Ex-President Taft on one of his trips was playing golf on a western links when he noticed that he had a particularly good caddie, an old man of some sixty years, as they have on the Scottish links.

“And what do you do in winter?” asked the President.

“Such odd jobs as I can pick up, sir,” replied the man.

“Not much chance for caddying then, I suppose?” asked the President.

“No, sir, there is not,” replied the man with a great deal of warmth.  “When there’s no frost there’s sure to be snow, and when there’s no snow there’s frost, and when there’s neither there’s sure to be rain.  And the few days when it’s fine they’re always Sundays.”

On the way to the office of his publishers one crisp fall morning, James Whitcomb Riley met an unusually large number of acquaintances who commented conventionally upon the fine weather.  This unremitting applause amused him.  When greeted at the office with “Nice day, Mr. Riley,” he smiled broadly.

“Yes,” he agreed.  “Yes, I’ve heard it very highly spoken of.”

The darky in question had simmered in the heat of St. Augustine all his life, and was decoyed by the report that colored men could make as much as $4 a day in Duluth.

He headed North in a seersucker suit and into a hard winter.  At Chicago, while waiting for a train, he shivered in an engine room, and on the way to Duluth sped by miles of snow fields.

On arriving he found the mercury at 18 below and promptly lost the use of his hands.  Then his feet stiffened and he lost all sensation.

They picked him up and took him to a crematory for unknown dead.  After he had been in the oven for awhile somebody opened the door for inspection.  Rastus came to and shouted: 

“Shut dat do’ and close dat draff!”

  There was a small boy in Quebec,
  Who was buried in snow to his neck;
    When they said, “Are you friz?”
    He replied, “Yes, I is—­
  But we don’t call this cold in Quebec.”

  —­Rudyard Kipling.

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.—­Ruskin.

WEDDING ANNIVERSARIES

Uncle Ephraim had put on a clean collar and his best coat, and was walking majestically up and down the street.

“Aren’t you working to-day, Uncle?” asked somebody.

“No, suh.  I’se celebrating’ mah golden weddin’ suh.”

“You were married fifty years ago to-day, then!”

“Yes, suh.”

“Well, why isn’t your wife helping you to celebrate?”

“Mah present wife, suh,” replied Uncle Ephraim with dignity, “ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.”

WEDDING PRESENTS

Among the presents lately showered upon a dusky bride in a rural section of Virginia, was one that was a gift of an old woman with whom both bride and groom were great favorites.