An Ohio politician ‘on the stump,’ stayed the torrent of his eloquence for a moment, and looking round with a self-satisfied air, put the question: ‘Now, gentlemen, what do you think?’ A voice from the crowd replied: ‘Well, Mr Speaker, if you ask me, I think, sir, I do indeed, that if you and me were to stump the state together, we could tell more lies than any other two men in the country, sir; and I'd not say a word myself, sir, all the time.’ The orator must have felt as grateful as the actor whose impersonation of the hero of _Escaped from Sing-Sing_ impelled a weary pittite to proclaim aloud that the play would have been better ‘if that chap hadn't escaped from Sing-Sing;’ or the Opera tenor whose first solo elicited from Pat in the upper regions the despairing ejaculation: ‘Och, my eighteen-pince!’ A young negro, carefully conducting an old blind woman through the Philadelphia Exhibition, stopped in front of a statue of Cupid and Psyche, and thus enlightened his sightless companion: ‘Dis is a white mammy and her babby, and dey has just got no clo' onto 'em at all, and he is a-kissin' of her like mischief, to be shuah. I's kind o' glad you can't see 'em, 'cause you'd be flustered like, 'cause dey don't stay in de house till dey dresses deyselves. All dese figures seem to be scarce o' clo', but dey is mighty pooty, only dey be too white to be any 'lation to you and me, mammy.’ Then turning to a statue in bronze: ‘Dere be one nigger among 'em which is crying over a handkerchief. Dey call him Othello. Mebbe his mother is dead, and he can't fetch her to de show, poor fellow!’ An American officer riding by the bronze statue of Henry Clay in Canal Street, New Orleans, was asked by his Irish orderly if the New Orleans ‘fellers’ were so fond of niggers that they put a statue of one in their ‘fashionablest’ street. ‘That's not a nigger, Tom; that's the great Clay statue,’ said the amused officer. Tom rode round the statue, dismounted, climbed upon the pedestal, examined the figure closely, and then said: ‘Did they tell yez it was clay? It looks to me like iron!’ Tom's ignorance was more excusable than that of the Yankee who, learning on inquiry that the colossal equestrian figure in Union Square, New York, was ‘General Washington, the father of his country,’ observed: ‘It is? I never heard of him before; but there is one thing about him I do like--he does set a horse plaguy well.’ A compliment to the artist, at all events.