Water won’t hurt any one, of course, if care is used not to forget and drink any of it, but it is this horrible suspense and uncertainty about facing the nozzle of a garden hose in the hands of a cross-eyed woman that unnerves and paralyzes me.

Instantaneous death is nothing to me.  I am as cool and collected where leaden rain and iron hail are thickest as I would be in my own office writing the obituary of the man who steals my jokes.  But I hate to be drowned slowly in my good clothes and on dry land, and have my dying gaze rest on a woman whose ravishing beauty would drive a narrow-gauge mule into convulsions and make him hate himself t’death.

A Long-Lived Family

A “dime museum” manager, having heard of a man 123 years of age, journeyed to his home to try and secure him for exhibition purposes.

“Well, my friend,” said the museum manager, “the proofs of your age seem to be all right.  Now, how would you like to come to my place, just do nothing but sit on a platform and let people look at you, and I will pay you $100 a week ?”

“I’d like it all right,” answered the aged man.  “But I couldn’t go, of course, unless I had my father’s consent.”

“Your father!” gasped the manager.  “Do you mean to say your father is alive?”

“Yes, indeed,” replied the man.

“Well, where is your father?  Home here?” asked the manager.

“Oh, yes,” was the answer.  “He’s upstairs, putting grandfather to bed!”

Silenced the Ringleader

The head teacher in a Sunday-school was much worried by the noise of the pupils in the next room, At last, unable to bear it any longer, he mounted a chair and looked over the partition.  Seeing a boy a little taller than the others talking a great deal, he leaned over, hoisted him over the partition, and banged him into a chair in his room, saying: 

“Now be quiet.”

A quarter of an hour later a smaller head appeared around the door and a meek little voice said: 

“Please, sir, you’ve got our teacher.”

Got Out of That, All Right

“My dear,” said a wife to her husband, “do you realize that you have forgotten that this is my birthday ?”

“Yes, dearie, I did forget it,” replied the husband.  “Isn’t it natural that I should?  There isn’t really anything about you to remind me that you are a day older than you were a year ago.”

He Simply Looked That Way

The man in the smoker was boasting of his unerring ability to tell from a man’s looks exactly what city he came from.  “You, for example,” he said to the man next to him, “you are from New Orleans?” He was right.

“You, my friend,” turning to the man on the other side of him, “I should say you are from Chicago?” Again he was right.

The other two men got interested.

“And you are from Boston?” he asked the third man.