“I want some cigars for my husband for Christmas.”
“Well, I don’t know, exactly; but he is a middle-aged man and always dresses in black.”
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., tells a story of his father:
“Father tells many stories. Sometimes he tells a new one. Not long ago he related one to me that concerned a man who had imbibed rather too freely. The man, in this condition, fell into a watering trough. To the officer who came to help him out as he wallowed in the water, he said:
“‘Offzer, I ken save self. You save women an’ shildern.’”
“On Sunday, September 20, the wife of ---- of a daughter. Others please copy.”
Bret Harte was so frequently complimented as the author of “Little Breeches” that he was almost as sorry it was ever written as was Colonel John Hay, who preferred his fame to rest on more ambitious works. A gushing lady who prided herself upon her literary tastes, said to him once: “My dear Mr. Harte, I am so delighted to meet you. I have read everything you ever wrote, but of all your dialect verse there is none that compares to your ‘Little Breeches.’”
“I quite agree with you, madam,” said Mr. Harte, “but you have put the little breeches on the wrong man.”
Mr. Knox, the Secretary of State in Taft’s Cabinet, was formerly engaged in the practise of law in Pittsburg.
One day, says a friend, Mr. Knox was much put out to find on his arrival at his office that everything was topsy-turvy and that the temperature of his rooms was much too low for comfort. Summoning his office-boy, a lad but recently entered his employ, the lawyer asked who had raised every window in the place on such a cold morning.
“Who is Mr. Muldoon?” asked the attorney.
“Who carried off my waste-basket?” was the next question.
Mr. Knox looked sternly at the boy and said: “See here, Richard, we call men by their first names here. We don’t ‘mister’ them in this office. Do you understand?”
In a few minutes he reappeared and in a shrill, piping voice announced:
“There’s a gentleman that wants to see you, Philander.”
A Scottish parson, still on the under side of forty, was driving home from an outlying hamlet when he overtook a young woman. He recognized her as the maid of all work at a farm which he would pass, so he pulled up and offered her a lift. Mary gladly accepted his offer and they chatted pleasantly all the way to the farm gate.