ld maid of Scotch descent with her
cosey cottage and the dear old-fashioned garden where she loved to work.
Our physician, a man of infinite humor, who honestly admired her
sterling worth, and was attracted by her individuality, leaned over her
fence one bright spring morning, with the direct question: "Miss Sharp,
why did you never get married?"

She looked up from her weeding, rested on her hoe-handle, and looking
steadily at his hair, which was of a sandy hue, answered: "I'll tell you
all about it, Doctor. I made up my mind, when I was a girl, that, come
what would, I would never marry a red-headed man, and none but men with
red hair have ever offered themselves."

* * * * *

We all know women whose capacity for monologue exhausts all around them.
So that the remark will be appreciated of a lady to whom I said,
alluding to such a talker: "Have you seen Mrs. ---- lately?"

"No, I really had to give up her acquaintance in despair, for I had been
trying two years to tell her something in particular."

A lady once told me she could always know when she had taken too much
wine at dinner--her husband's jokes began to seem funny!

* * * * *

Lastly and--_finally_, there is a reason for our apparent lack of humor,
which it may seem ungracious to mention. Women do not find it politic to
cultivate or express their wit. No man likes to have his story capped
by a better and fresher from a lady's lips. What woman does not risk
being called sarcastic and hateful if she throws back the merry dart, or
indulges in a little sharp-shooting? No, no, it's dangerous--if not
fatal.

"Though you're bright, and though you're pretty,
They'll not love you if you're witty."

Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier are good illustrations of this
point. The former, by her fearless expressions of wit, exposed herself
to the detestation of the majority of mankind. "She has shafts," said
Napoleon, "which would hit a man if he were seated on a rainbow."

But the sweetly fawning, almost servile adulation of the _listening_
beauty brought her a corresponding throng of admirers. It sometimes
seems that what is pronounced wit, if uttered by a distinguished man,
would be considered commonplace if expressed by a woman.

Parker's illustration of Choate's _rare humor_ never struck me as
felicitous. "Thus, a friend meeting him one ten-degrees-below-zero
morning in the winter, said