“‘Hard was he up;
And in the hardness of his upness
Stole a ham.
“‘Down on him swooped,
And swooping, up him scooped,
The minions of the law.’ Neptune.”
Commenting upon this thrust at silly queries, the editor remarks: “It shows what a newspaper has practised upon it daily in one form or another; yet the writers of communications quite as absurd as the foregoing wear very solemn faces, and enter long complaints against the editors for declining to print queries which would merely make the public laugh, or may be answered by consulting the nearest dictionary, or are of no possible interest to anybody save the querist himself. A bit of satire like ‘Neptune’s’ is a word to the wise; we almost despair, however, of its producing any effect upon the foolish.”
Puffery Extraordinary
A manufacturer of patent medicines wrote to a friend living on a farm in the West for a good strong recommendation for his (the manufacturer’s) “Balsam.” In a few days he received the following:
“Dear Sir,—The land composing my farm had hitherto been so poor that a Scotchman could not get a living off it, and so stony that we had to slice our potatoes and plant them edgeways, but hearing of your balsam, I put some on a ten-acre lot surrounded by a railroad fence, and in the morning I found that the rock had entirely disappeared, a neat stone wall encircled the field, and the rails were split into oven wood, and piled up systematically in my back-yard.