FACETIÆ.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 185, 24 August 1871, Page 7

FACETIÆ.

A kiss, says a French authoress, gives more pleasure than Anything else in the world. But Puck declares that that ■woman evidently never experienced the childish rapture of descending the parlour stairs by sliding down the banisters. An Ohio photographer presented a revolver at the head of a gentleman who was sitting for his photograph, with the encouraging remark ; "My reputation as an artist is at stake. If you don't look amiling I'll blow your brains out." He smole a ghastly smile. Don Platt declares that interviewing Sutnner "is not such a pleasant business as some may suppose. He has a toplof tical, Senatorial way of looking down on the reporter that makes that representative of the mighty press feel as if he were in danger of slipping through the keyhole and disappearing. As one of these humxners told me once, when the magnificent | .Chawlei looked down on him and said 1 Sir,' he felt so small that his skin hung loose upon him." This story comes from Cedar Falls, Jowa : — " An uptown bridegroom dreamed on his wedding night that he was chained to a log on a railroad track, and awoke .to find himself on the floor with his head .nearly mashed with a chair, and an gxcited woman standing over him, asking if it was customary for brides to be dragged out of bed by the feet. She said she never had submitted to such extortion before, and she'd be darned if she would now. He told her it was new to him too." . Poor . Theodore -Hall, who seeks a divorce at St. Louis, has a tale of rare matrimonial infelicity to reveal. The .-wife weighs thirty pounds more than he, and, he says mournfully, " Always got -the best of me ; she would strike me and knock me round generally." Once she knocked him over with a coal oil lamp, and lumps and flat irons were her usual •weapons, indeed, though she sometimes . varied to the use of a hatchet. Hall *ays, sadly, " She was too sharp to show bad temper befor marriage." Timbuctoo may be considered a difficult word to rhyme with, but some genius has done it, as witness the following: — I went a hunting on the plains, The plains of Timbuctoo, I ahot one buck for all my pains, And he was a slim buck, too. And there is another one quite as •good :—: — If I were a Cassowary On the plains of Timbuctoo, And I met a missionary, Fd swallow him and hymn-book, too. Hood, in his "Comic Annual" for 1830, communicated the following from a •contributor :—": — " Sur, my wyf had a torn •cat that dyd. Being a • torture shell, and •a great faverit, we had him berried in the guardian, and for the sake of inrichment of the sile. I had the carkis lade under -the roots of a guzberry bush. The frute being up till then of the smooth kind. But the next sesons frute after the. cat was berried, the sfnzberries was all hairy, and more remarkabul, the csrtpilars of the same bush was all of the same hairy description." A certain magistrate was travelling on the Chatham and Dover line the other ■morning. By his side sat a lady, who from a single glimpse of her countenance he imagined he knew. M last he ventured to remark that the day was pleasant. "Yes," murmured the female. ■"Why do your wear a veil?" inquired ' the dispenser of justice. " Lest I attract attention." "It is the province of gentlemen to admire," replied the gallant man of law. " Not when they are mar'riea." "But I'm not." "Indeed?" "" Oh, no, I'm a bachelor." The lady • quietly removed her veil, disclosing to -the astonished magistrate the face of his mother-in-law. He had business elseTvhere suddenly. * Doubtless we shall have some queer of the details of the Census re•turns. The first remarkable case on the list is worthy of note, and one which has •not yet gone the round of the papers. In a certain dwelling not one hundred miles from Camberwell, the wife of the " head of the house" gives her age as thirty, -while that of her eldest daughter is recorded as twenty-three— showing that the good lady was only seven years old when ■she gave birth to her first child. In the

same house, Maria, the cook— who has .^ been with the family since thoy began - Tiousekeeping— gives her age as twentyr one, •which proves an amount of precocity -utterly unprecedented, seeing that, as she nas been with the same master and mistress twenty-four years, "Mariar* must liave begun cooking three years before she vas born J