A large, good-looking woman, wife of a farmer, has had twelve children; every one of whom died before living a year.—The woman has some serious inward disease, which, the doctor says would have killed her long ago had she not borne children; and that, when she has a child born that lives and grows well and perfectly _^well, the woman herself will die.—

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When _^my little friend Tom Thumb, travelled with the circus he stood behind the stand, in a Missouri settlement, one afternoon, and sold notions.—Amid the crowd, came up the biggest kind of a Western bully, and presently demanded the change _^due him on for the dollar.—. . . . ."O, yes," says Tom, "all but the dollar."—Then crowds the louping giant closer up and cries, "Damn your little heart, didnt I just buy three cigars, and give you a dollar bill half an hour ago?". . . . . .Tom was up to Western rigs, and couldn't be persuaded for he had taken handled nothing but change and a gold quarter-eagle since he opened trade. On stating this, the baffled ruffian sings out, "Then I lie, do I?—Take that to remember me by!" and reaching over his long arm like _^like a windmill in a gale, hits the poor boy a staggerer that brings the blood from his nose and raises a purple cushion around one eye in short metre.—

The fifteen minutes that passed away before any of the circus people to whom this stand could be decently confided, came within