“It is singular that as a boy I was a good deal like other boys. At school I was the teacher’s pet. She liked me because I was pretty, and she noticed that budding genius which has developed so grandly since, but of which the public has failed to take proper cognizance. When I had reached decimals in arithmetic and could declaim ‘Rolla’s Address to the Peruvians,’ the old man considered that my education was complete, and put me to work. “He was a rough carpenter, and I became a rough carpenter. I think I was the roughest carpenter in the United States. I built a shed once that was constructed in a manner so diametrically opposite to all the rules of carpentry, that it caved in three days after its completion and killed two coal heavers. On another occasion my employer noticed that I put a lock on upside down and hung a door the wrong way. He kindly but firmly suggested that I should quit. After revolving the question in my own mind I did quit; I thought the employer would be angry if I didn’t. “When my father died he left me some money and I was pretty well fixed, but in a moment of abberation of mind I yielded to the advice of some of my friends and joined a building and loan association. That settled it; in a short time the association gobbled my property and was loaning my money to some one else. If I had a hundred sons I would advise them all to be solicitors for or presidents of building and loan associations. There’s money in it. “After that I made the most gigantic mistake of my life. I got a job on a newspaper as a reporter, and, after stoving my legs up running a route, I bloomed out as a humorist writer. As I said before, the people don’t know I’m a humorist, but that is due to their lack of appreciation, and is no fault of mine. I have written some of the most exquisitely all-but funny things I ever saw, and I am now engaged on a series of important jokes for an almanac. I have a wife, three children, and an occasional dose of dyspepsia. “I do not intend to retire from business for some time. The newspaper business is easy, and especially easy is the task of running the funny end of it. A fellow has merely to be funny when he feels sad, and to grind out humorous items every day in the year. Then the salary of newspaper men is so enormous that college graduates would rather take a situation on a newspaper than get a job driving a street car. I am still grinding out mental pabulum for the public, and still waiting for some appreciative newspaper publisher to offer me a situation at $5,000 per annum. W. W. CLARK.” IRWIN RUSSELL. The night before Christmas, 1879, witnessed the death of one of the brightest young humorists the United States has ever called her own. Of bright intellect and finished education, Irwin Russell was rapidly winning a name in American literature, when taken ill, as the result of overwork; he lingered a few days, and died Christmas Eve.