down very sleekly, made their complaint in a weak kind of utterance. It was to the effect that they had discovered a little stock of Sunday School books in a paper box, which were very affecting, and narrated how "Little Freddie" and "Good Teddie" and others, committed forty feet of texts in one day, which disagreed with them so that they died very early, not being good enough for this world. They had just succeeded in getting into the box, and now the books were gone. In this manner, complaint after complaint was made, and the meeting adjourned to another evening without taking action. You should have seen the assembly after adjournment. The whole mass of rats and mice rushed pell-mell through the dusty heaps of papers on the floor. One set danced a polka on fragments of editorials touching the finances and internal revenue, taxation and other topics. In the local room a rather spare rat, with long reddish hair, mounted the City Editor's desk, and read off, to the edification of the crowd, several mutilated fragments of a "Horrible Murder," "Atrocious Villainy in Bridgeport," "Destructive Fire in Holstein," "Scandal Case on Michigan Avenue," "Religious Announcements," etc. In the Commercial Room several casualties occurred. One unfortunate mouse was nearly choked to death with a column of figures which he found on the floor, and attempted to swallow. Another, of a sentimental turn of mind, went insane trying to understand some commercial quotations he found in an antique looking scrap-book, and three incautious little mice, venturing too hastily into Colbert's Astronomy, fell into the Dipper and couldn't get out, until an old rat helped them with the North Pole and a line dropped from the plane of the ecliptic, through the parallax of the sun, whatever that is. In another room, the cockroaches had a carnival in the Night Editor's coffee-pot. It was one of the most touching sights in the world to see them enter in festive procession at the top and come out through the nose. On my own old desk, twenty-three assorted cockroaches, of a beautiful bronze color, each one of whom I have killed twenty-three times in twenty-three various ways, were dancing a can-can. A few of the odoriferous, small brown bugs stood round in various attitudes, like supernumeraries, while an old rat, against whom I once swore eternal war, as Hannibal swore against the Romans, beat time with his stump of a tail. I forgave the rat, but I shall never forget the scene. I shall miss those cockroaches in the coming days, surrounded by the inanimate splendors of the new desk, upon which I write you to-day, looking no more upon the brick walls, but sitting in a flood of roseate light, which pours through the new window from the dying day. I could not bear to interfere with the sports of those poor creatures, and I left them there in the moonlight, engaged in their wild revels. I cannot say with any degree of veracity that I loved