he place. Two
days later came the superintendent of the division. Alighting from his
private car, he encountered the old master bridge-builder.

"Bill," said the superintendent--and the words quivered with energy--"I
want this job rushed. Every hour's delay costs the company money. Have
you got the engineer's plans for the new bridge?"

"I don't know," said the bridge-builder, "whether the engineer has the
picture drawed yet or not, but the bridge is up and the trains is
passin' over it."

THE LAST WORD, AS USUAL

The ways of a woman are supposed to be past finding out, but after all
there are times when her logic is irresistible as in the case of a
certain wife who had spent her husband's money, had compromised him more
than once, had neglected her children and her household duties, and had
done everything that woman can do to make his life a failure.

And then, as they were both confronted by the miserable end of it all,
and realized that there was no way out of it, he said:

"Perhaps I ought not to appear to be too trivially curious, but I
confess to a desire to know why you have done all this. You must have
known, if you kept on, just what the end would be. Of course, nobody
expects a woman to use her reason. But didn't you have, even in a dim
way, some idea of what you were doing?"

She gazed at him with her usual defiance, a habit not to be broken even
by the inevitable.

"Certainly I did. It was your fault."

"My fault! How do you make that out?"

"Because I have never had the slightest respect for you."

"Why not?"

She actually laughed.

"How could you expect me to have any respect for a man who could not
succeed in preventing me from doing the things I did?"

FRUGAL TO THE END

Not long ago a certain publication had an idea. Its editor made up a
list of thirty men and women distinguished in art, religion, literature,
commerce, politics, and other lines, and to each he sent a letter or a
telegram containing this question: "If you had but forty-eight hours
more to live, how would you spend them?" his purpose being to embody the
replies in a symposium in a subsequent issue of his periodical.

Among those who received copies of the inquiry was a New York writer. He
thought the proposition over for a spell, and then sent back the
truthful answer by wire, collect:

"One at a time."

NOT MUCH TO TALK ABOUT

There was an explosion of one of the big guns on a battleship not long
ago.