and always in a new place. The death of Washington's body-servant has
ceased to be a novelty; it's charm is gone; the people are tired of
it; let it cease. This well-meaning but misguided negro has not put six
different communities to the expense of burying him in state, and has
swindled tens of thousands of people into following him to the grave
under the delusion that a select and peculiar distinction was being
conferred upon them. Let him stay buried for good now; and let that
newspaper suffer the severest censure that shall ever, in all the future
time, publish to the world that General Washington's favorite colored
body-servant has died again.

WIT INSPIRATIONS OF THE "TWO-YEAR-OLDS"

All infants appear to have an impertinent and disagreeable fashion
nowadays of saying "smart" things on most occasions that offer, and
especially on occasions when they ought not to be saying anything at
all. Judging by the average published specimens of smart sayings, the
rising generation of children are little better than idiots. And the
parents must surely be but little better than the children, for in most
cases they are the publishers of the sunbursts of infantile imbecility
which dazzle us from the pages of our periodicals. I may seem to speak
with some heat, not to say a suspicion of personal spite; and I do admit
that it nettles me to hear about so many gifted infants in these days,
and remember that I seldom said anything smart when I was a child. I
tried it once or twice, but it was not popular. The family were not
expecting brilliant remarks from me, and so they snubbed me sometimes
and spanked me the rest. But it makes my flesh creep and my blood run
cold to think what might have happened to me if I had dared to utter
some of the smart things of this generation's "four-year-olds" where my
father could hear me. To have simply skinned me alive and considered his
duty at an end would have seemed to him criminal leniency toward one
so sinning. He was a stern, unsmiling man, and hated all forms of
precocity. If I had said some of the things I have referred to, and said
them in his hearing, he would have destroyed me. He would, indeed. He
would, provided the opportunity remained with him. But it would not, for
I would have had judgment enough to take some strychnine first and say
my smart thing afterward. The fair record of my life has been tarnished
by just one pun. My father overheard that, and he hunted me ov