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Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3142, 23 July 1881, Page 4

The Princes Albert Victor and George, and the other middies, were busy one day on board the Bacchante working out the reckoning. They were al' muddled, and none of them could get the thing to come At last one of the bewildered middies looked across at Albert Victor, and said, "I say, if this is the way you're going on, what a blooming fine king you'll make!" —Bulletin. The colonel of a regiment lately sent for a young subaltern who had joined only a few days before, and who had been heard to mutter, and that by no means to himself, that the colonel's wife was a shrew. ' How, sir !' exclaimed the infuriated old martinet. c You go about speaking of my wife as an old shrew, a termagant, and all that sort of thing, before you have been in the regiment a fortnight, and when you have not been acquainted with her for more than a week !' The young subaltern stammered and hung his head. 'It was insufferable impudence and presumption on your part, sir! After a week's acquaintance too ! Patient Job ! Young man, if you'd been married to that she-fiend for thirty-five years, as I have, and knew her as 7 did, I could understand !' To a grand dinnei*, given the other day at Belgrade by an august personage to some foreigners of distinction visiting the Servian capital, several members of theSkuptschina, or National Parliament, happened to sit next to a Servian M.P., and was considerably diverted by his quaint expedients for dealing with certain attributes of civilisation obviously unfamiliar with him. Towards the conclusion of the feast the Prench man selected a tooth-pick from a small tray lying near him, and politely passed the receptacle on to his neighbor, who however peremptorily declined his offer exclaiming, 'No Gospodin ; I have already eaten two of the accursed things and I want no more!' A Non-Communicative Female.—l got into a car and took a seat in juxtaposition to a female. That fomale'e face was a perfect insurance company—it insured her against ever getting married to anybody but to a blind man. Her mouth looked like a crack in a dried lemon, and there was no more expression in her face than there is in a cup of cold custard. She appeared as though she had been through one famine, and got about two-thirds through another! She was old enough to be great-grand-mother to Mary that had the little lamb. She was chewing prize pop-corn, and carried a yellow rose, with a bandbox and a cotton umbrella nestling sweetly by her side. I could'nt guess whether she was on a mission of charity or going west to start a sawmill. I was full of curiosity to hear her speak, so I said : —'The exigencies of these times require great circumspection in a person who is travelling.' Says she, « What ?' Says I, ' The orb of day shines resplendent in the vault above.' She hitched around uneasy like then she raised ber umbrella and said, ' I don't want any of your Bass—get out,' and I got. —Mark Twain.