The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1879-07-26 00:00:00

CUTTINGS FROM AMERICAN PAPERS.

An editor in Mississippi recently wrote, "Before
our subscribers go down to bathe In the bayou, we wish they
would send their cards to this office, for we do not like to
print a man's name wrong who has been devoured by an
alligator.
An American writer says :—Half the time we have
had a peculiarly bright thought, we have found, after putting
it in elegant language, that some Shakespeare or Longfellow
or Carlyle has anticipated us, and not infrequently used our
very words.
"Gentlemen of the jury," said an eloquent Chicago
advocate; "you have heern the witness swar he saw the pri-
soner raise his gun; you hey heern him swar he saw the
flash and heerd the report; you hey heern him mar he saw
the dog fall dead: you bay heern him swar he dug the bullet
out with his jack-knife, and you hey seen the bullet produced
in court; but whar, gentlemen, whar, I ask you, is the man
who saw that ballet hit that dog ? "
- -

An unsophisticated New England commercial
traveller, on reading the sign "General Merchandise" on a
store, waited in and asked if he could see the General.
There is something about the term "brass band"
that is particularly unssithetic. A brazen confraternity is
far more elegant, without lacking perspicacity. Boston
Telegraph.

James Russell Lowell uses the phrase, "Rare as a
day in June." We have carefully examined the almanaek,
and find that June has thirty days, and of those, the longest
in the year, therefore we don't consider it at all rare to have
days in June.
A Chicago paper says that a young wife of that city,
who is anxious to keep her husband at home evenings,
flatters him about the exquisite dainty proportions of his
feet, and induces him to wear boots about two sizes too small
for him. He is on his feet all day long in town, and when
he oomes home at night she has a soft chair and a pair of
loose, cool slippers for him, and by the time he, with great
drops of agony pearling on his brow, has got off his boots,
he comes to the conclusion that there is no place like home
after all, and has no desire to go down town to lodge or to
sit up with a sick friend.
A claim has recently been proudly put forth in New
York by a family of the name of Moss to be the most
ancient family of whom there is any record and scientific
proof. They base their claim on the statement of a well-
known professor, that the origin of life was "the most-grown
fragments from the rains of another world."
Josh Billings was asked, "How fast does sound
travel?" His idea is that it depends a good deal upon the
noise you are talking about. "The sound ov a dinner horn,
for instance, travels half a mile in a second, while an in-
vitashun tew git up in the morning i have known to be
3-quarters us an hour goin' 2 pair of stairs, and then not hey
strength enuff left to be heard."
A Danbury young man who left on a Far Western
expedition was bidding his friends good-bye at the depot,
when a young girl cried out, "Bring me the scalp of a
Modoc, won't you ? " The young man, feeling a little hurt at
her indifference to his departure and the dangers he was
about to encounter, sadly replied, "No, Emma; you
should not look for more hair until you have paid for that
you now wear." The remark appeared to subdue her.
An American says that, from his late experience of
English weather, he should imagine that "Rain, Britanuia I"
ought to be as popular in England as "Rail Columbia I" is in
the States.

A Mobile paper describes a young lady with hair
"as black as a raven's" The ravens weren't wearing any
hair to speak of last summer, bat we suppose the style has
changed this year.

- Out in search of an item to-day, says the reporter
of a Nevad% newspaper, we asked a fellow-citizen, "What's
the news f' "Nothing startling," he replied. That man
would never do for a newspaper reporter in a small interior
town. Nothing startling indeed! Why, as he made the
remark two dogs were preparing to sign articles for a prize-
fight right in front of his store; a waggon loaded with wood
could be seen in the distance, which was sure to pass his
way during the day if something did not break; two women
whom he knew to be mortal enemies were approaching each
other on the corner above: a doctor was hurrying across the
street, and a man who always kicks up a fuss and gets
arrested when he gets excited Dy teetotaling was just enter-
ing the door of a salocn a few doors below! Had that
fellow-citizen had the soul of a reporter within his breast,
he might have convulsed half Europe by the free use of
adjectives, superlative quotations from the classics and the
Chelsea philosopher, and capital letters.