"Alas, he did not rest soon enough! He tarried at his desk too long."

But his Uncle Ben, who came in to attend the funeral, and had to do all his weeping out of one eye, because the other was blacked half-way down to his chin, said it was a pity, but Mustapha was too awfully lazy to live and he had no get-up about him.

But Mustapha wist not what they said, because he was dead. So they divided his property among them, and said if he wanted a tombstone he might have attended to it himself while he was yet alive, because they had no time.

It is a beautiful legend of the Norseland. Amilias was the village blacksmith, and under the spreading chestnut treekjn his village smithopjken stood. He the hot iron gehammered and sjhod horsee for fifty cents all round, please. He made tin hjelmets for the gjodds, and stovepipe trousers for the hjeroes.

Mimir was a rival blacksmith. He didn't go in very much for defensive armor, but he was lightning on two-edged Bjswords and cut-and-slash svjcutlassssses. He made chyjeese knives for the gjodds, and he made the great Bjsvsstnsen an Arkansaw toothpick that would make a free incision clear into the transverse semicolon of a cast-iron Ichthyosaurus and never turn its edge. That was the kind of a Bhjairpin Mimir said he was.

One day Amilias made an impenetrable suit of armor for a second-class gjodd, and put it on himself to test it, and boast

fully inserted a card in the Svensska Norderbjravisk jkanaheldes plvtdenskgorodovusaken, saying that he was wearing a suit of home-made, best-chilled Norway merino underwear that would nick the unnumbered saw-teeth in the pot-metal cutlery of the ironmongery over the way. That, Amilias remarked to Bjohnn Bjrobinssson, was the kind of a Bdjucckk he was. When Mimir spelled out the card next morning, he said "Bjjj!" and went to work with a charcoal furnace, a cold anvil, and the new isomorphic process, and in a little while he came down street with a sjword that glittered like a dollar-store diamond, and met Amilias down by the new opera house. Amilias buttoned on his new Bjarmour, and said:

"If you have no hereafter use for your chyjeese-kjnife, strike."

Mimir spat on his hands, whirled his skjword above his head, and fetched Amilias a swipe that seemed to miss everything except the empty air, through which it softly whistled. Amilias smiled, and said, "Go on," adding that it "seemed to him he felt a general sense of cold iron somewhere in the neighborhood, but he hadn't been hit."

"Shake yourself," said Mimir.

Amilias shook himself, and immediately fell into halves, the most neatly divided man that ever went beside himself.

"That's where the boiler-maker was away off in his diagnosis," said Mimir, as he went back to his shop to put up the price of cutlery sixty-five per cent. in all lines, with an unlimited advance on special orders.

Thus do we learn that a good action is never thrown away, and that kind words and patient love will overcome the harsh

est natures.

Rheumatism Movement Cure

ONE day, not a great while ago, Mr. Middlerib read in his favorite paper a paragraph stating that the sting of a bee was a sure cure for rheumatism, and citing several remarkable instances in which people had been perfectly cured by this abrupt remedy. Mr. Middlerib thought of the rheumatic twinges that grappled his knees once in a while and made his life a burden.

He read the article several times and pondered over it. He understood that the stinging must be done scientifically and thoroughly. The bee, as he understood the article, was to be gripped by the ears and set down upon the rheumatic joint and held there until it stung itself stingless. He had some misgivings about the matter. He knew it would hurt. He hardly thought it could hurt any worse than the rheumatism, and it had been so many years since he was stung by a bee that he had almost forgotten what it felt like. He had, however, a general feeling that it would hurt some. diseases require desperate remedies, and Mr. willing to undergo any amount of suffering if it would cure his rheumatism.

But desperate Middlerib was

He contracted with Master Middlerib for a limited supply of bees; humming and buzzing about in the summer air, Mr. Middlerib did not know how to get them. He felt, however, that he could safely depend upon the instincts and methods of boyhood. He knew that if there was any way in heaven whereby the shyest bee that ever lifted a two-hundred-pound man off the clover could be induced to enter a wide-mouthed glass bottle, his son knew that way.

For the small sum of one dime Master Middlerib agreed to procure several, to wit: six bees, sex and age not specified; but, as Mr. Middlerib was left in uncertainty as to the race, it was made obligatory upon the contractor to have three of them honey and three humble, or, in the generally accepted vernacular, bumblebees. Mr. M- did not tell his son what he wanted those bees for, and the boy went off on his mission with his head so full of astonishment that it fairly whirled. Evening brings all home, and the last rays of the declining sun fell upon Master Middlerib with a short, wide-mouthed bottle comfortably populated with hot, ill-natured bees, and Mr. Middlerib and a dime. The dime and the bottle changed hands. Mr. Middlerib put the bottle in his coat pocket and went into the house, eying everybody he met very suspiciously, as though he had made up his mind to sting to death the first person who said "bee" to him. He confided his guilty secret to none of his family. He hid his bees in his bedroom, and as he looked at them just before putting them away he half wished the experiment was safely over. He wished the imprisoned bees did not look so hot and cross. With exquisite care he submerged the bottle in a basin of water and let a few drops in on the heated inmates to cool them off.

At the tea-table he had a great fright. Miss Middlerib, in the artless simplicity of her romantic nature, said:

"I smell bees. How the odor brings up"

But her father glared at her, and said, with superfluous harshness and execrable grammar: "Hush up! You don't smell nothing."

Whereupon Mrs. Middlerib asked him if he had eaten anything that disagreed with him, and Miss Middlerib said:

"Why, pa!" and Master Middlerib smiled as he wondered. Bedtime at last, and the night was warm and sultry. Under

various false pretences, Mr. Middlerib strolled about the house until everybody else was in bed, and then he sought his room. He turned the lamp down until its feeble ray shone dimly as a death-light.

Mr. Middlerib disrobed slowly-very slowly. When at last he was ready to go lumbering into his peaceful couch, he heaved a profound sigh, so full of apprehension and grief that Mrs. Middlerib, who was awakened by it, said if it gave him so much pain to come to bed perhaps he had better sit up all night. Mr. Middlerib choked another sigh, but said nothing and crept into bed. After lying still a few moments he reached out and got his bottle of bees.

It was not an easy thing to do to pick one bee out of the bottleful with his fingers and not get into trouble. The first bee Mr. Middlerib got was a little brown honey-bee, that wouldn't weigh half an ounce if you picked him up by the ears, but if you lifted him by the hind leg would weigh as much as the last end of a bay mule. Mr. Middlerib could not repress a groan.

"What's the matter with you?" sleepily asked his wife.

It was very hard for Mr. Middlerib to say he only felt hot, but he did it. He didn't have to lie about it either. He did feel very hot indeed-about eighty-six all over, and one hundred and ninety-seven on the end of his thumb. He reversed the bee and pressed the warlike terminus of it firmly against the rheumatic knee.

It didn't hurt so badly as he thought it would.

It didn't hurt at all.

Then Mr. Middlerib remembered that when a honey-bee stabs a human foe it generally leaves its harpoon in the wound, and the invalid knew that the only thing this bee had to sting with was doing its work at the end of his thumb.

He reached his arm out from under the sheets and dropped