On one occasion a pompous little man was being shown through one institution when he came upon an Indian lad of seventeen years.  The worker was engaged in a bit of carpentry, which the visitor observed in silence for some minutes.  Then, with the utmost gravity, he asked the boy: 

“Are you civilized?”

The youthful redskin lifted his eyes from his work, calmly surveyed his questioner, and then replied: 

“No, are you?”—­Taylor Edwards.

“My dear, listen to this,” exclaimed the elderly English lady to her husband, on her first visit to the States.  She held the hotel menu almost at arm’s length, and spoke in a tone of horror:  “’Baked Indian pudding!’ Can it be possible in a civilized country?”

“The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.”—­The Philistine.

CLEANLINESS

“Among the tenements that lay within my jurisdiction when I first took up mission work on the East Side.” says a New York young woman, “was one to clean out which would have called for the best efforts of the renovator of the Augean stables.  And the families in this tenement were almost as hopeless as the tenement itself.

“On one occasion I felt distinctly encouraged, however, since I observed that the face of one youngster was actually clean.

“‘William,’ said I, ’your face is fairly clean, but how did you get such dirty hands?”

“‘Washin’ me face,’ said William.”

A woman in one of the factory towns of Massachusetts recently agreed to take charge of a little girl while her mother, a seamstress, went to another town for a day’s work.

The woman with whom the child had been left endeavored to keep her contented, and among other things gave her a candy dog, with which she played happily all day.

At night the dog had disappeared, and the woman inquired whether it had been lost.

“No, it ain’t lost,” answered the little girl.  “I kept it ’most all day, but it got so dirty that I was ashamed to look at it; so I et it.”—­Fenimore Martin.

“How old are you?” once asked Whistler of a London newsboy.  “Seven,” was the reply.  Whistler insisted that he must be older than that, and turning to his friend he remarked:  “I don’t think he could get as dirty as that in seven years, do you?”

If dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!—­Charles Lamb.

CLERGY

“Now, children,” said the visiting minister who had been asked to question the Sunday-school, “with what did Samson arm himself to fight against the Philistines?”

None of the children could tell him.

“Oh, yes, you know!” he said, and to help them he tapped his jaw with one finger.  “What is this?” he asked.

This jogged their memories, and the class cried in chorus:  “The jawbone of an ass.”