A member of an eminent St. Louis law firm went to Chicago to consult a client. When he arrived he found that he had unaccountably forgotten the client’s name. He telegraphed his partner, “What is our client’s name?” The answer read, “Brown, Walter E. Yours is Allen, William B.”
A traveling man stopped at an Indiana hotel. The proprietor told him he had not a room in the house. The man said he must have a room. Finally the proprietor told him there was a room, a little room separated by a thin partition from a nervous man who had lived in the house for ten years.
“He is so nervous,” said the landlord, “I don’t dare put any one in that room. The least noise might give him a nervous spell that would endanger his life.”
“Oh, give me a room,” said the traveler. “I’ll be so quiet he’ll not know I’m there.”
The room was given the traveler. He slipped in noiselessly and began to disrobe. He took off one article of clothing after another as quietly as a burglar. At last he came to his shoes. He unlaced a shoe and dropped it.
The shoe fell to the floor with a great noise. The offending traveler, horrified at what he had done, waited to hear from the nervous man. Not a sound. He took off the second shoe and placed it noiselessly upon the floor; then in absolute silence finished undressing and crawled between the sheets.
Half an hour went by. He had dropped into a doze when there came a tremendous knocking on the partition.
The traveler sat up in bed trembling and dismayed. “Wh-wha-what’s the matter?” he asked.
“Hang you! Drop that other shoe, will you?”
There was once an Irishman, who sought employment as a diver, bringing with him his native enthusiasm and a certain amount of experience. Although he had never been beneath the water, he had crossed an ocean of one variety and swallowed nearly an ocean of another. But he had the Hibernian smile, which is convincing, and the firm chanced to need a new man. And so on the following Monday morning Pat hid his smile for the first time in a diving helmet.
Now, the job upon which the crew to which Pat had attached himself was working in comparatively shallow water, and Pat was provided with a pick and told to use it on a ledge below in a manner with which he was already familiar.