THE LIGHTER SIDE ously, ' I want to get a divorce from my papa and mamma.' ' A Sure Witness. — Judge Hadley of the Lowell police court is a purist in the use of the English language, and hardly a session passes that he does not reprove some one for doing violence to the mother tongue. "Sure," replied the witness, with great earnestness. "If you mean ' yes,' say so," thundered the judge. "Sure," innocently replied the witness. "Can't you say yes? " asked the judge. "Sure, yes, sure." The judge leaned back in his chair, stifled an impulse to laugh and said: "It was the rule once in all English courts to correct any misused English, but I have abandoned that practice for the most part, and I'm afraid it would serve no useful purpose in this instance." "Sure," said the witness, nodding his head up and down vigorously; " sure, sure." Then every one, the judge included, broke out into a roar of laughter. — Boston Record. The Papers in the Case. — A good one is told about a deputy clerk of the Superior Court in the same section of the South where the justice of the peace declared the eternal principal of" law, I go in for justice," and in the same county where the justice of the peace enjoined a whole township from passing over a disputed road and giving as his reason, " If any court can do it, mine can." But the latest is that a clerk coming into his office after a temporary absence inquired as to what had been going on. This clerk was also business manager of the county news paper and he found that his deputy had been requested to " file this answer and put it in the papers," but he was more than astonished when he found that to get the type distributed he had to pay $4.00 to keep the answer from going in the " papers." The deputy is deputy no longer nor is the clerk a general manager of the county newspaper. An Honest Man — New School. — Cassius R. Peck, Assistant United States District Attorney of Oklahoma, at a banquet in Guthrie recently spoke on honesty. One thing he said was this:
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"What are we coming to? Are we coming to such a pass that our ideas of an honest man will correspond with the idea of old Hiram Stroode? "Hiram Stroode, for the seventh time, was about to fail. He called in an expert account ant to disentangle his books. The accountant, after two days' work, announced to Hiram that he would be able to pay his creditors four cents on the dollar. "At this news the old man looked vexed. "' Heretofore,' he said, frowning, ' I have always paid ten cents on the dollar.' "A virtuous and benevolent expression spread over his face. "' And I will do so now,' he resumed. ' I will make up the difference out of my own pocket." " — New York Tribune. Extra-territoriality. — "Yes, your honor, I have lived with my wife twenty-two years, but it has been in hell," testified John Locker, libellant in the contested divorce suit against Mrs. Joanna Locker. Judge Bond looked up gravely from the book in which he had been writing. " In that case, sir," he said, " this court can have no jurisdiction." The trial went on, however. — Boston Record. Bumped-into-the-Bureau Kind. — Justice Harlan, of the Supreme Court, despite his length of service on the Bench, still preserves that elasticity of spirit and love of a joke that have distinguished him all through his career. On circuit last year the justice created con siderable merriment in a western court. A learned counsel was arguing the question as to what circumstances constituted an " acci dent," and was offering instances of what he considered would properly come within that term and what would not, on the other hand. "Suppose, your Honor," said he, " some one were to hit me in the eye, making it black in consequence. The fact of its becoming black could not be called an accident." "Perhaps not," suggested Harlan, with a chuckle, " but you would doubtless explain it on that ground." — Harper's Weekly. A Maxim Interpreted. — A witness named Leak had sworn palpably falsely in one mate
