Mirko Earflapes, a Jugo-Slavian centenarian, who celebrated his one hundred and sixty-fourth birthday yesterday, confessed to a certain amount of depression inspired by European affairs.
"I have not felt like this," he said, in an interview, "since I met my nineteenth wife, whom I married by proxy, and realized that it was indeed she whose face I had seen from a distance through her father's attic window, and not the female pet goat which her brother had assured me it was.
"I married her when I was a lad of 100, She died last year. And now all this fighting, "What sense there is in that expression 'A short life and a gay one," he concluded, "I have never been able to see."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.