I'M ALL READY.
DECAPITATED CHARADE.
My whole a churchman is of weight,
Summoned his grievances to state,
Where, in the lofty audience-hall,
The bishops are assembled all.
His head cut off reveals his plan,
Which he will do as best he can.
What's left, again beheaded, shows
The state of mind in which he goes,
As, mounted on his good gray steed,
He rides along through vale and mead.
Behead that word, and, lo! 'tis plain
Why all his efforts were in vain.
Dejected now, at close of day,
He, sighing, takes his homeward way.
Behead once more: see what he did
Ere sleep fell on each weary lid.
A GEOGRAPHICAL GAME.
An amusing and instructive geographical game has just been invented by M. Levasseur, a well-known French geographer. It is called "Tour du Monde," and is played on a large terrestrial globe, richly illustrated, and divided into 232 spherical rectangles, each of which is marked with a number corresponding to a number on a list which indicates gains or losses in the game. A brass rib or meridian running from pole to pole of the globe, but raised above the latter, is perforated with a row of eighteen holes; and there are eighteen tiny flags provided for the purpose of being planted in the holes. Each flag corresponds to one of the principal states of the world, from China the most populous to Holland the least populous.
To play the game the globe is set revolving, and a player, commencing at the south pole, plants a flag into each hole one after another at each revolution of the globe, and advances northward. The score of the player, which may be either a gain or a loss, is determined by the nature of the facts indicated on the rectangular space above which a flag may stand when the globe stops revolving; and this is, of course, the interesting and humorous part of the game. London, for example, counts thirty, Paris twenty, and so on, according to population. A coal mine, a Manchester cotton factory, a grain mart, all are reckoned gains; but an encounter with a Zulu or a lion in Africa, a storm in the Atlantic, a polar iceberg, a crocodile on the Nile, naturally go for serious losses.