PATIENT. Yes; I'm a forge-man, a ship-carpenter, (that's what I follow most ;) a plattender-te make plates-china of all kinds; gold tumblers and gold wires; a tanner, a burn-smith and goldsmith, and a shoe-maker.

PHYSICIAN. Have you any money?

PATIENT. Yes; I have money enough.

PHYSICIAN. How much?

PATIENT. My house is full of money, and all the money in the banks is mine. I'm a Belgian, and the cashier of the bank.

PHYSICIAN. How many dollars' worth of money have you?

PATIENT. Thusalem, Thusalem States of dollars; that money I'm worth. I'm a laborer; I've got arms in the forgus skies; in the forgus regions.

PHYSICIAN. That's all nonsense.

PATIENT. It is n't nonsense. I'm a general. I've got to stand all the fighting, all the gouging, and all the wars. I've been in a hundred thousand ninety-nine battles; and separate devils makes a hundred million of battles, and more too. I brought twelve women when I came here.

PHYSICIAN. Are you married?

PATIENT. Yes; lawfully married by law. I have in this country nine wives, and in my own country five ALMIGHTIES and fifty thousand other wives; that's all.

PHYSICIAN. You're trying to make a fool of me.

PATIENT. No; that's the truth; that's a fact; you may go there and see, when I go home; the expenses won't cost you nothing, because I'll allow it to you free. I'm fifty nations of land. I'm Liberator, Alabroma, Luzherbesher, Rosanna and Regina. I'm a Maker. I make women all day; seventy Thusalem women. After that I'm the Son of Man and the Son of SAVIOUR; that's all I be in this land. CHRIST is a brother to me; he lives over in Pennsylvania.

PHYSICIAN. What do you expect to do when you leave this place?

PATIENT. I'm going into Jersey shore and going to be drowned, take a new frame, a white man, a large, big lord, and then I'm going home and have that island across the river sent to Massachusetts, into the Island of St. Gorah. Soon as I'm in Jersey I'm at home. Every body there halloos 'Hurrah for General HAMBLETON!' when I go over there. I'm a traveller and bave a big-headed cane to go to Boston. That's my country, and I'll live there if I please; but I don't want to. I want to hurry on and get to Dublin city; then I'm going to Jericho, and may be I'll stop there a while; I don't know. I have an Asylum in Jericho; it is locked up, though. Nobody lives in it. It's in sight of the city. If I stop there it will be to save GOD ALMIGHTY. He was imprisoned in the jail there, and after he was liberated he was sent to the Asylum to sail vessels. He gave the Asylum to me, and counties, states, and judgments of money. He gave me some rivers of money and a thousand States of money, every day, to sail four vessels for him and to take care of seven hundred women and one GOD, and he to pay all the debts and all the clerks of the Asylum. He pays them counties of dollars a month. I have three years to sail for him, and he is to see that we clear a hundred states of money a day. We can clear that easy enough. I've cleared that by my Asylum.

In reply to the question how he could take care of his Asylum if he was sailing, he answers categorically, as follows. We think that, independent of a conception of 'banking privileges,' he has some vague idea of the 'phalanx' and 'phalanstery' of FOURIER:

PATIENT. I am to leave somebody I can trust. I only want one to sit and keep the books, and one woman. The woman I 've got; her name is Miss B-; that 's the house-keeper. She's a whitehaired woman; gray-haired woman; ten foot high; the tallest woman I've seen in some time. She's over in Jersey, only about forty miles from the shore. I shall have a hundred nurses. I've seen them all; they 're good-looking people. The patients all lisp, like the French. GOD ALMIGHTY wants them broke of this, and Miss N- —is going to do it. She's a short, hump-backed woman; she's been here; was here last fall. Dr. Mis to be the first doctor. I shall have four doctors. It's a very big house; will hold fifty thousand; that's the big part will hold so many. It has a steeple on it. The little part will hold a hundred; the next little part, a hundred; the next, fifty; the next, forty; that's all. You may be one doctor if you've a mind to. We do n't allow any man to sleep in the Asylum. We have a big hotel and bank. It's a little town, twenty-four miles round, a wall running round twelve feet high, and more too, with iron pickets on the top as big as your arm. The men will all sleep at the hotel.

