She was a devout Christian Scientist, and the way she assured the boy he must be deceiving himself, and there could not be anything the matter with him, would have convinced you or me right away.

But Teddy stubbornly refused to take comfort.

"I think I ought to know," he groaned. "I guess I've got inside information."

Speaking of these fads puts me in mind of the widow McCree, whose husband when alive was noted as a tough case, but he left her well provided for, and she tries to make people believe she mourns for him.

Once she even went to a medium, hoping to hear some message of consolation from the dear departed.

But I rather guess that same medium had been acquainted with Billy during his lifetime.

"Is there any message from my dear husband?" asked the widow, anxiously.

"Yes, there is," snapped the medium, "and it's hot stuff, too."

By the way, on that Old Dominion steamer there was a newly-married couple – there always is.

I soon discovered that the lady had been something of a yachtswoman, and seemed perfectly at home on the heaving ocean.

Not so the newly-made Benedict.

As soon as the swell off the capes set us to dancing he rushed to the side and started lightening the ship.

This he repeated many times, but was too game to seek his berth.

So, as night came on, they sat there, she chipper as a lark, and he about as dejected a bridegroom as could be found in seven counties.

Perhaps she thought a touch of the romantic might get him out of his mood, so she tried this:

"The moon is up, isn't it, darling?"

"Yes," I heard him reply, languidly; "that is, if I swallowed it."

It isn't often that a shrewd lawyer gets two set-backs on the same day.

Yet I once witnessed such a thing.

It was in a Western city – never mind the name.

This lawyer was cross-examining a woman who it seemed was the spouse of a burglar of considerable notoriety.

It was his intention to shatter her testimony, and he went about it in the usual browbeating way.

"Madam, you are the wife of this man?"

"Yes."

"You knew he was a burglar when you married him?"

"Yes."

"How did you come to contract a matrimonial alliance with such a man?"

"Well," the witness said, sarcastically, "I was getting old, and I had to choose between a lawyer and a burglar."

The cross-examination ended there.

In the other case, the gentleman of the green bag received even a worse dose, and he was such a bulldozing character that no one felt sorry.

"Now, sir," began the attorney, knitting his brows and preparing to annihilate the witness whom he was about to cross-examine, "you say your name is Williams? Can you prove that to be your real name? Is there anybody in the courtroom who can swear that you haven't assumed it for purposes of fraud and deceit?"

"I think you can identify me yourself," answered the witness, quietly.

"I? Where did I ever see you before, sir?" demanded the astonished lawyer.

"I put that scar over your right eye twenty-five years ago, when you were stealing peaches out of father's orchard. Yes, I'm the same Williams."

Which must have shattered some of the nerve of that same legal gentleman.

But that's nothing to the nerve of a Western landlord! One of them roped me in for fair. You see the blamed hotel burned down while I was there, and – would you believe it? – the next day I got a bill from the proprietor for a fire in my room.

I've been abroad more than once during my checkered career, the last time with a company that played the "Children of the Ghetto." When it was staged in New York, in order to get the best effect of the mob scene the manager went into the New York Ghetto and engaged the real article, employing at the same time an interpreter to explain to them in Yiddish the stage directions. The plan was successful.

But when the production was taken to London we abandoned this scheme.

The English manager had employed the usual group of cockney supers, and spent a good deal of English gold in buying make-ups for them. When our manager saw the lot he was furious.

"Why," he screamed, "that band of mutts looks like a gang of sneak thieves trying to dodge the police! They'll ruin the play! – ruin it! – do you hear me? They'll ruin it! Look at those whiskers!"

And he yanked off the beard of one of the supers, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.

"And look at that wig!" and a bit of false head-dressing followed the whiskers to the floor, and was shredded under the American's angry heel. "And that one, too!" Another wig went to destruction. "And that nose! – that nose!"

Here he made a grab at the very prominent and highly Roman nasal organ of a very short super, and tweaked it as through he would throw it, too, to the floor and stamp on it.

The super's eyes filled with tears, he uttered a cry of pain, indignantly grabbed and pulled away the manager's wrenchlike fingers, and then backing away, bowed and explained very humbly:

"Hi begs your pardon, sir, but that's me hown."

