Accordingly, when the pontiff falls ill, and the illness is serious enough to make a fatal termination probable, a successor is nominated, and he, so soon as he is consecrated, enters the high priest's hut and clubs him or strangles him to death. A somewhat similar custom obtains in Unyore when the King falls seriously ill, and seems likely to die, for his wives to kill him. The same rule is followed if he gets beyond a certain age, for an old Unyore prophecy states that the throne will pass away from the family in the event of the King dying a natural death. A DELFT PARTY. BY EMMA J. GRAY. [Illustration] "Look here! look here!" and mischievous Penelope rustled a handful of bank-bills before her mother, and the next second raised them above her head and waltzed around the room. "What ails you, child, and where did you get that money?" was the ready inquiry, while Mrs. Thayer's admiring eyes followed her daughter's graceful, swift-moving figure. All of a sudden Penelope's rosy face, flushed with exercise and radiant with happiness, burst into a merry laugh--one of the laughs that ripple all through the atmosphere, and prove so contagious that everybody within hearing of it laughs also. Then stopping just before her mother, and again rustling the crisp bills, for they were bran-new, she this time teasingly said, "Guess." "But I cannot." "Well, then," and dragging a chair so as to be opposite both her mother and Cousin Blanche--this cousin has been a young lady for over ten years, and makes her home with them--Penelope sat herself down, and with the tantalizing manner that she could assume on occasions, slowly counted, "One--two--three--four--five," and so on, laying one five-dollar bill over the other while doing so, until they numbered ten. Then satisfactorily surveying the pile before her, she raised her eyes, and looking full into the earnest faces of her listeners, exclaimed, with a wave of her hand in the money direction, "All mine!" "You tantalizing, tormenting--" and Penelope's mother, trying to look severe, rose, and threw on the blazing log fire a paper which, until her daughter's entrance, she had been reading, and then with a swift backward turn of her head she concluded, "mischievous girl." Mrs. Thayer was rarely known to have administered anything but caresses on any of her children, much less to her only daughter and youngest child. "Mother's pet," the boys called her, but people called her everybody's pet, for from her youngest brother to her eldest, and she had five of them, their first question was, "Where's Penelope?"