this Fountain of Oratory has gushed forth his "four hundred and
twenty-first consecutive Presidential lecture." Imagine a possible scene
upon a raft! GEORGE FRANCIS, mounted upon a whiskey-barrel, is making
all the air resonant with rhetoric. The "rafters" are swearing!
The "choppers" are cursing! The "jammers" are most reprehensibly
blaspheming! The enormous mass floats onward, and "TRAIN!" the floods,
"TRAIN!" the forests, "TRAIN!" the overarching skies resound! No
miserable hall, no narrow street, no "pent-up Utica" contracts the
power of this miraculous elocutionist--his auditorium seems to be a
hemisphere--his audience all mankind! ORPHEUS singing moved rocks
and trees. Great GEORGE spouting subdues all the inhabitants of the
wilderness. Timid deer trip to the shore to listen; ferocious bears,
catching the echo, shed tears of penitence; all creatures of the roaring
kind acknowledge themselves surpassed and silenced; the whispering pines
whisper all the more softly, as if ashamed of their own verbal weakness.
All speeches, even the speeches of a TRAIN, must come to an end; and
having ended, the floating DEMOSTHENES sits down to write to the
newspapers, that he has just been delivered of his four-hundred-and-
twenty-second, and is as well as could be expected.

Mr. PUNCHINELLO has, in his day, been considered talkative; but he
feels, as he listens to GEORGE FRANCIS, that he is himself a marvel of
taciturnity--that in the noble art of sounding his own trumpet he is
a mere child--that as a contributor to the public amusement he is in
danger of falling into paltry insignificance. Alas! he is not the
marvellous mountebank which he has heretofore considered himself to be;
and the nonsense upon which he so prided himself, in comparison with
the nonsense of GEORGE FRANCIS, sinks into the most melancholy and
insufferable wisdom. He looks forward to the future with a fear lest he
may descend to the depths of serious and slow solemnity. When he has