“How are you getting on?” Mrs. McKinley asked her a few months after her marriage.

“Fine, thank yo’, ma’am,” the bride answered.

“And is your husband a good provider?”

“’Deed he am a good providah, ma’am,” was the enthusiastic reply.  “Why, jes’ dis las’ week he got me five new places to wash at.”

“I suffer so from insomnia I don’t know what to do.”

“Oh, my dear, if you could only talk to my husband awhile.”

“Did Hardlucke bear his misfortune like a man?”

“Exactly like one.  He blamed it all on his wife.”—­Judge.

A popular society woman announced a “White Elephant Party.”  Every guest was to bring something that she could not find any use for, and yet too good to throw away.  The party would have been a great success but for the unlooked-for development which broke it up.  Eleven of the nineteen women brought their husbands.

  A very man—­not one of nature’s clods—­
    With human failings, whether saint or sinner: 
  Endowed perhaps with genius from the gods
    But apt to take his temper from his dinner.

  —­J.  G. Saxe.

A woman mounted the steps of the elevated station carrying an umbrella like a reversed saber.  An attendant warned her that she might put out the eye of the man behind her.

“Well, he’s my husband!” she snapped.

OLD MONEY (dying)—­“I’m afraid I’ve been a brute to you sometimes, dear.”

YOUNG WIFE—­“Oh, never mind that darling; I’ll always remember how very kind you were when you left me.”

An inveterate poker player, whose wife always complained of his late hours, stayed out even later than usual one night and tells in the following way of his attempt to get in unnoticed: 

“I slipped off my shoes at the front steps, pulled off my clothes in the hall, slipped into the bedroom, and began to slip into bed with the ease of experience.

“My wife has a blamed fine dog that on cold nights insists on jumping in the bed with us.  So when I began to slide under the covers she stirred in her sleep and pushed me on the head.

“‘Get down, Fido, get down!’ she said.

“And, gentlemen, I just did have presence of mind enough to lick her hand, and she dozed off again!”

MR. HOMEBODY—­“I see you keep copies of all the letters you write to your wife.  Do you do it to avoid repeating yourself?”

MR. FARAWAY—­“No.  To avoid contradicting myself.”

  There is gladness in his gladness, when he’s glad,
  There is sadness in his sadness, when he’s sad;
  But the gladness in his gladness,
  Nor the sadness in his sadness,
  Isn’t a marker to his madness when he’s mad.

See also Cowards; Domestic finance.

HYBRIDIZATION

We used to think that the smartest man ever born was the Connecticut Yankee who grafted white birch on red maples and grew barber poles.  Now we rank that gentleman second.  First place goes to an experimenter attached to the Berlin War Office, who has crossed carrier pigeons with parrots, so that Wilhelmstrasse can now get verbal messages through the enemy’s lines.—­Warwick James Price.