The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1853-08-09 00:00:00

my salar

to feed, so I crawled to work again directly. And our
rehearsals are very heavy, with so much spectacle ; and I
fully expect to break my limbs one of these mornings out
of a cockle-shell of a car which they are trying to make
six horses bring in on their backs, at an awful height,
and me in it—the poor things kick so and get so unmerci-
fully beaten ; but Brax swears it is as safe as a cradle—a
cradle on the tree-top I tell him. However, it's only
slavery for life, that's one comfort, and it'll be all the
same a hundred years hence, that's another." "By Jove,"
said PauL An'd he became thoughtful for full three

minutes, considering how hard so people worked for a
morsel Of bread.—Bentley's Miscellany.
OBTUSENESS OF TIM AFRICAN NATIVES.—They have
no way of distinguishing days, but reckon by the rainy
season, the dry season, or the pig-nut season. When in-
quiries are made about how many days' journey off a place
may be, their ignorance of all numeral ideas is very an-
noying. In practice, whatever they may possess in their
language, they certainly use no numerical greater than
three. When they wish to express four, they take to
their fingers, which are to them as formidable instruments
of calculation as a sliding rule is to an English schoolboy.
They puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand
remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required
for " units. Yet they seldom lose oxen. The way in
which they discover the loss of one is not by the number
of the herd being diminished, but by the absence of a face
they know. When bartering is going on, each sheep must
be paid for separately. Thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco
to be the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely
puzzle a Damara to take two sheep and give him four
,sticks. I have done so, and seen a man first put two of
the sticks apart and take a sight over them at one of the
sheep he was about to sell. Having satisfied himself that
that one was honestly paid for; and finding to his surprise
that exactly two sticks remained in hand to settle the
account for the other sheep, he would be afflicted with
doubts ; the transaction seemed to come out too " pat "
to be correct, and he would refer back to the first couple
of sticks, and then his mind got hazy and confused, and
wandered from one sheep to the other, and he broke off
the transaction until two sticks were put into his hand
and one sheep driven away, and then the other two sticks
given him and the second sheep driven away. When a
Damara's mind is bent upon number, he is too much occu-
pied to dwell upon quantity. Thus, a heifer is bought
from a man for ten sticks of tobacco ; his large hands
being both spread out upon the ground, and a stick placed
on each finger, he gathers up the tobacco ; the size of the
mass pleases him, and the bargain is struck. You then
want to buy a second heifer : the same process is gone
through, but half sticks instead of whole ones are put
upon his fingers ; the man is equally satisfied at the time,
but occasionally finds it out and complains the next day.—
Galton's Narrative of an African Explorer.
MAERI A GILL BIAS DA UGIITIIIS.—If anything exemplifies
the vanity of human wishes, it is our efforts to marry our
daughters, and our regrets when the plans succeed. Tom
goes to India, and Billy to sea, and there is scarcely a gap
in the family circle. " The bOys" were seldom at home—
they were shooting in Scotland, or hunting in England, or
fishing in Norway. They never, so to say, made part of
the effective garrison of the house; they came and went
with that racketty good humour that even in quiet families
is pleasurable ; but •Tour girls are household gods : lose
them, even one of them, and the altar is despoiled. The
thousand little unobtrusive duties, noiseless cares, that
make home better a hundred-fold than anywhere else, be
it ever so rich and splendid—the unasked solicitude, the
watchful attention that provides for your little daily wants
and 'habits, is all their province. And just fancy, then,
what scheming and intriguing we practise to get rid of
them ! You'll say that this shows we are above the selfish-
ness of only considering our own enjoyment, and that we
sacrifice all for their happiness. There you mistake; our
sole aim is a rich man—our one notion of a good marriage
is, that the husband be wealthy. Its not a man like myself
who has sometimes paid fifty, ay sixty per cent. for money,
that can afford to sneer at and despise it ; but this I will
say, that the mere Possession of it will not suffice for hap-
piness. I know fellows with fifteen thousand a year that
have not the heart to spend five hundred. I know others,
that with as much, are always over head and ears in debt,
raising cash everywhere and any how ! What kind of life
must a girl lead that marries either of these ; and yet would
you or I think of refusing such a match for a daughter ?
Let me tell you, Toni, that for people of small fortune, the
nunneries were fine things ! What signifies serge and
simple diet to the wearisome drudgery of a governess. If
I was a woman, I think I'd rather sit in my•quiet cell,
working an embroidered 'suit of body 'clothes for Father
O'Leary, than I'd be snubbed by the family of some vulgar
citizen, tortured by the brats, and insulted by the servants.
—The Dodd Family Abroad.

