The Project Gutenberg EBook of Peck's Sunshine, by George W. Peck
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Title: Peck's Sunshine
Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun,
Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882
Author: George W. Peck
Release Date: May 16, 2008 [EBook #25491]
Last Updated: October 5, 2016
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PECK'S SUNSHINE ***
Produced by David Widger
Gentlemen of the Jury: I stand before you charged with an attempt to “remove” the people of America by the publication of a new book, and I enter a plea of “Not Guilty.” While admitting that the case looks strong against me, there are extenuating circumstances, which, if you will weigh them carefully, will go far towards acquitting me of this dreadful charge. The facts are that I am not responsible, I was sane enough up to the day that I decided to publish this book and have been since; but on that particular day I was taken possession of by an unseen power—a Chicago publisher-who filled my alleged mind with the belief that the country demanded the sacrifice, and that there would be money in it. If the thing is a failure, I want it understood that I was instigated by the Chicago man; but if it is a success, then, of course, it was an inspiration of my own.
The book contains nothing but good nature, pleasantly told yarns, jokes on my friends; and, through it all, there is not intended to be a line or a word that can cause pain or sorrow-nothing but happiness.
Laughter is the best medicine known to the world for the cure of many diseases that mankind is subject to, and it has been prescribed with success by some of our best practitioners. It opens up the pores, and restores the circulation of the blood, and the despondent patient that smiles, is in a fair way to recovery. While this book is not recommended as an infallible cure for consumption, if I can throw the patient into the blues by the pictures, I can knock the blues out by vaccinating with the reading matter.
To those who are inclined to look upon the bright side of life, this book is most respectfully dedicated by the author.
GEO. W. PECK. Milwaukee, Wis.,
March, 1882.
A St. Louis doctor factory recently turned out a dozen female doctors. As long as the female doctors were confined to one or two in the whole country, and these were experimental, the Sun held its peace, and did not complain; but now that the colleges are engaged in producing female doctors as a business, we must protest, and in so doing will give a few reasons why female doctors will not prove a paying branch of industry.
In the first place, if they doctor anybody it must be women, and three-fourths of the women had rather have a male doctor. Suppose these colleges turn out female doctors until there are as many of them as there are male doctors, what have they got to practice on?
A man, if there was nothing the matter with him, might call in a female doctor; but if he was sick as a horse—and when a man is sick he is sick as a horse—the last thing he would have around would be a female doctor. And why? Because when a man wants a female fumbling around him he wants to feel well. He don’t want to be bilious, or feverish, with his mouth tasting like cheese, and his eyes bloodshot, when a female is looking over him and taking an account of stock.
Of course these female doctors are all young and good looking, and if one of them came into a sick room where a man was in bed, and he had chills, and was as cold as a wedge, and she should sit up close to the side of the bed, and take hold of his hand, his pulse would run up to a hundred and fifty and she would prescribe for a fever when he had chilblains. Then if he died she could be arrested for malpractice. O, you can’t fool us on female doctors.
A man who has been sick and had male doctors, knows just how he would feel to have a female doctor come tripping in and throw her fur lined cloak over a chair, take off her hat and gloves, and throw them on a lounge, and come up to the bed with a pair of marine blue eyes, with a twinkle in the corner, and look him in the wild, changeable eyes, and ask him to run out his tongue. Suppose he knew his tongue was coated so it looked like a yellow Turkish towel, do you suppose he would want to run out five or six inches of the lower end of it, and let that female doctor put her finger on it, to see how it was furred? Not much! He would put that tongue up into his cheek, and wouldn’t let her see it for twenty-five cents admission.
We have all seen doctors put their hands under the bed-clothes and feel a man’s feet to see if they were cold. If a female doctor should do that, it would give a man cramps in the legs.
A male doctor can put his hand on a man’s stomach, and liver, and lungs, and ask him if he feels any pain there; but if a female doctor should do the same thing it would make a man sick, and he would want to get up and kick himself for employing a female doctor. O, there is no use talking, it would kill a man.
