The prisoner was silent for some time.  “Well,” he said at last, in a resigned tone, “I reckon, General, I’ll take the oath.”

The oath was duly administered.  Turning to Grant, the fellow then asked, very penitently, if he might speak.

“Yes,” said the general indifferently.  “What is it?”

“Why, I was just thinkin’, General,” he drawled, “they certainly did give us hell at Chickamauga.”

Historical controversies are creeping into the schools.  In a New York public institution attended by many races, during an examination in history the teacher asked a little chap who discovered America.

He was evidently thrown into a panic and hesitated, much to the teacher’s surprise, to make any reply.

“Oh, please, ma’am,” he finally stammered, “ask me somethin’ else.”

“Something else, Jimmy?  Why should I do that?”

“The fellers was talkin’ ’bout it yesterday,” replied Jimmy, “Pat McGee said it was discovered by an Irish saint.  Olaf, he said it was a sailor from Norway, and Giovanni said it was Columbus, an’ if you’d a-seen what happened you wouldn’t ask a little feller like me.”

Our country!  When right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right!—­Carl Schurz.

Our country!  In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.—­Stephen Decatur.

There are no points of the compass on the chart of true patriotism.—­Robert C. Winthrop.

Patriotic exercises and flag worship will avail nothing unless the states give to their people of the kind of government that arouses patriotism.—­Franklin Pierce II.

PENSIONS

WILLIS—­“I wonder if there will ever be universal peace.”

GILLIS—­“Sure.  All they’ve got to do is to get the nations to agree that in case of war the winner pays the pensions.”—­Puck.

“Why was it you never married again, Aunt Sallie?” inquired Mrs. McClane of an old colored woman in West Virginia.

“’Deed, Miss Ellie,” replied the old woman earnestly, “dat daid nigger’s wuth moah to me dan a live one.  I gits a pension.”—­Edith Howell Armor.

If England had a system of pensions like ours, we should see that “all that was left of the Noble Six Hundred” was six thousand pensioners.

PESSIMISM

A pessimist is a man who lives with an optimist.—­Francis Wilson.

  How happy are the Pessimists! 
    A bliss without alloy
  Is theirs when they have proved to us
    There’s no such thing as joy!

  —­Harold Susman.

A pessimist is one who, of two evils, chooses them both.

“I had a mighty queer surprise this morning,” remarked a local stock broker.  “I put on my last summer’s thin suit on account of this extraordinary hot weather, and in one of the trousers pockets I found a big roll of bills which I had entirely forgotten.”