The selectmen, on finding children ignorant, may take them away from their parents, and put them into better hands, at the expense of their parents. A man that strikes his wife shall pay a fine of £10; a woman that strikes her husband shall be punished as the court directs. A wife shall be deemed good evidence against her husband. Married persons must live together, or be imprisoned. No man shall court a maid in person, or by letter, without first obtaining consent of her parents: £5 penalty for the first offence; £10 for the second; and for the third, imprisonment during the pleasure of the court. Every male shall have his hair cut round according to a cap. Paronomasia. Hard is the job to launch the desperate pun; A _pun-job_ dangerous as the Indian one.—§Holmes.§ Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and _verbicide_—that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are alike forbidden. _Manslaughter_, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man’s laughter, which is the end of the other.—§Ibid.§ The quaint Cardan thus defineth:—“Punning is an art of harmonious jingling upon words, which, passing in at the ears and falling upon the diaphragma, excites a titillary motion in those parts; and this, being conveyed by the animal spirits into the muscles of the face, raises the cockles of the heart.” “He who would make a pun would pick a pocket,” is the stereotyped dogma fulminated by laugh-lynchers from time immemorial; or, as the _Autocrat_ hath it, “To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion.” The “inanities of this working-day world” cannot perceive any wittiness or grace in punning; and yet, according to the comprehensive definition of wit by Dr. Barrow, the eminent divine, it occupies a very considerable portion of the realm of wit. He says, “Wit is a thing so versatile and multiform, appearing in so many shapes, so many postures, so many garbs, so variously apprehended by several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof, than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of the fleeting air. Sometimes it lieth in _pat allusions to a known story_, or in _seasonable application of a trivial saying_, or in feigning an apposite tale; sometimes it _playeth in words and phrases_, taking advantage of the _ambiguity of their sense, or the affinity of their sound_; sometimes it is wrapped in a dress of humorous expression, sometimes it lurketh under _an odd similitude_; sometimes it is lodged in a sly question, in a smart answer, in a _quirkish_ reason, in a shrewd intimation, in cunningly,