you inside the tent if I
have to pawn my shirt."
Of course it is a male teacher we are supposing said this. Well, don't
you suppose those boys and girls would study? They would fairly whoop it
up. And then suppose the teacher found forty boys that hadn't any money
to go, and he had no school funds to be used for such a purpose.
How long would it take him to collect the money by going around among
business men who had been boys themselves? He would go into a store and
say he was trying to raise money to take some of the poor children to
the circus, and a dozen hands would go down into a dozen pockets in two
jerks of a continued story, and they would all chip in.
O, we are too smart. We are trying to fire education into boys with a
shotgun, when we ought to get it into them inside of sugar coated pills.
Let us turn over a new leaf now, and show these boys that we have got
souls in us, and that we want them to have a good time if we don't lay
up a cent.
A TRYING SITUATION.
It was along in the winter, and the prominent church members were having
a business meeting in the basement of the church to devise ways and
means to pay for the pulpit furniture. The question of an oyster
sociable had been decided, and they got to talking about oysters, and
one old deaconess asked a deacon if he didn't think raw oysters would go
further, at a sociable, than stewed oysters.
He said he thought raw oysters would go further but they wouldn't be as
satisfying. And then he went on to tell how far a raw oyster went once
with him. He said he was at a swell dinner party, with a lady on each
side of him, and he was trying to talk to both of them, or carry on two
conversations, on two different subjects, at the same time.
They had some shell oysters, and he took up one on a fork--a large, fat
one--and was about to put it in his mouth, when the lady on his left
called his attention, and when the cold fork struck his teeth, and no
oyster on it, he felt as though it had escaped, but he made no sign. He
went on talking with the lady as though nothing had happened. He glanced
down at his shirt bosom, and was at once on the trail of the oyster,
though the insect had got about two minutes start of him. It had gone
down his vest, under the waistband of his clothing, and he was powerless
to arrest its progress.
He said he never felt how powerless he was until he tried to grab that
oyster by placing his hand on his person, outside his
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