Toaster's Handbook Part 107

MAKING GOOD

"What's become ob dat little chameleon Mandy had?" inquired Rufus.

"Oh, de fool chile done lost him," replied Zeke. "She wuz playin' wif him one day, puttin' him on red to see him turn red, an' on blue to see him turn blue, an' on green to see him turn green, an' so on. Den de fool gal, not satisfied wif lettin' well enough alone, went an' put him on a plaid, an' de poor little thing went an' bust himself tryin' to make good."

_See also_ Success.

MALARIA

The physician had taken his patient's pulse and temperature, and proceeded to ask the usual questions.

"It--er--seems," said he, regarding the unfortunate with scientific interest, "that the attacks of fever and the chills appear on alternate days. Do you think--is it your opinion--that they have, so to speak, decreased in violence, if I may use that word?"

The patient smiled feebly. "Doc," said he, "on fever days my head's so hot I can't think, and on ague days I shake so I can't hold an opinion."

MARKS(WO)MANs.h.i.+P

An Irishman who, with his wife, is employed on a truck-farm in New Jersey, recently found himself in a bad predicament, when, in attempting to evade the onslaughts of a savage dog, a.s.sistance came in the shape of his wife.

When the woman came up, the dog had fastened his teeth in the calf of her husband's leg and was holding on for dear life. Seizing a stone in the road, the Irishman's wife was about to hurl it, when the husband, with wonderful presence of mind, shouted:

"Mary! Mary! Don't throw the stone at the dog! throw it at me!"

Mary had a little lamb, It's fleece was gone in spots, For Mary fired her father's gun, And lamby caught the shots!

--_Columbia Jester_.

MARRIAGE

MRS. QUACKENNESS--"Am yo' daughtar happily mar'd, Sistah Sagg?"

MRS. SAGG--"She sho' is! Bless goodness she's done got a husband dat's skeered to death of her!"

"Where am I?" the invalid exclaimed, waking from the long delirium of fever and feeling the comfort that loving hands had supplied. "Where am I--in heaven?"

"No, dear," cooed his wife; "I am still with you."

Archbishop Ryan was visiting a small parish in a mining district one day for the purpose of administering confirmation, and asked one nervous little girl what matrimony is.

"It is a state of terrible torment which those who enter are compelled to undergo for a time to prepare them for a brighter and better world,"

she said.

"No, no," remonstrated her rector; "that isn't matrimony: that's the definition of purgatory."

"Leave her alone," said the Archbishop; "maybe she is right. What do you and I know about it?"

"Was Helen's marriage a success?"

"Goodness, yes. Why, she is going to marry a n.o.bleman on the alimony."--_Judge_.

JENNIE--"What makes George such a pessimist?"

JACK--"Well, he's been married three times--once for love, once for money and the last time for a home."

Matrimony is the root of all evil.

One day Mary, the charwoman, reported for service with a black eye.

"Why, Mary," said her sympathetic mistress, "what a bad eye you have!"

"Yes'm."

"Well, there's one consolation. It might have been worse."

"Yes'm."

"You might have had both of them hurt."

"Yes'm. Or worse'n that: I might not ha' been married at all."

A wife placed upon her husband's tombstone: "He had been married forty years and was prepared to die."

"I can take a hundred words a minute," said the stenographer.

"I often take more than that," said the prospective employer; "but then I have to, I'm married."