inwention, she roared reight eout, 'O! de _Lud_, ef dar ain't one de ole Virginny _spinnin' wheels!_' I kinder had bus'ness somewheres else 'beout that time! I took with a leaving!" A Dreadful State of Excitement. A retrospective view of some ten or fifteen years, brings up a wonderful "heap of notions," which at their birth made quite a different sensation from that which their "bare remembrance" would seem to sanction now. The statement made in a "morning paper" before us, of a fine horse being actually scared stone and instantaneously dead, by a roaring and hissing locomotive, brings to mind "a circumstance," which though it did not exactly _do our knitting_, it came precious near the climax! Some years ago, upon what was then considered the "frontier" of Missouri, we chanced to be laid up with a "game leg," in consequence of a performance of a bullet-headed mule that we were endeavoring to coerce at the end of a corn stalk, for his "intervention" in a fodder stack to which he could lay no legitimate claim. About two miles from our "lodgings" was a store, a "grocery," shotecary pop, boots, hats, gridirons, whiskey, powder and shot, &c., &c., and the post office. About three times a week, we used to hobble down to this modern ark, to read the news, see what was going on down in the world, and--pass a few hours with the proprietor of the store, who chanced to be a man with whom we had had a former acquaintance "in other climes." Well, one day, we dropped down to the store, and found pretty much all the men folks--and they were not numerous around there, the houses or cabins being rather scattering--getting ready to go down the river (Missouri) some ten miles, to see a notorious desperado "stretch hemp." My friend Captain V----, the storekeeper, was about to go along too, and proposed that we should mount and accompany him, or--stay and tend store. We accepted the latter proposition, as we were in no travelling kelter, and had no taste for performances on the tight rope. Having officiated for Captain V---- on several former occasions, we had the run of his "grocery" and _postal_ arrangements quite fluent enough to take charge of all the trade likely to turn up that day; so the captain and his friends started, promising a return before sunset. One individual, living some seven miles up the road, called for his newspaper, and got his jug filled, spent a couple of hours with us--put out, and was succeeded by two squalid Indians, with some skins to trade for corn juice and tobacco; they cleared out, and about two or three P. M., some _movers_ came along; we had a little dicker with them, and that closed up the business accounts of the day.