Page:Everybody's Book of English wit and humour (1880).djvu/45

 patient, who was now lying, faint, upon the sofa, said, "Tut! tut! It's nothing—nothing at all!" [25]

A gardener's boy having gone to sleep under the shade of some fruit trees,—"Wretched fellow," cried his master, as he awoke him; "are you not ashamed to sleep instead of working? Go along with you, you vagabond, you are not worthy that the sun should shine on you."

"That is why I went into the shade," replied the boy.

A gentleman who had been led by curiosity to visit the Positivist Church in London, where the doctrine of Humanity was preached to a select few, being asked what he had found there, replied, "Three persons and no God."

An editor received a letter from a vain and tiresome contributor, asking for an opinion on the work he had recently sent in.

"I want your opinion," said the contributor, "written in your own hand, so that I can show it to my friends, and socially, I think it will greatly help me. I see that you sometimes write poetry, and it would please me much better if you would write it out in rhyme. You may make it funny if you want to."

The editor sent him the following:— "Try to be pleasant, and your writings are flat, Try to be funny, and they are worse than that; Try to be wise, and you're simply a fool— Try to be honest, and you're only a tool— And it seems that there's no use in trying it more, For you only succeed, sir, in being a bore."

A somewhat amusing incident is told of a woman whose husband, a wealthy man, died suddenly without making a will. The widow, desirous of securing the whole of the property, concealed her husband's death, and persuaded a poor shoemaker to take his place while a will could be made. Accordingly he was closely muffled in bed, as if very sick, and a lawyer was called in to write