Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 December 1907 — Guilty, but Good Smoke. [ARTICLE]

Guilty, but Good Smoke.

The tendency to preserve relics of absent ones sometimes results In odd complications, if the experience of a man who visited a West Philadelphia home recently may be taken as an example. He had been ushered Into a small sitting room until the master of the house should be at liberty to see him. He took a chair, and, noticing a corncob pipe on a shelf, picked It up, found it about half filled with tobacco, lit it and smoked.

When the tobacco was exhausted he put the pipe back on the shelf and waited for his host. The flatter came In, their business was soon finished, and then the host-explained that most of the articles In the room were preserved exactly as the son of the house had left them when he went to Europe to study, several years tpfore. “Here, for Instance, Is his pipe!;” he said, “still half loaded, Just as he laid it down when be was last at home. It gives his mother and myself great pleasure to think that these things have not been used or touched since be went away, as If he were coming back to finish Ms smoke Sentiment, of course, but It consoles us.” The visitor naturally felt his sacrilegious conduct too deeply to mention the fact that be had finished the absent son’s smoke. —Philadelphia Record. When a boy goes out west hunting, and writes home that be killed a dew, he can fool his mother, but he can’t fool his father.