, 1904-05-23
AND ONE HAD LOVE-,

AND ONE HAD LOVE.
One man had riches for his gift and
The emptiness thereof;
Another, where Fame's topmost sum
mits lift
All pigmy peaks above,
Felt the keen pangs of lofty loneli,
ness;
And one had love,
Down in the lowly valley-paths of life
His years were spent
Where. far removed rom moiling din
and strife,
Brook-song and bird.song Lient
Babbled of quiet things, Of restful
peace,
And deep content.
Yet there was something in his cup of
days
Ineffably more sweet
Than e'er he knew who, in the giddy
maze
OF fortune set his feet
Or quaffed Fame's goblet. wreathed
with rue and bays,
And found it incomplete,
Hilton r. Greer, in National Maya
zine.
The English Joke.
The average English joke has its pc
culiarities. A sort of mellow distance.
coy and timid yet trusting. though
e~vanescent intangibility which softly
fingers in the untroubled air, and lulls
the tired senses to dreamy rest, like
the subdued murmur of a hoarse jack
ass about nine miles up the gulch.
He must be a hardened wretch, in
deed. who has not felt his bosom heave
and the scalding tear steal down his
furrowed cheek after he has read an
English joke. There can be no hope
for the man who has not been touched
by the gentle, pleading, yet all potent
sadness embodied in the humorous
paragraph Of the true Englishman.
One may fritter away his existence
in chasing the follies Of u day and
generation, and have naught to look
back upon but a choice assortment of
robust regrets, but if he will stop in
his mad career to read an English pun,
his attention will be called to the sol
emn thought that life is after all but a
fearful journey to the tomb.
Death and disaster on every hand
may fail to turn the minds of a
thoughtless world to serious matters
but when the London funny mar
grapples with a particularly skittish
and evasive joke, with its weeping will
low attachment, and hurls it at a gid
dy and reckless humanity, a prolonged
wall of anguish goes up from broken
hearts, and a sombre pail hangs in the
gladstone sky like a pair of soldier
pants with only one suspender.
II the lost and undone victim to the
great catalogue Of damning vice and
enervating dissipation will for a mo-
ment turn his mind to the solemn con.
%sideration Of the London Punch, and
ing eyes of the world cannot penetrate,
though unused to tears, the fountains
the great deep in his nature will be
opened up, and he will see the black
ness of intense darkness which sur
him, and be led to penitence
and abject humility.
The mission of the English humorist
is, to darken the horizon and shut out
the false and t%reacherous Joy II ex-
istence-to shut out the beauty of the
and scatter a 81 gloom over
the glad green earth.
English humor is like a sore toe.
1t makes you glad when you are over
it, 1t is like having the smallpox, be-
aus If you live through it you are
not likely to have it again.
When We ass from earth and our
place is filled by another sad-eyed ge-
MUS whose pants are too short and who
manifests other signs Of greatness, let
no stored urn or animated bust be
over our lowly resting place.
but stun an English conundrum SO
that it will look as it did in life, and
let it stand above our silent dust to
shed its damp and bilious influence
the cemetery a a monument
Of desolation and a fountain Of unshed
ears. and the grave robDer will shun
'ur final resting place as he would the
melon patch where turks the spring
;un and the alert and irritable bull
og.-Bnl Nye.