“I don’t know,” said the bridge-builder, “whether the engineer has the picture drawed yet or not, but the bridge is up and the trains is passin’ over it.”

THE LAST WORD, AS USUAL

The ways of a woman are supposed to be past finding out, but after all there are times when her logic is irresistible as in the case of a certain wife who had spent her husband’s money, had compromised him more than once, had neglected her children and her household duties, and had done everything that woman can do to make his life a failure.

And then, as they were both confronted by the miserable end of it all, and realized that there was no way out of it, he said: 

“Perhaps I ought not to appear to be too trivially curious, but I confess to a desire to know why you have done all this.  You must have known, if you kept on, just what the end would be.  Of course, nobody expects a woman to use her reason.  But didn’t you have, even in a dim way, some idea of what you were doing?”

She gazed at him with her usual defiance, a habit not to be broken even by the inevitable.

“Certainly I did.  It was your fault.”

“My fault!  How do you make that out?”

“Because I have never had the slightest respect for you.”

“Why not?”

She actually laughed.

“How could you expect me to have any respect for a man who could not succeed in preventing me from doing the things I did?”

FRUGAL TO THE END

Not long ago a certain publication had an idea.  Its editor made up a list of thirty men and women distinguished in art, religion, literature, commerce, politics, and other lines, and to each he sent a letter or a telegram containing this question:  “If you had but forty-eight hours more to live, how would you spend them?” his purpose being to embody the replies in a symposium in a subsequent issue of his periodical.

Among those who received copies of the inquiry was a New York writer.  He thought the proposition over for a spell, and then sent back the truthful answer by wire, collect: 

“One at a time.”

NOT MUCH TO TALK ABOUT

There was an explosion of one of the big guns on a battleship not long ago.  Shortly afterward one of the sailors who was injured was asked by a reporter to give an account of it.

“Well, sir,” rejoined the jacky, “it was like this:  You see, I was standin’ with me back to the gun, a-facin’ the port side.  All of a sudden I hears a hell of a noise; then, sir, the ship physician, he says, ‘Set up an’ take this,’”

FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS

YOUTH (with tie of the Stars and Stripes):  I sent you some suggestions telling you how to make your paper more interesting.  Have you carried out any of my ideas?