d the old woman earnestly, "dat daid nigger's
wuth moah to me dan a live one. I gits a pension."--_Edith Howell
Armor_.

If England had a system of pensions like ours, we should see that "all
that was left of the Noble Six Hundred" was six thousand pensioners.

PESSIMISM

A pessimist is a man who lives with an optimist.--_Francis Wilson_.

How happy are the Pessimists!
A bliss without alloy
Is theirs when they have proved to us
There's no such thing as joy!

--_Harold Susman_.

A pessimist is one who, of two evils, chooses them both.

"I had a mighty queer surprise this morning," remarked a local stock
broker. "I put on my last summer's thin suit on account of this
extraordinary hot weather, and in one of the trousers pockets I found a
big roll of bills which I had entirely forgotten."

"Were any of them receipted?" asked a pessimist.

To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into
recklessness and despair.--_Fronde_.

With earth's first clay they did the last man knead,
And there of the last harvest sowed the seed:
And the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

Yesterday this day's madness did prepare;
Tomorrow's silence, triumph, or despair.
Drink! For you know not whence you came, nor why;
Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where.

--_Omar Khayyam_

PHILADELPHIA

A Staten Island man, when the mosquitoes began to get busy in the
borough across the bay, has been in the habit every summer of
transplanting his family to the Delaware Water Gap for a few weeks. They
were discussing their plans the other day, when the oldest boy, aged
eight, looked up from his geography and said:

"Pop, Philadelphia is on the Delaware River, isn't it?"

Pop replied that such was the case.

"I wonder if that's what makes the Delaware Water Gap?" insinuated the
youngster.--_S.S. Stinson_.

Among the guests at an informal dinner in New York was a bright
Philadelphia girl.

"These are snails," said a gentleman next to her, when the dainty was
served. "I suppose Philadelphia people don't eat them for fear of
cannibalism."

"Oh, no," was her instant reply; "it isn't that. We couldn't catch
them."

PHILANTHROPISTS

Little grains of short weight,
Little crooked twists,
Fill the land with magnates
And philanthropists.

_See also_ Charity.

PHILOSOPHY

Philo