To Subscribers in Arrears.

SUBSCRIBERS Who are in arrears will please take notice that the recent change in the proprietorship of this Magazine renders it of the utmost importance that all the outstanding claims should be liqui dated as early as possible. The business of dunning is equally unpleasant to all parties, and we trust this notice will make all further and more direct application for the small amounts due from each wholly unnecessary. Please remit by mail to

S. HUESTON,

139 Nassau-st.

Entered, according to the act of Congress, in the year 1849,

BY SAMUEL HUESTON,

In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Southern District of New-York.

A WOUND-UP TALE OF AN UNKNOWN QUANTITY.

AFTER scrutinizing the neighborhood sharply, that abominable old settler, whose character we took occasion to discuss in our last chapter, called out: 'Come forth, ye children of Night!—the coast is clear. Be bold, ye myrmidons! ye eagles of Acheron !'

At this, fourteen diabolical troopers, mounted on coal-black steeds, wild storming colts with wings, caught on the Stygian bottoms, issued from the obscurity, revolving designs within their breasts, compared with which the smoke of a coal-pit is celestial. Their malevolent leader, z, scanned them a moment with much satisfaction; then, waving his hand, away they tore, bending forward, and skimming the ground like night-hawks. Away they sped, and, scoundrels as they were, it was nevertheless a rare sight to see them sail across the country in a perfectly straight line, for an hundred leagues, swifter than swallows; only swerving as some encampment of the frontier guards glimmered in the glens; then, as a dark pile of mountains rose before them, they inclined toward the ocean, as it lay off in the north-east without a ripple. On this they dashed, and you might mark their track for miles by the glistening of the waters where the horse-hoofs touched, or the edge of their wings, straight as the line of a rail-road. The admiral of the realm happened to be cruising on those seas with a four-decker; but old z, fearing no such huge, clumsy, lumber-stack, whistled with his satellites under its very stern, as it lay silently on the sea. The admiral, though, was well acquainted with the ropes and other articles manufactured from hemp, and knew in a minute that those were no bumble-bees or wild-fowl; so he let off his big guns, little guns, bomb-shells and muskets, and run all his spare lanterns up to the mast-head. The Symbol of Darkness by this time was leagues away, and chuckled

down to his fifth rib to hear the spiteful old salt burning his powder and lamp-oil so abundantly. But if he had looked behind, he would have become aware that his joke on the admiral was likely to be a serious matter, for the alarm was communicated to the frontierguards; rockets were shooting up hundreds of miles along the marches; yea, the whole land behind him was alive with an army wide awake to lay hands on him at his return. But the atrocious old fellow who was unconsciously the object of so much kind considera. tion had meanwhile turned a tall promontory. Any body but those malevolent troopers would have halted with amazement. Upon a mountain not very distant was the habitation of the Grand Quadratic, blazing with splendor, like the palace of Lucifer. The illuminated amphitheatres, the prisms filled with many-colored light, the yellow cylinders, the silver cones, the purple globes and the everchanging hemispheres, made a confusion of magnificence which would have stunned those wild sons of Night, were it not that all sense of the sublime and beautiful had been destroyed in them by their depraved propensities. So they scudded across the bay, over the plain, and ascended the long dike without meeting a single sentry. The Symbol then concealed his followers under a bridge which crossed a chasm between the dyke and the mountain, and bidding them to keep dark,' (no difficult thing, considering the atrocity of their natures and the obscurity of the night,) he disguised himself in the uniform of the Light Tangents, a corps which patrolled the fron tier, and entered the great hall

I was petrified! In ten minutes this arch-renegade had quizzed the sublimest dignitaries of the realm, in fifteen he made a fool of the Lord Coefficient, and just as the twentieth was fulfilled he stood, with audacity altogether disgusting, before the imperial throne and the potentate who sat upon it. The latter, seeing a young Tangent, apparently just from the frontiers, waiting with much humility before. him, spoke in his usual four-story rhetoric to the following effect:

• What tidings bringst thou, Vigil, swift of steed, from the troubled marches of our slumbering realm? Doth that stiff-necked traitor, whose base plots have oft disturbed the Atlantic of our sleep, and scared the tremulous dreams with vague uproar, yet tempt the

swollen billows of our wrath?'

The insidious scamp who was thus addressed then actually spun off, with an air of modest confusion, a yarn which was not only characterized by an utter disregard of truth, but which involved contradictions so glaring, that at any other time they would have been fatal. Unfortunately it happened that the Bench of Seers (their mathematical sense is so acute, that a sophism or contradiction affects them as a discord does a musician,) was beginning to feel a little wild, possibly from the effect of certain goblets which prevailed' around the throne; (his majesty too was a little more magnificent than usual, and the First Fluxion was talking thick ;) so the wilder these reverend old gentlemen felt, the more prophetic they looked, till you would have supposed them a grand jury. One of them, though, was inclined to be boisterous, and was quite facetious about

the Pons Asinorum.' Old thus escaped undetected. He now ranged deliberately through the vast building. Mirth was at its height; a perfect maëlstrom of dancers whirled through the amphitheatres, while the noise of horns, viols and organs resounded from each lofty cone. In the banquetting-halls the tables were crowded with revellers elevated to about two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit; and when old z, with unbounded effrontery, stood up in a chair of state at the head of the great dining-room, the late occupant of which had just fallen, overpowered with the responsibili ties of his station, and after a few remarks of an incendiary character, drank to the confusion of all rebels, and to the especial confusion, discomfort and annihilation of the Black Rat of the Frontiers,' (one of his own honorary titles,) the house fairly cracked with applause. Fluxions, Signs and Exponents pounded the mahogany so mightily, and cheered so vehemently, that every other tumult in the palace paused for an instant, and the clerical Surds, who had been rather relaxing ever since they sat down to the good cheer, two hours before, sprang upon the tables and roared like bulls of Bashan on the verge of insanity.

