The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-09-10 00:00:00

CUTTINGS FROM AMERICAN PAPERS.

There are places in the Gulf of Mexico six miles
deep. Good spots to hide a jack-knife.

"Yes; always sympathise with the under dog in a
fight, but bet your mosey on the other.
In Flint, Mich., there is a piano that was built in
1810. It is still capable of putting the next door neighbour
into spasms when the right girl is present to do the pounding.

- -
The San Antonio people complain of little fishes in
the water mains. They can't expect the Water Works Com-
pany to furnish them with whales 120 feet long for a dollar
a month.—Texa,s Siftings.

Conscience? What is conscience? Well, when
you see the Assessor coming round to survey your personal
property and you slip your gold watch into your coat-tail
pocket and feel as mean as an Arab about it—that's con-
science.
A little six-year-old Chicago boy astonished his
mother by exclaiming, "I wish I was an angel!" Wonder-
ing what holy thoughts were filling his young mind she
waited for a reason. "Then I could see all the circuses at
once."
No comedian, says Uncle Sam, ean make as laugh-
able a face as that made by the small boy when he briegs a
jelly jar down from the closet shelf and discovers it to be
full of tenpenny nails.

A Nebraska editor says :—" Send us, from every
town and county in America, poems; sad, sweet, dreamy
poems on "summer." Write only on one side of the paper,
please. We want the other side of the sheet to write
editorials on."

The Webster (Mass.) Times says Lake Chaubuna-
gungamaug in that town is sometimes erroneously written
Chargoggagoggmanchauggagogg. A man who would know-
ingly change the spelling of a lake in that horrible fashion
ought to be compelled to pronounce it as he writes it.
There is a poetic sonorousness in Lake Chaubunagunga-
maugaugbunggaugmaug, but how tame and insipid when
written Chargoggagoggoggogmanckaugogmaugoggoggoggg-
gogg No wonder the Times complains about It—Norris-
town Herald.
" Ah, love ! " she murmured, as they wandered
through the moonlight, " ah, dearest, why do the summer
roses fade?" He happened to be a young chemist of a prac-
tical turn of mind, and he replied that it was owing to the
insufficiency of oxygen in the atmosphere.

- -
A Connecticut man lost papers representing 8,000
dols. while at a pic-nic. That night he dreamed three or
four times where the papers were, and next morning he
went to the spot and recovered them. He is now trying to
dream the whereabouts of 10 dols. he loaned a man two
years ago, but up to the hour of going to press he had not
succeeded.—. Norristown Herald.

Josh Billings says—" When I was a young man I
was always in a hurry to hold the big end of the log, and do
all the lifting; now I am older I seize hold of the small end
and do all the grunting."
"Never marry for wealth," says an American
authority on life, &c., "but remember that it is just as easy
to love a girl who has a brick house with a Mansard roof and
a silver-plated door-bell as one who has not anything but an
auburn head and an amiable disposition"
A shopkeeper in the Far West, having had a stormy
discussion with his better half, put up the shutters and
affixed the following notice :—" Closed during altercations."
There are six different ways of getting into a ham-
mock, and only one way to roll out. Seems as if things
ought to be evened up a little.
A New York girl has a case in which she displays
rings received from her captives in matrimonial engage-
ments, Sort of war hoops, as it were.
When some one throws a basin of water from a
fourth-story window the pedestrian who catches it always
wants to whip some one on the first floor, and why is it?

Useless as the pistol is in most every respect, it
occasionally vindicates its right to existence in a very satis-
factory and righteous fashion (says the Detroit Free Press).
Such was the part it played at a toll-gate house near India-
napolis, a day or two since, when a burglar, arousing the
gate-keeper, an old lady, made her hand over her money—
eight dollars—and then asked for the revolver she usually
kept under her pillow. While he continued swearing at her
and abusing her, she went and got it and "presented" it to
him, aiming it in the direction of his voice. The bullet en-
tered his skull just behind the ear, inflicting a wound from
which he dropped insensible and died.

BLACK ON THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. —New
South Wales has developed a, " shoeblack plant ! "
It is a species of Inhtscus, with scarlet flowers, which,
when dry, make an admirable blacking. It grows
freely in almost any soil, so that now we grow our
blacking in our own gardens. With this plant, and
the well-known boot-tree, we shall now be independent
of the bootmaker an the blacking manufacturer. Of
thia you may be 041-6n—Fun.