"I've got a new machine," said a Yankee pedlar, "for picking bones out of fish. Now, I tell you, it's a leetle bit the darndest thing you ever did see. All you have to do is to set it on a table and turn a crank, and the fish flies right down your throat and the bones right under the grate. Well, there was a country greenhorn got hold of it the other day, and he turned the crank the wrong way; and, I tell you, the way the bones flew down his throat was awful. Why, it stuck that fellow so full of bones, that he could not get his shirt off for a whole week!" In addition to the paper on the Fenians, two other articles by Artemus Ward are reprinted in the present work. One relates to the city of Washington, and the other to the author's imaginary town of Baldinsville. Both are highly characteristic of the writer and of his quaint spellings--a heterography not more odd than that of the postmaster of Shawnee County, Missouri, who, returning his account to the General Office, wrote, "I hearby sertify that the four going A-Counte is as nere Rite as I now how to make It, if there is any mistake it is not Dun a purpers." Artemus Ward has created a new model for funny writers; and the fact is noticeable that, in various parts of this country as well as in his own, he has numerous puny imitators, who suppose that by simply adopting his comic spelling they can write quite as well as he can. Perhaps it would be as well if they remembered the joke of poor Thomas Hood, who said that he could write as well as Shakespere if he had the mind to, but the trouble was--he had not got the mind. * * * A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY MELVILLE D. LANDON. Charles Farrar Browne, better known to the world as "Artemus Ward," was born at Waterford, Oxford County, Maine, on the twenty-sixth of April, 1834, and died of consumption at Southampton, England, on Wednesday, the sixth of March, 1867. His father, Levi Browne, was a land surveyor, and Justice of the Peace. His mother, Caroline E. Brown, is still living, and is a descendant from Puritan stock. Mr. Browne's business manager, Mr. Hingston, once asked him about his Puritanic origin, when he replied: "I think we came from Jerusalem, for my father's name was Levi and we had a Moses and a Nathan in the family, but my poor brother's name was Cyrus; so, perhaps, that makes us Persians." Charles was partially educated at the Waterford school, when family circumstances induced his parents to apprentice him to learn the rudiments of printing in the office of the "Skowhegan Clarion," published some miles to the north of his native village. Here he passed through the dreadful ordeal to which a printer's "devil" is generally subjected. He always kept his temper; and his eccentric boy jokes are even now told by the residents of Skowhegan.