But I will not attempt to follow this abandoned wretch through all his crooked ways; the details of his operations are too shocking to meet the eyes of an intelligent and discriminating public. I will not disclose the dastardly machinations, the profound plots and the perfidious suggestions by which he enticed several ladies of quality and virtuous education to the ravine where his troopers lay hid, who tied them up in bunches, (hands hitched to feet,) coupled and slung them over their horses with as little compunction as if they had been saddle-bags. But the remorselessness with which, last of all, he conducted thither the ethereal y, was really appalling. This radiant being he found leaning, like a star, apart,' against a lofty cylinder which overlooked the ocean, meditating a sonnet concerning the monsters of the briny deep. His tactics were marked with consummate duplicity. He accosted her in the language of a young man haunted by the Everlasting Nay;' then, as he saw that the sympathies of that spiritual creature were aroused, by quoting a sentence from Goethe which could not be sounded with a lead and line, and by professing to be partial to baphometic fire-baptism,' he quite stole her heart. But we can't dwell on these painful details. Once at the bridge, the old rebel threw off his disguise, called up his satel lites, tossed the frightened y on his horse, and springing on himself, gave a yell which rang through the palace with startling effect. The revellers were instantly sobered, and the dragoons of the guard, suddenly awakened, galloped furiously down the dyke to the plain country, and scoured the neighborhood just about as you would expect to see men scared out of their sleep and only knowing that something was wrong; keeling each other into the ditches, cracking their carbines at every sheep, and flying around like bats at noon. As for the Grand Quadratic, he was in a high fury, and swore by the Binomial Theorem that he would utterly eliminate the Symbol who had offered him such an indignity, and all Quantities, known or unknown, in any manner abetting him or offering aid and comfort.'

V.

THE Symbol and his troopers went down to the sea-shore with exultation, and riding across the bay, disappeared in the shadow of certain precipices, which were piled out into the ocean for many leagues. Now when they moved slowly along under the awful dark cliffs and war-scarred promontories, and when they sometimes heard whining phantoms in the caves singing faintly on a minor key, and sometimes caught a discordant stanza from inner basaltic saloons, where leather-lunged Tritons and furious journeymen of Vulcan were making night hideous, one of these brigands, whose name was Ybbl, beholding Ophiucus and the planets above, the smooth ocean below, and the luminous castle on the mountains, broke forth into a psalm which the infernal raftmen sing when steering down the channels of Puriphlegethon. All lifted up their voices in the chorus; a strange and appalling ululatus. The moral lunatic, who had a kind of trap-rock music in his otherwise altogether felonious soul, descended with a couple of hoarse dragoons to the bottom of the lower clef, and ground a steady, rolling bass, like under-ground thunder; others ascended spirally to the dizzy leger lines above the staff, and lost themselves in the regions above; while the rest of the corps rambled through the chromatic scale; now carelessly, with disgraceful discords; now grandly, like kings in chariots; now fiercely, like horsemen in battle, with spears and trumpets.

Thus passing under the precipices, to the great wonder of marine deities, they halted at the outward cliffs, where the Symbol surveyed the visible heavens and expressed the result of his observations as follows:

Time weareth on, ye brindled burglars! Now the clock-tower of the Pole strikes two; guns are firing in the eastern fort, to rouse the dreaming cavaliers of Daybreak; the stars wink mischief; therefore, ye diaboli, buzz like the lightning-bugs of Erebus!' The burglar then whispered some smoking syllable into the ear of Pyribroskon, the Stygian steed, and off the squadron flew over the ocean, on a line that seemed to have been staked out by an aquatic civil engineer. You might have seen them for miles, for their cattle were provided with fire-fly wings, flashing incessantly.

Lights glimmered in the horizon. The monomaniac grinned amiably. There lay the four-decker, black and motionless, a huge timber dragon; the lighted port-holes were like eyes, and seemed to wink. Again the old admiral heard an infernal hum over the waters, fiery wings sparkled by, and three-score hoofs, like skipping shot, went spattering under his bows.

Fire! fire! fire!-up with your signals!' shouted the mariner, and straightway the vessel was wrenched with a woful agony;' all the batteries spouted flame and thunder for a space of time, lanterns ran up to the mast-head on cords, like spiders, and then the monster relapsed into sluggishness as perfect as if it had merely yawned, cracked its joints, and gone to sleep again.

Now signal-fires were kindled on the mountains, rockets shot up