Johnny Jones, you know, was studying botany, and he declared that he had an infallible way to tell the difference between mushrooms and toadstools.

“When you git vi’lent spasms,” said little Johnny, “with cramps, swelling of the feet and partial loss of vision ending in insanity and death—­then it ain’t mushrooms.”

MUSIC

HE—­“Most girls, I have found, don’t appreciate real music.”

SECOND HE—­“Why do you say that?”

HE—­“Well, you may pick beautiful strains on a mandolin for an hour, and she won’t even look out of the window, but just one honk of a horn and—­out she comes!”

Music is the language of the soul; jazz is its profanity.

“How do you sell your music?”

“We sell piano music by the pound and organ music by the choir.”

“Samantha, what’s thet chune the orchestry’s a-playin’ now?”

“The program says its ‘Choppin’, Hiram.”

“Waal—­mebbe—­but ter me it sounds a deal more like sawin’.”

While Chopin probably did not time his “Minute Waltz” to exactly sixty seconds, some auditors insist that it lives up to its name.  Mme. Theodora Surkow-Ryder on one of her tours played the “Minute Waltz” as an encore, first telling her audience what it was.  Thereupon a huge man in a large riding suit took out an immense silver watch, held it open almost under her nose, and gravely proceeded to time her.  The pianist’s fingers flew along the keys, and her anxiety was rewarded when the man closed the watch with a loud slap and said in a booming voice:  “Gosh!  She’s done it.”

MRS. NEWRICHE—­“I believe our next-door neighbors on the right are as poor as church mice, Hiram.”

MR. NEWRICHE—­“What makes you think so?”

MRS. NEWRICHE—­“Why, they can’t afford one of them mechanical piano-players; the daughter is taking lessons by hand.”—­Puck.

MUSICIANS

“Excuse me,” said the detective as he presented himself at the door of the music academy, “but I hope you’ll give me what information you have, and not make any fuss.”

“What do you mean?” was the indignant inquiry.

“Why, you see, we got a tip from the house next door that somebody was murdering Wagner, and the chief sent me down here to work on the case.”

Pianist Rachmaninoff told in his New York flat the other day a story about his boyhood.

“When I was a very little fellow,” he said, “I played at a reception at a Russian count’s, and, for an urchin of seven, I flatter myself that I swung through Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ pretty successfully.

“The ‘Kreutzer,’ you know, has in it several long and impressive rests.  Well, in one of these rests the count’s wife, a motherly old lady, leaned forward, patted me on the shoulder, and said: 

“‘Play us something you know, dear.’”