FUN AND FACTS FOR LITTLE FOLKS.

"How does a hardware dealer differ from a bootmaker?" asked a bright boy of one of his playmates. The latter, somewhat puzzled, gave it up. "Why," said the other, "because the one sold the nails, and the other nailed the soles."

Little Lucy fell and hurt her knee badly, which her mother, when she went to bed in the dark, tried to bandage. Soon the little one was heard calling. "Mamma," she said, "this bandage is not in the right place. I fell down higher up."

A grandfather, coming to read his paper, found that he had mislaid his spectacles, and thereupon declared, "I have lost my glasses somewhere, and can't read the paper." A little three-and-a-half-year-old girl, desiring to assist him, answered; "G'an'pa, you go outside and look froo ze window, and I'll hold ze paper up so you can read it."

A "Menagerie Race" was recently the source of great amusement to a party of army officers in India. Each competitor had an animal to enter, which he drove as straight as he could. There was a frog, a goose, a young pig, a cock, a cat, a dog, a turkey, a kid, a duck, a young monkey, and a pelican. The latter got away from his string and flew up into a high tree just as the race was going to begin. The animals had ribbons round their necks. The goose won the race, as he was the only one who went straight; the dog made for the pig, and a battle-royal ensued; the monkey and the cat laid down and would not move a step. It was a very amusing scene, so say the spectators, and the curious antics of the astonished animals caused a vast amount of laughter.

We had a parrot once which knew how to talk so well that it seemed as if he must certainly be able to think and reason as well as any of us. Two instances may be given to show what Polly could do in the way of conversation: One fine summer's morning, a young woman bringing a message to the house was asked into the kitchen, and while, as she supposed, quite alone there, a rather gruff voice remarked that it was "a very hot day," which it certainly was. As she did not know the parrot was there, she was considerably startled, and would scarcely believe it was the bird which had spoken to her. Another day Polly's cage was hung up on a tree near the poultry-yard, where a fight for supremacy was going on between two cocks, and the gardener, who was at work hard by, distinctly heard Polly say, "You idiots! Bran" (calling to the big dog which lay asleep in his kennel)—"Bran, bite them! bite them!"

Who could have believed that even among the famous riders of Hungaria would be found one who could perform the following feat? While a noble stag of ten was being hotly chased by the Kàposzátsmegyerer hounds—a subscription pack—one Karl Pörös, a discharged hussar, managed to bring the terrified animal to a stand-still in some close cover through which it was forcing its way, and, by an almost superhuman effort of strength and agility, to vault upon its back. After several desperate but unsuccessful attempts to dislodge its rider from his seat, the stag, stimulated anew to flight by the cry of the fast-approaching hounds, resumed its course, but it soon broke down under the weight of its unaccustomed burden, and died from sheer exhaustion and terror. Pörös—at least so the story goes—was found by the huntsmen sitting on the unwounded carcass of the stag, which he had literally ridden to death and resolutely claimed as the just reward of an achievement, unprecedented in the annals of the chase.