Your costume is scanty, O Goddess;
A slip, with a shoestring begirt,
That boasts nothing much of a bodice,
And flaunts rather less of a skirt.
The imbecile stuff of your hose is
Sheer silk, of the thinnest of thins,
Whose gauze half conceals, half discloses
Your shapely young shins.

Your hair is bobbed off like a Fiji;
You're swaddled in furs in July!
Your hat is a bowl, put on skee-gee,
Entirely eclipsing one eye.

Your ears are as lost as Atlantis;

Yet out from that muddle of hair
Come earrings that shock and enchant us-
So ears must be there!

Your lips are the crudest vermilion,

While your cheeks have a cochineal tint
(More Indianlike than civilian

The paint you apply without stint).
Your nose is a powdered marshmallow
In the midst of the color display;
Your chin, like a round lump of tallow,
Oh, Girl of To-day!

Don't think I'm a rabid exhorter

Yet I hate to contemplate, my dear,
If your skirts should get very much shorter-
Or your stockings a trifle more sheer;
If you paint your face any more thickly,
Or don a more scanty array-

I pray that reform may come quickly,
Oh, Girl of To-day!

Incompatibility

"it worn't nothin' like dat. Yo' jest couldn't

MOSES DIGGS, an old Alabama darky, git on with her onless yo' was somewhars

had been arrested for having more than

one wife, the last woman being the complainant. He happened to be well known locally and considered an orderly character.

else."

A Memorial Token

"How many wives have you had?" de- WHEN his mother returned from a day's manded the examining judge.

"Six, yo' Honah," was the reply. "Why couldn't you get on with them?" "Well, suh, de fust two sp'iled de white folks' clo's when dey washed 'em; de thu'd worn't no cook; de fo'th was jest nacherally lazy; an' de fifth-I'll tell yo', jedge, de fifth, she-"

"Incompatibility?"

"No, yo' Honah," said the negro, slowly,

absence she found seven-year-old Gar

rett wearing a very mournful air.

"My white rat died to-day!" he announced.

"Oh, I am sorry, son," she sympathized. "I held a funeral, and buried it in the back yard." He went on, "I put some flowers on its grave, but I knew they would wither, and I was afraid I'd lose the place, so I just left its tail sticking out for a marker.”

tion:

of the ball field stood up. He was a small, snub-nosed lad, with a plentiful supply of

verses with the following note of explana- freckles, but he glanced about him with a

"These lines were written sixty years ago by one who has for a long time slept in his grave merely for a pastime."

dignified air of controlling the situation.

"I'm going to be captain this year," he announced, convincingly, "or else father's old bull is going to be turned into the field." He was elected unanimously.