Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FITZHUGH LUDLOW SELECTIONS FROM A BRACE OF BOYS I Am a bachelor uncle. That, as a mere fact, might happen to anybody; but I am a bachelor uncle by internal fitness. I am one essentially, just as I am an individual of the Caucasian division of the human race; and if, through untoward circumstances?which heaven forbid? I should lose my present position, 1 shouldn’t .be surprised if you saw me out in the Herald under Situations Wanted?Males. Thanks to a marrying tendency in the rest of my family, I have now tittle need to advertise, all the business being thrown into my way which a single member of my profession can attend to. I meander, like a desultory, placid river of an old bachelor as I am, through the flowery mead of several nurseries, but I am detained longest among the children of my sister Lu. Lu married Mr. Lovegrove. He is a merchant, retired with a fortune amassed by the old- fashioned, slow processes of trade, and regards the mercantile life of the present day only as so much greed and gambling Christianly baptized. . . . Lu is my favorite sister; Lovegrove an unusually good article of brother- in-law; and I cannot say that any of my niecea and nephews interest me more than their two children, Daniel and Billy, who are more unlike than words can paint them. They are far apart in point of years; Daniel is twenty-two, Bill eleven. I was reminded of this fact the other aay by Billy, as he stood between my legs, scowling at his book of sums. ‘A boy has eighty-five turnips and gives his sister thirty’?pretty present for a girl, isn’t it? said Billy, with an air of supreme contempt, Could you stand such stuff?say? I put on my instructive face and answered: Well, my dear Billy, you know that arithmetic is necessary to you if you mean to be an indust…