days of pleasure are present, and the fountain of enjoyment is for ever flowing. Go it, girls!-exult in the extatic enthusiasm of youth-pluck the posies of pleasure ere they begin to fade in the sad September of womanhood-romp over the fields of flirtation, and through the gardens of gayety, as much as you please, but protect your petticoats from the various puddles of vice that obstruct the path of virtue; for, when they are once stained, neither turpentine nor tears can render them clean as before: and be careful, also, how you are induced in an unguarded moment to wander without the walls of propriety, lest the gates be for ever closed upon you, and you be left to wander still, pitiless and unbefriended, except, perhaps, by some angel of mercy who looks out from the window of heaven, and beckons in vain for you to come and partake of hospitalities denied by a wicked and uncharitable world. Partake of all the proper enjoyments that the spring of youth affords. Luxuriate in love as long as it lasts, but don't make yourselves sick with its sweets, nor too early inoculated with its poison. The May-month of maidenhood-the last and the loveliest of youth-is the time to revel in the delights of love. Therefore, improve it as you best can while the rosy bed of Cupid is surrounded with the richest of fragrance; for remember, my dear young feminines, that with you it will not always be May, and that love hath not all seasons for its own. No in the very summer of life the blossoms of love begin to fade—in the autumn they are withered and devoid of perfume, and even the green leaves upon the tree of love grow sere, and fall to the ground; but ah! in the winter of age the hollow wind murmurs amid the naked branches, as though wailing for the loss of those wreaths of fond affection which youth's gay spring so gracefully wove. An old woman of fifty or sixty can no more feel the full influence of the tender passion than a chunk of ice can be warmed by moonshine. She may fancy that she feels sometimes a little of the liquor of love leaking through the half-closed pores of her heart; but her love is just about as much like the genuine article which you, young maidens, possess, as the momentary gleams of a lightningbug's latter extremity are like the ever-blazing rays of the eternal sun. Her love amounts to nothing more than partiality, sympathy, fondness, or friendship-a kind of calm liking, that doesn't stir up the bosom much or create any particular pricking or uneasy sensation of the flesh; but yours is the real ginger of affection. When you love, you go it like water down an eave's spout-you cling to the idols of you hearts like sheep-ticks to the wool-now the waves of joyful excitement beat about in your breasts, and now the mild moonlight of melancholy rests upon a scene of gloom and silence-now you feel a curious, silly, sublime, mysterious and magnetic sensation all over, even to your very ancles, as though you were just beginning to feather out—and now again your hearts, hands, feet and flesh are as cold and senseless as the toes of a brass monkey in winter. Such, girls, are your feelings when in love; and I know very well that they are as rapturous as they are ridiculous. Therefore I would have you enjoy them while the calendar of youth is set for the merry month of May, and ere the frosts of November shall have destroyed the blossoms of your beauty and congealed the current of your loves. My dear friends-it is not always May, neither will it always be life with us; so let us literally ENJOY its enjoyments while they are within our reach, and not crush such beautiful eggs in our hands by grasping too eagerly. Let us, by prudence, economy, morality, and a moderate indulgence in the pleasures of the world, try to gather the roses of life without its thorns. Let us endeavor to live as well as we oUGHT, and not as well as we CAN ;-not pride ourselves too much upon vain accomplishments, for they must all perish with us in the ground-nor boast of honors, for the tomb must hide them. What are the dead to us, bugs of mortality, that crawl upon their graves? Nothing. There they lie, rotting, unheeded, unthought-of, as though they never had been! The grass grows from their bosoms-the cattle eat the grass-man eats the cattle and Death swallows man at a gulp? Dust, then, we are; and we must make up our minds soon to return to dust. If we have been vicious and reckless in our younger days, we must contrive to be serious and virtuous in our maturer years. Virtue adds a bloom and a freshness even to the beauty of youth; but an old reprobate has more wrinkles on his soul than he has on his forehead. If we so manage as to really enjoy all the gifts that heaven bestows upon us, and don't teaze Providence with too many foolish petitions, there is no doubt but we shall eventually find that happier and better land, where it is always May, from January to the December of eternity. So mote it be! HIGHFLOWN WORDS. TEXT.