But, after all, it takes a young woman of the present day, to rub it in with a free hand.

There's Miss Gutting, for instance, whose father roped me in on many a deal on Wall Street. He made his little pile, and of course the daughter is considered a great catch, and among those who hover about the bright flame are several young society swells whose brains have never come out of their swaddling clothes.

She gave Softleigh an awful jolt the other day when he thought to get off a poem, which somehow seemed to lose all its point in his hands.

"I think, Mr. Softleigh, you will become quite a distinguished man if you live long enough," she said.

"Ah, thanks, awfully, doncher know. It's very good of you to say that. By the way, what do you – aw – think I will be distinguished for?"

"Longevity," said the minx.

It was cruel, perhaps, but I've no doubt she enjoyed it.

But Miss Gutting sometimes finds her match in the grim old Wall Street operator whom she calls papa.

She has a passion for hats, and of course her Easter creation was a dandy.

"Isn't it a duck of a hat?" she asked the old gentleman, parading it before him.

"Certainly; only I'd call it a pelican," he said, grimly glancing at the account on his desk, "judging from the size of the bill."

I suppose you've noticed that I've done a good deal of chin-scratching to-night. Some people do that when they're thinking hard, but not so with me. Oh, no, the simple fact is I got shaved by a new barber and I guess I'll grow a beard in future. Some people say there's lots of comedy in a barber shop. They mean tragedy. Again some people think there's poetry in the prattlings of the knight of the brush. I know one man who thinks different. Little Archie Rickets has a horror of the tribe and has a scheme to head 'em off.

Whenever he has to patronize a strange barber during the course of his travels, it is his invariable custom to immediately hand out a piece of money before sitting down in the chair, and whisper:

"Here, put this in your pocket for yourself."

The barber, delighted of course, always declares that he has never before received a tip before commencing operations.

Whereupon Rickets will frown and cut him short with:

"That is not a tip – it's hush money."

And in every case the barber tumbles to the racket, and puts a lock on his lips.

Rickets was telling me the other day about a wonderful bookkeeper his father used to have in his office.

"An all-around athlete," he declared, with a grin.

"Indeed," I replied, knowing he had a card up his sleeve, for Rickets is quite prone to have his little joke.

"Yes, indeed," he continued, "you ought to have seen him balancing the books. Why, he could keep the day-book in the air while he juggled the ledger on his nose and totaled up the journal with either right or left hand. Oh, he was fine, but pop had to let him go."

"How was that?" I asked.

"He was too much of an adept at the horizontal bar."

"Yes," I remarked, "that same bar has doubtless been the cause of many a fine fellow's downfall. But it is becoming the fashion now among men who lead a strenuous life to give up their tippling. I was just reading that Santos Dumont, the celebrated Brazilian air-ship navigator, does not indulge at all."

"Quite right," remarked Rickets, soberly; "probably he is afraid of taking a drop too much."

There's poor old Juggins, who used to be a great friend of mine till he took to drink.

I knew he would get his desserts if he continued his habit of a periodical spree, and the other day sure enough he turned up in the pen when the cases of drunk and disorderly were called.

"Officer," said the police-court judge, "what made you think the prisoner was drunk?"

"Well, your honor, as he was going along the sidewalk he ran plump into a street lamppost. He backed away, replaced his hat on his head, and firmly started forward again, but once more ran into the post.

"Four times he tried to get by the post, but each time his uncertain steps took him right into the iron pole.

"After the fourth attempt and failure to pass the post he backed off, fell to the pavement, and clutching his head in his hands, murmured, as one lost to all hope:

"'Lost! Lost in an impenetrable forest.'"

"Ten days;" said the court.

Juggins has been given to this sort of thing ever since he lost his chance of marrying a belle in Washington, and the daughter of a rich senator.

As a newspaper man Juggins was rather free with his criticism of public men and measures, and one of his letters, written before he became infatuated with the young lady in question, had rubbed it in so hard that the senator had gone to the trouble of finding out just who the writer was.

