The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-09-23 00:00:00

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AMERICAN HUMOUR. J
-aft"

Unmarried girls in Vestnla have to wear little bells
on their ankles, and the eloping business is not good in that
locality.

Three lakes in Georgia have disappeared lately.
They found that wator was not appreciated in that State, and
left.

Same ow who believes that "brevity is the soul of
wit" writes: "Thal eat Q-cumbers. They'll W up."

Said a Denver prisoner to His Honour :—" You've
sent me up every summer for four years, and I've mimed the
li'ourt of July every time. Now I want you to make it short
this time. Make it so get out before the Fourth. This is
the last Centennial I expect to spend on earth, and I don't
want to spend it in Jail."
A young lady at Niagarl was beard to exclaim,
"What an elegant trimming that rainbow would make for a
white lace over a dress 1"

Josh Billinss says, before arimetic were invented,
people multiplified on the face of the airth.

- - -
A young lady once went to a photographer and
witted him to take her picture with an expression as if com-
posing a poem It came out with the expression she wore
when the editor put the poem in the waste•basket.
Truth is quite as strange As fiction. A New York
uncle bequeathed his nephew the fragments of a photograph
of himself that the young man had torn to pieces and turown
in his face. No novelist cuuld have conjured up a neater
retribution.
A breed of dogs without tails has been d:scovered in
Africa; and how the mischievions boys there utilize old tin
kettles and fruit cans we cannot pretend to say.
lif new social philosopher says the art of flirting is in
its ancy. It will be a Bad day when the thing is grown
up.
poet was asked by a lady, who introduced her four
che abs to him (old cherub, aged live) what he thou.ht of
the eft. She expected that he would have said something
i abo t dimples, golden hair, sunshine in the home, &0,, for
he opened her album, and wrote in it. The lines were
ins cted by his desire after he had gone. They were—
"Es shocking! There are four of 'em!
Thank goodness, there are no more of 'em!"

--
ONE BY ONE I—The opet.ker, at an anniversary
meeting, mournfully said :—" One by one our friends
are passing from us into the land of shadows." "Well,"
exclaimed an old lady, you wouldn't have 'em go two
by two, or all in a huddle, would you 'V'

LETTER FROM MISS FLORENCE
NIGHTIN GALE.
'Sir John Bennett has raceived the following letter, wit a
cheque for £lO 101, frc,m Miss Florence Nightingale :
"London, Sept. 15.

"Gad speed Sir John Bennett in collecting help for
these innocent Bulgarians—martyrs of a pereecution
like which there has nothing been Been in Europe since
the persecution of the Cariatians under a It nuan
Emperor whose name was cruelty. In the midst of
their rose garden industry, their women and children
are all at once attacked and butchered with never-to-be-
forgotten horrors. Their valleys, beautiful as our
Derbyshire valleys, where every stream once turned its
mills, are laid waste into literally howling wilder-
nesses.' Their very means of life are gone—burnt,
pillaged, deetroyed ; and this in a country in which if
in edncation it has not yet raised itself to a level with
Are West, American missionaries had but to plant
schools, when at once these spiead and multiplied a
huudrecifoll in the people's own hands. These schools
—these particullrly—are all deatroy ed, the mistresses
and masters tortured, girls sold into slavery. I say
that a poor little country which could do BO much in
15 years under such a brute of a Government—a
Government to which one has to pay tribute not
to be burnt, plundered, or murdered—is itself
not only struggling into our Western life, but up
to the highest level of civilization. To this
country thus bravely, industriously struggling into
lile, comes the brute, vile rapine, with nameless crimes.
And some tell us the same things ire to be in Servia.
Already, already they are there, in Bosnia and the
Mazegovina in a chronic state, intolerably aggravated
now. Oh, let us help them back to the struggle into
life. L3t us, who have everything they have lost,
home, schools, security, good government, indepen-
dence, freedom to worship God, show how we value
these by giving each our mite to help them to help
themselves. With a cheque for 210 10s.—FLOBENCE
NIGHTLNGA.LE,—Sir John Bennett."