The great round earth was a luscious peach, The grass was the puckery fuzz-- If it doesn't seem true to all and each, Let him believe it who does-- Then the mountain-peaks were chocolate drops, And the icebergs Roman punch; And the dark storm-clouds rained lemonade-- People dug up the mud for lunch. When it hailed, the hailstones were fine popcorn, And pulverized sugar it snowed; And the brooks as they ran by the candy-trees With lovely root-beer o'erflowed. Ah! that was the time, in the long ago, When children worked hard, tooth and tongue; But most of them suffered from overfed stomachs, And, somehow, they all died young. R. H. WINNING A WATERMELON. Scratchbones is certainly not a very elegant name, and yet the animal to whom it belonged, a very ragged-looking mule, was proudly claimed by its owner, Goliath Washington Jackson, an equally ragged-looking Southern darky, to be the philosopher of the mule tribe. Why he claimed this has never been definitely settled, and whenever any question was put to Goliath regarding the excellence of Scratchbones's intelligence, the reply would be something like this: "Yes, sah! How I know dat mule am intelligent? He! he! he! but dat's funny. You 'member de ole school-massa? Well, sah, he owned dat mule once, an' neber feeded 'im up to de handle. One day Scratch was hungrier dan usual, an' he chewed de ole man's books. He neber forgot dat eddication." And here Goliath would chuckle to himself. Our town recently received an innovation in the shape of a splendidly asphalted street, and one very hot day, shortly after its completion, Goliath drove up to the door of the hardware store with Scratchbones. Coming in, he began boasting, as usual, of his wonderful mule, and how well he stood the hot weather. None of us young fellows cared to question the heat, and as for the mule, we thought it was either stand it or lie down. He evidently preferred to stand, for there he stood in the blazing sun staring blankly down the street.