store! A lawsuit followed, and Mr. Bumps was fined $100, and sent to the House of Correction for sixty days. How many new clerks Nebuchadnezzar Cheatum has put through since, we know not; but Jeremiah Bumps is now engaged in the practical science of agriculture, and shudders at the idea of a young man from the country being _wanted_ in a dry goods shop, if they have got to see the elephant that he _observed--in Boston_. Presence of Mind. Mr. Davenport--the "Ned Davenport" of the Bowery boys--before sailing for Europe and while attached to the Bowery Theatre, was of the lean and hungry kind. In fact he was extremely lean--tall as a may-pole, and slender enough to crawl through a greased _fleute_,--to use a yankeeism. Somebody "up" for Shylock one night, at the Bowery, was suddenly "indisposed" or, in the strongest probability, quite stupefied from the effect of the deadly poisons retailed in the numerous groggeries that really swarm near the Gotham play-houses. Well, Mr. Davenport--a gentleman who has reached a most honorable position in his profession by sobriety and talent--was substituted for the indisposed _Shylock_, and the play went on. In the trial scene, Mr. Davenport really "took down the house" by his vehemence, and his ferocious, lean, and hungry aspirations for the pound of flesh! One of the b'hoys, so identical with the B'ow'ry pit, got quite worked up; he twisted and squirmed, he chewed his cud, he stroked his "soap-lock," but, finally, wrought up to great presence of mind,--our lean Shylock still calling for his pound of flesh,--roars out;-- "S'ay, look a' here,--_why don't you give skinny de meat, don't you see he wants it, sa-a-a-y!_" We very naturally infer that "the piece" _went off with a rush!_ The Skipper's Schooner. No better specimen of the genus, genuine Yankee nation, can be found, imagined or described, than the skippers of along shore, from Connecticut river to Eastport, Maine. These critters give full scope to the Hills and Hacketts of the stage, and the Sam Slicks and Falconbridges of the press, to embody and sketch out in the broadest possible dialect of Yankee land. One of these "tarnal critters," it is my purpose to draw on for my brief sketch, and I wish my readers to do me the credit to believe that for little or no portion of my yarn or language am I indebted to fertility of imagination, as the incidents are real, and quite graphic enough to give piquancy to the subject.