Next day the same young man came again. “Well, did you succeed in making Tillman yell?” he asked. The dentist shook his head sadly. “No,” he replied in a disappointed tone. “I couldn’t make him flinch. He didn’t make a sound, and, d’ye know, when he got out of the chair he turned to me with a smile and said: ‘Say, doctor, I didn’t know before that you ran a painless dental shop.’” (Text.)
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ENDURING ART
You can go down into the narrow vault which Nero built as a retreat from the great heat, and you will find the walls painted all over with fanciful designs in arabesque, which have been buried beneath the earth fifteen hundred years; but when the peasants light it up with their torches, the colors flash out before you as fresh as they were in the days of St. Paul.—Wendell Phillips.
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ENEMIES
Mr. Vernon L. Kellogg, with a child friend, were watching an ant-dragon as he caught an ant in a sandpit-trap.
“But, see,” cried Mary, “the ant has stopt sliding. It is going to get out!”
Ah, Mary, you are not making allowance for all the resources of this dreadful dragon of the pit. Not only is the pit a nearly perfect trap, and the eager jaws at the bottom more deadly than any array of spikes or spears at the bottom of an elephant pit, but there is another most effective thing about this fatal dragon’s trap, and that is this: it is not merely a passive trap, but an active one. Already it is in action. And Mary sees now how hopeless it is with the ant. For a shower of sand is being thrown up from the bottom of the pit against the ant and it is again sliding down. The dragon has a flat, broad head and powerful neck muscles, and has wit enough to shovel up and hurl masses of dry sand-grains against the victim on the loose slopes. And this starts the avalanche again, and so down slides the frantic ant.—Vernon L. Kellogg, “Insect Stories.”
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