THE JOKERS BETRAYED.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1149, 8 March 1884, Page 3

THE JOKERS BETRAYED.

In New Zealand (never mind the town) there wag, according to a Sydney contemporary, one John Smith—not Sydney, Clad, Plantagenec, Coriolanus Smyth, Smythe, or Smyithe, mind you but plain John Smith—who had the character of being an easy-going slab of a fellow, that could always be counted on not to forget honors of whist, or compromise himself with the strong woman of a travelling circus. There is no man more easily sold than your flashy, superficial chaterer, who thinks himself ‘fly’ to every move, and no more difficult to circumvent than the assuming citizen who just lies low like Brer rabbit, and never shifts a piece without having another behind to back it up. At last the town heard that John was about to visit England—some said for a change, for a wife others. Then the smart men of the settlement, the know ing mirth-loving ones, determined to make a present an hour before he went abroad. They gave the jeweller orders for a 17s aluminium watch, to be presented by the Mayor, and the back parlor of a public house rang with laughter and songs that night, as the conspirators imagined how poor John would claw the air when he discovered the trick. But he got wind of it in time, and the person who told him said the proper course to pursue was to receive the present, and then turn round, show his knowledge of tha mean details, strike an attitude, crush the trumpery thing with his heel and scorn the presenters with withering words. This might be G. V. Brooke’s or Mr Irving’s line, but it did not suit John Smith, What did suit him was this : He went to the jeweller, to whom he was unknown, —said that committee had decided at she last moment that as John Smith, after all, was a decent, honest-fellow, it would be to rather shabby to give him such a send off, and resolved that the watchmaker’s only 80-guinea article should be sent instead of the aluminum. It was sent ; the Mayor presented it with a neat speech. John received it cheerily and responded modestly ; the subscribers were in fits at the magnitude of the joke, and a wheezy trombone struck up ‘ The girl I left behind me.’ When John’s vessel was splitting the South Pacific waves at 16 miles an hour, the Mayor, the chief mover in the affair and who had made himself responsible for the payment—received the jeweller’s bill. He pulled through, but the doctor said it was the worst case of homicidal hypochondriasis he’d met in his thirty years’ practice.

Miss Jenny Marks, of Baltimore, won a sewing machine by making a guess at the number of pills in a bottle in a window. There were 25,100 pills in the bottle and she guessed 25,190. There were over 5000 guesses, and the worst one was 9,000,000. The man who guessed 9.000,000, was one of those fellows who get their education by reading meters. — Oil City Derrick. Drunken Stuff. —How many children and women are slowly but surely dying, or rather being killed, by excessive doctoring, or the daily use of some drug or drunken stuff called medicine, that no one knows what it is made of, who can easily be cured and saved by Hop Bitters, which is so pure, simp ! e, and harmless that the most frail woman, weakest invalid, or smallest child cun trust it ! See Advt. woman’s rights. The right to watch while others sleep, The right o'er other’s woes to weep, The right to succor in distress, The right when others curse to bless, The right to love when others scorn, The right to comfort all who mourn, The right to shed new joy on earth. The right to feel the soul’s high worth, The right to lead the soul to God Along the path her Saviour trod ; Such women’s rights God will bless And crown her champion with success.