'A LETTER from the Crimea tells the following tale: Vultures are very numerous in the Crimea. They smell the powder, anl await the coming of the fight, to throw themselves on their victims After one of the recent combats, an English officer was found who had just expired, pressing in both his arms one of these birds of prey, dead, like himself, and which he had crushed in a last effort of agony.'' DAILY PAPER.

HE left proud Albion's sea-girt shore,

With hopes and bearing high,

To mingle in the battle's roar,

And shout Saint GEORGE'S cry:
He recks not that the Golden Horn
O'erflows with noblest blood,
Or that the rays of coming morn
Will still augment its flood;

For, 'mid the carnage, he must win
A hero's glorious fame,

That he may claim of haughty kin
The fairest of her name.

Upon his heart a raven tress,

A truer shield than steel;
An angel-presence, come to bless
This day, he seems to feel.

And glorious visions! - his the lance
To turn the lilies pale!

And with the Working-Bees of France
Can England's Lion fail?

Upon Sebastopol's proud towers

Her blood-red cross must float:
The glory of the Allied Powers,
The hatred of the Croat.

To drive the Cossack from his lair,
Unearth him from his den;
To mine and double, like the hare,
Unworthy of brave men:

One desperate, fierce assult must test

The fortunes of the hour:

Saint GEORGE! Saint DENNIS! for the West

To crush the Despot's power!

We cannot paint the dreadful scene,

And weep to think such deeds have been.

The fight is o'er, the day is won:

On Malakoff's stern height,
Exultant in the glowing sun,
Imperial Eagles 'light;

And if the lion couchant scems

Before the Redan's base,

'T is but with rage to lap the streams

Which have no fitting vase.

Low, too, the noble form who led
His comrades to their death;
But from unnumbered wounds he bled
Ere he resigned his breath:
Even then, a vulture on his breast,
Encircled in his arms, was prest;
And while in agony he crushed

The cruel bird, he too was hushed.

And one who weeps in stately halls,
Envies that vulture's rest:
For her, Earth's highest glory palls,
To die with him were blest.
She bears the vulture on her heart,
PROMETHEUS like, of old,

And longs for DEATH'S reluctant dart
To shrine her 'neath the mould.

THE OBSERVATIONS OF MACE SLOPER, ESQ.

FAMILIARLY NARRATED BY HIMSELF.

NUMBER ONE.

'STRIKE the hewgag! sound the tomjohn!
Let the loud hosanna ring!

Beat the huzzy fuzzy! wake the gongong!
Bumtum! fuzzlebum, dingo bim!'

ODE TO KING KANKERSQUAMKEE, OF THE FEGEE ISLANDS.

I NEVER was what you might call smart. What I call smart is thinking and acting at a snap on the spontaneous percussion principle. Now my brother Mad always was smart. He was in fact the most ex

cessively simultaneous man I ever knew.

One day in New-York I saw Mad velocitating down Fifth Avenue in a sulkey, just behind a three-minute trotter. I'm not what you might call smart, myself; but I thought 't Mad might better have cut just as big a swath somewhere else in general, and on the island in particular. Before I could say, 'easy over the stones,' Mad's right wheel went over something believe it was an Alderman's right foot — and up went my only surviving brother into the air like a brick-bat at election-time, and fell flat as a buckwheat on the side-walk.

Exchequer Harrison, of Milwaukee, and I picked the fraternal up. Madison, are you sensible?' said Exchequer.

'What'll you give for the sulkey as she runs, Check?' replied Mad, as he undid his optics. I really believe he'd have gone stunned if he had 'nt first concluded to stick some body.

'Forty dollars,' said Check, looking down the street at the team as it Taconey'd along.

'Done!' says Mad. He had 't the word out of his mouth, before a tree-box took part of the sulkey, and annihilation the balance. Exchequer Harrison, of Milwaukee, got one wheel, in pretty good order; and the loafers the rest.

We caught the trotter, and then Mad became very much laid out, indeed. I said nothing; but reckoned that he was getting no better rather too fast for the good of some body's port-money.

