School guardian.  Widowed priest plays the harmonium and sings:  “Rest with the saints.”

* * * * *

In July the red bird sings the whole morning.

* * * * *

“A large selection of cigs"[1]—­so read X. every day when he went down the street, and wondered how one could deal only in cigs and who wanted them.  It took him thirty years before he read it correctly:  “A large selection of cigars.”

[Footnote 1:  Cigs in Russian is a kind of fish.]

* * * * *

A bride to an engineer:  a dynamite cartridge filled with one-hundred-rouble notes.

* * * * *

“I have not read Herbert Spencer.  Tell me his subjects.  What does he write about?” “I want to paint a panel for the Paris exhibition.  Suggest a subject.” (A wearisome lady.)

* * * * *

The idle, so-called governing, classes cannot remain long without war.  When there is no war they are bored, idleness fatigues and irritates them, they do not know what they live for; they bite one another, try to say unpleasant things to one another, if possible with impunity, and the best of them make the greatest efforts not to bore the others and themselves.  But when war comes, it possesses all, takes hold of the imagination, and the common misfortune unites all.

* * * * *

An unfaithful wife is a large cold cutlet which one does not want to touch, because some one else has had it in his hands.

* * * * *

An old maid writes a treatise:  “The tramline of piety.”

* * * * *

Ryzeborsky, Tovbin, Gremoukhin, Koptin.

* * * * *

She had not sufficient skin on her face; in order to open her eyes she had to shut her mouth and vice versa.

* * * * *

When she raises her skirt and shows her lace petticoat, it is obvious that she dresses like a woman who is accustomed to be seen by men.

* * * * *

X. philosophizes:  “Take the word ‘nose.’  In Russia it seems something unmentionable means the deuce knows what, one may say the indecent part of the body, and in French it means wedding.”  And indeed X.’s nose was an indecent part of the body.

* * * * *

A girl, flirting, chatters:  “All are afraid of me ... men, and the wind ... all leave me alone!  I shall never marry.”  And at home poverty, her father a regular drunkard.  And if people could see how she and her mother work, how she screens her father, they would feel the deepest respect for her and would wonder why she is so ashamed of poverty and work, and is not ashamed of that chatter.