Have made the remark in a jocular way;
But then on my honour, I didn't mean you!"


TOO CANDID BY HALF

As John and his wife were discoursing one day
Of their several faults, in a bantering way,
Said she, "Though my _wit_ you disparage,
I'm sure, my dear husband, our friends will attest
This much, at the least, that my judgment is best."
Quoth John, "So they said at our marriage."

When Saxe heard of a man in Chicago who threw his wife into a vat of
boiling hog's lard, he remarked: "Now, that's what I call going too
far with a woman."

After a railroad accident, in which he received some bruises, I said:
"You didn't find riding on the rails so pleasant?" "Not riding on, but
riding off the rail was the trouble."

He apostrophized the unusually pretty girl who at bedtime handed each
guest a lighted candle in a candlestick. She fancied some of the
fashionable young women snubbed her but Saxe assured her in rhyme:

"There is not a single one of them all
Who could, if they would, hold a candle to you."

He was an inveterate punster. Miss Caroline Ticknor tells us how he
used to lie on a couch in a back room at the Old Corner Bookstore in