It was feared that the noise would startle the audience and perhaps throw them into a panic.  The mayor of the town stepped forward to give warning.  The audience, however, had not assembled to listen to the mayor, and overwhelmed him with cries of “Marshall!  Marshall!”

Silence was not restored till the infuriated official yelled at the top of his voice: 

“I’m not going to make a speech!  I have something to say!”

“Do you know what it is to go before an audience?”

“No.  I spoke before an audience once, but most of it went before I did.”

A lank, disconsolate-looking farmer, stood on the steps of the town hall during the progress of a political meeting.

“Do you know who’s talking in there now?” demanded a stranger, briskly, pausing for a moment beside the farmer.  “Or are you just going in?”

“No, sir; I’ve just come out,” said the farmer, decidedly.  “Congressman Smiffkins is talking in there.”

“What about?” asked the stranger.

“Well,” continued the countryman, passing a knotted hand across his forehead, “he didn’t say.”

“You haven’t had much to say lately,” commented the old friend.

“True,” replied Senator Sorghum.  “But you must give me credit for one thing—­I realized the fact and kept still.”

Captain “Ian Hay,” on one of his war lecture tours, entered a barber’s shop in a small town to have his hair cut.

“Stranger in the town, sir?” the barber asked.

“Yes, I am,” Ian Hay replied.  “Anything going on here tonight?”

“There’s a war lecture by an English fighter named Hay,” said the barber:  “but if you go you’ll have to stand, for every seat in the hall is sold out.”

“Well, now,” said Ian Hay, “isn’t that provoking?  It’s always my luck to have to stand when that Hay chap lectures.”

See also Politicians.

PUBLISHERS

He was a typical gamin, so diminutive in stature that I had to stoop to interrogate him, which I did in this way: 

“Where do you get your papers, my little man?”

“Oh, I buy ’em in the Times alley.”

“What do you pay for them?”

“Fi’ cents.”

“What do you sell them for?”

“Fi’ cents.”

“You don’t make anything at that?”

“Nope.”

“Then what do you sell them for?”

“Oh, just to get a chance to holler.”

PUNCTUALITY

Epitaph for Any New Yorker

I, who all my life had hurried,
Came to Peter’s crowded gate;
And, as usual, was worried,
Fearing that I might be late

So, when I began to jostle
(I forgot that I was dead)
Patient smiled the old Apostle: 
“Take your Eternity,” he said.

  —­Christopher Morley.