable thing in the yard, kill the dog, choke up the pump with sand, tramp on the pansy bed and girdle the cherry trees, because he couldn’t carry them away. Good clothes or bad are never an infallible index to a man that is in them. JOE C. ABY. The subject of this sketch is a resident of New Orleans. His entire life, almost, has been spent there. His name,--that of Aby,--is an uncommon one and a short one, and with the short, very short, surname of Joe prefixed, makes the whole an extraordinary short name. Joe C. Aby has written much in the way of humor, under the rather curious name of “Hoffenstein.” The larger portion of his productions have appeared in the way of sketches, in the columns of that well known Southern newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Democrat. Joe C. Aby was born on the 23d day of July, 1858, and is consequently one of the youngest of our American humorists. According to his own story, he was in boyhood “a tame sort of individual. I was not vicious, nor was I given to saying smart things, for the reason that my father, whose kindly hand is now still in death, had a habit of hovering around the rear portion of my anatomy with a strap, in order to impress upon my tender mind the fact that it was not becoming in a small boy to get ‘too big for his old clothes.’ His theory was, that the seat of a boy’s pants was the proper medium through which to reach the mind, and the demonstrations of his theory were invariably successful.