Mary Kyle Dallas says love-making is always awkward. “A stolen kiss, if seen, creates a laugh; a squeeze of the hand, if detected, is a great joy. I myself, who claim to be romantic, did grin at a shadow picture cast upon the wall of the white garden fence, next door, by an envious gas-light, when I saw the shadow of the young lady with much waterfall feed the shadow of the young gentleman with no whiskers with sugar-plums and then kiss it; but the shadows were very black, and took odd crinks in their noses as they moved to and fro, and that may have been the cause of my mirth.”

“Oh! your nose is as cold as ice,” a Boston father thought he heard his daughter exclaim the other evening, as he was reading in the next room. He walked in for an explanation, but the young fellow was at one end of the sofa and the girl at the other, while both looked so innocent and unconscious that the old gentleman concluded that his ears had deceived him, and so retired from the scene without a word.

A country girl, coming from a morning walk, was told that she looked as fresh as a daisy kissed by the dew, to which she innocently replied, “You’ve got my name right, Daisy; but his isn’t Dew.”

Scene at the Atlantic Telegraph office.

Fond Wife (to telegraph-operator). “Oh, sir! I want to send a kiss to my husband in Liverpool. How can I do it?”

Obliging Operator. “Easiest thing in the world, ma’am. You’ve got to give it to me with ten dollars, and I’ll transmit it right away.”

Fond Wife. “If that’s the case, the directors ought to put much younger and handsomer men in your position.”