"Why was it you never married again, Aunt Sallie?" inquired Mrs. McClane of an old colored woman in West Virginia.
"'Deed, Miss Ellie," replied the old woman earnestly, "dat daid nigger's wuth moah to me dan a live one. I gits a pension."--_Edith Howell Armor_.
If England had a system of pensions like ours, we should see that "all that was left of the Noble Six Hundred" was six thousand pensioners.
A pessimist is a man who lives with an optimist.--_Francis Wilson_.
How happy are the Pessimists! A bliss without alloy Is theirs when they have proved to us There's no such thing as joy!
A pessimist is one who, of two evils, chooses them both.
"I had a mighty queer surprise this morning," remarked a local stock broker. "I put on my last summer's thin suit on account of this extraordinary hot weather, and in one of the trousers pockets I found a big roll of bills which I had entirely forgotten."
"Were any of them receipted?" asked a pessimist.
To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.--_Fronde_.
With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed: And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.
Yesterday this day's madness did prepare; Tomorrow's silence, triumph, or despair. Drink! For you know not whence you came, nor why; Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where.
A Staten Island man, when the mosquitoes began to get busy in the borough across the bay, has been in the habit every summer of transplanting his family to the Delaware Water Gap for a few weeks. They were discussing their plans the other day, when the oldest boy, aged eight, looked up from his geography and said:
"Pop, Philadelphia is on the Delaware River, isn't it?"
"I wonder if that's what makes the Delaware Water Gap?" insinuated the youngster.--_S.S. Stinson_.
Among the guests at an informal dinner in New York was a bright Philadelphia girl.
"These are snails," said a gentleman next to her, when the dainty was served. "I suppose Philadelphia people don't eat them for fear of cannibalism."
"Oh, no," was her instant reply; "it isn't that. We couldn't catch them."
Little grains of short weight, Little crooked twists, Fill the land with magnates And philanthropists.