PHYSICIAN. I think your plan is a good one.

PATIENT. I guess 't is! I have a large farm and a large barn, fields, stables, peach-orchard twelve miles of peaches, two miles of cherries, ten miles of apples, twenty miles of pears; big pears, do n't get ripe till very late; blue bell pears, big round as your fist, most as big round as your head. There's a good blacksmith's-shop, goldsmith's-shop and carpenter's shop; that's all the shops there is. There's a cabinet-shop, but we don't use it; the man is dead that used to make bedsteads and bureaus. His name was FEENLY. He died of the cholera. He got sick in the morning, eating cabbage. He stole his wife's cabbage and eat it, and it killed him. He is buried in the Asylum; he's the only one buried there.

PHYSICIAN. Shall you spend your life at that Asylum?

PATIENT. NO; I shall stay about three years, and then go away. I'm going to Bandanna then; that's my home; all my family live there. I'm going to stay at home then. I shall be a rich man; a Maker. I have a country asylum at Jericho, but there's nothing in it; can't keep any thing in it. It has been haunted ever since it was built; I don't know what makes it haunted. It's a white one, and has a hundred doors in it. I slept in it one night, and I got all but tore up. I had an old quilt on the bed, and it got torn all up. I got up and went out doors to see what ailed the house; went a-top of the house, I did; but I did n't hear any thing, only the wind blowing, and the doors slamming with a sound 'Wham! wham! wham! In the morning I see a little boy sitting in the door, and he said: 'You must never sleep here again, for you'll be torn up. There's never any man slept in it.' Then I gave it to Mr. B—, if he would sleep in it one night. He tried it, but he could n't sleep, and came back all in his shirt-tail. Now I'll give it to any man that will take it; he's welcome to it.

This, it will scarcely be denied by any body, is slightly incoherent; but it is vastly like the talks' of the characters depicted by the great author of Puffer Hopkins;' and not more erratic, we venture to say, than the unwritten conceptions of that defunct murderer of sundry defunct periodicals, (including, as was inevitable, YankeeDoodle,') as sad but self-sustained he saunters down the shady side of Broadway, a faithful lover of himself, without a rival.

6

ROMANCE OF THE STEAMBOAT.' - Our new correspondent, W. E. G.,' has certainly made out a good case,' as the lawyers term it, for the steam-boat, on the score of romance. We clip and condense his sketch somewhat, but not, as we think, to its detriment. He was about taking, at a New-York pier, one of the stately Hudson steamers, when out-spak' he thus: You see that she is ready for us. Already the inward struggle has commenced. The giant of the age is awaking; he stretches out his mighty arms and sends forth his deep-mouthed yawn. He has slumbered all day long as quietly as an infant. But now, while the sun goes down, and the slow twilight is impending, he lifts himself from his bed and calls for food and prepares for toil. They give him fire and water to digest, and the white blood soon rushes through every artery. They pile upon his sturdy back boxes and bags and hundreds of human beings; and yet they hold him in subjection, and will not let him move from his place until the last moment of the appointed hour has expired and the last tithe of his patience is exhausted. But the time has at length arrived The last carpet-bag is on board; the last porter has performed an Alvarado leap; the last newspaper boy has furnished the last passenger with the last news, and we are at length moving steadily out into the Hudson. Think what it is to commence a voyage under circumstances such as these; in the vicinity, almost in the embrace, of a chained monster, the terrible Genius at once of Water and of Fire; the past and future destroyers of the world; the great chemists of the entire universe! Think what it is to go out upon the waters, with the faces of age and of youth smiling around you; the manly coun

