“A penny for your thochts, Sandy,” murmured Maggie, after a silence of an hour and a half.

“Weel,” replied Sandy slowly, with surprising boldness, “tae tell ye the truth, I was jist thinkin’ how fine it wad be if ye were tae gie me a wee bit kissie.”

“I’ve nae objection,” simpered Maggie, slithering over, and kissed him plumply on the tip of his left ear.

Sandy relapsed into a brown study once more, and the clock ticked twenty-seven minutes.

“An’ what are ye thinkin’ about noo—­anither, eh?”

“Nae, nae, lassie; it’s mair serious the noo.”

“Is it, laddie?” asked Maggie softly.  Her heart was going pit-a-pat with expectation.  “An’ what micht it be?”

“I was jist thinkin’,” answered Sandy, “that it was aboot time ye were paying me that penny!”

The coward calls himself cautious, the miser thrifty.—­Syrus.

There are but two ways of paying debt:  increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.—­Carlyle.

See also Economy; Saving.

TIDES

A Kansan sat on the beach at Atlantic City watching a fair and very fat bather disporting herself in the surf.  He knew nothing of tides, and he did not notice that each succeeding wave came a little closer to his feet.  At last an extra big wave washed over his shoe tops.

“Hey, there!” he yelled at the fair, fat bather.  “Quit yer jumpin’ up and down!  D’ye want to drown me?”

At a recent Confederate reunion in Charleston, S.C., two Kentuckians were viewing the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.

“Say, cap’n,” said one of them, “what ought I to carry home to the children for a souvenir?”

“Why, colonel, it strikes me that some of this here ocean water would be right interestin’.”

“Just the thing!” exclaimed the colonel delightedly.  From a rear pocket he produced a flask, and, with the aid of the captain, soon emptied it.  Then, picking his way down to the water’s edge, he filled it to the neck and replaced the cork.

“Hi, there!  Don’t do that!” cried the captain in great alarm.  “Pour out about a third of that water.  If you don’t, when the tide rises she’ll bust sure.”

Nae man can tether time or tide.—­Burns.

TIME

Mrs. Hooligan was suffering from the common complaint of having more to do than there was time to do it in.  She looked up at the clock and then slapped the iron she had lifted from the stove back on the lid with a clatter.  “Talk about toime and toide waitin’ fer no man,” she muttered as she hurried into the pantry; “there’s toimes they waits, an’ toimes they don’t.  Yistherday at this blessed minit ‘twas but tin o’clock an’ to-day it’s a quarther to twilve.”

MRS. MURPHY—­“Oi hear yer brother-in-law, Pat Keegan, is pretty bad off.”