abstract of title.]

"That said Mary Ann Wolcott died an infant, 2 or 3 years old, unmarried,
intestate, and that she left no husband, child, or children."

* * *

INGENIOUS CALIFORNIA PARADOX.

[From the Oakland Post.]

The Six-Minute Ferry route across the bay will take only eighteen to
twenty minutes.

* * *

ALMOST.

Sir: S. Fein has put his name on the door of his orange-colored taxicab.
Can you whittle a wheeze out of that?

R. A. J.

* * *

Knut Hamsun, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, used to be a
street-car conductor in Chicago. This is a hint to column conductors.
Get a transfer.

The Witch's Holiday.

A TALE FOR CHILDREN ONLY.

I.

Matters had gone ill all the day; and, to cap what is learnedly called
the perverseness of inanimate things, it came on to rain just as the
Boy, having finished his lessons, was on the point of setting out for a
romp in the brown fields.

"Isn't it perfectly mean, Mowgli?" he complained to his dog. The water
spaniel wagged a noncommittal tail and stretched himself before the wood
fire with a deep drawn sigh. The rain promised to hold, so the Boy took
down a book and curled up in a big leather chair.

It was a very interesting book--all about American pioneers, trappers,
and Indians; and although the writer of it was a German traveler, no
American woodsman would take advantage of a worthy German globe trotter
and tell him things which were not exactly so. For example, if you and a
trapper and a dog were gathered about a campfire, and the dog were
asleep and dreaming in his sleep, and the trapper should affirm that if
you tied a handkerchief over the head of a dreaming dog and afterwards
tied it around your own head, you would have the dog's dream,--if the
trapper should tell you this with a perfectly serious face, you
naturally would believe him, especially if you were a German traveler.

The Boy got up softly and began the experiment. Mowgli opened an
inquiring eye, stretched himself another notch, and fell asleep again.
His master waited five minutes, then unloosed the handkerchief and
knotted it under his own chin.

For a while Mowgli's slumbers were untroubled as a forest pool, his
breathing as regular as the tick-tock of the old wooden clock under the
stair. Out of doors the rain fell sharply and set the dead leaves
singing. The wood fire dwindled t