earnest, started for a license, and the lady made her way to a boarding-house on Broadway, above Third, for dinner. At two o’clock the gentleman returned with a license and a Justice, to the great astonishment of the fair one, and after a few tears and half-remonstrative expressions, she submitted with becoming modesty, and the Squire performed the little ceremony in a twinkling. If this is not a fast country, a search-warrant would hardly succeed in finding one.
—Cincinnati Commercial.
THE MERCHANT AND HIS CLERK.
A London merchant resided a few miles from the City, in an elegant mansion, to and from which he journeyed daily, and invariably by third class. It happened that one of the clerks in his employ lived in a cottage accessible by the same line of railway, but he always travelled first class; the same train thus presenting the anomaly of the master being in that place which one would naturally assign to the man, and the man appearing to usurp the position of the master. One day these two alighted at the terminus in full view of each other. “Well,” said Mr. B—, in that tone of banter which a superior so frequently thinks it becoming to adopt, “I don’t know how you manage to ride first-class, when in these hard times I find third-class fare as much as I can afford.” “Sir,” replied the clerk, “you, who are known to be a person of wealth and position, may adopt the most economical mode of travelling at no more risk than being thought eccentric, and even with the applause of some for your manifest absence of pride. But, as for myself, I cannot afford to indulge in such irregularities. Among the persons I travel with I am reported to be a well-paid employé, and am respected accordingly; to maintain this reputation I am compelled to travel in the same manner as they do, and were I to adopt an inferior mode, it would be attributed to some serious falling off of income; a circumstance which would occasion me not only loss of consideration among my quondam fellow-travellers, but one which, upon coming to the ears of my butcher, baker, and grocer, might seriously injure my credit with those highly
respectable, but certainly worldly minded tradesmen.” Mr. B— was not slow in recognizing the full force of the argument, more particularly as the question of his own liberality was involved, nor did he hesitate to give it a practical application by immediately increasing the salary of his clerk; not only to the amount of a first-class season ticket, but something over.
—The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book.
REMARKABLE WILL.
Some years ago an old gentleman of very eccentric habits, Mr. John Younghusband, of Abbey Holme, Cumberland, died, and his will has proved to be of the most eccentric character. The Silloth Railway runs through part of his property, an arrangement to which he was most passionately averse; and though years have elapsed since then, his bitterness was in no way assuaged. In his will he leaves near £1000 to a solicitor who opposed the making of the railway; the rest of his money he bequeaths to a comparative stranger upon these conditions—that the legatee never speaks to one of the directors of the railway, that he never travels upon it, that he never sends cattle or other traffic by it; and should he violate any of these conditions, the estate reverts to the ordinary succession. To Mr. John Irving and the other directors of the Silloth line Mr. Younghusband has sarcastically bequeathed a farthing.
IMMENSE FRAUD ON THE GREAT-NORTHERN RAILWAY.
In the Annual Register for 1856, November 14th, we read, “Another fraud connected with the transfer of shares and stock, but on a far grander scale, and by a much more pretentious criminal, has been discovered.