“Why, Jack,” laughed his wife, as she came to his assistance, “you don’t seem to like paper-flower work. I guess you forgot to tie one hand behind you and so used both to throw time at the birds.”
“Now see here, Jennie, don’t strike a man when he’s down. I’ll admit that I’m not nearly so smart as I thought I was this morning, but how things ever got in this shape I can’t tell,” said Jack with a grim smile.
Together they soon brought order out of chaos, and as they sat eating their picked-up dinner Jack said:
“If it is all the same to you, Jennie, I’ll finish the orchard this afternoon.”—The Los Angeles Times.
A BAD NIGHT
By J. Ross Browne
I gradually dropped off into a doze, a mere doze, for I scorn the charge of having slept a wink that night. The grating of the grindstones, the everlasting clatter of tongues, the dust, the chaff, smoke, and fleas, to say nothing of the roar of the water down below, were enough to banish all hope of sleep; I merely closed my eyes to try how ridiculous it would feel. How long they remained closed I scarcely know; it was not long, however, for I soon heard a heavy breathing close by my head, and felt the warm breath of some monster on my face. I knew it to be no Arab; it blew and snuffed altogether unlike anything of the human kind. Thinking it might be all fancy, I cautiously put out my hand in the dark and began to feel around me. For some moments I could discover nothing, but in waving my hand around I at length touched something—something that sent the blood flying back to my heart a good deal quicker than it ever flew before. To tell the honest truth, I never was so startled in all the previous adventures of my life. The substance that I put my hand on was bare and warm; it was wet also and slimy, and had large nostrils which seemed to be in the act of smelling me, previous to the act of mastication. With the quickness of lightning I jerked up my hand, and felt it glide along a skin covered with long rough hair; the next instant my ears were stunned by the most dreadful noises, which resembled, as I thought in the horror of the moment, the roaring of a full-grown lion. But it was not the roaring of a lion; it was only the braying of an ass.—From The Mill of Malaha.
AN UNTHANKFUL ORPHAN
By Kate Langley Bosher
My name is Mary Cary. I live in the Yorkburg Female Orphan Asylum. You may think nothing happens in an Orphan Asylum. It does. The orphans are sure enough children, and real, much like the kind that have Mothers and Fathers; but though they don’t give parties or wear truly Paris clothes, things happen.