VARIETIES.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2332, 7 September 1880, Page 3

VARIETIES.

In view of the fact that a change of air is an excellent remedy for whoopingcough, someone has proposed that children afflicted with that disease be sent up in a balloon attached to the earth and provided with toys and other promoters of comfort and happiness. Fancy the temptation to children haters to cut the cords and let the little darlings go coughing up into the empyrean. Peace and War.—Mr. Rusk in has just said what he considers a,good thing about war. It is this : “ You fancy you arc sorry for the pain of others. How, I tell you this, that if the usual course of war, instead of unroofing peasants’ houses and ravaging peasants’ fields, merely broke the china upon your own dressingroom tables, no war in civilised countries would last a week.” Mrs. Marriwcll is not a woman to waste much lime in vain repining. When Marriwcll had been consigned to mother earth, she was heard to murmur, as she wiped her tears away, “ There, I feel better now , I’ve had a real good cry. And now for somebody else to make good my loss !” An Irish gentleman once remarked in the House of Commons that the French were the most restless nation in the universe —adding very pointedly, “ They will never be at peace till they are engaged in another war.” A Philadelphian undertaker recently received an order to furnish a rich cloth-casket with velvet trimmings and solid silver-plate and handles. The interior of the casket was to he lined with white satin and silk trimmings. All this was for a dead dog belonging to a wealthy family up town. The animal had been nursed and taken care of for the past twenty years. The dead animal lay in the casket wrapped in a mantle of white satiu, with white silk ribands around tbe neck. Tbe remains were taken to a cemetery close to New York and put in the family vault. Six carriages containing the friends of the dog, followed the remains to the cemetery.

“ I can’t trust you,” said a rum-seller to an impoverished customer. “ You should let liquor alone ; if you hadn.t drunk so much of it you might be riding in your carriage.”—“And if 3 r ou hadn’t sold it,” retorted the victim, “ you’d have Veen my driver !” It was the 'Rev. Ten Brooch, an American minister, who, when elected by the laity and rejected by the clergy, was asked, “If a man is ‘ Eight Ecvcrcnd’ who is wholly elected bishop, what is a man who is only half elected?” “The left reverend,” was his witty reply. The young man had given his views about everything to everybody for an unendurable half-hour, when the old man said, with a nice courtesy— ‘ I beg your pardon my dear sir, but if you be "in teaching everybody at eighteen wlmn do you intend’learning anything yoursel f ?’ Being called to account for the statement that a certain meeting was “ a large and respectable one,” when only

one other person be ibs himself was present, a repor cr insisted that what ho hail set down wat literally true; “for,” said he “ I was large and the other was respectable.” A gentleman was caught in the middle of Hyde Park during one of the recent fogs. After stumbling about some time he came across a man who was walking along us though it was bright sunlight. “Come with me,” ho said, “for I can find my way about,” He was a blind man.

Bachelor Housekeeping.—“ Thomas,” said an old bachelor to his servant, “I hare always placed the greatest confidence in you ; now, tell mo, Thomas, how is it that my butcher’s hills are so remarkably large, and yet we have such bad dinners?”—“Realty, sir, I don’t know ; for I’m sure we never have anything nice in the kitchen that we don’t send some of it to the parlor.

There must be a strong tendency to rhyme as well as reason in the bucolic interior of California, The following is the direction put upon the Ligurian bees, forwarded to Los Angelos to Mr Creighton, en route to New Zealand : Expressman, handle with care, For yon have Italian bees in there,

Out of the sun and in the shade, Or low in death they’ll all be laid. Robert James Creighton, to him they go, Who lives in the city of Francisco. Him there these pets will be sure to meet, At No. 2 Montgomery street.

The bees should have hummed sweetly to the above pretty Georgia on their on their voyage across the Pacific. — “ New Zealand Herald.”