Odds and Ends.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 285, 14 July 1877, Page 3

Odds and Ends.

Mb. Mjbable informed his London hostess that he did not think a certain young lady very charming, because she affected aniline dyes, and he " weally couldn't go down to suppah with a young lady who wears mauve trimmings in her skirt and magenta wibbons in her hair." Among the replies to an advertisement of a music committee for " a candidate as organist, musicteacher," &c, was the following : " Gentleman,—l noticed your advertisement for a music teacher and organist, either lady or gentleman. Having been both for several years, I offer you my services." Afteb the happy Day.—They had been married five months, and she was turning the leaves of a book when she espied a pressed flower, part of a bouquet he had given her previous to wedlock, and said, " 'Tis but a little faded flower, but, oh, how fondly dear !" " I should say so," he growled ; that's a representative of a half-guinea bouquet ; and to buy it I walked in to town and deprivod myself of luncheon for a week." In a thriving town of Michigan, a year or two ago, when the country was full of agents, and almost everybody was agent for something or other, a csrtain child of that town, being blessed by the advent of a babybrother, was very inquisitive as to where the little stranger came from. On being informed that the docter had brought it, he stood in a brown study for a few moments, and then, with the intelligent look of one who has solved a difficult matter, asked, " Say, pa, Is he the agent for tk 3m ?" What Obgans of Sense ! The effusiveness of some of our American female cousins is finely illustrated in the following extract from a letter of a young lady of New York : "Oh, how. pleased we were to drive away from the restraints of the city into the free and open air ! Everything looked so nice and beautiful —and, oh, if you had only enjoyed the fragrance of the roses in full bloom ! We were so eager to sniff the delight that a keen, long smell actually pulled up the more delicate flowers by the roots." Nest-Hiding is discounted by Joaquin Miller's latest nonsense : " If all the world a garden were And women were but bowers ; If men were bees that busied there Through all the summer hours ; Oh ! I would hum the garden through, For honey, until I came to you. Then I should hive within your hair, Its sun and gold together ; And I shovdd hide in glory there Through all the changeful weather."

Alphonse, the clerk in Merrill's grocery, was somewhat indisposed on Monday, so much so as to cause comment from the customers as they came in. Two young ladies were in after, a pound of starch, and Alphonse was waiting on them, when a man at the store, having intently observed him for a moment, suddenly remarked : "It is.a decided advantage to you to look pale, Alphonse ." The young man looked up with a grateful expression. " Because it makes your moustache show," added the man. Alphonse winced. " And is it really true that I shall recover?" asked a patient of his doctor. " Infallibly," answered the man of medicine, taking from his pocket a paper full of figures. " Here, look at the statistics of your case; you will find that one per cent, of those attacked with your malady are cured." " Well ?" said the sick man in a dissatisfied manner. ."Well, you are the hundredth person with this disease that I have had under my care, and the first ninety-nine are all dead." It is terrible to get up these mornings at 5 o'clock, with the mercury trying to get out of the bottom of the thermometer, to find every fire in the house gone dead out, the key of the woodhouse down at a charity ball in a'hired girl's pocket, and the hatchet borrowed the evening previous by a boy in the next street to make a sled and not returned. It makes a man wvnt to sell his stove and move into the tropics. You can't fool a visitor from the country on pianos, says the San Francisco Nevjs Letter. They may get taken in at bunko, the strap game, faro, and confidence illusions, but, when it comes to music, you can bet your mucuous membrane they are all there. This week a middle aged farmer's wife from Mind Gulch came to the city, determined to buy a box of music for the girls at home. She had five hundred dollars tied up in a handkerchief. After interviewing one of the polite clerks for over an hour, during which time she had listened to the different tones of sixty-nine Weber pianos, her attention was called to a particular instrument specially recommended by? the courteous Mr. Benham. "Young man," she said, "you can't fool me with no pianner as has got smooth legs like that. I'll have em carved if I die first 1" The astute manager signalled to a clerk to; ry a richly-carved square grand, on which he performed " Kiss Me as my Mother Used." Bringing a hand which had daily milked thirty cows morning and evening for fifteen years on to the shoulder of the'astonished musician, she remarked, "Jes'let up on that for once, Mr. Man, for I don't want no pianner as plays funeral music in my house." With a hasty movement and his neck smarting all over, the youth retreated to the next instrument and plunged into " Hail, Columbia," "Lanigan's Ball," "The Mulligan Guards," and " Pull Down the Blind" till he was black in the face. " Them's my piannerforty!" cried the delighted purchaser, and, paying her money, she departed smilling all over, the happy possessor of " the kind of musicbox as 'ud suit the gals." Tai.e of a Mule. —' Speaking about mules," remarked a six-footer from Harnet County, as he cracked his whip at market, " I've got a mule at home which knows as much as I do, and I want to hear somebody say that I'm half a fool." No one said so, and he went on. "I've stood around here and heard men blow about kicking mules till I've got disgusted. When you come down to kicking, I want to bet on my mule. A friend came along and took dinner with me the other day, and, as he seemed a little downhearted I took him out to see Thomas Jefferson, my champion mule. I was telling the good man how that mule would flop his hind-feet around, and he said he'd like to see a little fun. He'd passed his whole Ufa In the South, but had never seen a mule lay his ■oui into a big time at kicking, " Well," he continuea,

