The surging crowd along Broadway
  Was stirred so strangely yesterday. 
  It stood on tiptoe, eyes aglow,
  It stared, and turned to whisper low
  Of wonders such as seldom pass
  That way.  What swayed the living mass? 
  What marvel from the fabled isles
  That drew the eye from Paris styles? 
  A street car left the track perhaps? 
  Two bootblacks nabbed for shooting craps? 
  A fire to call the engines out? 
  A skidding auto turned about? 
  A homebrew Bacchus’ raisin dance? 
  At these perhaps the crowd would glance
  But never act like this at all. 
  Amazed, I asked a copper tall
  And broad, and heard at last;
  A horse and buggy just went past.

  —­Roland D. Johnson.

An English novelist took his first look at Broadway aflame with light.  He read the flashing and leaping signs and said:  “How much more wonderful it would be for a man who couldn’t read.”

UNCLE EZRA—­“Eph Hoskins must have had some time down in New York.”

UNCLE EBEN—­“Yep.  Reckon he traveled a mighty swift pace.  Eph’s wife said that when Eph got back and went into his room he looked at the bed, kicked it, and said, ’What’s that darn thing for?”—­Judge.

After Mark Twain had been in New York for five years, he wrote to his folks back home that he was the loneliest man in the world!

“What!” exclaimed his people, “in New York and lonely!”

“Yes,” wrote Mark; “I’m the only man in this town that doesn’t touch a drop.”

TEACHER—­“Do you know the population of New York?”

MAMIE BACKROW—­“Not all of them, ma’am, but then, we’ve only lived here two years.”—­Puck.

NEWSBOYS

NEWSBOY—­“Great mystery!  Fifty victims!  Paper, mister?”

PASSER-BY—­“Here, boy, I’ll take one.” (After reading a moment.) “Say, boy, there’s nothing of the kind in this paper.  Where is it?”

NEWSBOY—­“That’s the mystery, guvnor.  You’re the fifty-first victim.”

NEWSPAPERS

APPLICANT—­“I’m ready to begin at the bottom, sir.”

NEWSPAPER PROPRIETOR—­“Well, what’s your idea?”

“To start first with the leading editorials and gradually work myself up to the sporting page.”

“Never state as a fact anything you are not certain about,” the great editor warned the new reporter, “or you will get us into libel suits.  In such cases use the words, ‘alleged,’ ‘claimed,’ ‘reputed,’ ‘rumored,’ and so on.”

And then this paragraph appeared in the society notes of the paper: 

“It is rumored that a card party was given yesterday by a number of reputed ladies.  Mrs. Smith, gossip says, was hostess.  It is alleged that the guests with the exception of Mrs. Bellinger, who says she hails from Leavitt’s Junction, were all from here.  Mrs. Smith claims to be the wife of Archibald Smith, the so-called ‘Honest Man’ trading on Key Street.”