If the unhappy victims of mud-juice had constant access to the solar microscope, and there was occasionally in London a little sunshine to set off the animated bedevilments which are crowded into the composition, and could see thousands of animals, generated in filth, and living in the highest spirits and the greatest abundance, in the stuff destined for their stomachs, they would go mad. Boiled down in tea (for which, in the midst of _starvation_, a cockney pays five hundred per cent. beyond its value, and a tax of five hundred per cent. more than that,) these centipedes, toads, small alligators, large worms, white bait, snails, caterpillars, maggots, eels, minnows, weeds, moss, offal in detachments, gas-juice, vinegar lees, tallow droppings, galls, particles of dead men, women, children, horses, and dogs, train-oil, copper, dye-stuff, soot, and dead fish, are all, according to the chemistry of the washerwomen, neutralized, mollified, clarified, and rectified--but this we doubt; and if any of the unhappy persons who imbibe nastiness fourteen times a week, under the idea that it is good and wholesome because it is hot, will take the trouble to look at the agreeable deposit in the bottom of the "slop-basin," they will find that independent of all the muddy, fishy, oily, gaseous, animal and vegetable stuff, introduced into their stomachs under the guise of that most poisonous of all herbs, tea, they are in the habit of swallowing mud, earth, stones, sand, and gravel, in quantities sufficient to establish in less than three months spaces of land as big as Cornish freeholds in their insides.--_John Bull_. * * * * * NAPOLEON. While Napoleon was a subaltern in the army, a Russian officer remarked, with much self-sufficiency, "That his country fought for glory and the French for gain."--"You are perfectly right," answered Napoleon; "every one fights for that which he does not possess." INA. * * * * * FORBIDDEN FRUIT. Sir Richard Steele, who represented the borough of Stockbridge, Hants, in parliament in the reign of Queen Anne, carried his election against a powerful opposition, by sticking a large apple full of guineas, and declaring that it should be the prize of that man whose wife was first brought to bed after that day nine months. This merry offer procured him the interest of the ladies, who, it is said, commemorate Sir Richard's bounty to this day, and once made a vigorous effort to procure a standing order of the corporation, that no man should ever be received as a candidate who did not offer himself on the same terms. HALBERT H. * * * * * EPITAPH ON A SILLY, DRUNKEN SOT. His life and death five letters do express; A.B.C. he knew not, and he died of X.S. G.J.F. * * * * * CONVENIENT ABSENCE.