hands about equally balanced by the dauby debris of more or less hardened taffy to which allusion has before been unavoidably made. This group (the fact may as well be set down in this place as at any later period)--this was Shoddy on its summer tour. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had been, a considerable number of years before, Patrick B. Cunningham; and his name had been scrawled, many hundreds of times, to receipts for work done as a petty contractor about the streets of New York City, with one horse and a dirt-cart, digging out cellars, and helping to cart the dirt of pipe-layings and excavations. Gradually he had crept up to two carts, and then to three. Eventually he had reached the employing of a dozen or two, with the bipeds that drove and the quadrupeds that drew them. By that time he had removed from his shanty of one story and rented a house. Then he had gone into ward politics and contracts with the city, at about the same time, and emerged into possession of a couple of brown-stone-front houses and a seat in the Board of Aldermen, at periods not very far apart. People said that the seat in the municipal board, with the "ring" performances (more or less clown-ish) thereunto appertaining, were made the means of increasing the two houses to four and of causing Mrs. Patrick B. Cunningham to forget the whole of her husband's first name and merely use the initials "P. B.," which might or might not stand for 'Pollo Belvidere. Then had come the war, with that golden opportunity for all who stood prepared for it. Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been at that time the proprietor of some fifty or sixty gallant steeds used before dirt-carts, and his vigorous and patriotic mind had conceived the propriety of aiding the country by disposing of those mettled chargers as aids towards a first-class cavalry mount. He had sold, prospered, bought more dirt-cart and stage-horses with an admixture of those only to be discovered between the thills of clam-wagons, found no difficulty in passing them as fit for the service, through the kindness of a friendly inspector who only charged two dollars per head for deciding favorably on the quadrupeds,--sold and prospered again and yet again. Mr. P. B. Cunningham had accordingly found himself, three months before the period of this narration, the lawful proprietor of half a million, acquired in the most loyal manner and without for one moment wavering in his connection with either Tammany Hall, through which he managed the Democrats, or the Loyal League by which he kept in favor with the Republicans.