“Were any of them receipted?” asked a pessimist.

To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.—­Fronde.

  With earth’s first clay they did the last man knead,
  And there of the last harvest sowed the seed: 
  And the first morning of creation wrote
  What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

  Yesterday this day’s madness did prepare;
  Tomorrow’s silence, triumph, or despair. 
  Drink!  For you know not whence you came, nor why;
  Drink!  For you know not why you go, nor where.

  —­Omar Khayyam

PHILADELPHIA

A Staten Island man, when the mosquitoes began to get busy in the borough across the bay, has been in the habit every summer of transplanting his family to the Delaware Water Gap for a few weeks.  They were discussing their plans the other day, when the oldest boy, aged eight, looked up from his geography and said: 

“Pop, Philadelphia is on the Delaware River, isn’t it?”

Pop replied that such was the case.

“I wonder if that’s what makes the Delaware Water Gap?” insinuated the youngster.—­S.S.  Stinson.

Among the guests at an informal dinner in New York was a bright Philadelphia girl.

“These are snails,” said a gentleman next to her, when the dainty was served.  “I suppose Philadelphia people don’t eat them for fear of cannibalism.”

“Oh, no,” was her instant reply; “it isn’t that.  We couldn’t catch them.”

PHILANTHROPISTS

  Little grains of short weight,
    Little crooked twists,
  Fill the land with magnates
    And philanthropists.

See also Charity.

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy is finding out how many things there are in the world which you can’t have if you want them, and don’t want if you can have them.—­Puck.

PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS

The eight-year-old son of a Baltimore physician, together with a friend, was playing in his father’s office, during the absence of the doctor, when suddenly the first lad threw open a closet door and disclosed to the terrified gaze of his little friend an articulated skeleton.

When the visitor had sufficiently recovered from his shock to stand the announcement the doctor’s son explained that his father was extremely proud of that skeleton.

“Is he?” asked the other.  “Why?”

“I don’t know,” was the answer; “maybe it was his first patient.”

The doctor stood by the bedside, and looked gravely down at the sick man.

“I can not hide from you the fact that you are very ill,” he said.  “Is there any one you would like to see?”