The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-04-01 00:00:00

AMERICAN HUMOUR.

A New York gentleman is blessed with 15 daughters
and he is looking about for 15 likely young men to bless each
of them with a wife.

A cheap way of getting credit for liberality was
devised by the managers of a fair in Illinois, who offered a
premium to the oldest spinster present. Of course nobody
claimed it.

A gallant Alabama editor, in "noticing" a grocery
shop kept by a woman, says, "her tomatoes are as red as
her own cheeks, her indigo as blue as her own eyes, and her
pepper as hot as her own temper."

A Lewiston (Maine) man boasted that he traded
horses nine times in one day, and at night he had the same
horse Ile started with in the morning, 45 dollars in money.
a watch worth 20 dollars, a double-barelled ehot-gun, and
four bushels of potatoes.

A young man in New York read somewhere that
more deaths occurred at five o'clock in the morning than at
any other hour, and now gets up regularly at four, in order
to be out when Death makes his morning calls.
Here is a good business like Yankee epitaph :
"Here lies Jane Smith, wife of Thomas Smith, marble
cutter. This monument was erected by her husband as a
tribute to her memory and a specimen of his work. Monu-
ments of the same style, 250 dols.
A wife, who often stormed at her husband, was sit-
ting with him at the breakfast table, when, suddenly, amid
loud coughing, "Dear me," she exclaimed, "a bit of
pepper has gotten into my windpipe I"—"Hurricane-pipe,
you mean, my dear," coolly rejoined her sarcastic spouse.

A Yankee reporter is terrifically "graphic" in de-
scribing the recent collision of railroad trains in Missouri.
Hear him: The two engines rushed at each other like
malign and enraged monsters, grappled with a tremendous
crash, reared from the track in a mortal wrestle, and fell
into helpless and disjointed fragments on the ground."

In Nevada, when a building falls and kills two or
three people, the jury first hunt up the contractor and hang
him, and then bring in a verdict that nobody is to blame but
the contractor, who cannot be found.

"What. Mr. Speaker, what shall I say to my con-
stituents?" exclaimed a wrathful member of the Congress
on the passage of a bill to whi(lli he was utterly opposed.
"What shall I say 1" he repeated, but found it impossible to
go beyond the interrogatory.—" Tell them," replied the wag-
gish Speaker, "that you tried to make a speech, but couldn't.
A Chicago paper tells the story of a nocturnal
serenader who hanz, "When the mo-hoon's shi-ht-hi-ning
o'er the la-lake, 0, th-hen I'll thi hbk of thee he-he-hee 0,
the•hen, 11l thi-hi-hi-htink of thee-ee-ee !" The music
aroused a dog about the size of a flour barrel, and the
musician is doing as well as could be expected.

- The San Francisco style of advertising is rather sen-
sational. Here is a late specimen from one of the Journals
of that city. "Away from the land of her birth and loved
of her youth, she met the relentless conqueror, bowed her
lovely head to his stroke. Other hands smoothed the long,
brown tresses; other fingers closed the blue eyes, and folded
the gentle hands upon the peaceful, sinless bosom." "Pure
pork sausages—six pounds for 1 doL. at William & Cook's,
under Exchange.