A GOOD JOKE.

Observer, Volume 7, Issue 232, 21 February 1885, Page 3

A GOOD JOKE.

It does not say much for the shrewdness of our contemporaries that they have treated seriously that huge joke' of Keuter's about the reward of £10,000, offered in the United Irishman by some person unknown, for th* body cf H.B.H. the Prince of Wales, dead or alive. The story is too much like a whale, in fact like several W(h)ales. It seems .there are too many Scotchman in the Auckland press. . Mark Twain . tried to get a Scotchman to see a joke. He bought him a microscope and a pair of sxjectacles, administered laughing-gas, and then read over some of his happiest efforts, one of which had made a stone Gorgon on a public building in N"ew York split itself with laughing. But the Scotchman couldn't see it. He only gave a church-yard yawn. Mark was exasperated. His credit was at stake, and Besides he felt he was growing morose arid melancholy, and wanted to kill someone. He determined to make that Scotchman laugh or perish in the attempt. So he got a pick-axe and a spade, dug a shaft in the man's head, planted his best joke, covered it up, and left it to germinate and grow. Twelve months later the man returned from Chicago, and got the joke wrong end first. We believe some of the descendants of this Scotchman are now editing our contemporaries. We hear Eeuter is a German Jew, but he must have a strain of Scotch blood in his veins. He has killed Gordon half a dozen times, and each time the hero of Khartoum has come to life again. If Gordon had been one of Reuter's favorite cats he could not have shown greater tenacity of life. Seriously speaking the cable message

about. the reward for the body ,of the Prince of Wales must have been another of Reuter's little jokes.