Business Economy
Two commercial tourists, chancing to meet in an inn of a country town, began, after lighting their cigars, a dispute as to the relative extent of the business of their respective houses. One, zealous to prove the superiority of the establishment he represented, after enumerating extraordinary instances, reached the climax with the assertion that the business of his house was so extensive, that in their correspondence alone, it cost them over five hundred dollars a year for ink.
“Pooh, pooh,” said the other, “why, we save that much yearly by just omitting the dots to the i’s and the strokes to the t’s.”
Completing an Unfinished Stanza
It is related that Dr. Mansel, of Trinity College, Cambridge, by chance called at the rooms of a brother Cantab, who was absent, but had left on his table the opening of a poem, in the following lofty strain:
“The sun’s perpendicular rays
Illumined the depths of the sea.”
Here the flight of the poet, by some accident, stopped short, but Dr. Mansel, equal to the occasion, completed the stanza in the following facetious style:
“And the fishes, beginning to sweat,
Cried ‘Damn it,’ how hot we shall be.”