tenance beaming with high hope and determined resolution; the beautiful glance of woman, never so reflective as when she looks with curious interest and expectation into the mystery of the distance, and holds in check the fancies of the moment; the rising romance of the scene and the hour; the very noise and animation around her. Yes, there is romance in the very noise and confusion: it rouses the energy of thought; it awakens fancies too thick-coming to be distinct; ideas which are rather the spirit of thought than thought itself; ideas which become emotions, so full are they of life and feeling and power. It is this species of romance which especially suits the character of an American. With him there is no quiet. The poetry of his soul is interwoven with the active and useful employments of life. It is called into exercise under the influence of a high pressure. But it is poetry, nevertheless. It takes in at a glance the old ideas of the past; it conceives and appreciates the spirit of ancient song and fåble. But it does not dwell upon these things. Even as the boat of his invention glides swiftly by a hundred scenes of natural beauty, so do his thoughts glide over the past and present to settle down in the future, the end of his intellectual journey. The life of the future is ever before him; it absorbs every thing else; for his destiny is unfulfilled, and his heart will not be at rest. Observe him at this moment; now that we have passed the suburbs of the noisy city, and are careering pleasantly past the Palisades.' Take, for instance, the young man whose restless look is ranging along their stately summits. See him lean forward, impatient even of the speed of the great steamer. He already imagines he can see the Highlands, the Kaätskills, the West, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific his only resting-place; the grave of his energy and the end of his ambition. His poetry, resembling that of the ocean and the prairie, is the vastness of the field of life which lies before him. His romance is the greatness and almost wildness of the adventures of civilization. There is a mystery about his country which enchains him, an unexplained something which he is trying to fathom; and he brings the past to bear upon his subject and draws upon its truth and its fiction for illustration, and still remains unsatisfied.

It is not the least of his wonders that twenty or thirty years ago the strange thing of life' which now bears him so smoothly and steadily along over the bosom of the Hudson had no existence. The great invention of WATT, confined to the drudgery of the work-shop, had then but little of the poetry with which its present employment has invested it. Its labors were useful but common-place. It furnished him with the necessaries and even the luxuries of life; but it did not bear him with his freight of ambition and hope to the very ends of the earth. It did not penetrate the distant veins of his native land, nor add its sharp cry and its deep roar to the voices of the wilderness. Nor did it press on, as now in the gray hour of twilight, along the banks of our classic river.

The evening melts imperceptibly into the night, and our thoughts sink into repose; but not into a dreamless slumber; for now the witchery of the steam-boat increases, and dreams, clear and distinct, shaping themselves amidst the flying sparks and ceaseless motion of the engine, dreams that are lulled by the unchanging music of the mighty machine, present grand ideas of power and striking thoughts of the sublime. Observe, in the contemplative countenance of the boy who leans upon the railing and looks out upon the scene before him, the influence of the scene and the time. The germ of poetry is shooting up within his bosom. He marvels at the world in which he lives; at the great works of man presented to his astonished eyes. He wonders whether he himself is like the rest of his species; whether he shall ever

successfully emulate the skill of the cunning artificers who have fashioned the strange fabric on which he has been gazing with awe and admiration. And as he turns away to lose himself in the sublimer works of nature, he feels, perhaps for the first time, the majesty which dwells in the heavens above him and in the earth and air and water around and beneath him. He is looking for a clue to the mystery of the enginery which he has been contemplating; and as he looks and dreams, and looks again, the light breaks in upon his opening mind, and he comprehends more clearly than he has ever yet done the great lesson of truth; the inexhaustible source of knowledge and its power. He seems to have lost, for the time, his restlessness; and although it is impossible to say where his visions may find a local habitation,' his mind is evidently active, and his resolution strong. He bears about him the unmistakeable spirit of adventure; and, if we may judge by the open and frank expression of his face, the spirit of honest daring in some good and truthful cause. ・・ NIGHT, relieved only by the light of the stars, has shrouded the scene in her own pall, yet adding to its mystery, and greatly enhancing the romance of the steam-boat. Indeed, it is only at night that this strange creation of man can be adequately appreciated. When the traveller is in some degree isolated from surrounding objects, its solemn roar is distinctly heard; and the emotions of its iron soul are chiefly felt to be a sort of real life, possessing the attributes of human existence. There is a breathing in those stupendous lungs; a strong pulsation, regular as that which marks the tide of life. When deep night has at length arrived, and all but ourselves have left the deck, the giant whose arms are in motion before us rises like a spectre and takes to himself an individual existence. What has he to do with the insignificant mortals who are so unthinkingly borne along by his fearful strength? Nothing, surely. He is working for the future generations of men; he is toiling for the civilization of the world. His deep anxiety and audible emotion are called forth by the vast undertaking in which he is engaged; and the straining of his muscles and the vigorous exercise of his iron sinews, together with his shriek at setting off, and his smothered groans, proceeding as it were from the anguish of a determined heart, are but so many indications of his awful sense of responsibility, and his terrible self-sacrificing will.'

