nty-eight next week you know."

HER LESSER HALF--"Oh, don't hurry, my dear. Better wait till the right
sort of man comes along."

HIS BETTER HALF--"But why wait? I didn't!"

O'Flanagan came home one night with a deep band of black crape around
his hat.

"Why, Mike!" exclaimed his wife. "What are ye wearin' thot mournful
thing for?"

"I'm wearin' it for yer first husband," replied Mike firmly. "I'm sorry
he's dead."

"What a strangely interesting face your friend the poet has," gurgled
the maiden of forty. "It seems to possess all the elements of happiness
and sorrow, each struggling for supremacy."

"Yes, he looks to me like a man who was married and didn't know it,"
growled the Cynical Bachelor.

The not especially sweet-tempered young wife of a Kaslo B.C., man one
day approached her lord concerning the matter of one hundred dollars or
so.

"I'd like to let you have it, my dear," began the husband, "but the
fact is I haven't that amount in the bank this morning--that is to say,
I haven't that amount to spare, inasmuch as I must take up a note for
two hundred dollars this afternoon."

"Oh, very well, James!" said the wife, with an ominous calmness, "If you
think the man who holds the note can make things any hotter for you than
I can--why, do as you say, James!"

A young lady entered a book store and inquired of the gentlemanly
clerk--a married man, by-the-way--if he had a book suitable for an old
gentleman who had been married fifty years.

Without the least hesitation the clerk reached for a copy of Parkman's
"A Half Century of Conflict."

Smith and Jones were discussing the question of who should be head of
the house--the man or the woman.

"I am the head of my establishment," said Jones. "I am the bread-winner.
Why shouldn't I be?"

"Well," replied Smith, "before my wife and I were married we made an
agreement that I should make the rulings in all major things, my wife in
all the minor."

"How has it worked?" queried Jones.

Smith smiled. "So far," he replied, "no major matters have come up."

A poor lady the other day hastened to the nursery and said to her little
daughter:

"Minnie, what do you mean by shouting and screaming? Play quietly, like
Tommy. See, he doesn't make a sound."

"Of course he doesn't," said the little girl. "That is our game. He is
papa coming home late, and I am you."

The stranger advanced toward the door. Mrs. O'Toole stood in the doorway
with a r