“I lined those superstitious fools along the mud-bank before that sham scaffolding of an alligator, and the sermon I preached them on the follies of Ju-ju ought to have converted them then and there. But the results were entirely contrary to my expectations. For when, some years later, after I had left old Emil, I returned for a short visit to the Barennas, who were always my grateful friends, I found Joaquin’s head hung in their veranda.
“A servant who did not know me saw me looking at it.
“‘That American debbil-debbil,’ he explained politely, and pointed to the little brass plate his master had had stuck upon it with an inscription setting forth that I had shot the brute on such and such a date. ‘Him name Banks,’ he added, ‘and great big Ju-ju. Nigger boy say prayers to him ebry night!’”
The Boy; His Hand and Pen
BY TOM P. MORGAN
MY Aunt Almira, who is an old maid, says that spring is the time when the young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love; but my Uncle Bill, who has been a bachelor so long that it’s chronic with him, says that ’most every spring he gets as bilious as a goat. That’s the way it goes; women are romantic and are everlastingly thinking about their hearts and souls, while men are generally more concerned about their stomachs and pocketbooks. You give a man enough to eat and a few dollars to squander and he’ll manage to scuffle along, but a woman won’t be happy unless she’s worrying about love, or something.
Uncle Bill once knew an old maid who lived in constant dread of finding a man under the bed. She kept on hopefully fearing him for thirty-seven years, and early in the thirty-eighth she was drowned. One time there was a Brighamyoungamist who married twenty-three different women in rapid succession, and he looked a good deal like the last end of a hard winter, too. Well, the judge threw up his hands in astonishment, and asked him how in all-git-out a man would go to work to marry twenty-three women. And the Brighamyoungamist grinned and replied:
“Aw—tee! hee!—Judge, I just asked ’em!”