After-dinner Wit.

Otago Witness, Issue 1990, 17 April 1890, Page 46

After-dinner Wit.

A schoolmaster, being called on to give a toast, produced this sentiment — "Addition to the friends of Old England, subtraction to her wants, multiplication to her blessings, division among her foes, and reduction of her debts and taxes." That needs some beatidg, but there is a neatness in another toast which makes it worthy of a foremost place among examples of after-dinner wit and wisdom. The sentiment thus expressed was— " The Press, the Pulpit, and the Petticoat : the three ruling powers of the day. The first spreads knowledge, the second morals, and the third spreads considerably 1 " That was a pretty touch in an old American minister's speech, in reply to a toast offered by a convivial company of ancient chums : "My old classmates and friends, you remember the story of Munchausen's bugle, in which the frost froze up the tunes as he plaj ed, but they were liberated and rang out a long time after, when the thaw set in. So you warm my heart now; and old thoughts, old affections, old dreams, come back upon me like lost music." At a certain public dinner a preacher was called upon for a toast. The evening was so far advanced that every person present had been toasted already, and also all their friends. But the good man was a person of large sympathies, and rising from his seat, said that, without troubling the company with any preliminary observations, he begged to propose the health of " All people that on earth do dwell." It is related that a physician's little girl, when called upon to give a toast, gave " the health of papa and mamma and all the world. But she suddenly corrected the sentiment — " Not all the world, for then papa would bave no patients." As ingenious and novel an after-dinner sentiment as any of the foregoing, was, perhaps, that given by Alphonse Karr when present at a banquet of medical men, where toasts were drunk of certain celebrities, when the president said : " Monsieur Karr, we now ask a toast from you." The

poet rose, and replied modestly—" I propose the health of all who ate sick." Pine Sentiments.— " Yes, gentlemen," he said, eloquently, and with a patriotic thrill in his voice, " I think that when an American citizen is tendered a nomination to office by his fellow-men it is his sacred duty to accept it. Let him put aside all thoughts of self. A man can serve his country in times of peace as nobly as he can in times of war. G-entlemen, friends, I thank you for tbe honour you have conferred upon me, and, even though the salary may be small, I will " "It is not a salaried office, Colonel,' explained one of his admirers. "Wha-a-atl No salary? Then Im dumbed if I accept it ! "—Texas Siftings. Answered Cobbecti/Y.— A teacher in one of the public schools of Detroit was giving a lesson on patriotism. The children seemed to know very little about Washington except the hatchet story and the fact that he was a great and good man, which they had read in the second reader. At last tbe teacher said : " You stay home from school on Washington's birthday, but you never do on my birbhday. Why not?" And with surprising emphasis came the " 'Cause he never told a lie."— Detroit Free Press. __—