How can it be possible that this world is all a fleeting show? I've
visited a great many shows, and have found that all of them are
conducted on the same principle. You pay your money at the door, sit
undisturbed through the performance, unless some junk-man should take to
junketing, and get out easily, the proprietor in fact seeming rather
glad to get rid of you. But when you enter the world, you pay nothing,
on your way through it you pay constantly, and getting out of it--at the
present prices of coffins and bombazines--is one of the most expensive
things on record.

Why mustn't you look a gift horse in the mouth, if you are prudent
enough to do it on the sly? Besides, don't everybody look in the horse's
mouth, as soon as the giver has departed? Suppose you're patriotic, and
offer your son to Uncle SAM as a gift, to use in his civil service,
isn't Mr. JENCKES's bill designed as a means of looking into your son's
mouth? Maybe it's to find out if he's a public cribber. What I want to
know is, does this prohibition apply to donkeys?

What possible connection can there be between doing handsome and being
handsome? Now there's BROWN, who persuaded me, on or about black Friday,
to buy his gold at the highest figures, and thus did a very handsome
thing (for himself), but he is still the ugliest looking man in our
street.

If it be true, as stated in "The Gates Ajar," that there will be pianos
in heaven, haven't the men who learned harp-making, on the theory that
it was a permanent business, been grossly deceived, and haven't they an
action for damages against somebody, if they can find out who it is?