just
then the letter-carrier came along, but he didn't have any letters for us,
and he didn't come onto the steps, and then I went up stairs and I said,
'Pa, don't you think it is real mean, after you and I fixed the soap on
the steps for the letter-carrier, he didn't come on the step at all,' and
Pa was scraping the soap off his pants with a piece of shingle, and the
hired girl was putting liniment on Ma, and heating it in for palpitation
of the heart, and Pa said, 'You dam idjut, no more of this, or I'll maul
the liver out of you,' and I asked him if he didn't think soft soap would
help a moustache to grow, and he picked up Ma's work-basket and threw it
at my head, as I went down stairs, and I came over here. Don't you think
my Pa is unreasonable to get mad at a little joke that he planned
himself?"

The grocery man said he didn't know, and the boy went out with a pair of
skates over his shoulder, and the grocery man is wondering what joke the
boy will play on him to get even for the cayenne pepper.

GATHERED WAISTS!

Andrews' _Bazar_ says: "Gathered waists are very much worn." If the men
would gather the waists carefully they would not be worn so much. Some men
go to work gathering a waist just as they would go to work washing sheep,
or raking and binding. They ought to gather as though it was eggs done up
in a funnel-shaped brown paper at a grocery.

CHURCH KENO.

While the most of our traveling men, our commercial tourists, are nice
Christian gentlemen, there is occasionally one that is as full of the old
Nick as an egg at this time of year is full of malaria. There was one of
them stopped at a country town a few nights ago where there was a church
fair. He is a blonde, good-natured looking, serious talking chap, and
having stopped at that town every month for a dozen years, everybody knows
him. He always chips in towards a collection, a wake or a rooster fight,
and the town swears by him.

He attended the fair and a jolly little sister of the church, a married
lady, took him by the hand and led him through green fields, where the
girls sold him ten-cent chances in saw dust dolls, and beside still
waters, where a girl sold him sweetened water with a sour stomach, for
lemonade, from Rebecca's well. The sister finally stood beside him while
the deacon was reading off numbers. They were drawing a quilt, and as the
numbers were drawn all were anxious to know who drew it. Finally, after
several numbers were