Il est beans,
Nous sommes bon bons,
Vous êtes bonbonnières,
Ils sont bon-ton.”
Tolstoy told Isabel Habgard, who has translated many of his books, a good story of one of his ancestors, an army officer, who was an excellent mimic. One day he was impersonating the Emperor Paul to a group of his friends, when Paul himself entered, and for some moments looked on, unperceived, at the antics of the young man. Tolstoy finally turned, and beholding the emperor, bowed his head and was silent. “Go on, sir,” said Paul; “continue the performance.” The young man hesitated a moment, and then, folding his arms and imitating every gesture and intonation of his sovereign, he said: “Tolstoy, you deserve to be degraded, but I remember the thoughtlessness of youth, and you are pardoned.” The czar smiling, said, “Well, be it so.”
When President Nicholas Murray Butler was at college, certain freshmen of his time made no scruple of stealing a pail of milk which a dairyman daily placed outside the door of Mr. Butler’s room while the occupant was in class. In order to foil the boys, Mr. Butler printed a sign in big letters, “I have poisoned this milk with arsenic.” Upon his return he found the milk intact, but added to the notice were these words: “So have we.”
There is an amusing story told of a clergyman, who, upon one of his trips through the West, observed that almost every man he met and spoke with used profanity. Finally he found one man who talked to him for twenty minutes without using an oath. The clergyman shook hands with him at parting and said: “You don’t know how glad I am to have a chance to have a talk with a man like you. You are the first man I have met for three days who could talk for five minutes without swearing.” The stranger, shocked, instantly and innocently ejaculated: “Well, I’ll be d——d!”