The Reporters of the Common Council have received 200 dollars each for their laborious services, which is a happiness to us beyond expression. We know their generous emotions, and their evening toil in a sickly atmosphere, some of whom have the ability and genius to wield the destinies of a city or nation. Although Horace Greeley recently told us that he had never been in the Board of Aldermen, and would hardly know where to find it, yet James Gordon Bennett has told us that he served a terrible apprenticeship as a Reporter of the Common Council, more than a quarter of a century since, and we know that most of the metropolitan editors were Municipal Reporters prior to their present exalted and lucrative, and powerful position as public journalists. Even before we baptised the _Alligator_, we had to endure the tortures of a ten years’ pilgrimage around the corners and through the subterranean caverns of the City Hall. But no more of this. We sincerely congratulate our Reportorial friends, on the reception of a trifling remuneration for their severe and honorable toil. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by STEPHEN H. BRANCH, In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New Turk. Life of Stephen H. Branch. My brother Albert came to New York without the knowledge of father, and I got him a situation at the Harpers. I shall never forget how hard I besought John Harper to employ Albert, who did not want a boy, but kindly employed him to please me. Albert had the salt rheum, and also had very small and spiteful yellow bugs on the surface of his cranium. As I had to sleep with him, I combed his head every day, and when I found one of the little villains, I most cruelly tortured him with pins and flame, to terrify his brethren who remained, and to thwart his return to Albert’s head. But in spite of my bloody precaution, poor Albert’s skull teemed like Egypt of old, with ferocious animals, and I retired with him at night, invested with the fear of a culprit on his march to the scaffold. The yellow scamps made such a Napoleonic resistance, that I procured a finer comb, and in my violent efforts to drag out and exterminate the enemy, (who were deeply embedded and irresistibly fortified in his invulnerable skull,) poor Ally screamed, like an eagle on his cliff, and Mrs. Harper came to the basis of the attic stairs, and severely scolded us for quarrelling and fighting, as she supposed. Mrs. Harper was extremely nervous, and fearing she would learn that Albert had battalions of animalculæ in the region of his brain, and also trembling lest they would ground arms, and encamp and form tents in my luxuriant intellectual foliage, I advised Albert to return to Providence, and after long persuasion, with candy and peanuts, and peaches, he assented, and I went to Captain Bunker, Junior, who kindly consented to take him to Providence, without charge.