after borrowing some tobacco, " I took Thomas out of the stable, backed him up agin a hill, gin him a cuff on the ear, and we stood back to see the amusement. It was a good place to kick his diundest, and what d'ye s'pose he did ? In ten minutes by the watch he was out of sight. In live more we couldn't feel him with a twelve-foot pole, and—and " The crowd began to yell and sneer, and the narrator looked around and asked, "Does anybody think I'm lying? Would 1 lie for one mule 1 Right here under my arm is a pound of tallow candles which are to light the hole for me to go in after Thomas ; and I got word not an hour ago that the hind-feet of a mule were sticking out of a hill thirty-nine miles as the bird flies from where my mule went in ! I'm shaky on religion, gentleman, but our family never had a liar in it."

About a week or two ago a recently arrived stranger from New York, who had been for a stroll came back to a San Antonio hotel rubbing his eyes and very much disgusted. He took occasion to observe to the clerk: "you have a great deal of dust here in San Antonio." "Y-a-s." drawled the clerk; " I suffer from it myself." " Weak eyes ?" inquired the sympathetic stranger. "Hardly any." "Your lungs are affected then ?" " Not to speak of," yawned the clerk. "In what way, then, do you suffer from the dust ?" asked the stranger, somewhat suprised, "By hearing about forty fools say a thousand times a day, ' You have a great deal of dust here in San Antonio.' " My AYife's Piano.—The deed is accomplished. My wife has got a piano, and now farewell the tranquil mind —farewell content and the evening papers, and the big cigars that make ambition virtue, O, farewell! "And oh, ye mortal engines whose rude throats the immortal Jove's dread clamors counterfeit!" But stop I can't bid them farewell, for one of them has just arrived. It came on a dray. Six men carried it into the parlor, and it grunted awfully. It weighs a ton, shines like a mirror, and has carved cupids climbing up its limbs. And such lungs—whew! My wife has commenced to practise and the first time she touched the machine I thought we were in the midst of a thunderstorm, and the lightning had struck the crockery chest. The cat, with tail erect, took a beeline for a particular friend upon the back fence, demolishing a six-shilling pane of 'glass. The baby awoke, and the little fellow tried his best to beat the instrument, but he could not do it. It beat him. A teacher has been introduced into the house. He wears a huge moustache, looks at me fiercely, smells of garlic, and goes by the name of Count Run-away-never-come-back-by. He played an extract de opera the other night. He ran his fingers through his hair twice, then grinned, then cocked his eye up to the ceiling, like a monkey hunting flies, and then came down one of his fingers and I heard a delightful sound, similar to that of a cockroach dancing upon the tenor string of a fiddle. Down came another finger and I was reminded of the wind whistling through a knot hole in a hen-coop. He touched his thumb, and I thought I was in a orchard listening to the distant brayings of a jackass. Now he ran his fingers along the keys, and I thought of a boy rattling a stick upon a storebox or a picket-fence. All of a sudden he stopped, and I thought something had happened. Then came down both fists, and O, Lord! such a noise was never heard before. I thought a hurricane had struck the house, and the walls were caving in. I imagined I was in the cellar, and a ton of coal was falling upon my head, I thought that the machine had bursted, when the infernal noise stopped, and I heard my wife ejaculate : "Exquisite!" "What the deuce is the matter?" The answer was, "Why, my dear, that's 'La Sonnambula !'" Sonnambula, 1 thought ; and the count rolled up his sheet of paper. He calls that music, but for the life of me I can't make it look like anything else than a rail fence with a lot of juvenile niggers climbing on it.