The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-04-30 00:00:00

CUTTINGS FROM AMERICAN PAPERS.

Tennyson claims to be a great poet, and yet he may
fret and study and tear about for a week, and then
cannot write an ode to a sawmill; while the sweet singer
of Michigan only gave two minutes to whacking up one,
beginning :

All hail to thee! most terrible invention
Which chew up trees to any wished dimension;
And when something distracts a man's attention,
Will break him up, so that a Gov'ment pension
Won't do him any good,
Oh, fierce devourer thou of men and wood.

-
When two gushing young women make a great dis-
play of bidding each other good-bye, it may be called "much
adieu about nothing."

-
A paragraphist, alluding to one of his brethren of
the quill states: "There will be a dearth of the sayings of
smart children in the newspapers now; our deceased friend
manufactured most of them; it was his special line, and he
worked it like an innocent child."

A sober resident in a small village "on the bleak
New England shore" occasioned quite a commotion by say-
ing that the bodies of three children had just been washed
ashore. The citizens were indignant when, after much in-
quiry, the sober resident said: "1 tell you they were. They
were washed ashore by their mother. You don't suppose
she could take them out into the middle of the ocean to wash
em, do you ? "

. .
A resident of New Orleans has patented an appa-
ratus for switching boys off the back of cabs. The urchin
who steals a ride is seized firmly from behind and is whipped
by machinery, after which he is tossed gently in the air.
file capacity of the machine is ten boys a minute.

- -
A Vermont professor, who recently tried to mes-
merize a bull by gazing fixedly at the ferocious beast, has
just recovered from the effects of his involuntary aerial
navigation, and has quite lost faith in the power of the human
eye over brutes.

A Western stump orator, in the course of one of his
spaches, remarked, "Gentlemen, if the Parsyfic Ocean
wor an inkstand, and the hull clouded canopy of heaven
and the level ground of our youth wor a sheet of paper, I
couldn't begin to write my love of country on to it.

An editor in the far West has bought a race horse,
for which he paid two thousand dollars. On being asked
what an editor had to do with a race horse, he replied, that
"he was to be used in catching runaway subscribers."

A resident of Kalamazoo writes to a "school
boored " in Ohio that he will,take a school as he "ihas tought
2 terms school and I attended 1 colledge 4 years at detroit,
michigan and am 26 yrs avage."
A Wisconsin editor illustrates the prevailing extra-
vagance of people now-a-day, by calling attention to the
costly baby carriages in use ; while, when he was,a baby,
they hauled him round by the hair of his head.

"I wish I was a star,' he said, smiling at his own
poetic fancy. "I would rather you were a comet," she said,
dreamily. His heart beat tumultuously. "And why?" he
asked tenderly, at the same time taking her unresisting
little hands in his own, "and why?" he repeated, im-
periously. "Oh," she said, with a brooding earnestness
that fell upon his soul like bare feet on a cold oil-cloth,"
because then you would only come round once every fifteen
hundred years."