Now, suppose a man had heart disease, and a female doctor should want to listen to the beating of his heart. She would lay her left ear on his left breast, so her eyes and rosebud mouth would be looking right in his face, and her wavy hair would be scattered all around there, getting tangled in the buttons of his night shirt. Don’t you suppose his heart would, get in about twenty extra beats to the minute? You bet! And she would smile—we will bet ten dollars she would smile—and show her pearly teeth, and her ripe lips would be working as though she were counting the beats, and he would think she was trying to whisper to him, and——
Well, what would he be doing all this time? If he was not dead yet, which would be a wonder, his left hand would brush the hair away from her temple, and kind of stay there to keep the hair away, and his right hand would get sort of nervous and move around to the back of her head, and when she had counted the heart beats a few minutes and was raising her head, he would draw the head up to him and kiss her once for luck, if he was as bilious as a Jersey swamp angel, and have her charge it in the bill; and then a reaction would set in, and he would be as weak as a cat, and she would have to fan him and rub his head till he got over being nervous, and then make out her prescription after he got asleep. No; all of a man’s symptoms change when a female doctor is practicing on him, and she would kill him dead.
The Sun is a woman’s rights paper, and believes in allowing women to do anything that they can do as well as men, and is in favor of paying them as well as men are paid for the same work, taking all things into consideration; but it is opposed to their trifling with human life, by trying to doctor a total stranger. These colleges are doing a great wrong in preparing these female doctors for the war path, and we desire to enter a protest in behalf of twenty million men who could not stand the pressure.
Mr. Crossman, of Marshall street, is a man who was once a boy himself, if his memory serves him, and no boy of his is going to ask him for anything that is in his power to purchase and be refused. But when his boy asked him to buy a goat Mr. Crossman felt hurt. It was not the expense of the goat that he looked at, but he never had felt that confidence in the uprightness of the moral character of a goat that he wanted to feel.
A goat he always associated in his mind with a tramp, and he did not feel like bringing among the truly good children of the neighborhood a goat. He told his boy that he was sorry he had lavished his young and tender affections on a goat, and hoped that he would try and shake off the feeling that his life’s happiness would be wrecked if he should refuse to buy him a goat. The boy put his sleeve up over his eyes and began to shed water, and that settled it.
Mr. Crossman’s religion is opposed to immersion, and when the infant baptism began his proud spirit was conquered, and he told the boy to lead on and he would buy the goat. They went over into the Polack settlement and a Countess there, who takes in washing, was bereaved of the goat, while Mr. Crossman felt that he was a dollar out of pocket.
Now that he thinks of it, Mr. Crossman is confident that the old lady winked as he led the goat away by a piece of clothes line, though at the time he looked upon the affair as an honorable business transaction. If he had been buying a horse he would have asked about the habits of the animal, and would probably have taken the animal on trial. But it never occurred to him that there was any cheating in goats.
The animal finally pulled Mr. Crossman home, at the end of the clothes line, and was placed in a neighbor’s barn at eventide to be ready for the morning’s play, refreshed. About 6 o’clock in the morning, Mr. Crossman was looking out of his window when he saw the neighboring lady come out of the barn door head first, and the goat was just taking its head away from her polonaise in a manner that Mr. Crossman considered, with his views of propriety, decidedly impolite.
Believing there was some misunderstanding, and that the goat was jealous of a calf that was in the barn, and that the matter could be satisfactorily explained to the goat, Mr. Crossman put the other leg in his trousers, took a cistern pole and went to the front. The goat saw him coming, and rushed out into the yard and stood up on its hind feet and gave the grand hailing sign of distress, and as Mr. Cross-man turned to see if any of the neighbors were up, he felt an earthquake strike him a little below where he had his suspenders tied around his body. Mr. Crossman repeated a portion of the beautiful Easter service and climbed up on an ash barrel, where he stood poking the goat on the ear with the cistern pole, when Mr. Crombie, who lives hard by. and who had come out to split some kindling wood, appeared on the scene.
Mr. Crombie is a man who grasps a situation at once, and though he is a man who deliberates much on any great undertaking, when he saw the lady behind the coal box, and Mr. Crossman on the ash barrel, he felt that there was need of a great mind right there, and he took his with him over the fence, in company with a barrel stave and a hatchet. He told Crossman that there was only one way to deal with a goat, and that was to be firm and look him right in the eye. He said Sep. Wintermute, at Whitewater, once had a goat that used to drive the boys all around, but he could do anything with him, by looking him in the eye.
He walked toward the goat, with “his eyes sot,” and Mr. Crossman says one spell he thought, by the way the goat looked sheepish, that Crombie was a regular lion tamer, but just as he was about to paralyze the animal, Mr. Crombie caught the strings of his drawers, which were dragging on the ground, in the nails of a barrel hoop, and as he stooped down to untangle them the goat kicked him with his head, at a point about two chains and three links in a northwesterly direction from the small of his back. Crombie gave a sigh, said, “I die by the hand of an assassin,” and jumped up on a wagon, with the barrel stave and hatchet, and the hoop tangled in his legs.
The goat had three of them treed, and was looking for other worlds to conquer, when Mr. Nowell, who was out for a walk, saw the living statues, and came in to hear the news. Mr. Crossmair said he didn’t know what had got into the goat, unless it was a tin pail or a lawn mower that was in the barn, but he was evidently mad, and he advised Mr. No-well to go for the police.
Nowell said a man that had raised cub bears had no right to be afraid of a goat. He said all you wanted to do, in subduing the spirit of animals, was to gain their confidence. He said he could, in two minutes, so win the affections of that goat that it would follow him about like a dog, and he went up and stroked the animal’s head, scratched its ear, and asked them if they could not see they had taken the wrong course with the goat. He said a goat was a good deal like a human being. You could coax, but you could not drive. “Come, Billy,” said he, as he moved off, snapping his fingers.
It is Mr. Nowell’s unbiased opinion that Billy did come. Not that he saw Billy come, but he had a vague suspicion, from a feeling of numbness some two feet from the base of the brain, that William had arrived in that immediate vicinity, and while he was recalling his scattered thoughts and feeling for any pieces of spine that might have become detached from the original column, Billy came again and caught three of Mr. Nowell’s fingers in the pile driver. That was talk enough between gentlemen, and Mr. Nowell got his back against a fence and climbed up on top backwards.
When he caught his breath he said that was the worst shock he ever experienced since he fell off the step ladder last summer. He said he had rather break a bear to ride any time.
At this point Mr. Crombie espied a letter carrier on the other side of the street, and called him over. He told the letter carrier if he would step into the yard and drive the goat in the barn they would all unite in a petition to have the salaries of letter carriers raised. There is no class of citizens more accommodating than our letter carriers, and this one came in and walked up to the goat and pushed the animal with his foot.
“This goat seems tame enough,” said he, turning around to speak to Mr. Crossman. His words had not more than vaporized in the chill air before the goat had planted two trip hammer blows into the seat of government, and the letter carrier went into the barn, fell over a wheelbarrow, and the letters from his sack were distributed in a box stall.
It was a beautiful sight to look upon, and they would have been there till this time had it not been that the Countess happened to come along gathering swill, and the party made up a purse of three dollars for her if she would take the goat away.
She took a turnip top from her swill pail, offered it to the goat, and the animal followed her off, bleating and showing every evidence of contentment, and the gentlemen got down from the positions they had assumed, and they shook hands and each took a bloody oath that he would not tell about it, and they repaired to their several homes and used arnica on the spots where the goat had kicked them.
The only trouble that is liable to arise out of this is that the postmaster threatens to commence an action against Crossman for obstructing the mails.
Probably the meanest trick that was ever played on a white man was played in Milwaukee, and the fact that there is no vigilance committee there is the only reason the perpetrators of the trick are alive. A business man had just purchased a new stiff hat, and he went into a saloon with half a dozen of his friends to fit the hat on his head. They all took beer, and passed the hat around so all could see it. One of the meanest men that ever held a county office went to the bar tender and had a thin slice of Limburger cheese cut off, and when the party were looking at the frescoed ceiling through beer glasses this wicked person slipped the cheese under the sweat leather of the hat, and the man put it on and walked out.
The man who owned the hat is one of your nervous people, who is always complaining of being sick, and who feels as though some dreadful disease is going to take possession of him and carry him off. He went back to his place of business, took off his hat and laid it on the table, and proceeded to answer some letters. He thought he detected a smell, and, when his partner asked him if he didn’t feel sick, he said he believed he did. The man turned pale and said he guessed he would go home. He met a man on the sidewalk who said the air was full of miasma, and in the street car a man who sat next to him moved away to the end of the car, and asked him if he had just come from Chicago. The man with the hat said he had not, when the stranger said they were having a great deal of smallpox there, and he guessed he would get out and walk, and he pulled the bell and jumped off. The cold perspiration broke out on the forehead of the man with the new hat, and he took it off to wipe his forehead, when the whole piece of cheese seemed to roll over and breathe, and the man got the full benefit of it, and came near fainting away.
He got home and his wife met him and asked him what was the matter? He said he believed mortification had set in, and she took one whiff as he took off his hat, and said she should think it had. “Where did you get into it?” said she. “Get into it?” said the man, “I have not got into anything, but some deadly disease has got hold of me, and I shall not live.” She told him if any disease that smelled like that had got hold of him and was going to be chronic, she felt as though he would be a burden to himself if he lived very long. She got his clothes off, soaked his feet in mustard water, and he slept. The man slept and dreamed that a smallpox flag was hung in front of his house and that he was riding in a butcher wagon to the pest house.
The wife sent for a doctor, and when the man of pills arrived she told him all about the case. The doctor picked up the patient’s new hat, tried it on and got a sniff. He said the hat was picked before it was ripe. The doctor and the wife held a postmortem examination of the hat, and found the slice of Limberger. “Few and short were the prayers they said.” They woke the patient, and, to prepare his mind for the revelation that was about to be made, the doctor asked him if his worldly affairs were in a satisfactory condition. He gasped and said they were. The doctor asked him if he had made his will. He said he had not, but that he wanted a lawyer sent for at once. The doctor asked him if he felt as though he was prepared to shuffle off. The man said he had always tried to lead a different life, and had tried to be done by the same as he would do it himself, but that he might have made a misdeal some way, and he would like to have a minister sent for to take an account of stock. Then the doctor brought to the bedside the hat, opened up the sweat-leather, and showed the dying man what it was that smelled so, and told him he was as well as any man in the city.
The patient pinched himself to see if he was alive, and jumped out of bed and called for his revolver, and the doctor couldn’t keep up with him on the way down town. The last we saw of the odoriferous citizen he was trying to bribe the bar-tender to tell him which one of those pelicans it was that put that slice of cheese in his hat-lining.
A woman of Bay City, Michigan, disguised herself as a man and clerked in a store for a year, and then applied for membership in the Knights of Pythias and was initiated. During the work of the third degree her sex was discovered. It seems that in the third degree they have an India rubber rat and a celluloid snake, which run by clockwork inside, and which were very natural indeed. The idea is to let them run at the candidate for initiation to see if he will flinch. When the snake ran at the girl she kept her nerve all right, but when the rat tried to run up her trousers leg she grabbed her imaginary skirts in both hands and jumped onto a refrigerator that was standing near, (which is used in the work of the fourth degree) and screamed bloody murder. The girl is a member of the order, however, and there is no help for it. This affair may open the eyes of members of secret societies and cause them to investigate. One lodge here, we understand, takes precaution against the admission of women by examining carefully the feet of applicants. If the feet are cold enough to freeze ice cream the candidate is black-balled.
There is one thing we want to set our face against and try and break up, and that is the habit of young and middle aged persons going fishing on Sunday, when going on the Summer excursions to the country. The devil, or some other inventor, has originated a walking-stick that looks as innocent as a Sunday school teacher, but within it is a roaring lion, in the shape of a fish-pole. We have watched young fellows, and know their tricks. Sunday morning they say to their parents that they have agreed to go over on the West Side and attend early mass with a companion, just to hear the exquisite music, and, by the way, they may not be home to dinner. And they go from that home, with their new cane, looking as pious as though they were passing the collection plate. When they get around the corner they whoop it up for the depot, and shortly they are steaming out into the country. They have a lot of angleworms in an envelope in their vest pockets, and a restaurant colored man, who has been seen the night before, meets them at the depot and hands them a basket of sandwiches with a bottle sticking out.
Arriving at the summer resort, they go to the bank of the lake and take a boat ride, and when well out in the lake they begin to unbosom the cane. Taking a plug out of the end of it, they pull out a dingus and three joints of fish-pole come out, and they tie a line on the end, put an angle worm on the hook, and catch fish. That is the kind of “mass” they are attending.
