The humour of the following is--to me, at least--simply exquisite: A man went to a professional scribe and asked him to write a letter for him. The scribe said that he had a pain in his foot. "A pain in your foot!" echoed the man. "I don't want to send you to any place that you should make such an excuse." "Very true," said the scribe; "but, whenever I write a letter for any one, I am always sent for to read it, because no one else can make it out."--And this is a very fair specimen of ready wit: During a season of great drought in Persia, a schoolmaster at the head of his pupils marched out of Shiraz to pray (at the tomb of some saint in the suburbs) for rain, when they were met by a waggish fellow, who inquired where they were going. The preceptor informed him, and added that, no doubt, Allah would listen to the prayers of innocent children. "Friend," quoth the wit, "if that were the case, I fear there would not be a schoolmaster left alive." The "harmless, necessary cat" has often to bear the blame of depredations in which she had no share--especially the "lodging-house cat"; and, that such is the fact in Persia as well as nearer our own doors, let a story related by the celebrated poet Jami serve as evidence: A husband gave a _man_ of meat to his wife, bidding her cook it for his dinner. The woman roasted it and ate it all herself, and when her husband asked for the meat she said the cat had stolen it. The husband weighed the cat forthwith, and found that she had not increased in weight by eating so much meat; so, with a hundred perplexing thoughts, he struck his hand on his knee, and, upbraiding his wife, said: "O lady, doubtless the cat, like the meat, weighed one _man_; the meat would add another _man_ thereto. This point is not clear to me--that two _mans_ should become one _man_. If this is the cat, where is the meat? And if this is the meat, why has it the form of the cat?"