NORTH: SHORE: BREEZE 
A FEW SMILES. 
“ T’]] never ask another woman to 
marry me so long as I live.’ 
** Refused? ”’ 
*“No;.accepted,’’—£x. 
bf 
‘‘T want to know,”’ cried the irate 
visitor, ‘‘whether that item of yours 
in regard to me is an intentional slur 
or merely editorial assininity.”’ ‘‘What 
are you talking about, my dear sir, 
and who are you, anyway ?”’ asked the 
editor. ‘I’m Dr. Killiam, and I refer 
to your announcement of the sudden 
illness of the honorable John Jones, 
in which you say, ‘Mr. Jones is in 
great danger. Dr. Killiam has been 
called in.’’’— Philadelphia Press. 
*“What’s the row over on the next 
street?” 
“Only a wooden wedding. 
“Wooden wedding?” 
“Yes; a couple of Poles getting 
married.’ — oston Record. 
” 
Farmer Hoptoad —* That Philadel- 
phy must be aright smart of a town.” 
Farmer Treefrog —‘‘ Why so, H1- 
ram?”’ 
Farmer Hoptoad — “ Why, I asked 
a man from there what the opery 
house was over, an’ he said it wasn’t 
over nothin’. Occupies the hull build- 
in’.”’— Puck. 
“As longas you have refused me, I 
shall never marry.”’ 
“Too bad. Why not?” 
“If you won’t have me, who in the 
world will ?”’— Chicago Jounal. 
Physician — ** You have only a few 
minutes to live. Have you any last 
wish ?”’ 
Patient —‘‘I wish I had engaged 
another doctor.”’— Boston Record. 
A Lover’s Quarrel. 
She (turning at the door)—“ I think 
you are just hateful, and I’m never 
going to speak to you again; so there’s 
no use coming into the music room 
after me, because I'll be on the rustic 
bench at the far end of the conserva- 
tory.” —Smart Set. 
Meals at all Hours. 
A lank, awkward countryman pre- 
sented himself at the clerk’s desk in 
an American hotel, and after having a 
room assigned to him, inquired at 
what hours meals were served. - 
‘‘Breakfast from seven to eleven, 
luncheon from eleven to three, dinner 
from three to eight, supper from eight 
to twelve,” recited the clerk, glibly. 
« Jerushy!’’ ejaculated the country- 
man, with bulging eyes. ‘‘ When am 
I a-going to git time to see the town?” 
11 
The Love of Natural Scenery. 
Until the last century the power of 
enjoying natural scenery, especially 
the grand and sublime in Nature, 
seems hardly to have been awakened. 
Illustrations abound. Darby Field, 
the first of the pioneers who saw the 
White Mountains, speaks of their 
appearance as ‘“‘daunting terrible.” 
John Woolson, that ‘ beautiful soul,”’ 
as tienry Crabbe calls him, who jour- 
neyed in his missionary tours nearly 
to the Alleghanies, speaks of ‘the 
roughness of the stones and the cavi- 
ties between them, and the steepness 
of the hills,” of ‘mountains, swamps 
and barren deserts,” and makes special 
mention of being ‘‘ preserved in safety 
through the kindness of Him whose 
works in these mountainous deserts 
appeared ‘awful.’ Jefferson, in his 
Notes on Virginia, applies the epithet 
“‘terrible’’ to the romantic pass of 
Harper’s Ferry. 
Irving, in his tales of Rip Van 
Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy 
Hollow, was almost the first to trans- 
fer the beauties of American scenery, 
as on the Hudson and among the 
Kaatskills, to the printed page. In 
fact, memory does not recall one of the 
earlier explorers and travelers in our 
country, or of those who wrote descrip- 
tions of it, down to the time of Presi- 
dent Dwight, who speak of its grand 
and magnificent’scenery with admira- 
tion. Barber’s Historical Collections, 
published early in the last century, 
contain many woodcuts of villages and 
buildings, but natural scenery is repre- 
sented on the most limited scale and 
inthe rudest manner. Even the col- 
ored lithographs in President Hitch- 
cock’s ‘Phenomena of the Seasons,” 
published about 1850, are wholly un- 
successful in their attempt torepresent 
the scenery which has made the Con- 
necticut valley famous. 
It is perhaps no wonder that the 
early settlers along the narrow strip 
of Atlantic seaboard saw little to 
delight them in the dark and pathless 
wilderness that stretched toward the 
setting sun, filled with real and fancied 
perils, with wild beasts and wilder 
men, and brooded over by everlasting 
mystery. But the same was true in 
England, with its much older civiliza- 
tion. Not until Wordsworth came to 
interpret its beauty, did the Lake 
district attract pilgrims and admirers ; 
and the Peak country in Derbyshire 
was regarded in the eighteenth cen- 
tury much as Johnson regarded the 
Hebrides, as a rough and forbidding 
region, fit only for savages. Neither 
in Wesley’s nor Whitefield’s Journals 
have we any allusion to the great 
moors, the hills and ravines, over 
which their toilsome way must often 
have led them. In truth, a real love 
for natural scenery, except such as 
Shenstone delighted in, seems to have 
been in al] countries of slow and late 
growth, and to have waited until the 
struggle for existence had become 
somewhat less strenuous. The old 
Virgilian conception of ‘‘shaggy,”’ 
“bristling”? and “ horrid’ woods and 
crags and mountains held its ground 
well until nature ceased to be a name 
for the mysterious and tragical, and 
man gained some control over forces 
which seemed ready to crush and 
overwhelm him with their vastness 
and their unknown powers. It is 
significant that the age of modern 
science and of the admiration of the 
great and sublime in nature almost 
exactly coincide. D. F. Lamson. 
METAPHYSICAL PHYSICS. 
Lucus a non lucendo. 
This so-called Christian Science 
Is avery curious biz: 
It affirms so much that isn’t, 
And denies so much that is! 
A Christian Scientist rebuked my aches — 
There is no pain and matter is a fake! 
Whatever haps of torture or of terror, 
Is but of mortal mind a baseless error. 
If what he says be so, ’tis very plain, 
That what affects me is a painless pain, 
The which I should ignore and be resigned. 
Patient I listen to his mindless chatter, 
For what to me is Matter? Never mind. 
And what is Mind? It really is no matter. 
Since in this cult all things become etherial, 
Spirit must be the only thing material! 4 
JosEpH A. TORREY. 
Got Into the Wrong Room, 
During the excitement of a physi- 
cal examination of candidates for 
places on the police force recently in 
City Hall, Philadelphia, a mild-man- 
nered man wandered into the room 
and somehow got mixed up with the 
aspirants for places on the force. He 
was instructed to remove his clothes 
partly, and ina few minutes was hard 
at work with the other men in the 
room, raising dumb-bells, inflating his 
chest and undergoing a general phy- 
sical examination. 
“Run around the room,’’ he was 
commanded, and, ona trot, he made 
the circuit of the room a dozen times. 
Almost out of breath he stopped 
then, and inquired : 
‘‘TLook at here, what else have I 
got to do to get my license? ”’ 
«‘What license?’”’ queried the sur- 
geon in surprise. 
‘‘Why, my marriage license. That’s 
what I came in for,” was the reply. 
‘‘ Say,” said the surgeon, “ you're 
in the wrong room. I thought you 
wanted to be a policeman. The 
license bureau is downstairs.” 
The man was mute for a moment 
and then said: “I’d rather never 
marry than take this examination 
again.” — Ex, 
