He mixed his figures about as badly as a famous Irishman, Sir Boyle Roche, who, suspecting the opposition of some sort of underhand intentions, revealed his acuteness and his purpose to head off the enemy in the following terms: “I smell a rat; I feel it in the air; and I will nip it in the bud!”
A SURE THING
The colonel and a friend were sitting on the back porch of the house smoking and talking. They fell to discussing the intoxicating properties of beer. The colonel maintained that a man couldn’t possibly drink enough beer to make him drunk, but his friend was of a contrary mind. The colonel went into his kitchen and brought out a two-gallon tin bucket, and said, “See this bucket? Well, I have a German sawing wood down in my barn at the end of the lot. I’ll bet you ten dollars that he can drink all the beer that bucket will hold at one sitting, and not be the worse for it.” The bet was taken, and the colonel called the man from his work, and said, “Diedrich, you see that bucket? If I were to fill that bucket with beer, do you think you could drink it all at one sitting?”
The German smiled broadly, and said he guessed he could—he could try. “But I want you to be certain,” said the colonel. “Vell,” said Diedrich, “I guess I could, but maybe I couldn’t.” With this he was dismissed and the subject was dropped.
At the end of a half hour, Diedrich appeared on the scene and said that if that bucket was filled with beer he could drink it all without stopping. He was certain he could. Accordingly he was sent with the bucket to a neighboring brewery and promptly returned with the vessel full to the brim. He placed it on a table, drew up a chair, tilted the bucket and set to work. In a very short time he had finished, arose, thanked the colonel and was making for the wood-pile.
“Hold on,” called the colonel, “I want to ask you a question. When I called you up the first time you were uncertain whether you could drink that bucket of beer or not, and then after a while you came back and said you were certain you could. How do you explain that?”
Diedrich drew the back of his hand across his mouth, and said, “Vy, colonel, dot is easy to explain. Der first time ven you ask me, I did not know for sure. So ven I vent away, I vent over to der brewery undt got me a bucket about so big as yours undt tried if I could—undt I found I could, I could; undt so I coom back here sure, sure dat I could drink your bucket full mit beer. See?”
THE LOGIC OF GRAMMAR
While instructing his pupils in grammar, a country school-teacher gave out this sentence to be parsed: “Mary milks the cow.” Each word had been parsed except the last, which fell to Bob, a sixteen-year-old boy, near the foot of the class, who began thus:
“Cow is a noun, feminine gender, singular number, third person, and stands for Mary.”