[Illustration: THE CELESTIAL SCARECROW IN MASSACHUSETTS.

Through the trees, coming up now, were two more of the ill-featured party, a swart, squat Italian, and just at his heels a ragged scarecrow of a man named Brail.

He is a scarecrow to that ale-house, where he drinks not his morning draught, and apprehends a drunkard for not standing in the king's name.

And, in truth, we made a most ludicrous spectacle, especially the Don, whom hitherto we had seen only in the neatest and most noble of clothes,looking more like a couple of scarecrows than living men.

Miss Polly Burton, in her presumption, had made up her mind, at the commencement of his tale, to listen attentively to every point of the evidence in connection with the case which he recapitulated before her, and to follow the point, in order to try and arrive at a conclusion of her own, and overwhelm the antediluvian scarecrow with her sagacity.

I suppose some vague idea of the fitness of things had induced them to send this living scarecrow into the cornfield, and if he had been set up in the midst of it, nobody, I am sure, would have imagined he was anything else; but it seems he was expected to run after the feathered fowl who alighted on the grain field, and I do not wonder that he did not fulfil this expectation.

Marry Miss Dutton, and you'll be a scarecrow within a year, and require the services of the mortician within two!

But it is extremely disagreeable to see the shivering scarecrows on the streets, and they ought to be kept to the poorer quarters of the city."