had got “30.” He was a particular friend of the chap at my elbow, and it was pretty hard work a good many mornings for either of them to tell which was J. B., and which was “t’other un.” But, however serious the debauch, the chief was invariably at his post at night-fall, and apparently as sober as a deacon, while his friend quite frequently found himself unfit for service. One night the latter awoke with a fearful headache, and thinking it useless to attempt to go to work, he scrawled a note saying he was ill, and sent it to the office. He had barely put himself outside of a glass of Seltzer, when he received the following reply, which rather startled him by its Johnsonian style and apparent earnestness:

Office——Telegraph Company,
——April 24, 187–

Sir:

You are drunk. This folly has been repeated to the detriment of the service much too often, and a recurrence of the offense must result in your peremptory discharge. I can not, and will not, tolerate it any longer.

Yours,
J. B.

P S. Where will you be at nine o’clock? I am on it.

It seems scarcely necessary to say that the postscript was about the sweetest morsel that ever followed an official signature; nor need I add that at nine o’clock precisely there was a telegraphic re-union on a small scale at the Occidental.

Old Mr. Harrington, of Maguffinsville, went to Newark, Monday, and bought a patent lock for his barn. He said he wanted it for the “eend door,” and explained that boys got in there nights and “cut up.” Wednesday, when the lock had been adjusted to the door, Mr. Harrington went out to “fodder the critters,” and left the door open with the key on the outside. A sudden gust of wind blew the door to, and there being no means of affecting the lock from the inside, he became a prisoner. Finally his wife, who had wearied of waiting for him, came over from across the street where Mr. Harrington’s house stands, and called to him. He responded, and said if she didn’t open that door and let him out she’d hear from him. After a moment she found the key in the grass where it had fallen when the door slammed, and then she tried and tried to unlock the door, but she was nervous and her husband made her more so by his sarcastic and abusive remarks through the hole where the latch string used to be, and at last she grew red in the face and went home in a huff. About nine o’clock Mr. Harrington arrived at the house in a sorry condition—he having made his exit through a small window in the barn cellar. Being a corpulent gentleman he had a hard time of it getting through the narrow aperture, and would, perhaps, have been sticking there yet, but for the fact that a couple of goats kept in the cellar ate off his coat-tails, and were attacking the remainder of his wardrobe with great vigor, thus accelerating his progress outward. Lowell’s Ode, read at the Lexington Centennial celebration, and just published in the Atlantic, which Mr. Harrington had brought home to read to his wife, was neglected that evening, and bitterness and rancor shone in his eye until bed-time.

They worked down in a branch office. One was an American girl and the other, far back in the dear and mellow past, owed her origin to Irish blood. The former was forever endeavoring to impress her friend with a sense of her greatness, and often succeeded in wounding the supreme sensitiveness of her co- laborer. But one day—a sad, fateful day in the calendar of one of them—there occurred an exchange of courtesies which settled forever the question of who was to be mistress of the situation hence-forward. It was merely one of those episodes in real life which many of us have watched, wherein a patient and submissive mind has been domineered over beyond the limit of its endurance, and a word spoken at the wrong moment has aroused a latent power or a spark of wit which had its fitting effect and put matters on their proper basis for all time. On the day in question a note was sent across the room to her of Irish propensities with an idea of arousing her envy, which read as follows:

“I have matinee tickets for the grand opera on Saturday, and don’t know the way to the Academy. Which cars shall I take?”