Odds and Ends.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 227, 15 January 1876, Page 3

Odds and Ends.

A sentence in the language of flowers. —lf you wish for " heart's case" never look to " marry gold." A ninety-five-year-old colored dame, residing in West Chester, Pa., is down with the whoopingcough. Sad.— A contemporary says :—" A child was run over in the street by a waggon three years old, with pantalets on, which never spoke afterwards," In New York, clergymen have. commenced their hacking cough in anticipation of being sent to Europe this summer for the benefit of their health. Working Out.—Being asked what made him so dirty, an unwashed street arab's reply was, " I was made, as they tell me, of dust, and I suppose it works out."

Disconsolate. —"I must marry that girl," said a disconsolate young man. " She whistles, and it'll never do to trifle with the affections of a girl that whistles."

Michigan girls are none of your sentimental kind that go around with croquet and the like. They pitch horseshoes and practise high kicking at the clothes-line.

When a Canada girl loves she loves like a hand engine going to a fire. In a breach of promise suit it was shown that a young lady wrote to her lover eighty times a day. A. Chicago barber cleared eight thousand dollars last year. The secret of his success was that he employed mutes, and didn't offer his customers any "patent hair tonic." An Irish geologist picked up a curious piece of stone some time ago in Wicklow, Ireland, which on scientific examination is pronounced to be a petrified plug of tabacco. New York young ladies lace tight to show economical young fellows how little waste they can get along with for a husband. .Also, on their own account, how much squeezing they can stand. A lady said to a small Aberdeen boy she found crying in the street the other day:—" Will you stop crying if I give you a penny ?" "No," said he ; " but if you'll make it twopence I'll stop." Ambiguous.—ln a country churchyard there is the following epitaph :—" Here lies the body of James Robinson and Ruth his wife ;" and underneath this text— "Their warefare is accomplished." " The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. In every clime, from Lapland to Japan ; To fix one spark of beauty's heavenly ray, The proper study of mankind is man." A presbytery in the North of Scotland (to prevent mistakes, 'tis fifty years ago) had a respected member of the name of Honey. At a large convivial party sundry conundrums were proposed for solution. A venerable member of presbytery, anxious to contribute his share to the common stock, propounded, Samson-like, the following riddle :—" Why is our presbytery like a bee-skep ?" Whether or not the company saw the sweet solution, or to vex the patriarch, there was an anxious silence, broken at last by a fine young damsel upsetting the gravity of the circle by the laugh inspiring answer, " Oh, yes ! I see it —just because it contains so many drones," The same minister thereafter never ventured the same riddle.

Warranted Frksh.—A confectioner, who has just been reading Shakspere in the intervals of business, says it's all nonsense for the bard to talk about custom paling anyone's infinite variety. It's the lack of custom which would do that.

His Answer.—A gentleman recently travelling in the country called out to a boy, " Where does this road go to, my lad?" "Well, I don't know where it goes, but it's always here when I come along." Simple Truth.—The late Mr Delahunty, member for Waterford, once commenced a speech in the House of Commons with the words, "Mr Speaker, Ireland is an island. It is entirely surrounded with water."

No allusion has yet been publicly made iu any woman's rights journal to the fact that next year is leap year. Of course the matter has been overlooked. But what legal authority is the custom based on ? It is an " odd" custom.

In the following happy fashion an attached Irish servant congratulated her mistress on her husband's elevation to the judicial bench : " Oh, ma'am, everybody says that master will make such a good judge—such a partial judge, ma'am ! " The Greatest Joiner.—The lawyer; he can place a tenant, empannel a jury, box a witness, bore the court, chisel a client, augur the gains, floor a witness, cut his board, nail the case, hammer the desk, file his bill, and shave a whole community, The collection of monograms is the latest wrinkle among the young ladies of America. When a large number is obtained the young lady pastes them on her fan, and the one who has the most and finest holds up her head in lofty scorn at everybody else. A louisa county man tamed a prairie dog that somebody sent him until the docile little creature would eat off his hand. At least it ate off about three-quarters of his thumb recently, but died of concussion in the brain before it could finish the hand.

