WIFE: Yes, well, what were the words before that?

HUSBAND: How should I know? I’m not learning the thing to recite somewhere, am I?

WIFE: Well, it’s very funny that you didn’t notice when I read the last sentence backwards. And if you weren’t asleep what were you doing with your eyes closed?

HUSBAND: I got smoke in them and was resting them for a minute. Haven’t I got a right to rest my eyes a minute?

WIFE: I suppose it rests your eyes to breathe through your mouth and hold your head way over on one side.

HUSBAND: Yes it does, and wha’d’yer think of that?

“If you weren’t asleep what were you doing with your eyes closed?”

WIFE: Go on and read your newspaper. That’s just about your mental speed.

HUSBAND: I’m perfectly willing to read books in this set if you’d pick any decent ones.

WIFE: Yes, you are.

HUSBAND: Wha’d’yer mean “Yes you are”?

WIFE: Just what I said.

(This goes on for ten minutes and then husband draws a revolver and kills his wife.)

XXVI—WHEN NOT IN ROME, WHY DO AS THE ROMANS DID?

There is a growing sentiment among sign painters that when a sign or notice is to be put up in a public place it should be written in characters that are at least legible, so that, to quote “The Manchester Guardian” (as every one seems to do) “He who runs may read.”

This does not strike one as being an unseemly pandering to popular favor. The supposition is that the sign is put there to be read, otherwise it would have been turned over to an inmate of the Odd Fellows Home to be engraved on the head of a pin. And what could be a more fair requirement than that it should be readable?

Advertising, with its billboard message of rustless screens and co-educational turkish-baths, has done much to further the good cause, and a glance through the files of newspapers of seventy-five years ago, when the big news story of the day was played up in diamond type easily deciphered in a strong light with the naked eye, shows that news printing has not, to use a slang phrase, stood still.

But in the midst of this uniform progress we find a stagnant spot. Surrounded by legends that are patent and easy to read and understand, we find the stone-cutter and the architect still putting up tablets and cornerstones, monuments and cornices, with dates disguised in Roman numerals. It is as if it were a game, in which they were saying, “The number we are thinking of is even; it begins with M; it has five digits and when they are spread out, end to end, they occupy three feet of space. You have until we count to one hundred to guess what it is.”