Good Stories Reprinted from the Ladies' Home Journal of Philadelphia Part 8

"That's it. You have it. Sixteen eighty-two----"

"Your first name; initial, please."

"Oh, K."

"O.K. Jepson."

"Excuse me, it isn't O. K. You did not understand me. I said 'Oh'."

"O. Jepson."

"No; rub out the O. and let the K. stand."

The clerk iooked annoyed. "Will you please give me your initials again?"

"I said K."

"I beg your pardon, you said O. K. Perhaps you had better write it yourself."

"I said 'Oh'----"

"Just now you said K."

"Allow me to finish what I started. I said 'Oh,' because I did not understand what you were asking me. I did not mean that it was my initial. My name is Kirby Jepson."

"Oh!"

"No, not O., but K. Give me the pencil, and I'll write it down for you myself. There, I guess it's O. K. now."

_The Worst Death There Is_ BY BILL NYE

It is now the proper time for the cross-eyed woman to fool with the garden hose. I have faced death in almost every form, and I do not know what fear is, but when a woman with one eye gazing into the zodiac and the other peering into the middle of next week, and wearing one of those floppy sunbonnets, picks up the nozzle of the garden hose and turns on the full force of the inst.i.tution, I fly wildly to the Mountains of Hepsidam.

Water won't hurt any one, of course, if care is used not to forget and drink any of it, but it is this horrible suspense and uncertainty about facing the nozzle of a garden hose in the hands of a cross-eyed woman that unnerves and paralyzes me.

Instantaneous death is nothing to me. I am as cool and collected where leaden rain and iron hail are thickest as I would be in my own office writing the obituary of the man who steals my jokes. But I hate to be drowned slowly in my good clothes and on dry land, and have my dying gaze rest on a woman whose ravis.h.i.+ng beauty would drive a narrow-gauge mule into convulsions and make him hate himself t'death.

_A Long-Lived Family_

A "dime museum" manager, having heard of a man 123 years of age, journeyed to his home to try and secure him for exhibition purposes.

"Well, my friend," said the museum manager, "the proofs of your age seem to be all right. Now, how would you like to come to my place, just do nothing but sit on a platform and let people look at you, and I will pay you $100 a week ?"

"I'd like it all right," answered the aged man. "But I couldn't go, of course, unless I had my father's consent."

"Your father!" gasped the manager. "Do you mean to say your father is alive?"

"Yes, indeed," replied the man.

"Well, where is your father? Home here?" asked the manager.

"Oh, yes," was the answer. "He's upstairs, putting grandfather to bed!"

_Silenced the Ringleader_

The head teacher in a Sunday-school was much worried by the noise of the pupils in the next room, At last, unable to bear it any longer, he mounted a chair and looked over the part.i.tion. Seeing a boy a little taller than the others talking a great deal, he leaned over, hoisted him over the part.i.tion, and banged him into a chair in his room, saying:

"Now be quiet."

A quarter of an hour later a smaller head appeared around the door and a meek little voice said:

"Please, sir, you've got our teacher."

_Got Out of That, All Right_

"My dear," said a wife to her husband, "do you realize that you have forgotten that this is my birthday ?"

"Yes, dearie, I did forget it," replied the husband. "Isn't it natural that I should? There isn't really anything about you to remind me that you are a day older than you were a year ago."

_He Simply Looked That Way_

The man in the smoker was boasting of his unerring ability to tell from a man's looks exactly what city he came from. "You, for example," he said to the man next to him, "you are from New Orleans?"

He was right.

"You, my friend," turning to the man on the other side of him, "I should say you are from Chicago?" Again he was right.

The other two men got interested.

"And you are from Boston?" he asked the third man.

"That's right, too," said the New Englander.

"And you from Philadelphia, I should say?" to the last man.

"No, sir," answered the man with considerable warmth; "I've been sick for three months: that's what makes me look that way!"