-Armado is a most illustrious wight, A man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight. MY HEARERS-allow me on this occasion, to be a kind of half Armado and half myself-as far as words are concerned. Listen, then, while I discourse upon Man. Open your ears that you may hear, and your understandings that you may know what I am talking about. Man is a loquacious, I may say garrulous, animal; carneous, carnivorous, graminivorous, herbivorous, and piscivorous in his nature. He is a singular biped-a puzzle to himself, and an enigma to the world. Unlike all other creatures that locomote, his knees bend forward-towards the future: which shows that he was intended to progress, and never retrograde. In shape he is diverse gibbous, gor-bellied, square and round-shouldered, bow-legged, knock-kneed, and straight-shanked: fat, plump, spare, lean, lantern-jawed, bacon-faced, and blubber-cheeked : natural-eyed, cross-eyed, blear-eyed, squint-eyed and goggle-eyed. But, my friends, to refrain from descanting and expatiating upon man's physical, physiognomical and corporeal qualities, what is he, entomologically speaking, but an ephemeral insect, that performs a diurnal peregrination to the grave? Scarcely has the erubescence of life's morning ceased to blush upon his cheek than he performs his nocturns amid the dull shadows of death. Ornithologically speaking, he is a non-plumigerous bird, that hops. from tree to tree, fills its crop with flies and grubs, sings a summer song or two, and departs to some unknown clime. My friends-man is a fastuous being, proud of a full purse, and as ostentatious of a fine appearance as a peacock with his posterior appendage extended. He sometimes manifests the longanimity of a jackass, but more frequently he is as restless and unsettled as a toad in a hail storm. He holds that good works are necessary to his salvation, yet his slothfulness induces him to rely upon solfidianism. With all his haughtiness, he kneels like a dromedary; but his genuflections are oftener performed at the altar of mammon than at the throne of grace. He moistens his spirit with the water of life, and furnishes his inner man with a humectation in the shape of a brandy toddy. After partaking of an omnifarious repast and going throngh a few manual exercises, which he calls the toils of the day, he goes yawning to his bed chamber and avails himself of the glorious consopiation, allowed to all weary mortals. Verily, the chief end of man is to eat, drink, get money, and sleep. Truly he is a bibacious, voracious, avaricious, and somnolerous creature. No oleaginous persuasion can make pliant his immutable obstinacy. He must and will have his own way, like a hog on a turnpike, or a woman making pies. Naturally addicted to litigiousness, he will wrangle about words, and nothing can put a stop to his logomachy but sheer exhaustion, or finding himself illequeated in his own arguments. Ignominiously parsimonious and self-denying, he abrogates the pleasures and comforts of life, and then whines about his own jejuneness, and thinks the world as barren of happiness as a bat is of feathers. Alas for his self-inflicted lycanthropy! Taking it for granted that he is born to sorrow, he indulges in luctiferous cogitations till a confirmed melancholy settles upon his soul, and both misanthropy and misogyny take a life lease of his bosom. Feeble and faint are his philanthropic emotions for the suffering ones around him who cry for his assistance; but strong are his feelings of humanity towards those who are sufficiently far off as to be beyond the reach of his generosity. His heart, for aught I know, may be as soft as wax by nature, but the scorching fire of selfishness makes it as dry and hard as a brickbat; and nothing but a golden or silvery prospect can malaxate its obduracy-which you all know by experience. My hearers-I will now consider Man alphabetically from A to Z.-He is an Antipode of righteousness, and the Antetype of sin; a Boaster of integrity, and a Beast of passion; a Chrisom of fate, and a Chouse of chance; a Duplicate of the devil, and a Dunce of fortune; an Enthymeme in logic, and an Epigram in the poetic collection of creation; a Formula for the making of monkeys, and a Foundation for an edifice of folly; a Gift of God, and a Grub of the ground; a Hallelujah in church, and a Hodge podge at home; an Idolator of golden images, and a decided Illusion; a Jackanapes of fashion, and a Jolthead of custom ; a Knave in a small way, and a Kernel of honesty; Lack brain in wisdom, and a Loggerhead in learning; a mimicking Monkey, and a coldblooded Monster; a Ninnyhammer at times, and a Niggard by nature; a restless Oaf, and a sample of Obliquity; a perfect Paradox, and a Parody on Adam and Eve; a Quagmire of corruption, and a Quintuple of error; a Radiance from the Sun of Righteousness, and a Rainbow of deception; a Saint on Sunday, and a Sausage skin stuffed every day; a Titmouse, and a Tempest in a teapot; an Urn of meinory, and an Ulcer on the face of creation; a Vulcan at making thunder, and a small Vial of wrath; a Weathercock in politics, and a Weazel withal; a Yew that braves the storms and tempests, and You who bend before them; a Zephyr breathed out of heaven to be blown into eternity. Such is Man, my friends-such are you-and so am I. Let's all get through the world together the best way we can, and without making bigger fools of ourselves than nature intended us to be. So mote it be! ON THE PROGRESS OF IMPROVEMENT. TEXT. Come bright Improvement on the car of Time, MY HEARERS-the spirit of improvement in the arts, sciences, agriculture, and commerce, is going ahead, like wild fire on a prairie, and there is no end to it—no stopping it—no such thing as a goal of perfection. But before I proceed further, allow me to remark, that we don't improve in everything quite so fast as we think we do; if we did, we men should all have become, ere this, gods, barely lacking omnipotence, and the women angels without wings. The world is too apt to think that every new feather in the cap of Fashion-every new wheel in the complicated machinery of Art -every dereliction from the plain paths our fathers trod-are all decided improvements; but the idea is no more correct than a wooden watch. What we gain on the one hand, my friends, we often lose on the other-and so things remain in statu quo, as the lawyers say. For instance, as we improve intellectually and mechanically, we digress morally; for (I hate to say it, but it must |