Deaf and dumb men have a poor chance in Texas. One of them went to a farmhouse, and when asked what he wanted, put his hand in his pocket to get a pencil, and he was at once shot by the farmer, who thought his visitor was feeling for a pistol. Two men named Charles H. Miller simultaneously had divorce suits in a Newhaven Court. A decree in one case was granted. Both Millers took the decision for their own and remarried, and the Miller who isn't divorced, therefore, has two wives on hand. Rural Crudity of Thought.—Having recently gone on a visit to some friends in the country during the heated term, a lady had the following delightful experience of the crudity of thought and deficiency of tact in rural life :—The lock of her dressing-case got out of order, aud it was sent to the village blacksmith to be opened. It chanced that during a saunter through the village with her hostess they passed the blacksmith's shop, when the lady stopped and asked if he had got Miss Blank's dressing case opened. " Yes, ma am," said the ingenuous villager ; " but I'm sorry to say that in doing it I broke one of the bottles of brandy." Tableau ! A Drunkard's Will.—l leave to society a ruined character, a wretched example, a memory that will soon rot. I leave to my parents, during the rest of their lives, as much sorrow as humanity in a feeble and decrepit state can well sustain. I leave to my brothers and sisters as much mortification as I could bring upon them..,, I leave to my wife a broken heart, a life of wretchedness and shame, to weep over my premature death. I give and bequeath to each of my children ignorance and low character, and the remembrance that their father was a drunken brute. Mark Twain, in the August Atlantic, mourns over the diminished length of the Mississippi in strain : He says, " Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague—vague. Please observe :—ln the space of 170 years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself 242 miles. There is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see in the Old Oolitic Silurian period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi river was upwards of 1,300,000 miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that 742 years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and threequarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns out of such a trifling investment of fact." There was a merry fellow who dined at Plato's some ages since, and the conversation over the wine turning upon love and matrimony, he said he had " learned from a very ancient tradition that man was originally created male and female in one, each individual being provided with a duplicate set of limbs, and performing his locomotive functions with a kind of rotary movement like a wheel; that man became in consequence so excessively insolent that Jupiter, indignant, split him in two. Since that time," added the merry guest to the philosopher, "each half runs about the world in quest of its other half, and if the two congenial halves meet, they are a very loving couple. If the contrary, they are subject to a miserable, peevish, nagging, and uncongenial matrimony. But the quest is rendered difficult by the fact that one man alighting upon the half that never belonged to him, another necessarily falls into the same error ; and thus, in the course of many centuries, society has been thrown into irretrievable confusion." An Economical Executioner. They have a sheriff in California at present who is evidently anxious that the law should be carried out at once economically and effectively. It would seem that on one or two occasions men who have desired a free transport to New York have hit on the ingenious idea of accusing themselves of murders, and have in consequence been taken to that famous city, when, Of course, their innocence has been established, and they have been released. Another man lately tried this scheme on the sheriff, who, however, has hit on a method of stopping it. The last self-accused slaughterer went to the sheriff, and told a long story of the agonies of conscience which afflicted him. "So your conscience ain't easy, eh ?" the official asked. "Ah," replied the murderer, "I have the curse of Cain upon my brow; I wander, but find no rest." "And you aie the man?" "lam." "And you want to be hanged?" "I feel that I shan't rest easy till I am hanged." " Well, my friend," replied the sheriff thoughtfully, "the county treasury ain't_ well fixed at present, and I don't want to take any risks in case you're not the man, and are. just fishing for a free ride to New York. Besides, those New York courts can't be trusted to hang a man. On the whole, as you say you deserve to be killed, and want to be killed, and as it can't make much difference to you or society how you are killed, so long as you are, I guess I'll kill you myself." The sheriff drew a revolver from his pocket, but before he could level it the murderer was down the road out of shot.