Excerpt from The World's Wit and Humor, Vol. 14 of 15: Russian, Scandinavian, Miscellaneous, Khemnitzer to Gorki, Holberg to Strindberg, Erasmus to Sienkiewicz

One day, while walking along a road, and gazing at the sky in speculating upon some problem of the universe to which the answer had never been found (because there was none), the young man stepped over the edge of a deep ditch. His father, who chanced to be near by, ran to get a rope. The son, however, sitting at the bottom of the ditch, began to meditate on the cause of his fall. He concluded that an earthquake had superinduced a momentary displace ment of his corporeal axis, thus destroying hie equilibrium, and, in obedience to the law of gravity as established by Newton, precipitating him downward until he encountered an immovable obstacle - namely, the bottom of the ditch.

When his father arrived with the rope, the following dia logue took place between them: I have brought a rope to pull you out with. There, now, hold on tight to that end, and don't let go while I pull.

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