"Well, confound it, you can discharge me if you want to, but what was a man to do? Would you have me march around three times when my military pants were coming off, and I knew it? Military pride, pomp, parade, and circumstance, are all right; but it can be overdone. A military squadron, detachment, or whatever it is, can make more of a parade, under certain circumstances, than is advertised. I didn't want to give people more show than they paid for, and I ask you to put yourself in my place. When a man is paid three dollars a week to play a Roman soldier, would you have him play the Greek slave? No, sir; I guess I know what I'm hired to play, and I'm going to play it. When you want me to play Adam in the Garden of Eden, just give me my fig leaf and salary enough to make it interesting, and I will try and properly interpret the character for you, or refund the money at the door." DECLINE OF AMERICAN HUMOR |DEAR, mellow-voiced, starry-eyed reader, did you ever see something about "the decline of American humor?" Well, we got a gob of American humor, yesterday, written by a yahoo with pale pink hair, which was entitled "Marriage in Mormondom on the Tontine Plan." Well, we declined it. Decline of American humor. _Sabe?_ CHICAGO CUSTOM HOUSE |THE Chicago custom house and post office, built from designs by Oscar Wild, and other delirum tremens artists, is getting wiggly, and bids fair to some day fall down and scrunch about 500 United States employes into the great billowy sea of the eternal hence. It is a sick looking structure, with little gothic warts on top, and red window sashes, and little half-grown smoke houses sprouting out of it in different places. It is grand, gloomy and peculiar, and looks as though it might be cursed with an inward pain. FOREIGN OPINION |WE are indebted to Fred J. Prouting, correspondent of the foreign and British newspaper press, for a copy of the London _Daily_ of the 9th inst., containing the following editorial notice: