A Protestant mission meeting had been held in an Irish town and this was the gardener’s contribution to the controversy that ensued:  “Pratestants!” he said with lofty scorn, “’Twas mighty little St. Paul thought of the Pratestants.  You’ve all heard tell of the ’pistle he wrote to the Romans, but I’d ax ye this, did any of yez iver hear of his writing a ’pistle to the Pratestants?”

PROVIDENCE

“Why did papa have appendicitis and have to pay the doctor a thousand dollars, Mama?”

“It was God’s will, dear.”

“And was it because God was mad at papa or pleased with the doctor?”—­Life.

There’s a certain minister whose duties sometimes call him out of the city.  He has always arranged for some one of his parishioners to keep company with his wife and little daughter during these absences.  Recently, however, he was called away so suddenly that he had no opportunity of providing a guardian.

The wife was very brave during the early evening, but after dark had fallen her courage began to fail.  She stayed up with her little girl till there was no excuse for staying any longer and then took her upstairs to bed.

“Now go to sleep, Dearie,” she said.  “Don’t be afraid.  God will protect you.”

“Yes, Mother,” answered the little girl, “that’ll be all right tonight, but next time let’s make better arrangements.”

PROVINCIALISM

Some time ago an English friend of Colonel W.J.  Lampton’s living in New York and having never visited the South, went to Virginia to spend a month with friends.  After a fortnight of it, he wrote back: 

“Oh, I say, old top, you never told me that the South was anything like I have found it, and so different to the North.  Why, man, it’s God’s country.”

The Colonel, who gets his title from Kentucky, answered promptly by postal.

“Of course it is,” he wrote.  “You didn’t suppose God was a Yankee, did you?”

A southerner, with the intense love for his own district, attended a banquet.  The next day a friend asked him who was present.  With a reminiscent smile he replied:  “An elegant gentleman from Virginia, a gentleman from Kentucky, a man from Ohio, a bounder from Chicago, a fellow from New York, and a galoot from Maine.”

They had driven fourteen miles to the lake, and then rowed six miles across the lake to get to the railroad station, when the Chicago man asked: 

“How in the world do you get your mail and newspapers here in the winter when the storms are on?”

“Wa-al, we don’t sometimes.  I’ve seen this lake thick up so that it was three weeks before we got a Chicago paper,” answered the man from “nowhere.”

“Well, you were cut off,” said the Chicago man.

“Ya-as, we were so,” was the reply.  “Still, the Chicago folks were just as badly off.”