--_Nixon Waterman_.
ECONOMY
TOM--"I"ve seen the girl I want to marry. I stood behind her at the ticket window this morning and she took seven minutes to buy a five-cent elevated ticket."
ALICE--"Did that make you want to marry her?"
TOM--"Yes, I figured out that she could never spend my income at that rate."
BOOK AGENT--"This book will teach you the way to economize."
THE VICTIM--"That"s no good to me. What I need is a book to teach me how to live without economizing."
How oft economy grows gay And boasts of its efficient work, When it has merely stopped the pay Of some two-thousand-dollar clerk!
Little June"s father had just returned from the store and was opening up some sheets of sticky fly-paper and placing it about the room. June watched a minute and then burst out with:
"Oh, papa, down at the corner grocery you can get the paper with the flies already caught. They have lots of it in the window."
"Well, Albert, I"ve been acting on your advice. I put a hundred dollars in the bank this month."
"Fine! It isn"t so hard, is it?"
"No; I simply tore up all the bills."--_Life_.
_See also_ Domestic finance; Thrift.
EDITORS
"An editor is a man who puts things in the paper, isn"t he?"
"Oh, no, my son; an editor keeps things out of the paper."
The editor of the newspaper in a certain small southern town was given an article to print, praising in very elegant language the life and works of a certain southern colonel.
The colonel and the editor were not the best of friends.
The article came out, but in spelling "scarred," in that very important phrase "battle scarred veteran," one "r" was omitted.
The colonel threatened violence but the editor promised to admit his error in the next issue.
In the following issue, in large type, appeared: "The editor of this paper regrets very much an error in spelling in our last issue. In describing our most worthy colonel, instead of "battle scared veteran"
it should read, "bottle scarred veteran.""
That day the editor ceased to edit. His wife was a widow.
A country editor wrote: "Brother, don"t stop your paper just because you don"t agree with the editor. The last cabbage you sent us didn"t agree with us either, but we didn"t drop you from our subscription list on that account."
The girl reporter accepted the editor"s invitation to dinner and when asked how she enjoyed it, said:
"Oh, fine, but I"ll never go to dinner with an editor again."
"Why not?"
"Well, the dinner was fine, but he blue-penciled about three-quarters of my order."
You may know the trade cla.s.sic about the exchange editor. The new owner of the newspaper asked who that man was in the corner. "The exchange editor," he was informed. "Well, fire him," said he. "All he seems to do is sit there and read all day."
A little boy was given the stunt by his father to write an essay on editors and here is the result:
"If an editor makes a mistake folks say he ought to be hung; but if a doctor makes a mistake he buries it and people da.s.sent say nothing because doctors can read and write Latin. When the editor makes a mistake there is lawsuits and a big fuss; but if a doctor makes one there is a funeral, cut flowers and perfek silence. A doctor can use a word a yard long without anyone knowing what it means; but if the editor uses one he has to spell it. If the doctor goes to see another man"s wife he charges for the visit but if the editor goes he gets a charge of buckshot. When the doctor gets drunk it"s a case of being overcome by the heat and if he dies it"s from heart trouble; when an editor gets drunk it"s a case of too much booze and if he dies it"s the jim-jams. Any college can make a doctor; an editor has to be born."
Wanted, an editor, who can read, write and argue politics, and at the same time be religious, funny, scientific and historical at will, write to please everybody, know everything, without asking or being told, always having something good to say of everything and everybody else, live on wind and make more money than enemies. For such a man, a good opening will be made in the "graveyard." He is too good to live.
Life in a newspaper office is one compliment after another. "You look so funny when you think," observed the blandishing Miss Harriette Underbill as she pa.s.sed the given point known as our desk late yesterday afternoon.
COUNTRY EDITOR (to new a.s.sistant)--"I shall expect you to write all the editorials, do the religious and sporting departments and turn out a joke column."
a.s.sISTANT--"What are you going to do?"
"Edit your copy."
EDUCATION