By-the-by, speaking of steam-boats,' another correspondent has reduced his thoughts on a kindred theme to rhyme. He has been inspired by looking down through the iron foot grating of a great lake-steamer and seeing the firemen, with the reflection of 'white-heat' strong upon their melting faces, feeding the capacious maws of the furnaces with their accustomed aliment:

VULCAN! heavens! what have you built,
Clacking, sweltering, thundering here?
Up from Hades, on a tilt,

Lugg'd you this, hung on your rear?

"Hissing, groaning, spiteful, strong,
Toils tremendous your machine;
While a fiery wizard song
Whistles something shrill within.

Toiling in the pit below,

Like infernal workmen, see

Dingy mortals to and fro
Lug the relics of a tree.

Blackened with the hues of smoke,
Straining at the chimney blaze,
See them feed the monster's stroke,
While with fiercer sweep it plays.'

GOSSIP WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. - We have been reading lately, and with much interest and pleasure, the Life of Judge Smith, of New-Hampshire,' who died full of years and full of honors,' some few years ago in the Old Granite State.' Aside from being an eminent lawyer, legislator, and jurist, he was a man of true humor; which quality, says his biographer, (whose name we should like to know,) like the foam and phosphoric light in the wake of a great ship at sea, often marked the progress of his mind through depths the most profound; and in his moments of relaxation burst out and flashed in all manner of antic and fantastic shapes.' We are glad to perceive that the writer fortifies his impressions of the value of humor by collateral opinions of several illustrious theological examples. It was a saying of PALEY, that he who is not a fool half of the time is a fool all the time. ROBERT HALL, who held a similar opinion, on being reproached by a very dull preacher with the exclamation, 'How can a man who preaches like you, talk in so trifling a manner?' replied: There, brother, is the difference between us; you talk your nonsense in the pulpit, I talk mine out of it.' The eminent Doctor SOUTH, being in the midst of a frolic on one occasion, and seeing a dignified, unbending acquaintance approaching, exclaimed, 'Stop! we must be grave now; there is a fool coming! Let us give our readers one or two instances of Judge SMITH's felicitous epistolary style, of which several examples are furnished in the volume before us. Some time after he had retired from the bench, and given up his profession, he writes as follows to a distinguished lawyer of Boston: I want two pairs of castors or rollers to make my bed move easily forward and back, and cannot find such as I want nearer than Mr. QUINCY'S great city of Boston, and cannot think of a less personage to procure them for me than H. H. F, Esquire, counsellor-at-law, etc., etc. They are not to be swivelled so as to go zig-zag. I am done with all zig-zagging, twisting, turning, etc., having left the profession, and am in the strait line of things, and want my bed to move back and forward in such a line. I prefer iron to copper or brass. I am, ' for the reason aforesaid,' done with all brass composition,' etc. From another letter, enclosing notes, due-bills, etc., to a brother lawyer for collection, we take this passage: 'I have a note against D. H. His hopes from death of father-in-law are so far realized, that the good old man is dead; but as to all beyond, (I do n't mean the effect of death on the Colonel, but on H ,) I am in the situation of the United States' Circuit-Court, JAY and Others, as SEWALL pleasantly told them, Your Honors mean well, but your Honors do n't know.' I have also a note against N. another man of your town, for moneys lent years ago. He pleads poverty, the honestest plea he ever made. I have a good many other debts in the same doleful situation.' He gives this hit to another correspondent who had contemplated a new work: 'If you will publish the great book you say you have written, I will buy it, and if possible, read it. I am your friend, and will make any reasonable sacrifice to serve you.' A complimentary critic, that! We segregate a few other brief passages which have impressed us by their satire or their originality and truth: TALLEYRAND once said that the art of putting men in their proper places, was perhaps the first in the science of government.' We do not always succeed; sometimes we send men to congress whom we ought to send to the state-prison; and place men on the bench who ought to be set before the bar; men are seen laboriously thumping the cushion who ought to be thumping the anvil.' You will sometimes see a college-graduate who