Jim will tie to Jane in the holy bonds of wedlock,
But ere a year is gone he’ll be scraping round on bedrock.
A Leap Year party was given on Monday evening at the Coyote District school-house, Potato county. The Temple of Science was beautifully decorated, the words “Leep Yeer,” tastily executed in colored chalks on the black-board, being conspicuously pleasing. They were the work of the teacher.
The McCorkle crowd is Novembering at Iron Springs. That summer place of last resort does not advertise in this journal, but we know enough about it from other sources to whack up our deepest dollar on the proposition that the essence of latch-key which Mother Earth spits out at that place will knock the McCorkle livers galley west.
THE EVOLUTION OF A STORY
ON a calm evening in the early summer, a young girl stood leaning carelessly against a donkey at the top of Plum Hill, daintily but with considerable skill destroying a biscuit by mastication’s artful aid. The sun had been for some time behind the sea, but the conscious West was still suffused with a faint ruddiness, like the reflection from an army of boiled lobsters marching below the horizon for a flank attack upon the stomach of Boston.
Slowly and silently the ruby legion held its way. Not a word was spoken; commands given by the general were passed from mouth to mouth, like a single bit of chewing gum amongst the seven children immortalized by Edward Bok, who was more than usually active this evening, if that were possible.
And it was possible; in no spirit of bravado, but with firm reliance on the blanc mange he had eaten for dinner, and which was even now shaping itself into exquisite fancies in the laboratory of his genius, the great editor had resolved to reach a higher excellence, or perish in the attempt, as the tree frog, baffled by the smooth bark of the beech, falls exhausted into the spanning jaws of the serpent biding his time below.
Having swallowed the frog, the reptile turned to go away, and by a sinuous course soon reached the highway. Here he stood up and looked about him. There was no living thing in sight. To the right hand and the left the dusty white road stretched away without a break in its dreary, mathematical sameness. Beyond a belt of pines on the opposite side rose a barren, rounded hilltop, resembling the bald crown of a game keeper thrust upward from behind a hedge to offer a shining mark for the poacher.