man who was waiting outside asked them if the millionaire had
finished his speech.

"Gee, yes!" replied the boys, "but he won't stop."

Mark Twain once told this story:

"Some years ago in Hartford, we all went to church one hot, sweltering
night to hear the annual report of Mr. Hawley, a city missionary who
went around finding people who needed help and didn't want to ask for
it. He told of the life in cellars, where poverty resided; he gave
instances of the heroism and devotion of the poor. When a man with
millions gives, he said, we make a great deal of noise. It's a noise
in the wrong place, for it's the widow's mite that counts. Well,
Hawley worked me up to a great pitch. I could hardly wait for him to
get through. I had $400 in my pocket. I wanted to give that and borrow
more to give. You could see greenbacks in every eye. But instead of
passing the plate then, he kept on talking and talking and talking,
and as he talked it grew hotter and hotter and hotter, and we grew
sleepier and sleepier and sleepier. My enthusiasm went down, down,
down, down--$100 at a clip--until finally, when the plate did come
around, I stole ten cents out of it. It all goes to show how a little
thing like this can lead to crime."

_See also_ After dinner speeches; Candidates; Politicians.

PUNISHMENT

A parent who evidently disapproved of corporal punishment wrote the
teacher:

"Dear Miss: Don't hit our Johnnie. We never do it at home
except in self-defense."

"No, sirree!" ejaculated Bunkerton. "There wasn't any of that nonsense
in my family. My father never thrashed me in all his life."

"Too bad, too bad," sighed Hickenlooper. "Another wreck due to a
misplaced switch."

James the Second, when Duke of York, made a visit to Milton, the poet,
and asked him among other things, if he did not think the loss of his
sight a judgment upon him for what he had writen against his father,
Charles the First. Milton answered: "If your Highness think my loss of
sight a _judgment_ upon me, what do you think of your father's losing
his head."--_Life_.

A white man during reconstruction times was arraigned before a colored
justice of the peace for killing a man and stealing his mule. It was
in Arkansas, near the Texas border, and there was some rivalry between
the states, but the colored justice tried to preserve an impartial
frame of mind.

"We's got two kinds ob law in dis yer co't," he said: "Texas law an'
Ar