To which the business man replied: "Sorry I am short of funds, but your proposition interests me."
An undertaker telegraphed to a man that his mother-in-law had died and asked whether he should bury, embalm or cremate her. The man replied, "All three, take no chances."
MOTORCYCLES
The automobile was a thing unheard of to a mountaineer in one community, and he was very much astonished one day when he saw one go by without any visible means of locomotion. His eyes bulged, however, when a motorcycle followed closely in its wake and disappeared like a flash around a bend in the road.
"Gee whiz!" he said, turning to his son, "who'd 'a' s'posed that thing had a colt?"
MOUNTAINS
Some real-estate dealers in British Columbia were accused of having victimized English and Scotch settlers by selling to them (at long range) fruit ranches which were situated on the tops of mountains. It is said that the captain of a steamboat on Kootenay Lake once heard a great splash in the water. Looking over the rail, he spied the head of a man who was swimming toward his boat. He hailed him. "Do you know," said the swimmer, "this is the third time to-day that I've fallen off that bally old ranch of mine?"
MOVING PICTURES
"Your soldiers look fat and happy. You must have a war chest." "Not exactly, but things are on a higher plane than they used to be. This revolution is being financed by a moving-picture concern."
MUCK-RAKING
The way of the transgressor is well written up.
MULES
Gen. O.O. Howard, as is well known, is a man of deep religious principles, and in the course of the war he divided his time pretty equally between fighting and evangelism. Howard's brigade was known all through the army as the Christian brigade, and he was very proud of it.
There was one hardened old sinner in the brigade, however, whose ears were deaf to all exhortation. General Howard was particularly anxious to convert this man, and one day he went down in the teamsters' part of the camp where the man was on duty. He talked with him long and earnestly about religion and finally said:
"I want to see you converted. Won't you come to the mourners' bench at the next service?"
The erring one rubbed his head thoughtfully for a moment and then replied:
"General, I'm plumb willin' to be converted, but if I am, seein' that everyone else has got religion, who in blue blazes is goin' to drive the mules?"
MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT
"What's the trouble in Plunkville?"
"We've tried a mayor and we've tried a commission."
"Well?"
"Now we're thinking of offering the management of our city to some good magazine."
MUSEUMS
It had been anything but an easy afternoon for the teacher who took six of her pupils through the Museum of Natural History, but their enthusiastic interest in the stuffed animals and their open-eyed wonder at the prehistoric fossils amply repaid her.
"Well, boys, where have you been all afternoon?" asked the father of two of the party that evening.
The answer came back with joyous promptness: "Oh, pop! Teacher took us to a dead circus."
Two Marylanders, who were visiting the National Museum at Washington, were seen standing in front of an Egyptian mummy, over which hung a placard bearing the inscription. "B.C. 1187."
Both visitors were much mystified thereby. Said one:
"What do you make of that, Bill?"
"Well," said Bill, "I dunno; but maybe it was the number of the motor-car that killed him."--_Edwin Tarrisse_.
MUSIC
The musical young woman who dropped her peekaboo waist in the piano player and turned out a Beethoven sonata, has her equal in the lady who stood in front of a five-bar fence and sang all the dots on her veil.