First, let me say my friend was right.  I did go to sleep very soon after my retirement.  Then a friend with his head under his arm came along and asked me if I wanted to buy his feet.  I was negotiating with him, when the dragon on which I was riding slipped out of his skin and left me floating in mid-air.  While I was considering how I should get down, a bull with two heads peered over the edge of the wall and said he would haul me up if I would first climb up and rig a windlass for him.  So as I was sliding down the mountainside the brakeman came in, and I asked him when the train would reach my station.

“We passed your station four hundred years ago,” he said, calmly folding the train up and slipping it into his vest pocket.

At this juncture the clown bounded into the ring and pulled the center-pole out of the ground, lifting the tent and all the people in it up, up, while I stood on the earth below watching myself go out of sight among the clouds above.  Then I awoke, and found I had been asleep almost ten minutes.—­The Good Health Clinic.

SMILES

  There was a young lady of Niger,
  Who went for a ride on a tiger;
    They returned from the ride
    With the lady inside,
  And a smile on the face of the tiger.

  —­Gilbert K. Chesterton.

SMOKING

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.—­Rudyard Kipling.

AUNT MARY—­(horrified) “Good gracious.  Harold, what would your mother say if she saw you smoking cigarets?” HAROLD (calmly)—­“She’d have a fit.  They’re her cigarets.”

An Irish soldier on sentry duty had orders to allow no one to smoke near his post.  An officer with a lighted cigar approached whereupon Pat boldly challenged him and ordered him to put it out at once.

The officer with a gesture of disgust threw away his cigar, but no sooner was his back turned than Pat picked it up and quietly retired to the sentry box.

The officer happening to look around, observed a beautiful cloud of smoke issuing from the box.  He at once challenged Pat for smoking on duty.

“Smoking, is it, sor?  Bedad, and I’m only keeping it lit to show the corporal when he comes as evidence agin you.”

SNEEZING

While campaigning in Iowa Speaker Cannon was once inveigled into visiting the public schools of a town where he was billed to speak.  In one of the lower grades an ambitious teacher called upon a youthful Demosthenes to entertain the distinguished visitor with an exhibition of amateur oratory.  The selection attempted was Byron’s “Battle of Waterloo,” and just as the boy reached the end of the first paragraph Speaker Cannon gave vent to a violent sneeze.  “But, hush! hark!” declaimed the youngster; “a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!  Did ye not hear it?”