“During your natural life,” I commenced, addressing a waiter who stood near by, evidently enjoying my surprise, “whether while officiating as head steward on board of a floating palace on the Mississippi, or serving as second cook on a grain scow on the San Joaquin, did you ever run across a place where the cockroaches were one-ninetieth part as numerous as they are in this restaurant?”
“Numerous?” he answered; “you should be here a warm, sunshiny day, if you want to see cockroaches, for then all the invalids are out—those fellows who have had their movements across the table accelerated by a snapping finger, or such as have only tasted the poison scattered around for their benefit, or those who have taken an overdose and throwed it up again. These lie in cracks and cupboards, with stiffened joints and weak stomachs, when the weather is cold and cloudy; but when a warm day comes, they are all abroad and busy.”
“Well, I will bear that in mind,” I said, rising from the table, “and when the next total eclipse of the sun occurs, which, as I am informed, will take place in about four hundred and thirty-seven years, I may come into this restaurant for another meal, and not until then,” and with that I left.
The editor of a city paper having occasion to take a trip into the country, prevailed upon me to assume the responsibility of answering letters from correspondents. The task is an onerous one—the more so as the editor, with that cunning ever noticeable in a person who takes the cream of a job, left me to reply only to the knottiest epistles. But I will some time get even with him, however. I will assume the editorial “we,” and should I waken the wrath of any person, _he_ will be the sufferer. Here is a copy of my answer to “Katie:”—
“The minister was perfectly right in refusing to marry the couple, if, as you say, the bride insisted upon holding her poodle in her arms during the ceremony. The more so as the clergyman was near-sighted. He might possibly mistake the puppy for the bridegroom.”
Another person accuses a correspondent of a mis-statement. He says it was the editor of the _Farmer_, and not the editor of the _Examiner_, who planted the package of No. 16 homœopathic pills sent him from the country by a wag, as the seeds of a Sandwich Island cabbage.