His hour of revenge arrived when Juggins summoned up courage to ask for his daughter's hand.

Then he arose in all his awful majesty.

"Only a year ago, Mr. Juggins, you referred to me emphatically as an old pirate," he said.

Juggins was naturally overwhelmed.

His sins had found him out.

Of course he tried to stammer out excuses, and how he had regretted his indiscreet act ever since.

"No, I'm not a pirate, Mr. Juggins, I wish you to distinctly understand that – I'm only a sort of freebooter. This (biff-bing) won't cost you a cent."

And Juggins went out of that senatorial mansion a sadder and a wiser man.

That was why he took to drink.

I've known the poor fellow to have the delirium tremens, and see all manner of goblins.

Did you ever run across a ghost, any of you?

Not the nicest experience in the world.

Perhaps you'd like to hear of an exciting adventure in that line that once befell me.

I was out West at the time, traveling on horseback, and pulled up at a tavern when night came on.

There I learned to my chagrin that as a crowd was attending the races – it was in Kentucky, of course – the landlord did not have a single place to stow me.

When I pressed the old chap, he admitted that there was one unoccupied room.

"But," he said, "no one can sleep in that room, for it's haunted. You must go on to the next village."

"I'll sleep in the room, ghost or no ghost," I declared, determined to go no further, as it promised to be a stormy night.

The landlord tried to persuade me; but I had established myself over the fire and called for supper.

Reluctantly the landlord gave orders to prepare the haunted chamber.

Meantime I was enlightened by the other guests as to the nature of the ghostly visitant.

Every night at a certain hour a sepulchral voice was heard outside the casement, saying:

"Do you want to be shaved?"

"And then, what happens?" I demanded.

No one could certainly say.

The last gentleman who slept in the room had fled, shrieking, on hearing the voice, and had spent the rest of his days in an asylum.

Some said that if you allowed the ghostly barber to approach and commence operations on your chin, your throat would infallibly be cut.

Fortified by this information, I retired early to rest, leaving the company engaged in an exciting game at cards, each with his pile of cash on the table before him.

Waking up from my first sleep, a hoarse, croaking sound seemed to come from the casement.

To my half-awakened senses the sound seemed to take form in the words:

"Do you want to be shaved?"

I jumped up and went to the window. The creaking branch of an old pear tree was swaying in the wind and scraping against the sash. This was the origin of the ghostly voice.

"What about those fellows downstairs?" I immediately asked myself, not thinking it fair that I should enjoy all of the fun.

I went to the door and listened. They were still at their cards.

So I dressed myself up in a sheet, took my razor in one hand, and a well-lathered brush in the other, and went downstairs.

Opening the door of the room where the card-players were still eagerly engaged in their game, I looked around. Every eye was fixed on me in terror. Advancing a step into the room, I waved my razor, and said, in a hoarse voice:

"Do you want to be shaved?"

There was a general stampede for the opposite door, and the ghost was left in possession. I walked around the table, and swept the various piles of money into my pocket. Retiring to bed, I slept soundly till the next morning. When I came down to breakfast, eager inquiries were made by the others as to what had happened.

"Well," I answered, "there was some one came, and asked, 'Do you want to be shaved?' So I said, 'No, I don't; but there are some chaps downstairs who do.'"

That's as near as I ever got to meeting a spectre.

But I have seen a dead man galvanized into life.

This is the way it happened.

It was on the stage.

We were playing Juliet at the time. I used to affect Shakespeare when I was young and foolish.

Paris had been duly slain, and Juliet lay stretched upon her bier.

Just then a portion of the scenery caught fire somehow, but some of us behind managed to extinguish it before much damage was done.

Juliet, with commendable presence of mind, did not move an eyelid, but the corpse of Paris was plainly nervous.

He raised himself to a sitting posture, gazing up at the fire in alarm, then scrambled to his feet and scuttled off the stage, the liveliest dead man you ever saw.

The danger being removed, his courage returned, and the audience shrieked with laughter at the spectacle of a corpse crawling along from the wings bent upon taking up his proper position for the final curtain.