A Yankee in the Far East

by George Hoyt Allen

I swelled out my chest and swaggered away and thought I was funny

Now word has just come to me that my ship won't sail today. Owing to unforeseen delays, she won't sail till tomorrow at 5 P. M., and it's the ship's delay, and "the haughtiness of office" for me. I feel just like the melancholy Dane in his famous soliloquy.

I'm in the same fix another fellow was, who thought he would be funny. He was standing on the rear platform of a train that was just pulling out from a town in Illinois, noted for its blood-thirsty, scrappy natives. The train was getting under good headway when this "humorist" thought it would be funny to shake his fist at one of the natives standing along the line, a great big especially vicious-looking citizen, and to promise him one good thrashing the next time he (the humorist) came that way.

Just then the train stopped and backed down to the station onto a siding.

With a blood-curdling whoop that native jumped aboard the train.

The "funny man" gently lifted the derby from the dozing passenger's head and set his own sombrero in its place

The humorist, who was wearing a wide-brimmed, conspicuous sombrero, ducked into the car, and espying an English tourist dozing and wearing a modest little derby, the "funny man" gently lifted the derby from the dozing passenger's head and set his own sombrero in its place, and sat down two seats back and was nonchalantly looking out of the window as the native raged into the car looking for blood and that fellow with a hat.

There was no mistaking the hat; he spotted his man and was going to eat him alive.