bearing down upon them, and killed them on the spot. During this massacre, Ali had gained a considerable start, yet not so far but that the beast at length overtook him and put him to his last shift. This was a small fiddle or kit, upon which he no sooner began to play than the Bear, rising uncouthly on his hind legs, began to cut capers to the great delight of the Cynic, to whom it was precisely the reverse of the Dance of Death. The faster one played the faster the other jigged-the musician purposely getting from presto to prestissimo, till the fascinated brute began to pant and puff, and besought the performer, with the most plaintive moans, and imploring glances, and supplicatory gestures, to desist. But Ali knew better, and only plied the bow more rapidly, till after a waltz the eye could scarcely follow, the Bear reeled off in an involuntary pirouette, and fell dead-beaten on his face. "Heaven reward the man," exclaimed Ali, as he gazed on his prostrate enemy. "Heaven reward the man who first hit upon the very original notion of sawing the inside of a cat with the tail of a horse!" and without further obstacle he arrived at the city of Buz. And now, quoth the Chronicler, it would be tedious to pursue individually the fortunes of the imitators of Ali Ben Nous; for instance, how foolishly the travellers from Buz essayed with their kits and fiddles to provoke to a hornpike the great crocodile of the Lake of Jad. Suffice it, they perished miserably one and all. As for the Cynic, he discovered that wherever he came he was as far as before from the haven he sought However fantastically extravagant and repulsively absurd the doctrines and habits he wilfully professed and practised, he invariably found himself more or less at the head of a sect. At length a pseudo Cynic appeared, who, by help of nature and art, so closely personated the original, as to acquire the surname of the Double. This, to Ali was the drop that overbrimmed his cup: and in a paroxysm of spleen including himself in his anathema against mankind in general, he resolved to perish by his own. hand. To this end, and a bad end it was, he repaired to a certain solitary spot, on the of a wood with a large phial, or rather family bottle, of mortal poison in his pocket. "Now then," exclaimed Ali, taking off half the fatal liquid at a gulp-" now then for an act at last in which I shall verge not be copied," when suddenly an Oran Outang, who had been watching the operation from a neighbouring tree, sprang down to the ground, snatched up the bottle, and before Nous could interfere, drank off the remainder of the poison. This untoward event, and the scene of mockery that ensued, seemed to pang the dying Cynic even more than the draught he had swallowed. “Alas!” he cried, already writhing under the effects of the potion, "alas, it is in vain to struggle with fate! I fled from my own species to avoid their imitation—and lo! yonder sits a brute beast poisoned out of the same bottle, suffering the same pains, making the same grimaces, no doubt, and the same contortions, and even composing himself-confound the son of a Monkey !-to die in the same attitude." THE TALENTED MAN. BY W. MACKWORTH PRAED. A LETTER FROM A LADY IN LONDON TO A LADY AT LAUSANNE. DEAR ALICE! you'll laugh when you know it,— Last week at the Duchess's ball, I danced with the clever new poet,- He is such a talented man! He came up from Brazen-nose College, |