knee-deep, he will ask you if you know what becomes of all the ends of
smoked-out cigars. Of course you submit that little boys pick them up
and smoke them to everlasting annihilation. "Pshaw! sir," exclaims the
microscopic person; "there is a man in the City of Dublin, sir--I
believe he is a baronet now, but will not force that as a fact--and he
made an enormous fortune by going about the streets at early dawn and
picking up all the cigar-stumps he could find, and they were not few, as
you may suppose, in that smokingest of cities. He used to furnish these
by the ton to old GUINNESS, who used them for giving color and body to
his famous 'Stout.' Body?--I should think so rather!--but only think
where the body came from! Just recall to mind the filthiest gutter that
ever you saw in your life, with the numerous ends of cigars that you
perfectly remember having observed sweltering in it, and then take
another pull at your GUINNESS, sir, and I wish you joy of it, sir!"

Once we remember to have heard the subject of the possibility of lizards
snakes, frogs, and other cheerful reptiles having resided for indefinite
periods in the stomachs of human subjects, discussed in the presence of
the microscopic man. A lady of the party was skeptical on the subject,
dwelling especially upon the impossibility of any person swallowing a
reptile unawares. "Observe those water-cresses of which you have been
partaking so freely, madam," said the microscopic man. "Beneath each
leaf I discern _ova_ of things that it might horrify you to enumerate in
full. Suffice it to say, then, for the present, that on the leaves of
this small sprig culled by me at random from the cluster, are to be
detected the germs of the _trigonocephalus contortrix_, than which, when
fully developed, no more deadly reptile wriggles upon earth. See this
minute agglomeration of yellowish specks on the stalk of the cress.
These are the eggs of the _lacerta horrida_, a lizard that within the
large warts with which its epidermis is studded secretes a poison of the