TO FRICASSE OLD CHICKENS.-First stew them until tender. With a sharp knife remove the largest bones; flour the pieces and fry them a light brown color, and pour into the frying-pan a tumblerful of the broth they were stewed in. Dredge in an even tablespoonful of flour, cover the pan with a lid, and stew until the gravy is thick enough. Pour this over the fowl, and serve hot. Onion shred fine may be used if the flavor is relished, or parsley chopped fine.

FORCE-MEAT BALLS.-Take half a pound of veal or very tender beef, half a pound of bacon or nice kidney suet if preferred; beat them fine together in a mortar, or grind them in a sausage grinder; add a small teacup of bread crumbs moistened with cream. Season with half a nutmeg, half a teaspoonful of mace, an even tablespoonful of chopped parsley; pepper and salt to taste. Work all together with a well-beaten egg. If the paste is too stiff add another egg or only the yolk, or a little more cream. If not stiff enough they will fall to pieces. Fry in hot lard. They should be the size of a nutmeg, if for soup; larger, if to be served with roast.

A FRENCH FISH SAUCE.-Beat the yolks of two raw eggs; season them with salt, pepper, and two tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Stir well; add the grated peel of a lemon. Add slowly two tablespoonfuls of fresh olive oil, stirring constantly until well mixed. Add the juice of the lemon, or vinegar, to make a piquant sauce. Color green with spinach juice.

SAUCE FOR BOILED FOWLS.-Beat the yolk of an egg; add to it a tumbler of melted butter, one wineglass of sweet cream; stew five minutes. Season any way liked. This makes a nice sauce for pork chops, if seasoned with sage.

BREAD SAUCE.-A tumbler of bread crumbs; pour over them two tumblers of boiling milk or pale veal broth. Let this stand until the bread has absorbed the gravy; stew five minutes. Make it sufficiently rich with butter; season in any way liked; salt to taste.

LIGHT BREAD.-To three pints of sifted flour pour one pint of warm milk or water and a tumbler of good yeast. Beat well and set it to rise in a moderately warm place; make this

at night. In the morning, stir to the sponge a pint of warm water and two teaspoonfuls of salt; work in as much flour as will make a rather stiff dough. Work it well; mould it into loaves; let it rise; bake in a moderately quick oven. Use, when cold, for dinner bread, It makes good toast when stale.

BEEF TEA AND SOUP FOR INVALIDS.-Make the cook understand that the virtue of beef tea is to contain all the contents and flavors of lean beef in a dilute form, and its vices are to be sticky and strong, and to set in too hard a jelly when cold. When she understands this, let her take half a pound of fresh-killed beef for every pint of tea she wants, and carefully remove all fat, sinew, vein and bone. Let it be cut up into pieces under an inch square, and set to soak for twelve hours in one-third of the water required to be made into tea. Then let it be taken out and simmered for three hours in the remaining two-thirds of water, the quantity lost by evaporation being replaced from time to time. The boiling liquor is then to be poured on the cold liquor in which the meat was soaked. The solid meat is to be dried, pounded in a mortar, and minced so as to cut up all strings in it, and mixed with the liquid. When the beef tea is made daily, it is convenient to use one day's boiled meat for the next day's tea, as thus it has time to dry and is easiest pounded. Good soup is that which is most like this beef tea, and is a very digestible article; bad soup, that which least resembles it, and is to be avoided as poison.

LINIMENT.-No better liniment was ever used than equal parts of alcohol, laudanum and oil of wormwood. It reduces the swelling rapidly, and removes soreness like a charm.

TO REMOVE A FELON.-Apply a fly-blister five or six hours; then remove, and under the blister will appear the felon; take out with knife or needle.

TO PREVENT MORTIFICATION. — Apply a poultice of hop yeast mixed with charcoal as fine as flour to the wound.

CURE FOR LOCKJAW.-Apply the green grease of a brass candlestick to the wound, which causes it to run; it is said to be a certain speedy cure; or apply warm turpentino into the wound.

A very good story is told of one of our sharp specimens of Young America, whose "fast" ways had necessitated his being cut off by the governor" from any further expenditure of his means. The young man finally became weary of leading a slow life without money, but he had invented so many stories to accomplish his designs, each of which succeeded, that he resolved to make one more attempt. He was in pressing need of $25, and concluded, if possible, to draw it in installments rather than to excite the curiosity of his father, and thus defeat his project. He put on a bold face, and visited the governor, and gravely informed him that a certain dog fancier on Elizabeth Street was his terms were actually teaching dogs to talk; $10 down, and $15 when the canine was able to speak. The governor doubted the story, but finally concluded to invest $10 in the arrangement, but added, "Mind, George, if he don't learn Fido (their dog) to speak, I wont give you the additional $15." right," says George, and away he went on a spree, of course.

"All

After the lapse of several days, and when the $10 had been all wasted, George returned home and told a straight story concerning the progress Fido was making under his tutor. The next day the governor requested that Fido should give an exhibition of his skill, and ordered George to bring him in, but was informed that the dog had been shot, and the sad event was explained in this way by the truthful George: "You see I went and got the dog, and on my way home he talked all sorts of nonsense, and when I reached the house and I sat down in the dining-room, he crept up on my lap, and, putting his mouth close to my ear, he whispered and told me in a very confidential way that the old man was in the habit of talking sweet to the servant girl in the kitchen. I concluded if the dog was going to lie so outrageously, that he had better be killed, and I shot him!" The governor remarked: "That's a good boy; here's your $15, and whenever you want any more, just let me know, but don't say anything to your mother."

