“Let me see,” replied the landlady, “you have been here four years.  You have never once grumbled at the food or failed to pay my bill promptly and without question.  No, sir, I’m sorry.  You’re too good a boarder to be put on the free list!”

BOASTING

The engineer had become tired of the boastful talk he heard from the other engine drivers at his boarding-house.  One evening he began: 

“This morning I went over to see a new machine we’ve got at our place, and it’s astonishing how it works.”

“And how does it work?” asked one.

“Well,” was the reply, “by means of a pedal attachment a fulcrumed lever concerts a vertical reciprocating motion into a circular movement.  The principal part of the machine is a huge disk that revolves in a vertical plane.  Power is applied through the axis of the disk, and work is done on the periphery, and the hardest steel by mere impact may be reduced to any shape.”

“What is this wonderful machine?” was asked.

“A grindstone,” was the reply.

Senator Tillman was arguing the tariff with an opponent.

“You know I never boast,” the opponent began.

“Never boast?  Splendid!” said Senator Tillman, and he added quietly, “No wonder you brag about it.”

They are mighty proud of their one sky-scraper up in Seattle.

It is a long, skinny building that stands on one leg like a stork and blinks down disdainfully from its thousand windows on ordinary fifteen-story shacks.

A San Francisco man recently in that city was incautious enough to express surprise.

“What are those posts sticking out all the way up?” he asked a Seattleite.

“Those are mile-posts,” said the Seattle man.

A gentleman from Vermont was traveling west in a Pullman when a group of men from Topeka, Kansas, boarded the train and began to praise their city to the Vermonter, telling him of its wide streets and beautiful avenues.  Finally the Vermonter became tired and said the only thing that would improve their city would be to make it a seaport.

The enthusiastic Westerners laughed at him and asked how they could make it a seaport, being so far from the ocean.

The Vermonter replied that it would be a very easy task.

“The only thing that you will have to do,” said he, “is to lay a two-inch pipe from your city to the Gulf of Mexico.  Then if you fellows can suck as hard as you can blow you will have it a seaport inside half an hour.”

BOLSHEVISM

“The reason you disapprove of Bolshevism is that you don’t understand it.”

“Probably.  Every time I get with Bolshevists and think I am beginning to understand, they start a riot and take my mind off the subject.”

There’s just one thing the Bolshevik in America can do well—­he can dampen the fire under the Melting Pot!