I am now a suffragette. I don’t exactly understand what it is all about yet, but when I was up in New Hampshire a few weeks ago I met a very enthusiastic lady who started in to convert me to “the cause.” Finally, after she had talked fourteen minutes without breathing once, I got a chance to speak.

“But wait a minute,” I said; “you are wasting time. As I understand this thing, what you want is equal rights for the sexes; is that correct?”

She said that was it exactly.

“All right then,” I said, “I am with you, heart and soul; and, although I haven’t known it, I have been with you for a long time. I am willing to fight shoulder to shoulder with you for this glorious cause, for if there is anything that will get a man equal rights with a woman I am for it.”

“But,” she said, “you vote, don’t you?”

“No,” I said, “I can’t! Martin Beck won’t let me off to go home.”

“But,” she continued, “you can sit on juries, and we can’t.”

“Well, good Lord,” I exclaimed, “you don’t want to sit on juries, do you?”

“We want to do everything that men do.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I replied; “it doesn’t look good to me; women on a jury.”

“Why not?”

“Well, supposing there should be some big case on, and there were six women and six men on the jury, and the jury should be locked up in the jury room all night. You know darn well the verdict would be ‘Guilty.’”

If I had an automobile that was in the last stages of decomposition and I couldn’t sell it to anybody else I think I should try to sell it to the chap that painted that automobile on the drop curtain in the Garrick Theater in Chicago.

On this drop curtain there is painted an electric runabout. The chap that painted it knew a good deal more about painting than he did about automobiles. There isn’t the slightest symptom of any steering gear on it; the front axle is a straight iron rod without a sign of any joint in it.

One of the passengers is either sitting exactly on the top of the steering bar, or else there isn’t any; and with all four wheels set rigidly so it can’t turn, the car is just leaving the roadway and plunging into a flower bed.

There is one theater in Chicago that is going to have an awful time enforcing that “no tipping allowed” rule. The Illinois Theater has a stage manager by the name of Frank Tipping.

My wife says that all the Mormons are not in Utah: only their wives are not on.

Jim Morton says Duluth is a nice little “Street in One.”

Fred Wyckoff says the two worst weeks in show business are Holy Week and Milwaukee.

“Tommie” Ryan has got the right idea. He has had himself appointed as a special police officer over at his home in Hohokus, N. J. (Think of any one’s having a bright idea in a town with a name like that.) Now when he gets lonesome he runs his automobile up Main Street at full speed (13 miles an hour), arrests himself for overspeeding, collects two dollars for making the arrest, then fails to appear against himself and the case is dismissed.

There is no disputing the fact that education is a great help to a young man starting out in the world. Said bright thought being prompted by the following ad, clipped from a Buffalo, N. Y., paper:

“Help Wanted: Automobile washer, $18.00. Stenographer and book keeper, $12.00.”

I attended a newspaper men’s banquet in Rochester, N. Y. One of the speakers, a quaint, funny appearing little old chap, was introduced as a man who lived in a town of six thousand population, but had a circulation of thirty thousand for his paper.

“And,” said the toastmaster, as he introduced him, “I would like to have him tell us where those thirty thousand papers go to.”

The little old chap arose, scratched his bushy head and said,

“Well it goes all over. Of course most of ’em go ’round through New York state. But some of ’em go down to Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire. Then a few go down South. I have a few subscribers out through California and Oregon and Washington. Some go to Honolulu; the Philippines and two or three go as far as Australia.

“And,” he continued, with a sigh, “along in the earlier days I used to have considerable trouble to keep it from going to Hell.”

A young fellow up in New Hampshire has written a Vaudeville playlet and sent it on for my approval. If he could have kept up the gait he struck on the first page I should have bought it:

Maid: A lady waits without.

Master: Without what?

Maid: Without food or raiment.

Master: Give her food and bring her hither.

The cost of high living has evidently not struck Philadelphia yet; for in the window of a little store on North Ninth Street there is a sign “A glass bowl a goldfish a tadpole and one seaweed all for 8 cents.”

There must have been a crook around New York this winter, for hanging up over the workmen’s lockers in the garage where I keep my car is a sign saying

“Keep Out. We Mourn Our Loss.”