Judge — May 31, 1913 — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MONOTONOUS Mr. Squavok— What 's the matter? Mirs, Squawh—Well, I'm tired of this rice diet. ‘This is the fourth wedding in this neigh- borhood withia a week. The Usual Varicty «« PAW-UH?” P “Well?” “Paw, what is an explanation?’ “An elongated, circumambulatory, in- volved, turgid statement, my son, which does not explain.’’ Who’s Whosiers Everywhere By HORACE DODD GASTIT. MARBSHALL—Thomas Riley. Vice- President of the United States and official post-prandial humorist of the Wil- son administration. First-known erup- tion at North Manchester, Ind., March 14th, 1854. Born at Man-chesty, he be- came a very chesty man. His first re- corded utterance, made at the age of ten minutes, three and one-eighth seconds, . was, *‘Now fora life of silence!’’ since which time his voice has never had a mo- ment’s rest. Studied the arts of expres- sion at such little red schoolhouses on the hill as were within his reach, and became one of the most continuously fluent utterers of periods on the stump in his native State, with the result that, before reaching even the years of ma- turity, he became an itinerant judge, dispensing justice and laying down max- ims worthy of the original Maximilian himself, with both hands and all the manifold powers of an untiring organ of speech. His name—or, at least, one- third of it, that of Riley—became a household word in Indiana and soon stretched beyond merely local limitations into world-wide distinction, Riley poems being everywhere spoken of in terms of affectionate appreciation by those who had benefited from their up- OPINION OF A MODERN CAVALIER Person with tea cup—I was just thinking that with all their laces ii ‘and curls they couldn't have been the manly chaps we are to-day. CFT laughter split every lifting suggestion. Carried still higher on the wave of popularity thus at- tained, the wheels of his car of fortune kept whirring by the exuberant gasoline of his own undaunted verbosity, he became Governor of the com- monwealth of Indiana, and even people in distant London and students of literature everywhere began to take a renewed interest in Martial’s Epigrams. Extracts from Riley’s Poems and Martial’s Epigrams, embalmed in the amber of his own thesaurian periods, soon drew attention to him as Indiana’s regular contribution to the quadren- nial race for the presidential nomination, George Ade hav- ing declined to permit the use of his name as a possible can- didate on a platform of pure humor for everybody. The suggestion was greeted with fervor everywhere, and the sullen clouds of discontent that hovered over all the land disappeared, while roars of WHY? Why does a chicken cross the road? welkin from Mexico to the Gulf, from Porto Rico to the sea, raising everything except the high cost of living out of the slough of despond. So strongly did the movement gather headway that at Balti- more the only way to check it was by giving him the nomination for the vice- presidency, which, with the usual grace of the Indiana statesman in the face of a chance to get on a political ticket, he modestly and smilingly accepted, pulling the ticket through at the subsequent elec- tions by a substantial minority. Enough cryptic utterances have fallen from his lips to fill a volume as large as any twenty of the Encyclopedia Britan- nica. Among the best known of these are: ‘‘I would sooner shake hands with a poor man in a palace than fall into a ditch with a billionaire on our way home from a banquet with princes.”” ‘‘Let others comicbooks.com of