AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
315 
A VALUABLE AUTOGRAPH. 
“ My dear sir,” said a stranger, advancing 
and warmly grasping Mr. Sedley’s hand, “ I 
have long wished to see you—to know you 
—and now at length, my desire is gratified.” 
“ Really you flatter me,” said the gratified 
Mr. Sedley. 
“ Not in the least, my dear sir—not in the 
least. And now let me tell you what motive 
has prompted me—a stranger—to intrude 
myself on you.” 
“ Oh, no intrusion,” said the Alderman, 
graciously. 
“ Thank you—thank you—a thousand 
thanks for saying so. But, in a word, I 
wish to secure your autograph.” 
“ I fear,” said Mr. Sedley, with a flutter of 
vanity at the request, “ that would hardly be 
worth the giving.” 
“ Let me judge of that,” said the stranger 
earnestly, “ I have already secured the au¬ 
tograph of some of the most distinguished 
men in the country. Among others, the 
President and his Cabinet have kindly fa¬ 
vored me.” 
“ Since you desire it,” said the Alderman, 
“ though I must again repeat it is not worth 
giving. 1 will comply with your wish.” 
“ Then please write your name just 
there.” 
The stranger took out a sheet of paper 
and spread it before Mr. Sedley, and pointed 
out a place at the bottom of the sheet, to 
which the latter at once affixed his name. 
“ How can I repay you ?” said the strang¬ 
er, with emotion, as he carefully folded the 
sheet, and placed it in his pocket-book, with 
a low bow as he retired. 
A few days afterward, Mr. Sedley had oc¬ 
casion to withdraw a portion of his funds 
from the bank. He was told that there was 
not that amount to his credit. 
“Certainly,” exclaimed he, in astonish¬ 
ment, “ I had near three times the amount 
deposited with you.” 
“ Very true, you had, but you drew out 
three thousand dollars of it only a few days 
since.” 
This, Mr. Sedley denied resolutely, till 
confirmed by a check drawn in his name, 
and bearing his signature. The latter was 
genuine; there was no denying it. The 
fatal truth dawned on his mind. The obse¬ 
quious stranger had written the check over 
the signature which he had purposely re¬ 
quested to have written at the bottom of the 
page. 
P. S.—If you wish to be regarded as a 
swindler, ask Mr. Sedley for his autograph. 
Even his vanity is not proof against the 
severe lesson he has received. 
Mrs. Partington on Marriage. —“ If ever 
I’m married,” said Ike, looking up from [the 
book he was reading, and kicking energeti¬ 
cally—“ if ever I’m married,”—“ Don’t 
speak of marriage, Isaac, till you are old 
enough to understand the bond that binds two 
congealing souls. People mustn’t speak of 
marriage with impurity. It is the first thing 
that children think of novv-a-days, and young 
boys in pinafores, and young girls with their 
heads fricaseed into spittoon curls, and full 
of lovesick stories, are talking of marriage 
before they get into their teens. Think of 
such ones getting married! Yet there’s 
Mr. Spaid, when Heaven took his wife away, 
went to a young ladies’ cemetery and got 
another, no more fit to be the head of a fami¬ 
ly than I am to be the board of Mayor and 
aldermen.” She tapped the new snuff box 
that her friend, the colonel, had given her, 
with her eye resting upon the gold heart in¬ 
laid in the lid, as if hearts were trumps in 
her mind at the time, while Ike, without fin¬ 
ishing his sentence, kept on with his reading, 
accompanying himself with a pedal perform¬ 
ance on the stove door, and a clatter upon 
the round of his chair with the handle of a 
fork in his left hand. ' [Boston Post. 
HOW THEY DO THINGS IN FRANCE. 
The following anecdote translated from the 
Paris correspondence of the Courier des 
Etats Unis, besides being amusing, suggests 
a contrast by which it would be well if we 
could profit : 
After a recent accident on a railroad near 
Paris, the Director took immediate meas¬ 
ures to compensate all those who had suf¬ 
fered in the affair, although the road was not 
the least to blame in the matter, and it was 
one of those occurrences no prudence can 
avoid. The travelers had been taken to 
their destination with the greatest dispatch 
in good carriages ; the wounded and bruised 
had received all imaginable attention, and a 
cempensation in money was made at once to 
all that demanded it, without any dispute as 
to their claims. The Directors thought they 
had arranged everything, when a gentleman 
of respectable position in the Parisian world, 
a man of note and wealth, whose name is 
well known, presented himself at the office 
of the company, and addressed himself to the 
clerk whose business it was to adjust such 
claims, and with a smile, and in an easy 
way— 
“ Sir, I was in the cars at the time of the 
accident.” 
“ Ah, you were in the cars 1” 
“I was, sir : here is my ticket.” 
“ And you have come to claim damages.” 
“ Of course I have.” 
“ You were wounded I” 
“ Not at all.” 
“ Bruised I” 
“ Not in the least, thank God.” 
“Then what claim have you upon the 
company 1 ?” 