A gentleman who was always at variance with some one of his acquaintances, and to

whom a law suit was as the bread of life, having quarrelled with a neighbor, once sought the counsel of a lawyer, who was more celebrated for sound common sense than for erudition. Having stated his case, he asked for a legal opinion in writing. After some hesitation, the request was being granted, when our litigious friend approached where the counsellor was seated, and looking over the latter's shoulder, saw the words, "In the case of so-and-so, my oppinion is—” when, striking his fist on the table, he exclaimed, "Pshaw! I wouldn't give a straw for an opinion with two p's." And with that, left the room in disgust.

Down in Dallas county, a pump peddler called upon an old lady, but she refused to buy, declaring that she had nothing to pay him with unless, she said, in a bantering way, he would take one of her daughters.

The peddler told her to "bring out the girls."

They were called in, and the peddler selected the one he would take in exchange for a pump. The bargain was concluded, the couple were married, and the pump was put into the well. All went merry as a marriage bell for two or three days, when one night the peddler pulled out his pump and decamped; leaving on the old lady's hands a disconsolate daughter and a pumpless well.

A schoolmaster tells the following good story: I was once teaching in a quiet country village. The second morning of the session I had time to survey my surroundings, and among the scanty furniture I espied a three-legged stool. "Is this the dunce block?" I asked a little girl of five. The dark eyes sparkled, the curls nodded assent, and the lips rippled out, "I guess so; the teacher always sits on it."

The following is the conclusion of an epitaph on a tombstone in East Tennessee:

"She lived a life of virtue and died of the cholera morbus, caused by eating green fruit in the full hope of a blessed immortality, at the early age of 21 years, 7 months and 16 days. Reader, go thou and do likewise."

aid them, but the chances are against their efforts, and we should not feel surprised to read that they had returned to Italy at an early day, disgusted with their subjects and Spanish royalty. In fact, a recent Madrid letter declares that King Amadeus is already weary of his royal honors, and that it is not improbable he will soon resign the crown of Spain, having discovered he can depend on nobody either for advice or friendship.

Our readers will recollect that the Spanish people freely elected a Congress, and that a majority of the latter resolved that Spain should have a king. To General Prim was entrusted the task of looking out for the proper man. As is well known, he found it difficult, and, to the dismay of crowned heads, Spain for two years got on well enough without a king; but the Congress said a king must be had, so General Prim went from Madrid to Portugal, from Portugal to Italy, and from Italy to Berlin, and from Berlin back again to Italy, in search of a king. The attempt to secure a prince of the House of Hohenzollern-Prince Leopold-led to the war between France and Prussia; there can be little doubt of that. It was the last feather breaking the camel's back. The mutual jealousy between the two countries was so fierce that only a pretext was wanted, and the most frivolous served.

Senor Castelar, a republican, and a very influential member of the Spanish Congress, all along had prophesied that this king-hunting would end in some frightful catastrophe, and in a speech in the Cortes, delivered last November, in opposition to the Italian candidate, he said little did he think the reality would have been sadder than his prognostications. He apostrophised the Spanish Government thus for their attempt to secure Prince Leopold: "O! when I hear the lamentations of widows and orphans, when I contemplate the ruins of the cities destroyed, when I feel the heat of the fires which sends up clouds of blood into the air filled with tears, when I see half a million of unburied corpses exhaling pestilence from their remains for the unhappy ones who survive, and Paris, the great capital of mankind, menaced like Rome by Alaric, 1 cannot comprehend how it is that you monarchical deputies do not, like Cain fleeing from the face of God, sink under the weight of your remorse!"

The duke was elected king, and accepted the position in the following words: "Faithful to the traditions of my ancestors, and

though I do not ignore the difficulties of my new position, and the responsibility to be assumed before history, I place my confidence in God and in the Spanish people, which has given proof that it knows how to unite respect for the law with liberty. To make myself worthy of my election, I have but to follow loyally the constitutional traditions to which I have been brought up. A soldier in the army, I shall at the same time be the first citizen to the representatives of the nation. I know not whether I shall have the good fortune to shed my blood for my new country, and of adding a new page to those which already celebrate the glory of Spain; but in any case I am sure that the Spaniards will be able to say of the king whom they have elected, 'His honesty could rise above the struggles of parties, and he had no other object but the peace and prosperity of the nation.""

The king was well received in Madrid when he arrived there, a few days after General Prim's assassination. He is doing as well as could be expected from a young man, for he was born in 1845, and is the third child of King Victor Emmanuel of Italy and Queen Maria Adelaide.

He takes his title of Duke of Aosta from a little town which lies in the north of Piedmont, under the shadow of the Alps, and at the foot of the well-known pass of St. Bernard. He is a lieutenant-general in the Italian army, and commands a brigade of cavalry, and, so far, has seen but little of public life. In 1867 he married a young lady two years younger than himself—Victoria Carlotta Henrietta Gianna del Pozzo della Cistema. She is the daughter of Prince Charles del Pozzo della Cistema, and of a Countess of Merode. Both of her parents have died during the last few years.

By his elevation to the throne of Spain, the governing houses of Italy and the Iberian Peninsula will hold unusually close relations, for the Princess Maria Pia, a young daughter of Victor Emmanuel, is Queen of Portugal, having in 1862 married King Louis. The eldest child of the Italian king, it will be remembered, is the Princess Clotilde, wife of Prince Napoleon.

The new king is very popular in Italy, and has been noted for his even temper and suavity. He has been brought up in the school of constitutional monarchy, and ought to make an honest and liberal ruler.