Life — October 23, 1884 — page 5: what you’re looking at

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

THE QUEEN'S MUNIFI- CENCE. UEEN VICTORIA, ever Q mindful of the wants of her colonial subjects, with that kindliness rare among royalty, has presented a copy of her latest book to a library in Canada. Such munificence on the part of her Gracious Majesty cannot fail to elicit the unbounded love of all her loyal subjects in the Colony who recognize in this liberal gift that marked interest and pride which Her Majesty has always shown in the pros- perity of her North American possessions. HE most powerful astro- nomical .journal in this country is the World. It has knocked the spots out of the T HE parlor lamp shed its peaceful rays on a happy group of five persons. There was the head-of-the-family | and the one who called himself the head-of-the-family, their two daughters, aged respectively eighteen and eight, and a boy of eleven years. The father carefully removed a bent pin from the seat of the rocking-chair, and stood holding it between his thumb and fore-finger. “My son,” he said pompously, “did you ever, when you saw a discarded, bent, little pin, pause and reflect how long it took to make it, and how many different | hands contributed towards fashioning it as it was? It is an instructive and a beneficial subject of contemplation. In the first. place, there were the miners who dug the metal it is composed of ; the men who transported it to the factories ; the workmen who made the pins; the workmen who sharp- ened them; the men who packed them; the dealers who sold them to tradesmen; the men that carried them to the stores, and the salesmen who retailed them over the counters, —just think what an army of laborers handled that crooked little pin “Yes,” said his son and heir reflectively, “ but you left out a lot, pa. “How so?” asked the old gentlemen, in a tone of sur- prise. “ Why, there was the old lady who bought a paper of ‘em; there was her biggest daughter who took one to pin up the rip in the waist of her dress ; the young man that told ‘em at the office that it was a cat that made that rail-road-map ANECDOTE OF B., F. CINCINNATUS. HE Roman patriot, B. F. Cincinnatus, having placed his Friends, a delegation fresh from the Convention hastened to his Sabine Farm, and found him, with a Rose in his Buttonhole, at the Plough, endeavoring to discover which end of the darned Thing went into the Ground. Upon being informed that the Convention had nominated Groverus Clevelandus, and had rejected his Tariff Plank, Cincinnatus, with many Manifestations of Delight, slew his Oxen and offered them upon the fragments of his Plough as a Sacrifice to the Infernal Gods, then shrieking, “Blamed if I don’t run on the Labor Ticket and help the Gauls!” telegraphed to the Rome So/ that he accepted the Nomination. himself in the Hands of scratch on the back of his hand; the girl's little brother who borrowed the pin to make into a fish-hook ; the little sister whose straw hat he took to keep his angle-worms in, and his old father who sat down on the bent pin when his little boy got tired of fishing. They all had a hand in it, too!” “No,” said the old gentlemen, as he threw the pin in the fire and took up his newspaper. “ You are drawing on your imagination, my son. I never found a pin that went through | such a series of experiences, in my life.” “May be you have n't, but you will,” remarked his son and heir. No, no. Run out and play,” replied his father. “1 am going to sit in my——” but before he sat down he noticed that his eldest daughter was mending a tear in her dress, while the little one was wiping the stains from a straw hat, so he pushed his arm-chair aside with a suspicious glance at a gleaming point on its seat, and sank wearily on to the sofa, However, ere he had fairly touched its surface he bounded toward the zenith with a yell of anguish. “The old man could n't very well have helped finding it,” said the small boy to himself, as he stopped to regain his breath two blocks off, “’cause there was a pin on every blamed piece of furniture in that room. My, but won't ma give it to him for swearin’ like that, though ?” CARLSBAD, 6“ AL, I never seed sitch doin’s,” said Mrs. Spriggins to her friend Mrs. Gubbins. “ How them pedes- trian fellus do come up. Spriggins tells me that Walkin’ Miller has writ a book of Memory on time.” comicbooks.com