Mash, the cook, bestowed her honest hand and maiden heart upon Patching, the artist, who had first seen her at the station house, and there contracted an artistic admiration of her face and figure. She would have preferred a pirate; but Patching's enormous hat gave him a freebooterish appearance, which went far to reconcile her to him. She was really a pretty woman—much handsomer than some of the shadowy beauties Patching was wont to put on canvas—and she made him a good and faithful wife—and cooked better dinners for him, at a small expense, than he had ever eaten before—and sent him out into the world clean and tidy every morning. Patching affected to be ashamed of his wife, and snubbed her sometimes in the presence of other people. But everybody who knew the couple, saw that he had the best of the bargain. Mrs. Patching still took her favorite weekly, and cried over the stories as copiously as ever.

Mrs. Crull continued to be the dearest and best friend of Pet and Mrs. Overtop; and little Helen and little Fayette would never know the great debt of gratitude that they owed to that excellent lady. Whenever she called on Mrs. Overtop, she always began to be extremely circumspect in her pronunciation and grammar, from force of habit; but soon relapsed into those old errors which, happily, were of the head, and not of the heart. Mrs. Crull made no mistakes in her affections. She was in mourning for Mr. Crull, and truly vowed that she would never marry again.

Mrs. Slapman had ceased to live on the block. Mr. Slapman had basely defeated the beneficent decree of the law, by turning his property into ready cash, and sailing for Europe. This deprived Mrs. S. of her alimony the second year after their separation, and compelled her to give up housekeeping, and the pursuit of TRUTH, in New York. She is now living among a small colony of Jigbees, in an obscure village of Connecticut, the pride of her family, the envy of the neighbors, and the idol of two local poets and of the professor of a High School in an adjoining town, who has learned her history, and is now patiently waiting for Slapman to die before offering her his hand in marriage.

Uncle Ith rang the great bell in the high tower for a number of years, with perfect satisfaction to himself and to the firemen. He took a paper, and he read it, and he found its political arguments so powerful, and so interesting, that he adopted them as his own—as many another man of greater pretensions has done—and he got into the bad habit of talking politics in a small way. It happened, not long after, that there was an election for mayor; and a mayor was chosen who held to a variety of politics quite the opposite of that which was so ably inculcated in Uncle Ith's favorite journal. About a month later, Uncle Ith turned to the political column of his paper, and there read that he had been turned out of office, and that one Schimmerfliming—a German politician of the ——th Ward, who had been of great service in compassing the election of the new mayor—had been appointed in his place. The fact was, that Uncle Ith was highly acceptable to all parties as a no-party man. But, when he turned politician, he made himself amenable to the harsh laws of political warfare, and became (as his paper phrased it) "the hoary-headed victim of the unprincipled tyrant who, with the cunning of the serpent and the vindictive ferocity of the hyena, weaves his spider's web of mischief in his dark corner of the City Hall." Uncle Ith retired to private life with a snug property, patiently saved up and thoughtfully invested. But, as Adam went on eating apples, notwithstanding the disaster which had come to him from that species of fruit, so Uncle Ith took his newspaper, and paid for it punctually, and devoured it daily to the last.

While Uncle Ith fell by politics, Coroner Bullfast rose by it. A judicious distribution of money and liquors, a notoriety for street fights, a singular talent for profanity, and an unstinted adulation of the basest classes of the community, won for him, in succession, some of the best prizes of the Municipal lottery. He has his small, sunken eyes now fixed on one of the highest offices of the State; and it will take a strong combination to defeat a candidate backed by such powerful agencies and interests.

Mr. and Mrs. Frump lived happily on their country property. Mr. Frump tried experiments in blackberry raising, which proved a success, and was, at last accounts, concentrating his talents on the development of a new strawberry seedling. Whenever he went to town, he made a point of carrying back Matthew Maltboy, for whom his regard was inexplicably strong; and nothing gave him greater pleasure than to see his wife, gracefully mounted on the spirited filly, and Matthew, heavily astride of the sober gray, starting off for a morning's ride, while he stayed at home to push on the seedling.

When Wesley Tiffles had spent ten thousand dollars in elegant leisure, he arrived at the noble determination to "salt down," as he called it, the remaining ten thousand dollars, in ten different savings banks. He distributed it thus, in order that the failure of one of the banks might not ruin him. The interest of this money, drawn half-yearly, furnished him with a basis for operations of a character requiring genius, pens, ink, and paper, rather than ready cash. Whenever Tiffles's resources ran short, as they did occasionally, he always borrowed, and paid on the next interest day. In this policy he was inflexible; and he flattered himself on the sternness of his self-denial.

Among the schemes which failed to receive the cordial approbation of capitalists, were the following: "A process for extracting green paint from green leaves;" ditto for "making nutritious food from the direct combination of earth, air, and water;" a plan (submitted to the unappreciating Government of Naples) to "extinguish the volcano of Vesuvius, by pumping water from the Bay into the crater, in consideration of the sum of one million florins, and a monopoly of working the extinct volcano for lava."

Wesley Tiffles, profiting, at a late day, by the lesson of the "Cosmopolitan Window Fastener," finally invented and patented a striking improvement in an apple-paring machine, and, at last accounts, was clenching a good bargain for the sale of his invention.

THE END