"What are the directions?"
"Keep the bottle tightly corked."
MEMORY
Most of us forget to remember; it is harder, far, to remember to forget. And the more one endeavors to forget, the more memory insists.
"So you really think your memory is improving under treatment. You remember things now?"
"Well, not exactly, but I have progressed so far that I can frequently remember that I have forgotten something, if I could only remember what it is."
A school-teacher who had been telling a cla.s.s of small pupils the story of discovery of America by Columbus, ended it with: "And all this happened more than six hundred years ago."
A little boy, his eyes wide open with wonder, said, after a moment"s thought: "Gee, what a memory you"ve got!"
_A Thing Forgotten_
White owl is not gloomy; Black bat is not sad.
It is only that each has forgotten Something he used to remember: Black bat goes searching ... searching....
White owl says over and over Who? What? Where?
WALTER--"Mr. Smith"s left his umbrella again. I do believe he would leave his head if it were loose."
ROBINSON--"I dare say you"re right. I heard him say only yesterday he was going to Switzerland for his lungs."
Rose, the garrulous domestic, can give you facts of history--international, dramatic, scandalous--right off the bat without a moment"s hesitation.
"How do you manage to remember all these things, Rose?" inquired her employer the other day.
Then Rose came back with the infallible rule for memory training.
"I"ll tell ye, ma"am," says she. "All me life never a lie I"ve told.
And when ye don"t have to be taxin" yer memory to be rememberin" what ye told this one or that one, or how ye explained this or that, ye don"t overwork it and it lasts ye, good as new, forever."
"What brought you here, my man?" asked the prison visitor.
"Just plain absent-mindedness," replied the prisoner.
"Why, how could that be?"
"I forgot to change the engine number of the car before I sold it."
MEN
"Daughter," said the father, "your young man, Rawlings, stays until a very late hour. Has not your mother said something to you about this habit of his?"
"Yes, father," replied the daughter sweetly. "Mother says men haven"t altered a bit."
All mankind is divided into three cla.s.ses: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.--_Arabian proverb_.
For every woman who makes a fool out of a man there is another woman who makes a man out of a fool.
The ideal man is as numerous as there are women to describe him.
If a woman is an hour late in returning home, and her husband is worried, she is flattered. If a man is three hours late he is angry if anyone is worried.
He was fond of playing jokes on his wife, and this time he thought he had a winner.
"My dear," he said, as they sat at supper, "I just heard such a sad story of a young girl today. They thought she was going blind, and so a surgeon operated on her and found--"
"Yes?" gasped the wife breathlessly.
"That she"d got a young man in her eye!" ended the husband, with a chuckle.
For a moment there was silence. Then the lady remarked, slowly:
"Well, it would all depend on what sort of a man it was. Some of them she could have seen through easily enough."
A little girl wrote the following composition on men:
"Men are what women marry. They drink and smoke and swear, but don"t go to church. Perhaps if they wore bonnets they would. They are more logical than women, also more zoological. Both men and women sprang from monkeys, but the women sprang farther than the men."
_Essay on Man_
At ten, a child; at twenty, wild; At thirty, tame, if ever; At forty, wise; at fifty, rich; At sixty, good, or never!