Mr. Goboffle had a small child, no wife, a large dog, and a house.  As he was unable to afford the expense of a nurse, he was accustomed to leave the child in the care of the dog, who was much attached to it, while absent at a distant restaurant for his meals, taking the precaution to lock them up together to prevent kidnapping.  One day, while at his dinner, he crowded a large, hard-boiled potato down his neck, and it conducted him into eternity.  His clay was taken to the Coroner’s, and the great world went on, marrying and giving in marriage, lying, cheating, and praying, as if he had never existed.

Meantime the dog had, after several days of neglect, forced an egress through a window, and a neighbouring baker received a call from him daily.  Walking gravely in, he would deposit a piece of silver, and receiving a roll and his change would march off homeward.  As this was a rather unusual proceeding in a cur of his species, the baker one day followed him, and as the dog leaped joyously into the window of the deserted house, the man of dough approached and looked in.  What was his surprise to see the dog deposit his bread calmly upon the floor and fall to tenderly licking the face of a beautiful child!

It is but fair to explain that there was nothing but the face remaining.  But this dog did so love the child!  Boys who Began Wrong.

Two little California boys were arrested at Reno for horse thieving.  They had started from Surprise Valley with a cavalcade of thirty animals, and disposed of them leisurely along their line of march, until they were picked up at Reno, as above explained.  I don’t feel quite easy about those youths-away out there in Nevada without their Testaments!  Where there are no Sunday School books boys are so apt to swear and chew tobacco and rob sluice-boxes; and once a boy begins to do that last he might as well sell out; he’s bound to end by doing something bad!  I knew a boy once who began by robbing sluice-boxes, and he went right on from bad to worse, until the last I heard of him he was in the State Legislature, elected by Democratic votes.  You never saw anybody take on as his poor old mother did when she heard about it.

“Hank,” said she to the boy’s father, who was forging a bank note in the chimney corner, “this all comes o’ not edgercatin’ ’im when he was a baby.  Ef he’d larnt spellin’ and ciferin’ he never could a-ben elected.”

It pains me to state that old Hank didn’t seem to get any thinner under the family disgrace, and his appetite never left him for a minute.  The fact is, the old gentleman wanted to go to the United States Senate.  A Kansas Incident.