“Professor,” said Miss Skylight, “I want you to suggest a course in life for me.  I have thought of journalism—­”

“What are your own inclinations?”

“Oh, my soul yearns and throbs and pulsates with an ambition to give the world a life-work that shall be marvelous in its scope, and weirdly entrancing in the vastness of its structural beauty!”

“Woman, you’re born to be a milliner.”

A woman, when asked her husband’s occupation, said he was a mixologist. 
The city directory called him a bartender.

“A good turkey dinner and mince pie,” said a well-known after-dinner orator, “always puts us in a lethargic mood—­makes us feel, in fact, like the natives of Nola Chucky.  In Nola Chucky one day I said to a man: 

“‘What is the principal occupation of this town?’

“‘Wall, boss,’ the man answered, yawning, ’in winter they mostly sets on the east side of the house and follers the sun around to the west, and in summer they sets on the west side and follers the shade around to the east.’”

JONES—­“How’d this happen?  The last time I was here you were running a fish-market, and now you’ve got a cheese-shop.”

SMITH—­“Yes.  Well, you see the doctor said I needed a change of air.”

The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure.  Now, if I were a grave-digger, or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment—­Douglas Jerrold.

OCEAN

A resident of Nahant tells this one on a new servant his wife took down from Boston.

“Did you sleep well, Mary?” the girl was asked the following morning.

“Sure, I did not, ma’am,” was the reply; “the snorin’ of the ocean kept me awake all night.”

Love the sea?  I dote upon it—­from the beach.—­Douglas Jerrold.

  I never was on the dull, tame shore,
  But I loved the great sea more and more.

  —­Barry Cornwall.

OFFICE BOYS

“Have you had any experience as an office-boy?”

“I should say I had, mister; why, I’m a dummy director in three mining-companies now.”

OFFICE-SEEKERS

A gentleman, not at all wealthy, who had at one time represented in Congress, through a couple of terms a district not far from the national capitol, moved to California where in a year or so he rose to be sufficiently prominent to become a congressional subject, and he was visited by the central committee of his district to be talked to.

“We want you,” said the spokesman, “to accept the nomination for Congress.”

“I can’t do it, gentlemen,” he responded promptly.

“You must,” the spokesman demanded.

“But I can’t,” he insisted.  “I’m too poor.”

“Oh, that will be all right; we’ve got plenty of money for the campaign.”