Subscribers to the Philistine not fully understanding my jokes will be supplied with laughing gas at club rates.
The St. Louis Mirror is flashing the light on to one W. J. Arkell, who it says has a habit of carrying on a brilliant conversazione with himself through his chapeau. Just what this means I do not know, but Arkell is not the only man in this country who owns an Unjust Judge.
The city of Cork in Ireland has one hundred thousand inhabitants, one-half of whom can neither read nor write. Able-bodied men can be hired for forty cents a day, and women who get a dollar a week and board are very fortunate. The city of Cork has no street cars, nor electric lights; the best hotel has no elevator, nor gas; so you can neither fall down the shaft nor asphixiate. At bed-time you are given a candle which is duly charged in your bill. Three-fifths of the citizens are Catholics and yet the city of Cork boasts the finest Protestant Episcopal church of its size in the United Kingdom. I refer to the Church of St. Fin Barre. It cost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The bronze gates that separate the chancel from the nave, alone cost twenty thousand dollars; sixteen thousand dollars were paid for one window, and the grill-work, hand carved, in the choir, took two men five years to make. The building of this beautiful temple was made possible only through the generosity of one Mr. Guinness, manufacturer of a certain “stout” that is known as “XXX.” This mixture is highly recommended for nursing mothers and those in need of a tonic.
And now a resident of Chicago proposes to build in the Windy City a church patterned after the beautiful church at Cork, but whose steeple is to be twice as high, and which is to cost a full million dollars. Cork can keep her rags and illiteracy; she may continue sending her guests to bed with a candle; but no longer shall she be able to boast her supremacy in things ecclesiastic—not by a dam sight!