In conclusion we may note that the only disappointing answer was received from Signor Crinuto, the famous pianist, who replied, "I have never had a close shave, and never intend to have one."
[Illustration: THE WEEK-END AND THE EXHAUSTED MIDDLE.
_Client (to office-boy)._ "CAN I SEE MR. BROWN?"
_Office-Boy._ "AWAY FOR THE WEEK-END, SIR."
_Client_. "WHICH?" _Office-Boy._ "NEXT, SIR."]
"A Christmas Tree Entertainment will be held in Pelican Lake schoolhouse on Tuesday, Dec. 23. Everybody welcome, no admission."--_Vermilion Standard_ (Alberta. No relation to _The Sporting Times_).
You are at perfect liberty to hang about outside.
"No one can deny that it is essential London should have a thoroughly equipped shin hospital."--_Advt. in "Sphere."_
FROM A GENERAL KNOWLEDGE (SIC) EXAMINATION.
The Cat and Mouse Act is an Act by which a cat may not kill a mouse unless when necessary.
The Apocalypse is an ailment one has apolcalyptic fits.
Sea-legs are when you don't have legs but a tail.
The All Red Route is the human throat or swallow.
Ten instruments for an orchestra are banjo, pianola, concertina, mandoline, psalteries, shawms, bagpipes, bells to clash with, violins, and bassinette.
EMERSON says somewhere that there are great ways of borrowing; that, if you can contrive to transmute base metal into fine, nobody will worry as to where you got your base metal from. But, when it is the other way about, I think you must not be surprised if people ask you where you lifted your gold. And the answer, in the case of Miss ELEANOR GATES, is that the nuggets were the property of LEWIS CARROLL. She has taken the sprightly and fantastic humour of _Alice in Wonderland,_ passed it through the alembic (if that is the word) of her American imagination, and the result is something that hardly lets you smile at all. It is not a typical product of native industry, but even that does not make it much easier for us to grasp the secret of its success over there. It would seem that nearly all Transatlantic humour, indigenous or adoptive, is apt, like certain wines, to suffer in the process of sea-transit.
Her "Poor Little Rich Girl" is poor because her parents are too rich. Her father is too busy with finance and her mother with social climbing to spare time for their daughter's company, so they leave her to the care of governesses and menials. Her nurse, anxious for an evening out at a picture-palace, gives the child an overdose of sleeping-mixture, with the result that she nearly dies of it. In the course of delirious dreams she finds herself in the "Tell-Tale Forest" (which threatens to recall _The Palace of Truth_), and here all the picturesque phrases which she has been in the childish habit of misinterpreting in their literal sense--"a bee in the bonnet," to "ride hobbies," "to play ducks and drakes," "to pay the piper," and so forth--are realised in human or animal form. With these are mixed the familiar figures of her waking life, all of them exposed in their true characters so that you can distinguish the devotion of the doctor (who now appears in pink because he likes riding hobbies) and the affection of the teddy-bear (now expanded to human proportions) from the serpentine nature of the governess and the double-faced dealings of the nurse. Her father, who is a stranger to her, comes on dressed in banknotes and chained to a safe; her mother, also a stranger, wears a society bee which buzzes in the place where her bonnet would have been; and five samples of the fashionable world, where, as you know, everybody thinks the same thing at the same time, let off recitatives from time to time in unison. And there was much talk about "Robin Hood's Barn," a thing I was never told about at an age when I am sure it would have given me sincere pleasure.