A MEAN COMPANY

Mark Twain is credited with telling a good story about the meanest corporation on earth. A man was working for this company, drilling holes for blasting rock. He got to work on a place where there was a charge that had not gone off. So, as he sat there quietly drilling away, there was an explosion. He went up and up till he didn’t look any bigger than a hat; and then up and up till he didn’t look any bigger than a walnut; and then up and up till he went out of sight. Then he began to come down and down till he looked as big as a walnut; and then down and down till he looked as big as a hat; and then down and down till he sat right in the place he had left, and went on drilling away as if nothing had happened. He was absent just sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds—and the company was so mean that they docked him for loss of time!

“Say, boy, say!” exclaimed a hot looking man with a big valise, “what’s the quickest way to the cars?” “Run!” yelled the boy as he dodged into an alley. The man was very sorry the boy had so suddenly disappeared, for he was so pleased with the kind information that if he could only have come near enough to the boy, he would certainly have given him something to remember him by.

When the preacher went into politics and suffered in his professional character in consequence, he thought well to make an humble confession to his conference to the effect that “the muddy pool of politics was the rock on which I split.”

He mixed his figures about as badly as a famous Irishman, Sir Boyle Roche, who, suspecting the opposition of some sort of underhand intentions, revealed his acuteness and his purpose to head off the enemy in the following terms: “I smell a rat; I feel it in the air; and I will nip it in the bud!”