Truly, if anybody don’t know anything, you can’t git any sense out of ’em. You might jest as well go to reckonin’ up a hull row of orts, expectin’ to have ’em amount to sunthin’. Ort times ort is ort, and nothin’ else; and ort from ort leaves nothin’ every time, and nothin to carry; and you may add up ort after ort, all day, and you wont have nothin’ but a ort to fall back on. And so with the Widder Doodle, you may pump her mind till the day of pancakes, (as a profane poet observes,) and you wont git anything but a ort out of it,—speakin’ in a ’rithmatic way. Not that she is to blame for it, come to look at it in a reasonable and scientific sense. All figgers in life can’t count up the same way. There’s them that count one,—made so; got a little common sense unbeknown to them. Then there’s some that double on that, and count two,—more sense, and can’t help it; and all the way up to nine; and then there is the orts—made orts entirely unbeknown to them; and so, why should figgers seven, or eight, or even nine, boast themselves over the orts. Truly, we all have abundant reason to be humble, and feel a humiliatin’ feelin’. The biggest figgers in this life don’t count up any too high, don’t know any too much. And all the figgers put together, big and little mingled in with orts, all make up a curious sum that our heads haint strong enough to figger out straight. It is a sum that is bein’ worked out by a strong mind above our’n, and we can’t see the answer yet, none on us. 0000000000 0000000000 ————— 0000000000 [Illustration] A DEBATE ON INTEMPERANCE. Last Tuesday evenin’ the “Creation Searchin’ Society” argued on this question. “Resolved; It is right to licence intemperance.” Cornelius Cork, the President, got up and give the question out, and then a stern majestic look swept over his face, some like a thunder cloud, and says he, pintin’ out his forefinger nobly: “Brother ‘Creation Searchers,’ and friends and neighbors promiscous. Before we tackle this momentous subject to-night, I have got a little act of justice to preform, which if I shirked out of doin’ of it, would send my name down to posterity as a coward, a rank traitor, and almost a impostor. The public mind is outraged at the present time, by officers in high places provin’ traitors to their trust: traitors to the confidin’ public that have raised ’em up to their high stations. The public of Jonesville will find that _I_ am not one of that kind, that _I_ am not to be trifled with, nor will _I_ be seduced by flattery or gifts, to permit them that have raised me up to the height I now stand on, to be trifled with.”