a suburban house and
played havoc with the kitchen window. The woman waited, anger in her
eyes, for the appearance of the hoop's owner. Presently he came.

"Please, I've broken your window," he said, "and here's Father to mend
it."

And, sure enough, he was followed by a stolid-looking workman, who at
once started to work, while the small boy took his hoop and ran off.

"That'll be four bits, ma'am," announced the glazier when the window was
whole once more.

"Four bits!" gasped the woman. "But your little boy broke it--the little
fellow with the hoop, you know. You're his father, aren't you?"

The stolid man shook his head.

"Don't know him from Adam," he said. "He came around to my place and
told me his mother wanted her winder fixed. You're his mother, aren't
you?"

And the woman shook her head also.--_Ray Trum Nathan_.

_See also_ Egotism; Employers and employees; Office boys.

BREAKFAST FOODS

Pharaoh had just dreamed of the seven full and the seven blasted ears of
corn.

"You are going to invent a new kind of breakfast food," interpreted
Joseph.--_Judge_.

BREATH

One day a teacher was having a first-grade class in physiology. She
asked them if they knew that there was a burning fire in the body all of
the time. One little girl spoke up and said:

"Yes'm, when it is a cold day I can see the smoke."

Said the bibulous gentleman who had been reading birth and death
statistics: "Do you know, James, every time I breathe a man dies?"

"Then," said James, "why don't you chew cloves?"

BREVITY

An after-dinner speaker was called on to speak on "The Antiquity of the
Microbe." He arose and said, "Adam had 'em," and then sat down.

A negro servant, on being ordered to announce visitors to a dinner
party, was directed to call out in a loud, distinct voice their names.
The first to arrive was the Fitzgerald family, numbering eight persons.
The negro announced Major Fitzgerald, Miss Fitzgerald, Master
Fitzgerald, and so on.

This so annoyed the master that he went to the negro and said, "Don't
announce each person like that; say something shorter."

The next to arrive were Mr. and Mrs. Penny and their daughter. The negro
solemnly opened the door and called out, "Thrupence!"

Dr. Abernethy, the famous Scotch surgeon, was a man of few words, but he
once met his match--in a woman. She called at his office in Edinburgh,
one day, with a hand badly inflamed and swollen. T