Atchoo! Sneezes from a Hilarious Vaudevillian

"You brute! To think I should have married a gambler!"

I'm really sorry for Stubb.

He's a good fellow in the main, too, though somewhat henpecked at home.

You see he's at the head of a big syndicate, and lately the rumor went around that they might sell out if the right customer turned up.

I chanced to know this, and believed I could bring in a man who would pay their price.

It turned out that he also represented a company.

"Well," said Stubb, finally, "our price is just $150,000, not one cent less."

"Make it just that much less," suggested the promotor, "and I think we can cinch the deal."

"How do you mean?"

"Make it $149,999.99. The head of our syndicate is a woman."

Stubb always prided himself on what he was pleased to call his wonderful gift of reading character.

I've often wondered how such a genius ever came to make such a mistake before he married.

But then love, they say, is blind.

And like Rip Van Winkle's drink, that one didn't count.

To tell you the truth he was a pretty good hand at guessing character, and I've known him to tell five out of six men's occupation or trade just by keen analysis of their appearances and actions.

Of course Stubb went in for reading all such books as Sherlock Holmes.

"After all," he said to me one day as we rode in a Broadway car, "it is really a very simple thing; requires nothing but close observation.

"For instance, it is easy to tell a man's occupation.

"His facial expression, his actions, even his dress, are stamped by his daily work.

"You see that man sitting opposite us? Well, I am just as sure as though he had told me that he is a barber."

"You are mistaken," I replied, quickly. "That man is a butcher."

"Impossible!" exclaimed Stubb. "You never saw a butcher with slim, white hands, like his?"

"Perhaps not," I admitted, shaking my head, "but he is a butcher just the same."

"How do you know he is?"

"How do I know? Faith, I have very good reasons for persisting in my assertions, since the scoundrel shaved me once."

Our last servant girl is a daisy.

Only yesterday morning I heard my wife ask her why she left the alarm-clock on the kitchen table all night alongside the buckwheat batter.

"Sure, mum, so it would know what time to rise."

Her brother Mike has a saloon down on the Bowery.

The other day I went in to give him a message from Nora, and found him examining some sort of patent contraption guaranteed, if fastened in the furnace smokepipe, to effect a wonderful saving in the consumption of coal.

And just then such a thing was an object in New York, with hard coal soaring out of reach.

"And you say that wid wan av these patent dampers in me sthovepipe I'd save half me coal?" Mike was saying as I went in.

"That's it. It will do the work every time and save half your coal bill," declared the agent, eagerly.

"All right," says Mike, "thin, be jabers, phwat's the matter wid me takin' two and savin' the whole av it?"

Riding uptown on the elevated the other night, I noticed a parson sitting on one of the cross-seats, and he was evidently trying to extend sympathy to the cadaverous-looking young man who sat opposite him.

"Pardon me, sir," said the churchman; "but you look worn out. You know he who dissipates – "

"No, parson, it ain't dissipation. The truth is I'm most dead. I had about forty letters to write this afternoon."

"Why didn't you dictate them?" asked the parson.

"No typewriter."

"What's become of her?"

"I married her."

"Get another."

"Can't."

"Why not?"

"Costs too much to live now."

I can sympathize with that poor fellow.

Ah, me! What life was like in those old, old bachelor days, when a million hearts were at my feet. My wife came to me only this morning with an angelic smile on her face and, pointing to a book she held open, she said:

"George, dear, I have a little surprise for you. I have been going around among the girls who knew you before we were married and I have put down here the names of all those women you have kissed, and I'm going to ask you to give me a dollar for every kiss."

I had to pawn my watch to settle that terrible bill.

Talking about old days, when I was in budding manhood I thought I was in budding poethood as well. I wrote a little ballad for a grocery clerk, and he was so effusive he made me blush. But the glad hand he gave me started me on the road to ruin. By some strange freak of fortune, I butted up against a real live versifier who had actually had his lines printed.