A GREAT COUNTRY

They tried hard, but they couldn’t get the Yankee tourist to admit that he saw anything in Europe that could beat things at home. When he passed from Italy to Switzerland, they asked him whether he had noticed the magnificence of the Alps, and he acknowledged, “Waal, now, come to think of it, I guess I did pass some risin’ ground.” And before this they had showed him Vesuvius, and asked him what he thought of that, and whether there was anything in his country could equal it. And he said, “Pooh! Why, we’ve got a waterfall in my country so big that if you had it here and turned it into your burning mountain, it would put out all that fire in just six seconds.”

An American-born Irishman paid a visit to the home of his ancestors, and they proudly showed him the lakes of Killarney. “Killarney, is it?” said he. “We’ve got lakes in America so big that you could take all the lakes in Ireland an’ throw ’em in, and it wouldn’t raise the water an inch. An’ as fer yer city o’ Dublin—let me tell ye, me friend, we’ve got States over there so big that ye could put Dublin away in one corner of ’em, an’ ye’d never know it was there, except for the smell o’ the whiskey.”

These honored citizens could well appreciate the toast—“The United States: bounded on the east by primeval chaos; on the north by the Aurora borealis; on the west by the precession of the equinoxes, and on the south by the Day of Judgment!”