Joker Joked

The Vienna telephone of Herr Richard Strauss, 62. famed eccentric composer, rang an odd hundred times last week, each time to shriek at him a message more bewildering than the last:

"Richard, my old friend, the letter you wrote me yesterday has broken my heart [sobs]."

"Herr Strauss, I have been your publisher for 30 years, but after the telegram you sent me yesterday our relations are over, finished! Your terms are mad. [Click.]"

"Ah, Herr Strauss, it is you? We have had a hard time to get the 300 violins you ordered yesterday. But we have them. We always try to please our old customers. Shall I send them up to you at once?"

They came, scores of calls. At last Herr Strauss stuffed the bell of his telephone. Then letters and telegrams poured in. People brought him dead cats and said ,he had advertised for them. Three florid women came with valises, and went away insulted. Some two hundred children came with jelly glasses full of spiders. They had heard that Herr Strauss could pay for them. It was bedlam, pandemonium. , . .

No explanation came, last week, except the guess that enemies of Composer Strauss must have devised this cruel means to hound an old man out of Vienna, to perhaps drive him mad. Herr Strauss has many enemies; for he has played many a practical joke, sometimes leading an orchestra deliberately wrong and then reviling the know-nothing audience when it applauds.

The joker seemed to have been well joked last week.