If I could jam my head up through a wilderness of shirt and starch and saw off my windpipe as I looked out over the billowy, buttonless mass, and still smile, as Dr. Talmage does, I would give all my broad possessions in a moment. This offer will hold good up to the 15th. We got quite sociable and cordial toward the close, and I got the Doctor to reach up as far as he could on my spinal column and bring down the refractory end of a suspender, then I retaliated by going down into his true inwardness after a collar button that had dropped into oblivion. While he was smiling with that glad, free smile of his, which he takes along with him instead of baggage, he told me a pretty good thing on the editor of the _Herald_ of Salt Lake. He told it to me in confidence, he said, because he knew he could rely on a newspaper man. Then he laughed and seemed to think it was a good joke. It seems that when Dr. Talmage was in Salt Lake, the _Tribune_ published what purported to be an interview between a reporter of that paper and the Brooklyn divine. Shortly afterward, and while Dr. T. was in San Francisco, he received a letter from the editor of the _Herald_ and a marked copy of the paper, giving the Doctor a very flattering notice. In his letter the editor said: "I enclose a clipping from the _Tribune_ purporting to be an interview between yourself and a reporter of that paper; will you be kind enough to write me whether it is or is not genuine?" The Doctor looked the clipping carefully over, and as it was nothing but a blood-curdling account of the merits of Day's Kidney pad, he had no hesitancy in pronouncing the alleged interview a fraud. Still he never wrote the editor of the _Herald_, and he no doubt still wonders why it is that Dr. Talmage don't come forward and state the facts, so that the Gentile _Tribune_ may be shown up. The Doctor says that too much care cannot be used by the editor who wields the shears not to get his editorials mixed up with patent medicine advertisements. FINE-CUT AS A MEANS OF GRACE. |The amateur tobacco chewer many times through lack of consideration allows himself to be forced into very awkward and unpleasant positions. As a fair sample of the perils to which the young and inexperienced masticator of the weed is subjected, the following may be given: