The auctioneer, offering the pasture lot for sale, waved his hand enthusiastically, pointed toward the rich expanse of herbage, and shouted:
"Now, then, how much am I offered for this field? Jest look at that grass, gentlemen. That's exactly the sort of grass Nebuchadnezzar would have given two hundred dollars an acre for."
The witness, in answer to the lawyer's question, said:
"Them hain't the boots what was stole."
The judge rebuked the witness sternly:
"Speak grammatic, young man—speak grammatic! You shouldn't ought to say, 'them boots what was stole,' you should ought to say, 'them boots as was stealed.'"
The teacher asked the little girl if she was going to the Maypole dance. "No, I ain't going," was the reply.
The teacher corrected the child:
"You must not say, 'I ain't going,' you must say, 'I am not going.'" And she added to impress the point: "I am not going. He is not going. We are not going. You are not going. They are not going. Now, dear, can you say all that?"
The little girl nodded and smiled brightly.
"Sure!" she replied. "They ain't nobody going."
The passing lady mistakenly supposed that the woman shouting from a window down the street was calling to the little girl minding baby brother close by on the curb.
"Your mother is calling you," she said kindly.
The little girl corrected the lady:
"Her ain't a-callin' we. Us don't belong to she."
The son and heir had just been confirmed. At the dinner table, following the church service, the father called on his son to say grace. The boy was greatly embarrassed by the demand. Moreover, he was tired, not only from the excitement of the special service through which he had passed, but also from walking to and from the church, four miles away, and, too, he was very hungry indeed and impatient to begin the meal. Despite his protest, however, the father insisted.
So, at last, the little man folded his hands with a pious air, closed his eyes tight, bent his head reverently, and spoke his prayer:
"O Lord, have mercy on these victuals. Amen!"
The eminent English Statesman Arbuthnot-Joyce plays golf so badly that he prefers a solitary round with only the caddy present. He had a new boy one day recently, and played as wretchedly as usual.
"I fancy I play the worst game in the world," he confessed to the caddy.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that, sir," was the consoling response. "From what the boys were saying about another gentleman who plays here, he must be worse even than you are."
"What's his name?" asked the statesman hopefully.
And the caddy replied:
"Arbuthnot-Joyce."
The clergyman was calling, when the youthful son and heir approached his mother proudly, and exhibited a dead rat. As she shrank in repugnance, he attempted to reassure her:
"Oh, it's dead all right, mama. We beat it and beat it and beat it, and it's deader 'n dead."
His eyes fell on the clergyman, and he felt that something more was due to that reverend presence. So he continued in a tone of solemnity:
"Yes, we beat it and beat it until—until God called it home!"
