s hand, and present to George's
astonished gaze, a large 40 cent watermelon, which he had brought with
him from the Orient.

"Ah," said George, "this is indeed a glad surprise. Albeit, how can I
ever repay you?"--_Bill Nye in Boston Globe._

[Illustration]

BILL NYE CONDOLES WITH CLEVELAND.

SURPRISE EXPRESSED THAT THE PRESIDENT SHOULD TAKE A MOTHER-IN-LAW INTO
HIS CABINET AND ADD HOUSEKEEPING TO HIS OTHER AGONY.

HUDSON, WIS., June 3, 1886.
_The Hon. Grover Cleveland, Washington, D. C.:_

MY DEAR SIR: You have now assumed a new duty and taken upon yourself an
additional responsibility. Not content with the great weight of national
affairs, sufficient to crush any other pachyderm, you have cheerfully
and almost gleefully become a married man. While I cannot agree with you
politically, Grover, I am forced to admire your courage.

This morning a new life opens out to you--the life of a married man. It
is indeed a humiliating situation. To be a president of the United
States, the roustabout of a free people, is a trying situation; but to
be a newly married president, married in the full glare of official
life, with the eye of a divided constituency upon you, is to place
yourself where nerve is absolutely essential.

I, too, am married, but not under such trying circumstances. Others have
been married and still lived, but it has remained for you, Mr.
President, young as you are, to pose as a newly wedded president and to
take your new mother-in-law into the cabinet with you. For this reason,
I say freely that to walk a slack rope across the moist brow of Niagara
and carry a nervous man in a wheelbarrow sinks into a mere commonplace.
Daniel playing "tag" with a denful of half-starved lions becomes a
historic cipher, and the Hebrew children, sitting on a rosy bed of
red-hot clinkers in the fiery furnace, are almost forgotten.

With a large wad of civil service wedged in among your back teeth, a
larger fragment, perhaps, than you were prepared to masticate when you
bit it off; with an agonized southern democracy and a clamorous northern
constituency; with disappointment poorly concealed among your friends
and hilarity openly expressed by your enemies; with the snarl of the
vanquished Mr. Davis, who was at one time a sort of president himself,
as he rolls up future majorities for your foes; with a lot of
sharp-witted journalists walking all over you every twenty-four hours
and climbing up your stalwar