We were still standing there, when one of the hands, who seemed to be working overtime, appeared with a step-ladder, climbed up to one of the highest shelves, and brought down three dusty Washington’s Birthday jars, which he opened on the spot. Two were in good condition, but the third containing a poem on “Our Uncrowned King,” was found to be in a bad state of preservation and emitted such a frightful odor that the workman hastily carried it outside the building, Mr. McClure and I following to see what was the matter with it. The poem was lifted out with a pair of pincers, and we saw in an instant that decay had started in the third verse, in which “Mount Vernon” was made to rhyme with “burning,” and had spread until the whole thing was ruined. “I am very lucky to get off as easily as this,” said Mr. McClure, as he noted the name of the author of the defective rhyme, “because it sometimes happens that these jars containing rotten poetry explode and do a great deal of damage. “These are our odd lots,” he explained, as we continued our tour of inspection. “Here are a few cans of ‘Envois’ for use in the repair shops, and here are a lot of hitherto unpublished portraits of people and pictures of houses and babies and all sorts of things that have been left over from our serials, and will come in handy for the Grant memoirs. Those pictures of the children of old Zachariah Corncob, who used to live next door to Lincoln, will do very well for Benjamin Franklin or Henry Clay in infancy, and there is that house that Mr. and Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward used to live in, left over from a lot of forty that I contracted for last year; that will look well as the house that would be occupied by Andrew Jackson if he were alive now and lived in Massachusetts. You see, I am reducing the literary business to a system, and my plan is to have nothing go to waste.” “It seems to me, McClure,” I remarked, as we left the building, “that you have everything here but love poems; won’t they bear canning, too?” “Certainly,” replied the great manufacturer, “but I have to put them all in cold storage, even during the winter months.” LITERARY LEAVES BY MANACLED HANDS. The attempt of Warden Sage, of Sing Sing, to provide literary labor for the idle convicts has excited so much interest that yesterday morning a party of well-known literary men visited the state prison on invitation of the warden, and made a careful inspection of the methods employed in turning out convict-labor prose and verse. Some of this work is done in the cells, and some is carried on in the shops formerly devoted to the manufacture of clothing, brushes, shoes, and other articles turned out under the old contract system. In the corridors outside the cells and in the shops were to be seen “trusties” going about with dictionaries, both Webster and rhyming, which they supplied to any convict who raised his hand as a signal.