“Why, Mollie!” exclaimed the mistress in surprise.  “Are you going away?”

“Naw’m, I ain’ goin’ nowheres,” Mollie declared.  “But me an’ Jim Harris we wuz married this mawnin’.  Yas.’m, Jim, he’s a new nigger in town.  You don’ know nothin’ ‘bout him, Miss Sallie.  I don’ know nothin’ ’bout him myself he’s er stranger to me.”

Miss Sallie glanced severely at the little package of jewelry.

“But, Mollie,” she demanded, “don’t you trust him?”

“Yas’m,” replied Mollie, unruffled.  “Cose I trus’ him, personally—­but not wid ma valuables.”

It is necessary to be almost a genius to make a good husband.—­Balzac.

Jennie, the colored maid, arrived one morning with her head swathed in bandages—­the result of an argument with her hot-tempered spouse.

“Jennie,” said her mistress, “your husband treats you outrageously.  Why don’t you leave him?”

“Well, I don’ ’zactly wants to leave him.”

“Hasn’t he dragged you the length of the room by your hair?” demanded her mistress.

“Yas’m he has done dat.”

“Hasn’t he choked you into insensibility?”

“Yas’m he sho has choked me.”

“And now doesn’t he threaten to split your head with an ax?”

“Yas’m he has done all dat,” agreed Jennie, “but he ain’ done nothin’ yet so bad I couldn’t live wid him.”

See also Carelessness; Domestic finance.

HYPOCRISY

  Hypocrisy will serve as well
  To propagate a church, as zeal;
  As persecution and promotion
  Do equally advance devotion: 
  So round white stones will serve, they say,
  As well as eggs to make hens lay.

  —­Samuel Butler.

  There is no vice so simple, but assumes
  Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.

  —­Shakespeare.

  Thus ’tis with all—­their chief and constant care
  Is to seem everything but what they are.

  —­Goldsmith.

  Dare to be true.  Nothing can need a lie;
  A fault which needs it most grows two thereby.

  —­Herbert.

HYSTERICS

Father, teaching his six-year-old son arithmetic by giving a problem to his wife, begs his son to listen: 

FATHER—­“Mother, if you had a dollar and I gave you five more, what would you have?”

MOTHER (replying absently)—­“Hysterics.”

“IF”

See Fords.

IGNORANCE

A professor noted among his students for the caustic wit had in one of his classes, one year, a young man who was both ignorant and conceited.  One morning he made a specially self-satisfied display of both these characteristics, and the professor said he would like to see him at the end of the hour.

When he came up after the lecture, the professor asked:  “You are Mr. Junkins?”