n undershtand how thim astronomers can
calkilate th' distance av a shtarr, its weight, and dinsity and color
and all thot--but th' thing thot gets me is, how th' divvle do they
know its _name_."

I think the stars do nod at me,
But not when people are about;
For they regard me curiously
Whenever I go out.

Brothers, what is it ye mean,
What is it ye try to say.
That so earnestly ye lean
From the spirit to the clay?

I may have been a star one day,
One of the rebel host that fell,
And they are nodding down to say.
Come back to us from hell.

AUTHORS

A clever author is one who never asks what they are saying when he is
told that everybody is talking about his latest book.

The wife of a successful young literary man had hired a buxom Dutch
girl to do the housework. Several weeks passed and from seeing her
master constantly about the house, the girl received an erroneous
impression.

"Ogscuse me, Mrs. Blank," she said to her mistress one day, "but I
like to say somedings."

"Well, Rena?"

The girl blushed, fumbled with her apron, and then replied, "Veil, you
pay me four tollars a veek--"

"Yes, and I really can't pay you any more."

"It's not dot," responded the girl; "but I be villing to take tree
tollars till--till your husband gets vork."

Kate Douglas Wiggin's choicest possession, she says, is a letter
which she once received from the superintendent of a home for the
feeble-minded. He spoke in glowing terms of the pleasure with which
the "inmates" had read her little book, "Marm Lisa," and ended thus
superbly:

"In fact, madam, I think I may safely say that you are the favorite
author of the feeble-minded!"

Harold Jenks, a syndicate editor of Denver, was talking about the low
rates paid by the magazines.

"They who write for newspaper syndicates, where their work appears
simultaneously in forty or fifty newspapers all over the country,"
said Mr. Jenks, "make a good deal of money. Of course, the magazine
writer, beside such men, isn't one, two, three.

"A seedy magazine writer dropped in on me this morning to borrow a
quarter. As he left, he said:

"'Jenks, old man, the difference between a hen and a magazine writer
is this--while they both scratch for a living, the hen gets hers.'"

_Consolation_

"How did your novel come out?"

"Well," replied the self-confident man, "it proved beyond all doubt
that it isn't one of these trashy b