LITTLE JOHNNEY'S PRACTICAL JOKE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3677, 27 April 1883, Page 4

LITTLE JOHNNEY'S PRACTICAL JOKE.

You see, pa chews tobacco, and it ispretty hard on him to sit all through the sermon without taking a chew, and he gets nervous. He always reaches around in his pistol pocket when they stand up to sing the last time and feels in his tobacco box and gets out a chew, and puts it in his mouth when the minister pronounces the benediction, and when they get out doors he is all ready to spit. He sdwnys does that, AVell, my chum had a present on Christinas of a music box, just about as big as pa's tobacco box, and all you have to do is to touch a spring and it plays

"She's a Daisy, She's a Dumpling." I borrowed it and put it in pa's pistol pocket, where he keeps his tobacco box, and when tho choir got most through singing pa readied his hand iv his pocket and began to fumble around for a chew. He touched the spring, and just as eveiybody bowed their head to receive the benediction, and it was so still you could hear a g-iun drop fall, the music box began to play, and in the stillness it sounded like a church organ.

AVell, I thought ma would sink. The minister heard it and he looked towards pa, iind everybody looked towards pa, too, and pa turned red, and the music-box kept up, " She's a Daisy," and the minister looked mad and said "Amen," and the people began to put on their coats, and the minister told the deacon to hunt up the source of that worldly music, and they took pa into the room back of the pulpit and searched him, aud ma says pa will | have to be churched. They kept the music box, and I have got to carry in coal to get money enough to buy my chum a new music box.