too small for you, around your neck, put on vest and coat, and liver pad and lung pad and stomach pad, and a porous plaster, and a chemise shirt between the two others, and rub on some liniment, and put a bunch of keys and a jack-knife and a button hook, and a pocket-book and a pistol and a plug of tobacco in your pockets, so they will chafe your person, and then go and drink a few whiskey cocktails, and walk around in the sun with tight boots on, sis, and then you will know what a man’s dress is.

Come to figure it up, it is about an even thing, sis,—­isn’t it?

THOSE STEP LADDERS!

There has got to be a law passed to punish the hardware dealers for selling those step ladders that shut up like a jack-knife.  A Ninth Street woman got onto one the other afternoon when it looked as though there was going to be a frost, to take her ivies down and carry them in the house.  We don’t care how handsome a woman is naturally, you put a towel around her head and put her up on a step ladder about seven feet high, with a tomahawk in her left hand, trying to draw a big nail out of a post on a veranda, and she looks like thunder.  This woman did.  Her husband tried to get her to let him do the work, but she said a man never knew how to do anything, anyway.  So he sat down on the steps to see how it would turn out.  She said afterwards that he kicked the ladder, but however that may be, there was an earthquake, and when he looked up the air was filled with calico, toweling, striped stockings, polonaise, trailing arbutus, red petticoats, store hair and step ladder.  He said the step ladder struck the veranda last, but as he picked her off of it, it seemed as though it must have lit first.  He said the step ladder must have kicked up.  In coming down she run one leg through the baby wagon, and the other through some flower pots, and a boy who was passing along said he guess she had been to the turning school.

WONDERS OF THE STAGE.

There is no person in the world who is easier to overlook the inconsistencies that show themselves on the stage at theatres than we are, but once in a while there is something so glaring that it pains us.  We have seen actors fight a duel in a piece of woods far away from any town, on the stage, and when one of them fell, pierced to the heart with a sword, we have noticed that he fell on a Brussels carpet.  That is all wrong, but we have stood it manfully.

[Illustration:  BEHIND THE SCENES.]

We have seen a woman on the stage who was so beautiful that we could be easily mashed if we had any heart left to spare.  Her eyes were of that heavenly color that has been written about heretofore, and her smile as sweet as ever was seen, but behind the scenes, through the wings, we have seen her trying to dig the cork out of a beer bottle with a pair of shears, and ask a supe, in harsh tones, where the cork-screw was, while she spread mustard on a piece of cheese, and finally drank the beer from the bottle, and spit the pieces of cork out on the floor, sitting astride of a stage chair, and her boot heels up on the top round, her trail rolled up into a ball, wrong side out, showing dirt from forty different stage floors.