adly.

"Wanderin' again, wanderin' again," he sighed. "It's a peety."

The canny Scot wandered into the pharmacy.

"I'm wanting threepenn'orth o' laudanum," he announced.

"What for?" asked the chemist suspiciously.

"For twopence," responded the Scot at once.

A Scotsman wishing to know his fate at once, telegraphed a proposal of
marriage to the lady of his choice. After spending the entire day at the
telegraph office he was finally rewarded late in the evening by an
affirmative answer.

"If I were you," suggested the operator when he delivered the message,
"I'd think twice before I'd marry a girl that kept me waiting all day
for my answer."

"Na, na," retorted the Scot. "The lass who waits for the night rates is
the lass for me."

"Well, yes," said Old Uncle Lazzenberry, who was intimately acquainted
with most of the happenstances of the village, "Almira Stang has broken
off her engagement with Charles Henry Tootwiler. They'd be goin'
together for about eight years, durin' which time she had been
inculcatin' into him, as you might call it, the beauties of economy;
but when she discovered, just lately, that he had learnt his lesson so
well that he had saved up two hundred and seventeen pairs of socks for
her to darn immediately after the wedding, she 'peared to conclude that
he had taken her advice a little too literally, and broke off the
match."--_Puck_.

They sat each at an extreme end of the horsehair sofa. They had been
courting now for something like two years, but the wide gap between had
always been respectfully preserved.

"A penny for your thochts, Sandy," murmured Maggie, after a silence of
an hour and a half.

"Weel," replied Sandy slowly, with surprising boldness, "tae tell ye the
truth, I was jist thinkin' how fine it wad be if ye were tae gie me a
wee bit kissie."

"I've nae objection," simpered Maggie, slithering over, and kissed him
plumply on the tip of his left ear.

Sandy relapsed into a brown study once more, and the clock ticked
twenty-seven minutes.

"An' what are ye thinkin' about noo--anither, eh?"

"Nae, nae, lassie; it's mair serious the noo."

"Is it, laddie?" asked Maggie softly. Her heart was going pit-a-pat with
expectation. "An' what micht it be?"

"I was jist thinkin'," answered Sandy, "that it was aboot time ye were
paying me that penny!"

The coward calls himself cautious, the miser thrifty.--_Syrus_.

There are but two ways of paying debt: increas