Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 October 1898 — ANECDOTE AND INCIDENT [ARTICLE]

ANECDOTE AND INCIDENT

A little girl rebuked her brother for laughing at a man with a crooked nose who passed the house. “You mustn’t do that,” she said: “God made him that way.” “Why do you s’pose he did it?” asked the small boy, with interest. "Oh, I don’t know,” responded the little sister, indifferently; “people flo funny things.” Professor Park, of Andover, figures rather amusingly in the reminiscences of the late Professor Sebaff Just published. In 1842, Schaff (being a privatdocent at Berlin) introduced Park to his German friends, and among the rest to Kahn is. He relates that, under the continuous pelting of Park’s questions, Kahnis finally exclaimed in despair: “God forgive Christopher Columbus for discovering America!” When Charles R. Thorne, Jr., was doing utility at the Boston Museum In the early sixties, he married the daughter of a well-known Boston detective oilicer named Calder. Afterward he came to California and did not return to Boston for some years. When he was a leading man, Calder went Into the apothecary store of Orlando Tompkins, then one of the lessees of the Boston Theater, and said: “I understand Charley Thorne is coming back to Boston.” “Yes,” was the reply of Tompkins. “Coming back to support Booth, is he not?” “Yes,” was again the answer. “Well,” drawled out Calder, “if he does not support Booth any better than he supported my daughter, he’ll be durned poor support.” Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, was noted for his bitter wit, for w hich, however, he had an excuse. “They tell me I say ill-natured things,” he once observed, In his slow, quiet, deliberate way; “I have a very weak voice; If I did not say ill-natured things no one would hear what I said.” It was owing to this weakness of voice that no candles were put on his dinner-table; for glare and noise go together, and dimness subdues the voices in conversation ai a handkerchief thrown over the cage of a canary subdues its song. The light was thrown Upon the walls and pictures and shaded from the room. This did not suit Sydney Smith, who said that a dinner in St. James’ Place was “a flood of light on all above nf|fc below nothing but darkness and gnashing of teeth.” On a recent visit of inspection, the State superintendent of schools in Maine, while in the town of Pembroke, asked a number of questions of the pupils in a school about the little things in the world about them. “How many seed compartments are there in an apple?” he asked, and “On which jaw has the cow her teeth?” with several similar questions, to which the pupils could make no reply. The next day, one of the teachers was amused to overhear the following conversation among the pupils in the playyard. A little girl had got some of her companions about her, and said, . gravely: “Now, children, let us play I am the superintendent. You’ve got to know more about common things; if you don’t you will all grow up to be fools. Now, tell me,”jdie said, looking sternly at a playmats»“how many feathers has a hen?” The woman who had charge of a banquet recently-given In Washington by a patriotic society of women notified each member of .the toast she would be expected to respond to ten days or so before the meeting. To one young woman, whom she did not know personally, she sent the toast, “Our Flag.” The young woman received it, and at once went to call on the head of the society, in a state of great distress. She simply could not respond to the toast, she said. She didn’t know whether a joke was intended, but she had been chaffed unmercifully about it already, and wouldn’t go near the meeting if she were to be called on to speak on that subject. “Why, what on earth Is wrong with that sentiment?” asked the head of the society. The pretty young woman hesitated. She blushed. “Well,” she said, “you see I’m going to marry a man named Flagg.” “Journalism for Women,” a book recently published in England, relates a story of a woman journalist in the North of England who wrote to a London paper for permission td act as Its special correspondent during the visit of some royal personages to her town.. The editor of the paper, knowing her for a good descriptive writer, gave the necessary authority, with explicit information as to the last moment for receiving copy. The moment came, but not the copy; and the editor had. to go to press without it. The next day, no explanation having arrived, he dispatched to his special correspondent a particular scathing and scornful letter. Then came the excuse. It was long, but the root of it amounted to exactly this: “I was so knocked up, and had such a headache after the ceremonies were over, that I really did not feel equal to the exertion of writing. I thought it would not matter.”