The king he laughed, and swore by the masse,
Ile make thee lord abbot this day in his place!
Now naye, my liege, be not in such speede,
For alacke, I can neither write nor reade.

Four nobles a week, then, I will give thee,
For this merry jest thou hast showne unto mee;
And tell the old abbot, when thou comest home,

Thou hast brought him a pardon from good King John.

Miscellaneous Facts for the Curious.

CHICK IN THE EGG.

THE hen has scarcely sat on the egg twelve hours, when we begin already to discover in it some lineaments of the head and body of the chicken that is to be born. The heart appears to beat at the end of the day; at the end of forty-eight hours, two vesicles of blood can be distinguished, the pulsation of which is very visible. At the fiftieth hour, an auricle of the heart appears, and resembles a lace, or noose folded down upon itself. At the end of seventy hours, we distinguish wings, and on the head two bubbles for the brain; one for the bill, and two others for the forepart and hind part of the head; the liver appears towards the fifth day. At the end of one hundred and thirtyone hours, the first voluntary motion is observed. At the end of one hundred and thirty-eight hours the lungs and stomach become visible; at the end of one hundred and forty-two, the intestines, the loins, and the upper jaw. The seventh day, the brain, which was slimy, begins to have some consistence. At the 190th hour of incubation, the bill opens, and the flesh appears in the breast. At the 194th, the sternum is seen, that is to say, the breastbone. At the 210th, the ribs come out of the back, the bill is very visible, as well as the gall-bladder.

The bill becomes green at the end of two hundred and thirtysix hours; and if the chick is taken out of its covering, it evidently moves itself. The feathers begin to shoot out towards the 240th hour, and the skull becomes gristly. At the 264th, the eyes appear. At the 288th, the ribs are perfect. At the 331st, the spleen draws near to the stomach, and the lungs to the chest. At the end of three hundred and fifty-five hours, the bill frequently opens and shuts; and at the end of four hundred and fifty-one hours, or the eighteenth day, the first cry of the chick is already heard: it afterwards gets more strength, and grows continually, till at last it sets itself at liberty, by opening the prison in which it was shut up. Thus is it by so many different degrees that these creatures are brought into life. All these progressions are made by rule, and there is not one of them without sufficient reason. No part of its body could appear sooner or later without the whole embryo suffering; and each of its limbs appears at the proper moment. How manifestly is this ordination—so wise, and so invariable in the production of the animal-the work of a Supreme Being!

INNATE APPETITE.

He had been

McKenzie, in his Phrenological Essays, mentions the following curious fact, witnessed by Sir James Hall. engaged in making some experiments on hatching eggs by artificial heat, and on one occasion observed in one of his boxes a chicken in the act of breaking from its confinement. It happened that just as the creature was getting out of the shell, a spider began to run along the box, when the chicken darted forward, seized and swallowed it.

THE INDIAN AND HIS TAMED SNAKE.

An Indian had tamed a blacksnake, which he kept about him during the summer months. In autumn he let the creature go whither it chose to crawl, but told it to come to him again upon a certain day, which he named, in the spring. A white man who was present, and saw what was done, and heard

the Indian affirm that the serpent would return to him the very day he had appointed, had no faith in the truth of his prediction. The next spring, however, retaining the day in his remory, curiosity led him to the place, where he found the Indian in waiting; and, after remaining with him about two hours, the serpent came crawling back, and put himself under the care of his old master.

In this case, the Indian had probably observed that blacksnakes usually return to their old haunts at the same vernal season; and as he had tamed, fed, and kept this snake in a particular place, experience taught him that it would return on a certain day..

ALLIGATORS SWALLOWING STONES.

The Indians on the banks of the Oronoko assert that previously to an alligator going in search of prey it always swallows a large stone, that it may acquire additional weight to aid it in diving and dragging its victims under water. A traveller being somewhat incredulous on this point, Bolivar, to convince him, shot several with his rifle, and in all of them were found stones varying in weight according to the size of the animal. The largest killed was about seventeen feet in length, and had within him a stone weighing about sixty or seventy pounds.

