Varieties.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 658, 2 July 1870, Page 3

Varieties.

What is that which is sometimes with a head, without a head, with a tail, and without a tail? — A wig. Why is a horse halfway through a turnpike-gate like a penny ?—Because there is a headon one side and a tall on the other. A person once entering the House of Commons when the Rump Parliament was sitting, exclaimed, "These are goodly gentlemen; I could work for them all my days for nothing." What trade are you, my good friend ?" said one of the attendants. "A. rope maker, sir," replied the other. First Rough: " We're agoin' to be edgicated now, c'mpulaory, or else go to the treadmill!" Second Rough: "Ah I no vunder so many poor people's a emigratin' J" —Punch. " Come, Sambo, get up, my boy; it's after sunrise." " What ob dat, massa ? 'Spose if sun yise two hours fore day, poor Sambo must git üb, cos sun yise, eh? Don't come dat game ober dis nigger, no how." " Recollect, sir," said a tavern-keeper to a gentleman who was about leaving his house without paying the reckoning, "recollect, sir, if you lose your purse, you didn't pull it out here." The broad hint was taken. "As to being conflicted with the gout," said Mrs Partington, " high living don't bring it on. It is incoherent in some families, and is banded down from father to son. Mr Hammer, poor soul, who has been so long ill with it, disinherits it from his wife's grandmother." The poet Gray was notoriously fearful of fire, and kept a ladder of ropes in his bedroom. Some, misobievous young men at Cambridge, knowing this, roused him from below in the middle of a dark night with the cry of fire ! The staircase, they said, was in flames. Up went the window, and down he came on his rope ladder as fast as he could into a tub of water which they had placed there to receive him. He was put out. Whittier, tbe American Quaker poet, being asked for an autograph the other day, at once complied by penning— "The name is but a shadow, which we find . Too often larger than the man behind. " John G. Whittier." A Manchester paper gives the following as a note of excuse sent to a schoolmaster in that neighbourhood, in explanation of a pupil's absence : " Kepotoam tullid kolls dunnut waellim cossis rigs sor;" which may be thus translated: — "Kept at home to lade coals; do not wale (beat) him, because his rig (hack) is sore." Seventeen years ago, when Baron Haussman was Prefet of Bordeaux, he drove out with the Emperor, and being a man of commanding presence and winning manners, quite dwarfed the hero of the coup d'etat. " Prefet," said Napoleon, " the citizens seem to regard their Prefet and forget their Emperor." "Sire," was the courtly reply,; " when a regiment is marching the crowd is always struck with the drum-major, but it is not to be concluded they forget the general in command." That reply was the making of Baron Haussman.