Oh that Beau Brummel or any of his admirers could have seen Mo Mercer all this while! Calm as a summer morning, complacent as a newly-painted sign, he smiled and patronized, and was the only unexcited person in the room. Miss Patience rose. A sigh escaped from all present: the piano was evidently to be brought in. She approached the thick-leafed table and removed the covering, throwing it carelessly and gracefully aside, opened the instrument, and presented the beautiful arrangement of dark and white keys. Mo Mercer at this, for the first time in his life, looked confused: he was Cash's authority in his descriptions of the appearance of the piano; while Cash himself began to recover the moment that he ceased to be an object of attention. Many a whisper now ran through the room as to the "tones," and more particularly the "crank"; none could see them. Miss Patience took her seat, ran her fingers over a few octaves, and if "Moses in Egypt" was not perfectly _executed_, Moses in Hardscrabble _was_. The dulcet sound ceased. "Miss," said Cash, the moment that he could express himself, so entranced was he by the music,--"Miss Doolittle, what was the instrument Mo Mercer showed me in your gallery once, it went by a crank and had rollers in it?" It was now the time for Miss Patience to blush: so away went the blood from confusion to her cheeks. She hesitated, stammered, and said, if Mr. Cash must know, it was a-a-a-_Yankee washing-machine_. The name grated on Mo Mercer's ears as if rusty nails had been thrust into them; the heretofore invulnerable Mercer's knees trembled, the sweat started to his brow, as he heard the taunting whispers of "visiting the Capitol twice" and seeing pianos as plenty as woodchucks. The fashionable vices of envy and maliciousness were that moment sown in the village of Hardscrabble; and Mo Mercer, the great, the confident, the happy and self-possessed, surprising as it may seem, was the first victim sacrificed to their influence. Time wore on, and pianos became common, and Mo Mercer less popular; and he finally disappeared altogether, on the evening of the day on which a Yankee peddler of notions sold to the highest bidder, "six patent, warranted, and improved Mo Mercer pianos." WHAR DEM SINFUL APPLES GROW BY ANNE VIRGINIA CULBERTSON Ol' Adam he live in de Gyardin uv Eden, ('Way down yonner) He didn' know writin' an' he didn' know readin', ('Way down yonner) He stay dar erlone jes' eatin' an' a-sleepin', He say, "Dis mighty po' comp'ny I'se a-keepin'," 'Way down yonner whar dem sinful apples grow. So dey tuck ol' Adam an' dey putt him a-nappin', ('Way down yonner) An' de fus' thing you know dish yer w'at happen, ('Way down yonner) Dey tucken his rib an' dey made a 'ooman, She mighty peart an' she spry an' she bloomin', 'Way down yonner whar dem sinful apples grow.