Today's Stichomancy for Ashton Kutcher

ly ready with an explanation. I found him seated at the end of a long narrow table, facing his wife--a scraggy little woman, with long ringlets and a blue tooth, who smiled abroad stupidly and looked frightened when you spoke to her. Between them a waggling punkah fanned twenty cane-bottomed chairs and two rows of shiny plates. Three China- men in white jackets loafed with napkins in their hands around that desolation. Schomberg's pet table d'hote was not much of a success that day. He was feeding himself ferociously and seemed to

Falk

inspired by the masterpiece of Gerard Douw; he had turned the group of the "Dropsical Woman" toward the window, instead of presenting it full front. The condemned man was substituted for the dying woman--same pallor, same glance, same appeal to God. Instead of the Dutch doctor, he had painted the cold, official figure of the sheriff's clerk attired in black; but he had added an old woman to the young one of Gerard Douw. The cruelly simple and good-humored face of the executioner completed and dominated the group. This plagiarism, very cleverly disguised, was not discovered. The catalogue contained the following:--

510. Grassou de Fougeres (Pierre), rue de Navarin, 2.

Traveller, "what misfortune caused you to be so far away from the source of power?"

"I 'sought the man,'" said the Office.

The Tyrant Frog

A SNAKE swallowing a frog head-first was approached by a Naturalist with a stick.

"Ah, my deliverer," said the Snake as well as he could, "you have arrived just in time; this reptile, you see, is pitching into me without provocation."

"Sir," replied the Naturalist, "I need a snakeskin for my collection, but if you had not explained I should not have

Fantastic Fables

The band consisted of a fiddle, a clarionet, and a flageolet from the Blind Asylum. The three were paid seven francs in a lump sum for the night. For the money, they gave us, not Beethoven certainly, nor yet Rossini; they played as they had the will and the skill; and every one in the room (with charming delicacy of feeling) refrained from finding fault. The music made such a brutal assault on the drum of my ear, that after a first glance round the room my eyes fell at once upon the blind trio, and the sight of their uniform inclined me from the first to indulgence. As the artists stood in a window recess, it was difficult to distinguish their faces except at close quarters, and I kept away at first; but when I came nearer (I hardly know why) I