Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1902 — Our Man About Town. [ARTICLE]

Our Man About Town.

9 Discusses 1 Sundry x and j Other ■ Matters.

It is said of some men that they are all right as far as they know, but they don’t know very far. *★* There are a good many men in this town who look just as if they had been cut out for Puck pictures. They look as natural as life. *»*' A woman said the other day that men like a bargain counter just as well as women do, and when you see the way some men haggle you wonder if they are not a good deal worse. M* A man in this town goes to sleep reading the newspapers, but every time any member of the family tries to take the paper he wakes up and says. “Here, leave that paper alone,” and then goes back to sleep. • * ♦ « A man in this town whose only virtue is that he never smoked or used tobacco in any form, likes to boast what he has saved in his life by not using the weed. He says he has figured it out closely and he has made just forty acres of land in the deal. But as he does not own a foot of land, tobacco using men want to know where he is really ahead. Some men too skep tical. 1 > ***• Three members of a family are reading one book and there is great scrabbling and scrapping to see who gets it first after supper. They really quarrel so much about who is to have it first that they can hardly keep track of the real story in the book. They get the plot mixed and they are not sure whether they got it out of the book or out of the quarrel for the possession of the book. * ¥ ‘ *■ An obedient husband was objecting to do certain work about the household. and quoted Scripture texts to his wife, showing that the household duties should properly be assigned to the woman. The good wife replied by reading to her astonished liege 2 Kings, xxi, 13: “I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.” That husband, without a murmur has wiped the dishes ever since. One of our friends started to read one of the new books. It is one of the historical novels wherein a young man wades through blood up to his shoes and cuts and sloshes around till you can’t tell whether it is a love story or a slaughter of innocents. He had just got a good start reading the book, having reached the part of the plot where the girl declares that she cannot live without the hero. She threatens to drown herself in the cistern if the water is not too wet, and the hero cries out “Give me back my love or I will cut my throat with a corn cutter.” Just at that point some other member of the family loaned the book and the man is in suspense all this time to know whether the fellow gets the girl and it they lived happily ever afterward. The mental strain is something terrible. ¥ * When a couple of boys meet they are just like a couple of dogs. The other day two boys met and we watched them. First one struck at the other. Then the other boy struck back, not viciously, but just playfully, about hard enough to make his nose bleed if he had struck his nose. Then they clinched and let go. Each sidled off and kept a close watch for fear the other would get an advantage. They feinted and parried the blows. One made a lunge and grabbed the other around the waist, but they did not make a fall that time. They made another advance, and this time all we could see was a lot of heels in the atmosphere, for the boys had clinched and took a tumble head first into the soft dirt. They rolled oyer and one got up and grabbed the other’s hat and away he ran like Tom the Piper’s son. The last we saw of the pair, one boy was trying to throw the other’s hat into a tall tree, and the victim was running with all his might to reach him before he should have ac complished his purpose. Nothing is funnier than people. The Journal carries a full line of legal blanks at reasonable prices.