“What are you making such a noise for?” he demanded.  “Don’t you know I’m a ’painless dentist’?”

“Well, sah,” retorted Dinah, “mebbe yo’ is painless, but Ah isn’t.”

DENTIST—­“Open wider, please—­wider.”

PATIENT—­“A—­A—­A—­Ah.”

DENTIST (inserting rubber gag, towel, and sponge)—­“How’s your family?”

A young man who needed false teeth wrote to a dentist ordering a set as follows: 

“My mouth is three inches acrost, five-eighths inches threw the jaw.  Some hummocky on the edge.  Shaped like a hoss-shew, toe forward.  If you want me to be more particular, I shall have to come thar.”

Dentist, speaking to patient about to have a tooth extracted—­“Have you heard the latest song hit?”

Patient—­“No.  What is the title of it?”

Dentist—­“The Yanks are Coming.”

Returning home from the dentist’s, where he had gone to have a loose tooth drawn, little Raymond reported as follows: 

“The doctor told me ’fore he began that if I cried or screamed it would cost me a dollar, but if I was a good boy it would be only fifty cents.”

“Did you scream?” his mother asked.

“How could I?” answered Raymond.  “You only gave me fifty cents.”

Mr. Harkins had taken his boy, aged ten, to have an offending molar tooth drawn.  When the job had been accomplished, the dentist said:  “I am sorry, sir, but I shall have to charge you five dollars for pulling that tooth.”

“Five dollars!” exclaimed Mr. Harkins, in dismay.  “Why, I understood you to say that you charged only one dollar for such work!”

“Yes,” replied the dentist, “but this youngster yelled so terribly that he scared four other patients out of the office.”—­Harper’s.

DEPARTMENT STORES

“I want some shoe-strings, some hairpins, a pair of gloves, and a tooth-brush,” the woman said.  “I have to catch a train, and have but a few minutes.”

“Yes, madam!” the floorwalker replied briskly.  “That’s the beauty of a department store-get anything you want, right under the one roof!  Take elevator to eleventh floor, shoe department, eight aisles to the right from the main passageway, for shoe-strings; hairpins in notions department, east side of basement, three aisles beyond hardware; gloves in women’s wear, fifth floor of annex, reached by passageway over street; toothbrush in drugs and toilet-articles department, on balcony, reached by moving stairway, which you will find on your right as you pass the fountain in the florist shop in the center of the main floor.”

DESTINATION

  Where’er I go, in this far land,
  The people wish to understand
  Where I am going.  If I knew
  They would not think my answer true;
  And if I said I did not know
  They would advise me not to go.