JUST ABOUT.
Sir: How long do you suppose the Snow Ball Laundry will last in Quinter, Kansas? The proprietor is G. W. Burns. P. V. W.
In an almanack, which is printed once a year, or in a dictionary or encyclopedia, which is republished after ten or twenty years, you would expect to find fewer errors than in a daily newspaper; but apparently time has little to do with [p 258] />]it. Consulting the Britannica’s article on Anatole France, we were inexpressibly shocked to find therein the atrocities, “L’Ile des Penguins” and “Maurice Bàrrès.”
We were looking through the France sketch to see whether there was mention of a story he wrote before he became well known, entitled “Marguerite.” A Paris publisher found it recently in a magazine and asked M. France to write a preface to it, that it might be issued as a book. Quoth France: “It would be an excess of literary vanity on my part to resurrect the story. But my vanity would, perhaps, be greater were I to try to suppress it.”
Reference books, as is well known, improve like wine with age, and the efficiency of our proof room is to be accounted for, in part, by the vintage volumes that line its library shelf. There are sixty of these rare old tomes, and five of them are useful; these being, we think, first editions. There is a Who’s Who of the last century that is still in good condition, and the dictionary of biography with which Lippincotts began business. Bibliophiles would, we believe, enjoy looking over the shelf.
[p 259]
]JAW JINGLES.
If a Hottentot taught a Hottentot tot
To talk ere the tot could totter,
Ought the Hottentot tot be taught to say “ought,”
Or “naught,” or what ought to be taught her?
If to hoot and to toot a Hottentot tot
Be taught by a Hottentot tutor,
Ought the Hottentot tutor get hot if the tot
Hoot and toot at the Hottentot tutor?