'He can't travel,' said Pres Haynes, who had just called a cab. 'Salubrity's below par!'

'Go you twenty that I can ride her in bare-backed,' muttered Mad, very faintly, with both eyes shut. And he did. That twenty and Check's forty, just brought him out on the square.

Such was my brother Mad, a youth both gifted and pious — in the Cincinnati sense of the word for before he was twenty-three years old he had made one hundred thousand dollars. Still his righteousness had its back-slidings; since previous to his twenty-fourth annual birthday he had spent it all; and his life ever since has been like that of the celebrated old oaken bucket, either up the top of the well, pouring out, or down at the bottom, taking in.

I have begun with my brother Madison, putting him a little out ahead of myself, on the same principle that a young lady at a party takes a beau or a chaperoon, to pilot fore-wise along, and ease her own debutt off a little. Were I one of the smart sort this would be needless. But I have also had my own experiences, kernickering round, as they say in good society, having travelled, so to speak, upward of some: at times on my shape, and semi-occasionally on rail-roads, steam-boats, ox-wagons, triumphal chariots, and cellar-doors. But it was with me a juvenile axeom that the manner of travel, whatever it be, is greatly helped by the application of metal (meaning thereby tin, pewter, brass, dough, brads, ready, heavy, dust, spicuniary, funds, or any other word for money) to the wheels. 'Where the wheels is 'nt tired the hosses is,' said an old driver to me during the innocent apple-stealing days of infancy.

'Buy an 'ography 'f Barnum?' said a man at my elbow, as I was lunching one morning in the Astor House. I looked around and remembered him as a thrifty, sparing book-peddler: so very sparing, indeed, that he was saving with his nouns, extra-economical with his adjectives, and clipped his words generally as if they had been coin. Buy an 'ography 'f Barnum?" said I thinkfully to self, as I went up-stairs with the book.

'Who comes next?' To judge from the book-seller's ad's and the police reports, one might reckon that every man in America has his life taken about twice on an average. All who go through the world pushing the big snow-ball of fortune before them, have got to find out, sooner or later, that a time will come when its size, and nothing else, will urgently call for a written description of the roller.

Why, I might just as reasonably set down some of my own notions. I aint smart - what of it?' and as Stetson handed over the key of my room, I looked him solemnly in the face and said:

'I WILL!'

'Will what?' answers Stetson.

'Will and bequeath to you my everlasting blessing if you don't move me down at least three stories below that toploftical garret where I'm stowed. Why, it's so high up that I can see the sun rise before sundown, and I have to start before bed-time to get down-stairs in time for dinner!'

'It shall be done,' said S. 'Here, James! move there, some of you! Take this gentleman's baggage to No.-' And it was accordingly in No. that this commencement was cogitated and crushed out. From my window I could see Broadway and the Park, the incorrectness of the City-Hall clock, and the imposing front of the Hall itself; which, according to the newspapers, is nothing at all compared to the imposing work which goes on inside. I could see Windust's over the way through the endless ghostly whirls of wind and dust, which the City Fathers (being as they were, no conjurers) had not succeeded in laying. And lastly, I could behold the great TEMPLE OF HUMBUG, with its waving banners and myriad signs, and all the pomp and circumstance of gam mon! From time to time as the omnibus wheels and ceaseless tramp of endless promenaders lulled a few, I could hear blasts of something like music from a balcony in front of the Museum, variegated with the occasional squeak of a pig, or of a lady just escaping vehicular death by about a hair's-breadth, on that celebrated crossing which is, according to travellers, (who ought to know,) more dangerous than the crossing of the Isthmus ever was in its worst days.

6

'This,' said I, as I looked out on the world in general, and at a white coat which sloped into the Tribune Buildings; this is the correct spot to win. This is about the centre of the hub of the great wheel of the American world. There is no discount on this town! Foreign activity is like a mill-wheel; it goes round mighty fast when the water's high, but it don't get ahead! American movement is like the wheel of a locomotive; the quicker its turn-roundativeness, the greater its get-along! Welcome thou busy scene! for in thy presence shall the Observations of Mace Sloper be begun!'