THE ONLY GERMAN POET RECOGNIZED IN WALL STREET.
KÖRNER.
FUN AND FIN.
| Since President GRANT's famous trouting excursion to Pennsylvania, piscatorial pastimes appear to have become quite the thing among the magnates of the Government. The following item from Washington, cut from a morning paper, reads very like a bit of gossip from the history of the Court of CHARLES II: "General SPINNER and some of his female Treasury clerks went to the Great Falls to-day to catch black bass." Redolent of all that is rural and sweet, is the idea of SPINNER, surrounded by a bevy of his "female Treasury clerks," reclining upon a shady rock just over the Great Falls. We behold SPINNER, with our mind's eye, "fixing" a bait for one of the lovely young fisherwomen, while half a dozen of the others are engaged in fanning him and "Shoo-ing" the flies away from his expressive nose. The picture is a very pretty one, recalling to mind some brilliant pastoral by WATTEAU. There are numerous accessories arranged in the foreground, such as hampers of cold chicken pie, hams of the richest pink and yellow hues, and baskets of champagne, and it would be interesting to know who pays for all. "Spinning a minnow," as the anglers term it, for black bass, is a very appropriate pastime for SPINNER, but, for a fresh-water fisherman, there is something very Salt Lakey in that arrangement regarding the "female Treasury clerks." |
"LOT" ON A LOT OF PROVERBS.
DEAR PUNCHINELLO: One of my friends, who, much to the disgust of his fellow boarders, is constantly playing an adagio movement in B flat upon a flute, (that may not be the correct musical term, but no one will ever know it unless you tell,) informs me that you are astute; another friend, who makes cigar stumps into chewing tobacco, says, you're "up to snuff." Assuming the truth of those statements, I apply to you for information. You have the ability, have you also the inclination, to aid a poor, weary mariner on the voyage of life, (in the steerage,) who has been buffeted by reason, tempest-tossed by imagination, becalmed by fancy, wrecked by stupidity, (other people's,) and is now whirling helplessly in the Maelstrom of conundrums? (If that doesn't touch your heart, then has language failed to accomplish the end for which it was designed--to deceive others.)
I'm the great American searcher after truth, and, though I've been at the bottom of every well, except the Artesian ones, I am still a searcher. Can you refuse to throw a straw to a drowning man, or a crumb to a starving fellow-creature? Knowing that you have a mammoth heart, and abundance of straw, and lots of bread, I feel that you cannot. List! oh, list! and I will my caudal appendage unfold.