Today's Stichomancy for Chuck Norris

date. When I heard the news you'd have thought I had lost my mother. It's bad enough having a whole day to kill but when I think of to-night," the leading lady's voice took on a note of hysteria, "it seems as though I'd----"

"Say," Pearlie interrupted, abruptly, "you ain't got a real good corset-cover pattern, have you? One that fits smooth over the bust and don't slip off the shoulders? I don't seem able to get my hands on the kind I want."

"Have I!" yelled the leading lady. And made a flying leap from the bed to the floor.

She flapped back the cover of a big suit-case and began

Buttered Side Down

"Oh," said the shaggy man, "if they're donkeys, we've nothing to fear at all."

"They may kick," said Dorothy, doubtfully.

"Then we will cut some switches, and make them behave," he replied. At the first tree he cut himself a long, slender switch from one of the branches, and shorter switches for the others.

"Don't be afraid to order the beasts around," he said; "they're used to it."

Before long the road brought them to the gates of the city. There was a high wall all around, which had been whitewashed, and the gate just before our travelers was a mere opening in the wall, with no bars

The Road to Oz

becoming doublet and hose.

For years she worked assiduously with the little boy's education. There were three subjects in her curriculum; French, swordsmanship and hatred of all things Eng- lish, especially the reigning house of England.

The old woman had had made a tiny foil and had commenced teaching the little boy the art of fence when he was but three years old.

"You will be the greatest swordsman in the world when you are twenty, my son," she was wont to say, "and then you shall go out and kill many Englishmen.

The Outlaw of Torn

demands a science to itself perhaps!"

And he would shrug his shoulders as much as to say, "But we are too high and too low!"

Louis' passion for reading had on the whole been very well satisfied. The cure of Mer had two or three thousand volumes. This treasure had been derived from the plunder committed during the Revolution in the neighboring chateaux and abbeys. As a priest who had taken the oath, the worthy man had been able to choose the best books from among these precious libraries, which were sold by the pound. In three years Louis Lambert had assimilated the contents of all the books in his uncle's library that were worth reading. The process of absorbing ideas by

Louis Lambert