SOME GOOD STORIES

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1681, 18 May 1904, Page 43 (Supplement)

SOME GOOD STORIES

RETALIATION. A lawyer, driving along a country road, asked a youth, who was walking in the same direction which way he had to turn to reach B . The youth instructed him, and added that he was going in that direction, and would point out the way. '‘All right, my boy,” said the lawyer; "better bad company than none/’ After jogging some miles farther the boy descended, and thanked the lawyer for the drive, '‘Have I much farther to go ere I reach the B road?” asked the latter. "Oh, you passed it some two or three miles back,” was the answer; "but as I thought bad company better than none, I brought you on?”

A RARE DISEASE. . Mrs Juniper entered the doctor’s consulting room, dragging by the hand an overgrown boy of fourteen. She was excited and impatient; he was dogged and glum. "G doctoi, he has lost his voice! He hasn’t spoken a word for two days,” she said. The boy looked at her sullenly, and suffered the doctor to hold his face up to the light. "Open your mouth. H’m! Tongue all right?” "Yes.” "Hold your head up and let me look at your throat. Seems to be nothing the trouble there. Push your tongue out. Now pull it back. Feel all right?” "Yes.” "Why, Mrs Juniper, there is nothing the matter with him,” said the doctor.

impatiently. "Boy, why don’t you talk ?” "How can I when I ain’t got anything to say?” A CRUSHING REPLY. The first Premier of New Zealand was a witty and eloquent Irishman, James Edward Fitzgerald. On his first election he was subjected to much interruption at the hustings by a butcher, who enjoyed a dual notoriety as a heckler in local politics, and as the owner of the first sausage-machine imported into the new settlement. The crowd wearied of his interjections, and heckled him in turn, and at last one man called to him, "Leave politics, and go back to your sausage-machine!” "If I had the candidate in my sausagemachine, I’d make mince-meat of him,” cried the excited butcher. Fitzgerald, with immobile face, retorted, "Is thy servant a dog, that thou would’st do this thing?”

THE CAR BULLY. She was a demure little woman with a baby. As the open car was crowded, she did not put the little one, who was old enough to sit up, on the seat beside her. She carried it on her lap, and mad® room for a fierce-looking, big man with a newspaper. The child kicked its tiny feet in delight at the strange things it saw while riding along, and its shoes rubbed against tho man’s trousers. "Perhaps, madam,” he exclaimed, "you imagine that this conveyance is your private carriage?” "Oh, no, I don’t,” was the prompt reply. "If it were you wouldn’t be riding in it.”