The new soda clerk was a mystery, until he himself revealed his shameful past quite unconsciously by the question he put to the girl who had just asked for an egg-shake.
"Light or dark?" he asked mechanically.
BEGGARS
The cultured maid servant announced to her mistress, wife of the profiteer:
"If you please, ma'am, there's a mendicant at the door."
The mistress sniffed contemptuously:
"Tell 'im there's nothin' to mend."
BEGINNERS
A woman visitor to the city entered a taxicab. No sooner was the door closed than the car leaped forward violently, and afterward went racing wildly along the street, narrowly missing collision with innumerable things. The passenger, naturally enough, was terrified. She thrust her head through the open window of the door, and shouted at the chauffeur:
"Please, be careful, sir! I'm nervous. This is the first time I ever rode in a taxi."
The driver yelled in reply, without turning his head:
"That's all right, ma'am. It's the first time I ever drove one!"
BETROTHAL
The cook, Nora, had announced her engagement to a frequenter at the kitchen, named Mike. But a year passed and nothing was heard of the nuptials. So, one day, the mistress inquired:
"When are you to be married, Nora?"
"Indade, an' it's niver at all, I'll be thinkin', mum," the cook answered sadly.
"Really? Why, what is the trouble?"
The reply was explicit:
"'Tis this, mum. I won't marry Mike when he's drunk, an' he won't marry me when he's sober."
The delinquent laggard swain had been telling of his ability as a presiding officer. The girl questioned him:
"What is the parliamentary phrase when you wish to call for a vote?"
The answer was given with proud certainty:
"Are you ready for the question?"
"Yes, dearest," the girl confessed shyly. "Go ahead."
BIGAMY
What is the penalty for bigamy?
Two mothers-in-law.
The man was weak and naturally unlucky, and so he got married three times inside of a year. He was convicted and sentenced for four years.
He seemed greatly relieved. As the expiration of his term grew near, he wrote from the penitentiary to his lawyer, with the plaintive query:
"Will it be safe for me to come out?"
BIRTH
The little girl in the zoological park tossed bits of a bun to the stork, which gobbled them greedily, and bobbed its head toward her for more.
"What kind of a bird is it, mamma?" the child asked.
The mother read the placard, and answered that it was a stork.
"O-o-o-h!" the little girl cried, as her eyes rounded. "Of course, it recognized me!"
BLESSING
The philosopher, on being interrupted in his thoughts by the violent cackling of a hen that had just laid an egg, was led to express his appreciation of a kind Providence by which a fish while laying a million eggs to a hen's one, does so in a perfectly quiet and ladylike manner.
BLIND
A shopkeeper with no conscience put by his door a box with a slit in the cover and a label reading, "For the Blind." A month later, the box disappeared. When some one inquired concerning it, the shopkeeper chuckled, and pointed to the window.
"I collected enough," he explained. "There's the new blind."
BLINDNESS
The sympathetic and inquisitive old lady at the seashore was delighted and thrilled by an old sailor's narrative of how he was washed overboard during a gale and was only rescued after having sunk for the third time.
"And, of course," she commented brightly, "after you sank the third time, your whole past life passed before your eyes."