Laura. You blessed boy! I would like to hug and kiss you.
Cupid. I'll shoot you if you do.
Amanda. I'm so relieved.
Georgiana. Tho am I.
Mollie. That funny boy has been shooting at us too. My own heart feels as if it had been hit, and I guess—don't you, girls?—that we'll never send any more comic valentines. We'll stick to Cupid's own, the missives of love.
curtain.
[AN IRISHMAN'S PATIENCE.]
In a neat little white painted house up in Maine, a baby's gold ring hangs upon the wall tied with a bit of ribbon. The owner, an Irishman, a humorous scion of his race, when interrogated about it, told the following story:
While fishing one day in an adjacent lake, he accidentally dropped the ring out of his pocket, and slipping off the edge of the boat, it sank down through the clear water. As he watched it disappearing, a large fish darted through the water, and opening his month gulped it down. The Irishman sadly lamented his loss of the ring as it belonged to his little baby. He resolved to fish that lake until he found the rascally thief, and day after day he hauled in the shiny, struggling members of the finny tribe, and cut them open in search of his ring. Weeks went by, and grew into months, until the cold weather arrived, but with a fisherman's patience he continued in his task even to cutting holes in the ice to fish through. One day after a severe and long protracted struggle, he hauled in a fine fish, and some intuitive instinct told him he had at last caught the thief, which, on cutting him open, proved to be the case.