SOME GOOD STORIES

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1675, 6 April 1904, Page 61

SOME GOOD STORIES

THE COMET—OLIVER WENDELL

HOLMES’S DREAIVi:

The Comet! He is on lxis way, And singing as he flies; The whizzing planets shrink before The spectre of the skies; Ah! well may regal orbs burn blue, And satellites turn pale ; Ten. million cubic miles' of head, Ten billion leagues of tail!

And what would happen to the land, And how would look the sea, If in the bearded' devil’s path Our earth should chance to be? Full hot and high the sea would boil, Full red the forests gleam; Methought I sa.Av and heard it all In a dyspeptic dream!

I saw a. tutor take his tube The Comet’s course to spy; 1 beard a scream—the gathered rays Had stewed the tutor’s eye; I saw a forb —the soldiers all Were armed with goggles green; Pep cracked the guns! whiz flew the balls! Bang went the magazine!

I saw the ox that browsed the grass Writhe in the blistering rays; The herbage in his shrinking jaws Was all a fiery blaze; I saw. huge fishes, boiled to rags, Bob through the bubbling brine', And thoughts of supper crossed my sc>ul; I had been rash ac mine. FORGETFUL. “My father is the most absent-minded man,” said the daughter of a college professor. “Why. when he goes upstairs to dress for going opt, some member of the family is obliged to go up and ‘knock on his door every ten minutes, for fear that he’ll forget' what he’s doing and undress and go to bed.” NOT APPRECIATED. Observing a prim, angular matron in the elevator. Colonel Hankthaader removed his hat. On reaching the tenth floor the elevator conductor, a dignified personage with side whiskers, leaned over and) whispered to the colonel-: “Lady says will you please put y our ’at on again, sir? Your bald ’eadi dazzles her eyes, sir.” THOUGHT HE WAS THE HEAD. He imagines that he is the head, of the family, but this belief is not shared by bis children. He had company recently, and as two of his children began playing nosily. he said, sternly: “.Tommy, stop that noise. Stop it at once.” Tommy looked up as if surprised. Then he resumed the play and the noise, saying to his brother, who was assisting him: “Just listen to papa trying to talk like mamma.” BELIEVE THE DOCTORS AND— Dring water and get typhoid. Drink milk and get tuberculosis. Drink whisky and get the jimjains. Eat soup and get Bright’s disease. Eat meat and encourage apoplexy. Eat oysters and acquire taxemia. Eat dessert and take to paresis. Smoke cigarettes and die eerily. Smoke cigars and get cat af rah. Drink coffee and obtain nervous prostration. Drink wine and get the gout. In order to be entirely healthy one must eat nothing, drink nothing, smoke nothing, and even before breathing one should see that the air is properly sterilised. A THANKFUL SOOT. - “An’ hoo’s the guidwife, Sandy ?” said one farmer to another as they met at the market and exchanged snuff-boxes. “Did ye no hear that she’s died an.’ buried?” said Sandy solemnly. “Dear me!” exclaimed hisi friend sympathetically, “surely it maun ha’e been sudden ?” “Oh, ay,” it was sudden,” returned Sandy. “Ye see, when she turned ill we had nae time tde send for a doctor, sae I gied her a bit medicine I had lyingin a drawer for a year or twa, an’ that I had got frae the doctor for mysel’, but hadha ta’en. It’s a sair loss tae me, but it’s something tae be thankfu’ for I di-dna tak’ the medicine mysel’.” KIPLING’S ORIGINAL. “That tramp is a genijus.” “You don’t say!” “I do, though. He struck me for a dime, saying he was a literary man; ten minutes later he struck me again; ten minutes later he struck me again; tackled me now just as though he had never seen me before.” “Well?” . , “I asked him what literary work was his line, and he said he was the AbsentMinded Beggar.” A CURIOUS HABIT. ‘What a curious habit we have,” remarked the street-car philosopher, ‘of saying that a man is worth so many thousands of po-undls. I know men who Lave many pounds, who, judged from any reasonable standard* that I know.

are not worth anything at all. It is refreshing to hear occasionally of men who do happen to be worth a great deal, even although they are rich, and who are anxious that people should forget they have money and think of them only for their qualities. All the same, it always gives me an unpleasant' turn when I see a man’s worth, put down in pounds.”