CHARA.CTEIt OF GOLDSMITIL—Who, of the millions
whom he has amused, doesn't love him ? To be the most
beloved of English writers, what a title that is for a man !
A wild youth, wayward, but full of tenderness and affec-
tion, quits the country village where his boyhood has been
passed in happy musing, in idle shelter, in fond longing
to see the great world out of doors, and achieve name and
fortune—and after years of dire struggle, and neglect and
poverty, his heart turning back as fondly to his native
place,' as it had longed eagerly for change when sheltered
there, he writes a book and a poem, full of the recollec-
tions and feelings of home—he paints the friends and
scenes of his youth, and peoples Auburn and Wakefield

with remembrances of Lissoy: Wander he must, but he
carries away a home relic with him, and dies with it on
his breast. His nature is truant ; in repose it lonzs for
_ .

Lrney i

He passes to-day in building an air castle for to-
w, or in writing yesterday's elegy ; and he would fly

s -hour, but that a cage of —necessity keeps hini

the chaim of his verse, or his style, and humour
regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile;
.us tremulous sympathy, the 'weakness which he owns ?
Your love for him is half pity. You come hot and
from the day's battle, and this sweet minstrel - sings t

His sweet

you. Who could harm the kind vagrant harper ?

did he ever hurt ? He carries no weapon—save the harp
on which he plays to you ; and with which he del

great and humble, young and old, the captain in the
tent, or the soldier round the fire, or the women and
children in the village, at whose porches he sings his
simple songs of love and beauty. With that sweet story
of the " Vicar, of Wakefield," he has found an entrance
into every hamlet in Europe. Not one of us, however
busy or hard, but once or twice in our lives has passed an
evening with him, and undergone the charm of his de-
lightful music.—Thackeray's Humorists.
AN IDIOT AS RE IS SUPPOSED TO BE, AND AS HE IS.—
The popular notion of an idiot would probably be found to
vary very little, essentially, in different places, however
modified by local Circumstances. To the traveller in
France or Italy, the. name rees.lls a vacant creature all in
rags, gibbering and blinking in the sun with distorted
face, led about as a possession and a stock-in-trade by
some phenomenon of filth and ugliness, in the form of an
old woman. In association with Switzerland, it suggests
a horrible being, seated at a chalet door (perhaps possess-
ing sense enough to lead the way to a neighbouring water-
fall), of stunted and misshapen forin, with a pendulous
excrescence dangling from his throat, like a great skin
bag with a weight in it. In the highlands of Scotland, or
on the roads of Ireland, he becomes a red-haired Celt,
rather more unreasonable than usual, plunging ferociously
out of a mud cabin; and casting stones at the stranger's
head. As a remembrance of our own childhood in an
English country town, he is a shambling knock-kneed man
who was never a child, with an eager utterance of dis-
cordant seitilds which he seemed to keep in his protruding
forehead, :a: tongue too large for his mouth, and a dreadful
pair istaids, that wanted to ramble over everything—
our ors E "face included. But in all these cases, the main
idea of an idiot would be of a hopeless, irreclaimable,
unimprovable being.. And if he be further recalled as
under restraint in a workhouse or lunatic asylum, he will
still come upon • the imagination as wallowing in the
lowest depths of degradation and neglect ; a miserable
monster, whom nobody may put to death, but whom every
one must wish dead, and be distressed to see alive. Until
within a few years, it was generally assumed, even by
those .who were not given to hasty assumptions, that
because an idiot was, either wholly or in part, deficient in
certain senses and instincts necessary, in combination with
others, to the due performance of the ordinary functions
of life--and because those senses and instincts could not
al
lr study— therefore nothing eould be done for him, and
ways reorafaithne subject has now dernongtratedan
object of pitiable isolation.
thbe BheuatstmuaPtuPlile litedose
cultivation of such senses and instincts as the
idiot is seen to Possess, will, besides frequently developing
others that, are latent within him, but obscured, so
brighten thoie glimmering lights, as immensely to improve
his condition both with reference to himself and to society.
Consequently there is no 'greater justification for -abandon-
ing him, in his degree, than for: abandoning -any other
beau creature.—.Dickenit "Household Words."