MRS. QUACKENNESS—­“Am yo’ daughtar happily mar’d, Sistah Sagg?”

MRS. SAGG—­“She sho’ is!  Bless goodness she’s done got a husband dat’s skeered to death of her!”

“Where am I?” the invalid exclaimed, waking from the long delirium of fever and feeling the comfort that loving hands had supplied.  “Where am I—­in heaven?”

“No, dear,” cooed his wife; “I am still with you.”

Archbishop Ryan was visiting a small parish in a mining district one day for the purpose of administering confirmation, and asked one nervous little girl what matrimony is.

“It is a state of terrible torment which those who enter are compelled to undergo for a time to prepare them for a brighter and better world,” she said.

“No, no,” remonstrated her rector; “that isn’t matrimony:  that’s the definition of purgatory.”

“Leave her alone,” said the Archbishop; “maybe she is right.  What do you and I know about it?”

“Was Helen’s marriage a success?”

“Goodness, yes.  Why, she is going to marry a nobleman on the alimony.”—­Judge.

JENNIE—­“What makes George such a pessimist?”

JACK—­“Well, he’s been married three times—­once for love, once for money and the last time for a home.”

Matrimony is the root of all evil.

One day Mary, the charwoman, reported for service with a black eye.

“Why, Mary,” said her sympathetic mistress, “what a bad eye you have!”

“Yes’m.”

“Well, there’s one consolation.  It might have been worse.”

“Yes’m.”

“You might have had both of them hurt.”

“Yes’m.  Or worse’n that:  I might not ha’ been married at all.”

A wife placed upon her husband’s tombstone:  “He had been married forty years and was prepared to die.”

“I can take a hundred words a minute,” said the stenographer.

“I often take more than that,” said the prospective employer; “but then I have to, I’m married.”

A man and his wife were airing their troubles on the sidewalk one Saturday evening when a good Samaritan intervened.

“See here, my man,” he protested, “this sort of thing won’t do.”

“What business is it of yours, I’d like to know,” snarled the man, turning from his wife.

“It’s only my business in so far as I can be of help in settling this dispute,” answered the Samaritan mildly.

“This ain’t no dispute,” growled the man.

“No dispute!  But, my dear friend—­”

“I tell you it ain’t no dispute,” insisted the man.  “She”—­jerking his thumb toward the woman—­“thinks she ain’t goin to get my week’s wages, and I know darn well she ain’t.  Where’s the dispute in that?”

HIS BETTER HALF—­“I think it’s time we got Lizzie married and settled down, Alfred.  She will be twenty-eight next week you know.”

HER LESSER HALF—­“Oh, don’t hurry, my dear.  Better wait till the right sort of man comes along.”