A friend thinks the antediluvian life must have been a great contrast to ours, and pictures it thus:--"Only fancy having two dried whales hanging in your larder, and a cold mammoth 'cut and come again' on the sideboard. 'Shall I help you to a bit of Icthoyaturns?' 'Thank you, I should prefer a slice of your Mastadon.' Stewed Plesiosauri! Leviathan _à la crapoderie_! Imagine a bill, not at twelve months, but at two hundred years; and a fellow who carried off your plate-box getting sent to the treadmill for fourscore summers! Consider an elderly gentleman, with a liver complaint of only one hundred years' standing, wearing out four sets of false teeth, and finally carried off, after a brief illness of three hundred and ten years, in a galloping consumption!" JIMMY O'NEIL AND PRESIDENT JACKSON.--161. When Jackson was President, Jimmy O'Neil, the porter, was a marked character. He had his foibles, which were offensive to the fastidiousness of Colonel Donelson, and caused his dismissal on an average of about once a week. But on appeal to the higher court, the verdict was invariably reversed by the good nature of the old general. Once, however, Jimmy was guilty of some flagrant offence, and was summoned before the highest tribunal at once. The general, after stating the details of the misdeed, observed, "Jimmy, I have borne with you for years, in spite of all complaints; but in this act you have gone beyond my powers of endurance." "And do you believe the story?" asked Jimmy. "Certainly," answered the general: "I have just heard it from two senators." "Faith," retorted Jimmy, "if I believe all that twenty senators say about you it's little I'd think you are fit to be President." "Pshaw! Jimmy," concluded the general; "clear out and go on duty, but be more careful hereafter." Jimmy remained with his kind-hearted patron not only to the close of his presidential term, but, accompanying him to the Hermitage, was with him to the day of his death. THE ORIGIN OF "SOME PUNKIN."--162. An old lady was engaged in making pumpkin pies; she had got the pumpkin all prepared, when by an untoward accident the table was overturned, and the pumpkin went on to the floor. The table in overturning overset the slop-pail, and the slops went on the floor too. The old lady being of a saving disposition, concluded to save the pumpkin and clean up also; so she takes up one handful, looks at it--"That's punkin"--puts it into the pumpkin-dish; takes up another--"That's slops"--puts it into the slop-pail. So she goes on picking up alternately pumpkin and slops, till finally she gets a handful mixed. She looks at it, and says, "That is _some punkin_, but mostly slops!" and hence the phrase. ARTEMUS WARD ON THE NEGRO.--163.