Uncle Dick and Lisa's Old Time Animal Tales

     When the clerks in a certain Rochester drug store are not operating with the morter and pestle, or compounding a black draught, or mixing equal parts of Turkey rhubarb and hydrocyanic acid [for children teething], or spreading shoemaker’s wax on porous plasters or engaged in any of the multifarious modes of making themselves useful known to apprentice apothecaries; in a word, when they have an idle hour and a friend to entertain, they resort to a plan decidedly novel and not without interest to lovers of anecdotes about animals. What the boys do is to take the honey jar from the shelf, take the stopper from its mouth and place it near a rat hole from which one of the rodents emerges quickly when the store is quiet. It discovers the presence of the honey in a short time through the assistance of its nose, and then puts in practice a plan it has found to work well for reaching the sweet contents of the jar. The expedient is simply to insert its tail in the mouth of the jar deep enough to reach the honey, then withdraw it and suck the linked sweetness at its leisure. The clerks are ready to swear the story is true, and they are now carefully observing, for the benefit of science, the effect on the human family of strained honey in which rat tails have been soaked.-Rochester [N. Y.] Union.