intently—in vain. He cupped a hand to his ear, but there was only silence. At last, in despair, he spoke his thought aloud:

   "It's come at last! I know you've been talking all this while, but I haven't heard a single word."

   The answer, given with a grin, was explicit and satisfying to the worried deaf man:

   "I hain't been talkin'—jest a-chewin'."

   The visitor to the poet's wife expressed her surprise that the man of genius had failed to dedicate any one of his volumes to the said wife. Whereupon, said wife became flustered, and declared tartly:

   "I never thought of that. As soon as you are gone, I'll look through all his books, and if that's so, I never will forgive him!"

   The schoolboy, after profound thought, wrote this definition of the word "spine," at his teacher's request.

   "A spine is a long, limber bone. Your head sets on one end and you set on the other."

   Phil May, the artist, when once down on his luck in Australia, took a job as waiter in a very low-class restaurant. An acquaintance came into the place to dine, and was aghast when he discovered the artist in his waiter.

   "My God!" he whispered. "To find you in such a place as this."

   Phil May smiled, as he retorted:

   "Oh, but, you see, I don't eat here."

   A woman in the mountains of Tennessee was seated in the doorway of the cabin, busily eating some pig's feet. A neighbor hurried up to tell of how her husband had become engaged in a saloon brawl and had been shot to death. The widow continued munching on a pig's foot in silence while she listened to the harrowing news. As the narrator paused, she spoke thickly from her crowded mouth:

   "Jest wait till I finish this-here pig's trotter, an' ye'll hear some hollerin' as is hollerin'."

   Some wasps built their nests during the week in a Scotch clergyman's best breeches. On the Sabbath as he warmed up to his preaching, the wasps, too, warmed up, with the result that presently the minister was leaping about like a jack in the box, and slapping his lower anatomy with great vigor, to the amazement of the congregation.

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