“What did you do when you met the train-robber face to face?”

“I explained that I had been interviewed by the ticket-seller, the luggage-carriers, the dining-car waiters, and the sleeping-car porters and borrowed a dollar from him.”

PRINTERS

The master of all trades:  He beats the farmer with his fast “hoe,” the carpenter with his “rule,” and the mason in “setting up tall columns”; and he surpasses the lawyer and the doctor in attending to the “cases,” and beats the parson in the management of the devil.

PRISONS

A man arrested for stealing chickens was brought to trial.  The case was given to the jury, who brought him in guilty, and the judge sentenced him to three months’ imprisonment.  The jailer was a jovial man, fond of a smile, and feeling particularly good on that particular day, considered himself insulted when the prisoner looking around the cell told him it was dirty, and not fit for a hog to be put in.  One word brought on another, till finally the jailer told the prisoner if he did not behave himself he would put him out.  To which the prisoner replied:  “I will give you to understand, sir, I have as good a right here as you have!”

SHERIFF—­“That fellow who just left jail is going to be arrested again soon.”

“How do you know?”

SHERIFF—­“He chopped my wood, carried the water, and mended my socks.  I can’t get along without him.”

PRODIGALS

“Why did the father of the prodigal son fall on his neck and weep?”

“Cos he had ter kill the fatted calf, an’ de son wasn’t wort’ it.”

PROFANITY

THE RECTOR—­“It’s terrible for a man like you to make every other word an oath.”

THE MAN—­“Oh, well, I swear a good deal and you pray a good deal, but we don’t neither of us mean nuthin’ by it.”

FIRST DEAF MUTE—­“He wasn’t so very angry, was he?”

SECOND DEAF MUTE—­“He was so wild that the words he used almost blistered his fingers.”

The little daughter of a clergyman stubbed her toe and said, “Darn!”

“I’ll give you ten cents,” said father, “if you’ll never say that word again.”

A few days afterward she came to him and said:  “Papa, I’ve got a word worth half a dollar.”

Very frequently the winter highways of the Yukon valley are mere trails, traversed only by dog-sledges.  One of the bishops in Alaska, who was very fond of that mode of travel, encountered a miner coming out with his dog-team, and stopped to ask him what kind of a road he had come over.

The miner responded with a stream of forcible and picturesque profanity, winding up with: 

“And what kind o’ trail did you have?”

“Same as yours,” replied the bishop feelingly.—­Elgin Burroughs.