hut. But in an hour my curiosity overcame my
judgment, and I found myself tapping for admittance at Munro’s. He opened the door, stared at
me, and then turned his head, while I entered;
but we neither of us spoke. Bessie knelt by her
mother, bathing her withered hand in contrite
tears, and Munro commenced a desperate rattling
of knives and forks, whilst his wife looked up
with a face of grateful gladness. I could form no
words befitting so tender a scene, so took up the
Bible and read the parable of the prodigal son.
They bore it with firmness until I reached the 23rd verse: “Bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive,” &c.; when the father burst out:
“Us hadn’t got no fatted calf; but mother’s boiled her best bit of pork, and with her here to eat it, it’s a feast fit for angels.”
Bessie needed not another warning that her father’s roof was her safest shelter, nor did she
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again leave it until a fine young husband took her home to a snug little farm in the interior. But this husband was not Joe Sadlers; of him my suspicion proved correct; he was a villain, and at the time of Bessie’s marriage he was fulfilling a sentence on the roads for the robbery at the Black Bear.
Oline Keese.
NEWSPAPER “CANARDS.”
M. Quételet, in the Annuaire de l'Académie (article Cornelissen), relates in the following terms the manner in which the word “canard” became used in its new sense. To give a sly hit at the ridiculous pieces of intelligence which the journals were in the habit of publishing every morning, Cornelissen stated that an interesting experiment had just been made, calculated to prove the extraordinary voracity of ducks. Twenty of these animals had been placed together; and one of them having been killed and cut up in the smallest possible pieces, feathers and all, and thrown to the other nineteen, was most gluttonously gobbled up in an exceedingly brief space of time. Another was then taken from the nineteen, and being chopped small like its predecessor, was served up to the eighteen, and at once devoured like the other; and so on to the last, who was thus placed
in the position of having eaten his nineteen companions in a wonderfully short time. All this, most pleasantly related, obtained a success which the writer was far from anticipating, for the story ran the round of all the journals of Europe. It then became forgotten for about a score of years, when it came back from America with amplifications which it did not boast of at the commencement, and with a regular certificate of the autopsy of the body of the surviving animal, whose œsophagus was declared to have been seriously injured. Every one laughed at the history of the “Canard” thus brought up again, but the word remained in its novel signification.L.
