“Just plain absent-mindedness,” replied the prisoner.

“Why, how could that be?”

“I forgot to change the engine number of the car before I sold it.”

MEN

“Daughter,” said the father, “your young man, Rawlings, stays until a very late hour.  Has not your mother said something to you about this habit of his?”

“Yes, father,” replied the daughter sweetly.  “Mother says men haven’t altered a bit.”

All mankind is divided into three classes:  those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.—­Arabian proverb.

For every woman who makes a fool out of a man there is another woman who makes a man out of a fool.

The ideal man is as numerous as there are women to describe him.

If a woman is an hour late in returning home, and her husband is worried, she is flattered.  If a man is three hours late he is angry if anyone is worried.

He was fond of playing jokes on his wife, and this time he thought he had a winner.

“My dear,” he said, as they sat at supper, “I just heard such a sad story of a young girl today.  They thought she was going blind, and so a surgeon operated on her and found—­”

“Yes?” gasped the wife breathlessly.

“That she’d got a young man in her eye!” ended the husband, with a chuckle.

For a moment there was silence.  Then the lady remarked, slowly: 

“Well, it would all depend on what sort of a man it was.  Some of them she could have seen through easily enough.”

A little girl wrote the following composition on men: 

“Men are what women marry.  They drink and smoke and swear, but don’t go to church.  Perhaps if they wore bonnets they would.  They are more logical than women, also more zoological.  Both men and women sprang from monkeys, but the women sprang farther than the men.”

Essay on Man

At ten, a child; at twenty, wild;
At thirty, tame, if ever;
At forty, wise; at fifty, rich;
At sixty, good, or never!

See also Husbands.

METHODISTS

He came of good Methodist stock and they were telling him about the disciples.  They told him quite a lot about them, and somehow he didn’t seem quite satisfied.

At last he voiced his trouble: 

“But were they all Disciples?  Weren’t there any Methodists?”

MIDDLEMAN

“The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” quoted the devout citizen.

“It makes no difference to me how you arrange ’em,” replied the expert commercialist.  “I’ll get mine either way.  I’m the middleman.”

“Pop!”

“Yes, my son.”

“What is a gardener?”

“A gardener is a man who raises a few things, my boy.”