HABITS OF SHEEP.

Never jumps a sheep that's frightened

Over any fence whatever,

Over wall, or fence, or timber,

But a second follows after,

And a third upon the second,

And a fourth, and fifth, and so on,

When they see the tail uplifted,—

First a sheep, and then a dozen,

Till they all, in quick succession,
One by one, have got clear over.

Dr. Anderson, of Liverpool, relates the following amusing illustration of the singularly persevering disposition of sheep to follow their leader wherever he

goes:

A butcher's boy was driving about twenty fat wethers through the town, but they ran down a street where he did not want them to go. He observed a scavenger at work, and called out loudly for him to stop the sheep. The man accordingly did. what he could to turn them back, running from side to side, always opposing himself to their passage, and brandishing his broom with great dexterity; but the sheep, much agitated, pressed forward, and at last one of them came right up to the man, who, fearing it was going to jump over his head, whilst he was stooping, grasped the broom with both hands and held it over his head. He stood for a few seconds in this position, when the sheep made a spring and jumped fairly over him, without touching the broom. The first had no sooner cleared this impediment than another followed, and another, in quick succession, so that the man, perfectly confounded, seemed to lose all recollection, and stood in the same attitude till the whole of them had jumped over him, and not one attempted to pass on either side, although the street was quite clear.

REMARKABLE EQUESTRIAN EXPEDITIONS.

Mr. Cooper Thornhill, an innkeeper at Stilton, in Huntingdonshire, rode from that place to London and back again, and also a second time to London, in one day,-which made a journey in all of two hundred and thirteen miles. He undertook to ride this journey with several horses in fifteen hours, but performed it in twelve hours and a quarter. This remarkable feat gave rise to a poem called the Stilton Hero, which was published in the year 1745.

Some years ago, Lord James Cavendish rode from Hyde Park Corner to Windsor Lodge, which is upwards of twenty miles, in less than an hour.

Sir Robert Cary rode nearly three hundred miles in less than three days, when he went from London to Edinburgh to inform King James of the death of Queen Elizabeth. He had several falls and sore bruises on the road, which occasioned his going battered and bloody into the royal presence.

On the 29th of August, 1750, was decided at Newmarket a remarkable wager for one thousand guineas, laid by Theobald Taaf, Esq., against the Earl of March and Lord Eglinton, who were to provide a four-wheel carriage with a man in it, to be drawn by four horses nineteen miles in an hour. The match was performed in fifty-three minutes and twenty-four seconds. An engraved model of the carriage was formerly sold in the print-shops.

The Marquis de la Fayette rode in August, 1778, from Rhode Island to Boston, nearly seventy miles distant, in seven hours, and returned in six and a half.

Mr. Fozard, of Park Lane, London, for a wager of one hundred and fifty pounds against one hundred pounds, undertook to ride forty miles in two hours, over Epsom course. He rode two miles more than had been agreed on, and performed it in five minutes under time, in October, 1789.

Mr. Wilde, an Irish gentleman, lately rode one hundred and twenty-seven miles on the course of Kildare, in Ireland, in six hours and twenty minutes, for a wager of one thousand guineas.

The famous Count de Montgomery escaped from the massacre of Paris in 1572, through the swiftness of his horse, which, according to a manuscript of that time, carried him ninety miles without halting.

WONDERFUL HORSE.

In the year 1609, an Englishman named Banks had a horse which he had trained to follow him where ever he went, even over fences and to the roofs of buildings. He and his horse went to the top of that immensely high structure, St. Paul's Church. After many extraordinary performances at home, the horse and his master went to Rome, where they performed feats equally astonishing. But the result was that both Banks and his horse were burned, by order of the Pope, as enchanters. Sir Walter Raleigh observes, that had Banks lived in olden times, he would have shamed all the enchanters of the world, for no beast ever performed such wonders as his.