Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 April 1892 — No Sense of Humor. [ARTICLE]

No Sense of Humor.

Now and then one encounters a man who cannot comprehend a joke; but as a rule the sense of humor is stronger in men than it is in woman. This seems strange when we consider her quickness In other directions. I remember once hinting to a lady that the fair sex were a little obtuse in tilts way. Of course she scouted the idea, and scornfully said that if ever they showed obtuseness it would be simply because the so-called joke was very thin—only the ghost of a joke in fact. But-as I pointed out, this ought only to make it the more easily seen through, Imagine my feelings when she asked me “how?” Another time a friend was relating how once, while traveling, he hud as companions a couple of Englishmen. The elder of the two was telling the other how one day at a hotel he hud noticed a Scotchman eating roast mutton. “And,” said the Englishman, impressively, "would you believe It, ho took mustard to his mutton.” "Mustard to ills mutton!” gasped his horrorstruck companion; “and did he die?” My friand, who told this with great gravity, here paused for a moment, and his wife, who hud been eagerly listening, and who, woman-like, wanted to hear the end, broke in with, “And did he die?” On another occasion the story was told of a man who, being badgered by a lawyer who insisted upon plain “yes” or “no” in answer to hisquestlons, finally turned upon his persecutor and asked him if he w’ould in turn answer yes or no to one question. Receiving an affirmative reply, he said, “Well, will you kindly say whether you are as big a fool us you look?” Now, I think this Isn’t bad, and we all had a good laugh, which, needless to say, was renewed when a lady who had evidently been pondering over the question, said with a triumphant, I’ve-discovered-it sort of air, “Why, if it had been me I would have said no!”

AV here the Banana Grown. Our young friends who are fond of bananas, and most of them we feel sure are, would like to be in South America. There, as Harper’s Young People tells us, the banana is not thought of as a luxury. In fact, it takes the place pf bread and meat and vegetables among a large part of the people. Every garden has its banana patch, just as we have our indispensable rows of potatoes. On the Isthmus of Panama the cars spin past hills covered from base to summit with the beautiful broad-leaved plants, their great clusters of fruit hanging from the stems just under the leaves. The banana plant looks something like an immense calla lily. Its stem is made up of the- bases of the leaves, so sheathed or folded around each other and hardened as to sustain the weight of the mass of foliage above. It will in some localities attain a height of twenty feet. When two years old it bears fruit and then dies, but a number of young shoots spring up from the base of the old stem, so that it continually renews Itself, and the farmer, who is usually an Indian or negro, has no trouble except to keep the weeds and the old withered trunks cleared away from the growing plant. Even the trunk is of use as it contains a fiber almost as soft as silk, which can be woven into the most exquisite muslins. Indeed, some of the danty India muslins are made of this very fiber.