“ The fact is, I was neither wounded nor 
bruised—but I was compelled to stand in the 
open air for a whole hour during a very cold 
night, while they put things to rights, and I 
caught cold—a severe cold ”—coughs. 
“ I see, and you claim damages for your 
cold ?” 
“ Well, I think forty francs would be none 
too much.” 
“ Agreed—forty francs. Is that all ?” 
“ No, my spectacles were broken in my 
pocket by the shock; they cost me eighteen 
francs ; it is fair you should pay that.” 
“ Well. Forty and eighteen make fifty- 
eight.” 
“ Excuse me.” 
“ Is there anything else ?” 
“ Yes. When I came to Paris, 1 was 
naturally anxious to set my friends at ease 
about my safety. I took a cab, which I kept 
seven hours—I have a large circle of friends 
—at two francs an hour.” 
“ That is fourteen—and fifty-eight are 
seventy-two. Is that all ?” 
“ That’s all.” 
The cashier counted out the seventy-two 
francs, the gentleman took the money, gave 
a receipt, and departed perfectly satisfied. 
“ Old Ladies. —The death of an old man’s 
wife,” says Lamartine, “ is like cutting down 
an ancient oak, that has long shaded the 
family mansion. Henceforth the glare of 
the world, with its cares and vicissitudes, 
I falls upon the old widower’s heart, and there 
|is nothing to break their force, or shield it 
from the weight of misfortune. It is as if 
his right hand was withered—as if one wing 
of an eagle was broken, and every move¬ 
ment that he made only brought him to the 
ground. His eyes are dim and glassy, and 
when the film of death falls over him, he 
misses those accustomed tones which might 
have soothed his passage to the grave.” 
IS RELIGION BEAUTIFUL? 
Always! In the child, the maiden, the 
wife, the mother, religion shines with a holy 
benignant beauty of its own, which nothing 
of earth can mar. Never yet was the female 
character perfect without the steady faith of 
piety. Beauty, intellect, wealth ! they are 
like pit-falls, dark in the brightest day, unless 
the divine light, unless religion throws her 
soft beams around them, to purify and exalt, 
making twice glorious that which seemed all 
loveliness before. 
Religion is very beautiful—in health or 
sickness, in wealth or poverty. We can 
never enter the sick chamber of the good but 
soft music seems to float on the air, and the 
burden of their song is—“ Lo ! peace is here.” 
Could we look into thousands of families 
to-day, when discontent fights sullenly with 
life, we should find the chief cause of unhap¬ 
piness, want of religion in woman. 
And in felon’s cells—in places of crime, 
misery, destitution, ignorance—we should 
behold in all its most terrible deformity, the 
fruit of irreligion in woman. 
Oh, religion ! benignant majesty, high on 
thy throne thou sittest, glorious and exalted". 
Not above the cloud, for earth clouds come 
never between thee and truly pious souls— 
not beneath the clouds, for above these is 
heaven, opening through a broad vista of ex¬ 
ceeding beauty. 
Its gates are the splendor of jasper and 
precious stones, white with a dewy light that 
neither flashes nor blazes, but steadily pro¬ 
ceeded! from the throne of God. Its towers 
bathed in a refulgent glory ten times the 
brightness of ten thousand suns, yet soft, 
undazzling the eye. 
And there religion points. Art thou weary 1 
It wnispers, “ rest—up there—there forever.” 
Art thou sorrowing ? “joy.” Art thou 
weighed down with unmerited ignominy ? 
“ kings and priests in that holy home.” Art 
thou poor? “ the very streets before thy 
mansion shall be gold.” Art thou friendless - ? 
“ the angels shall be thy companions, and 
God thy Friend and Father.” 
Is religion beautiful ? We answer, all is 
desolation and deformity, where religion is 
not. 
In the churchyard of the parish of Balso- 
ver, in Derbyshire, England, is the following 
epitaph : “ Here lies, in a horizontal posi¬ 
tion, the outside cases of Thomas Flinde, 
clock and watch maker, who departed this 
life wound up in the hopes of being taken in 
hand by his maker, and being thoroughly 
cleaned, repaired, and set a-going in the 
world to come, on the 15th day of August, 
1836, aged fifty years.” 
Pat on Natural History. —Van Amburgh’s 
elephant, being enveloped in a huge blanket, 
was picking up the fugitive straws of hay 
upon the ground, by poking his trunk through 
an opening in his covering, observing which, 
a son of the Emerald isle, who just entered, 
exclaimed : 
“ And what sort of a baste is that ating 
hay with his LailV' 1 
At a party a few evenings since, an- en 
thusiastic young man was emphatically ex¬ 
tolling the remarkable beauty of a certain 
lady, and among other remarks, comparing 
her cheek with a ripe rosy peach, when he 
was interrupted by a dignified judge, who. 
with a long drawn sigh, ejaculated, “ Ah ! 
would I were down on that peach!” and there¬ 
upon joined his hands, and walked away 
abstractedly. The air was rent with boister¬ 
ous mirth, much to the discomfiture of the 
young gallant. 
