A Midnight READER, did you ever fight with a mosquito not for five or ten minutes, nor half an hour only, but a regular pitched battle, lasting from midnight till daybreak? And after having exhausted all your powers in the fray, did you leave the field without being perfectly satisfied that your enemy was invincible? If so, you must be better skilled in the tactics of mosquito warfare than we are. A few nights ago we had a long and desperate conflict with one of these blood-thirsty wretches, and we speak advisedly when we say that we would rather be forced to cut our way through a body of Southern "rebs," even Ku Kluxers, than again endure the horrors of such a fight. We had just retired to rest, and sleep was gently descending on our eyelids, and gradually and deliciously overclouding our faculties, when our vagabond enemy, who had secretly effected his entrance into the room, lit on our forehead, and piercing it with his keen proboscis roused us suddenly by a most diabolical sting. Half asleep and half awake, we impatiently jerked our head, and knocking it violently against the bedpost put the assassin for a moment to flight. But it was only for a moment; for scarcely had we composed ourselves to sleep, when we heard a low buzzing in our ears, and immediately after felt his atrocious tube again perforating our face, from which he was sucking up blood, without so much as the civility of "by your leave." Our nerves were now acquiring a preternatural irritability, and, shaking off our drowsiness, we determined to crush the villain summarily and without mercy. Waiting quietly until he had again lit on our forehead and inserted his tube as deeply as possible, we cautiously and silently raised our arm, and were just hitting him, as we thought, a thundering rap, when plague on the luck! off he flew, just in season to escape from the wrath of our descending fingers, the force of which spent itself on our own luckless skull. 66 The little imp This did n't provoke us a bit no! we assure you, reader, positively not a bit compared with the mortification of hearing him chuckle over the success of his adventure; for, as he wheeled off, he uttered a buzz, buzz," full of scorn and contempt, mingled with a note of exultation which vexed us beyond all endurance. repeated his visitations sundry times with the same success, and we could almost see him each time, as he dodged our ineffectual blows and flew away, laughing and capering, and singing in a contemptuous tone, "Don't you wish you could come it?" "Hit one of your size!" "You can't come the giraffe over me!" as if purposely to fret us to distraction. At last a final and still more excruciating attack on the sensitive organ of smell put the last particle of patience to flight, and bouncing up from bed in a highly sublimated state of rage, we determined "not to give sleep to our eyes nor rest to our eyelids," till we should have caught the lawless villain, and lynched him without judge or jury. Lighting a lamp, we proceeded cautiously and warily to search for the murderer of our sleep. It is needless to sayat least, to any who have attempted a similar task -that, though bed and bedstead, carpet and curtains, wall and window, bureau and dressing-table, chair and sofa, were carefully inspected, not the slightest trace of the vampire could be found. He was lying low" in some snug place, and doubtless grinning with malignant delight at the idea of having feasted on our life-blood, while he 66 was rubbing his claws and sharpening his bill, preparatory to another attack. After a vain search of some twenty minutes, during which we looked into every nook and corner without finding hide or hair of our tormentor, and nearly broke our neck in exploring the ceiling from a chair and table, we gave up the attempt as hopeless, and again sought our couch with the fond conceit that he had bid us "good-night," or, at least, that we might from long sleeplessness fall into a slumber so profound that we should not be awakened even by his perforations. again he thrust the murder Vain hope! Hark! A gentle and barely audible murmur in a distant corner of the room, becoming by degrees a little louder and louder, and waxing eventually into the old, familiar, long-drawn hum! It came upon our ear like a knell! Escape was impossible; our doom was sealed. A moment of agonizing suspense followed, and again we felt the pest promenading on our face, leaving an intolerable itching wherever he trod; and ous tube deep into our cheek, inflicting the keenest stinging pain. Flesh and blood could stand it no longer. Jumping out of bed into the middle of the room, we chased the imp about the premises for half an hour in a perfect frenzy of rage, which nothing but his heart's blood could have appeased; when suddenly we lost sight of him, and sinking upon a lounge from sheer exhaustion, fell into a profound sleep, from which we awoke at daylight to recollect that- a mosquito is invincible! Mystery in IN re-reading that remarkable book, which Religion. so many persons have found full of original, suggestive, and stimulating thought, "Amiel's Journal," – I was struck with the following observations. Consider ing that their author was a pre-eminently "liberal" thinker, to whom no suspicion attaches of the slightest "orthodox prejudice," in fact, a sceptic, the sentiments must be deemed full of weight and significance. "The efficacy of religion," says Amiel, "lies precisely in that which is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal. . . The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. It is mystery, on the other hand, which the religious instinct demands and pursues; it is mystery which constitutes the essence of worship, the power of proselytism. When the cross became the 'foolishness' of the cross, it took possession of the masses. And in our own day, those who wish to get rid of the supernatural, to enlighten religion, to economize faith, find themselves deserted, - like poets who should declaim against poetry, or women who should decry love. . . . It is the forgetfulness of this physiological law which stultifies the so-called liberal Christianity." The First WHICH was the first novel in our language? Novel. If "Robinson Crusoe" may be regarded as a novel, it was the first, having been published in 1719. But this charming tale hardly exemplifies, perhaps, what we mean by the term; and if so, Richardson may therefore be considered as the true discoverer of this boundless realm of literature, which has since been so widely explored. "Pamela," Richardson's first work, appeared in 1741; and if, as the poet Gray believed, the most paradisaical of earthly pleasures is to lounge upon a sofa and "read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon," what a dreary world, comparatively speaking, must ours have been before that epoch! Sir Charles Grandison had not then bowed over the hand of Harriet Byron. Tom Jones had not exposed the foibles of Philosopher Square, nor Parson Adams prided himself on his sermon against vanity. Uncle Toby had not yet let the "poor devil" of a fly out of the window, or arranged his batteries of miniature cannon at Shandy Hall. The Vicar of Wakefield had not found a convert to his views on monogamy in Ephraim Jenkinson, nor Moses been overreached in trade by the same sharper. Dominie Sampson had not uttered his memorable exclamation, "Prodigious!" or indulged in the sole laugh of his life, so fatal to his landlady. Samuel Weller had not been shut up four and twenty hours in a public "conweyance" with a "vidder," nor had the world heard of that "poor, lone, lorn creature," Mrs. Gummidge, with whom "everything goes contrairy." What did men do before Richardson's time to amuse themselves on rainy days, or how did the ladies console themselves for the lack or loss of a lover? A Fallacy A WRITER in that able Chicago journal, Pricked. The Open Court," combats with great vigor the popular cry that the poor in this century are continually growing poorer in the essentials of happiness, that industrial progress increases and intensifies poverty, and that hence our modern civilization is a failure. He shows that in England the proportion of pauperism to population was nearly twice as great in 1846 as in 1876, and more than four times as great in 1803 as in 1888. Though the population of England has doubled in the last sixty years, the number of vagrants arrested annually in London has not increased. Again, trustworthy official statistics show that the consumption of tea, sugar, cheese, butter, bread, ham, |