“Die with? Why, the cholera, mostly, nowadays.”
“Well, I guess that’s the name of what I want. I’ll take three cents’ worth.”
The Hartford Courant told this story in 1869:—
“Cholera fenced in.—You have noticed the flaming handbills setting forth the virtues of a cholera remedy, that are posted by the hundreds on the board fence enclosing the ground on Main Street, where Roberts’ opera house is being erected. Well, there was a timid countryman, the other day, who had so far recovered from the ‘cholera scare’ as to venture into the city with a horse and wagon load of vegetables; and thereby hangs a tale. He drove moderately along the street, when he suddenly spied the word ‘Cholera,’ in big letters on the new fence, and he staid to see no more. Laying the lash on to his quadruped, he went past the handbills like a streak of lightning, went—‘nor stood on the order of his going’—up past the tunnel, planting the vegetables along the entire route,—for the tail-board had loosened,—hardly taking breath, or allowing his beast to breathe, till he reached home at W.
“Safely there, he rushed wildly into the midst of his household, exclaiming,—
“‘O, wife, wife, they have got the cholera in Hartford, and have fenced it in.’”
A Joke that’s not a Joke.—A funny limb of the law had an office, a few years since, on —— Street, next door to a doctor’s shop. One day, an elderly gentleman, of the fogy school, blundered into the lawyer’s office, and asked,—
“Is the doctor in?”