At night the train comes back to town, and the sunburnt young men, with their noses peeled, hand a basket to the waiting colored man, which smells of fish, and they go home and tell their parents they went out to Forest Home Cemetery in the afternoon, and the sun was awful hot. The good mother knows she smells fish on her son’s clothes, but she thinks it is some new kind of perfumery, and she is silent.
An honest up-and-up fish-pole is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, if the fishing is good, but one of these deceptive, three carde monte, political fish-poles, that shoves in and appears to be a cane, is incendiary, and ought to be suppressed. There ought to be a law passed to suppress a fish-pole that passes in polite society for a cane, and in such a moment as ye think not is pulled out to catch fish. There is nothing square about it, and the invention of that blasted stem winding fish-pole is doing more to ruin this country than all the political parties can overcome. If there was a law to compel the owners of those wailking-sticks to put a sign on their canes, “This is a fish-pole,” there would be less canes taken on these Sunday excursions in summer.
Look not upon the walking-stick when it is hollow, and pulls out, for at last it giveth thee away, young fellow.
The Sun is in receipt of an invitation to attend the opening of a new hotel in an Iowa city, but it will be impossible to attend. We remember one Iowa hotel which we visited in 1869, when the Wisconsin editors stopped there on the way back from Omaha,—the time when a couple of bed bugs took Uncle David Atwood up on the roof and were going to throw him off, and they would have done it, only a party of cockroaches took his part and killed the bed bugs.
Sam Ryan will remember how there was a crop of new potatoes growing on the billiard room floor in the dirt, that were all blossomed out; and Charley Seymour can tell how he had to argue for an hour to convince the colored cook that the peculiar smell of the scrambled eggs was owing to some of them being rotten. There were four waiters to a hundred guests, and it was a sight long to be remembered to see Mrs. Seymour and Mrs. Atwood carry their broiled chicken back to the kitchen and pick the feathers off, while good Uncle McBride, of Sparta, got into an altercation over his fried fish because the fish had not been scaled; where it was said the only thing that was not sour was the vinegar, and where the only thing that was not too small was the bill, and where every room smelled like a morgue, and the towels in the rooms had not taken a bath since 1827.
At this hotel the proprietor would take a guest’s napkin to wipe his nose, and the barefooted, waiter girl would slip up on the rare-done fried egg spilled on the dining-room floor, and wipe the yolk off her dress on a guest’s linen coat tail. That is all we want of a hotel in that place.
Not many months ago there was a meeting of ministers in Wisconsin, and after the holy work in which they were engaged had been done up to the satisfaction of all, a citizen of the place where the conference was held invited a large number of them to a collation at his house. After supper a dozen of them adjourned to a room up stairs to have a quiet smoke, as ministers sometimes do, when they got to talking about old times, when they attended school and were boys together, and The Sun man, who was present, disguised as a preacher, came to the conclusion that ministers were rather human than otherwise when they are young.
One two-hundred pound delegate with a cigar between his fingers, blew the smoke out of the mouth which but a few hours before was uttering a supplication to the Most High to make us all good, punched a thin elder in the ribs with his thumb and said: “Jim, do you remember the time we carried the cow and calf up into the recitation room?” For a moment “Jim” was inclined to stand on his dignity, and he looked pained, until they all began to laugh, when he looked around to see if any worldly person was present, and satisfying himself that we were all truly good, he said: “You bet your life I remember it. I have got a scar on my shin now where that d—blessed cow hooked me,” and he began to roll up his trousers leg to show the scar. They told him they would take his word, and he pulled down his pants and said:
“Well, you see I was detailed to attend to the calf, and I carried the calf up stairs, assisted by Bill Smith—who is now preaching in Chicago; got a soft thing, five thousand a year, and a parsonage furnished, and keeps a team, and if one of those horses is not a trotter then I am no judge of horse flesh or of Bill, and if he don’t put on an old driving coat and go out on the road occasionally and catch on for a race with some worldly-minded man, then I am another. You hear me—well, I never knew a calf was so heavy, and had so many hind legs. Kick! Why, bless your old alabaster heart, that calf walked all over me, from Genesis to Revelations. And say, we didn’t get much of a breeze the next morning, did we, when we had to clean out the recitation room?”
A solemn-looking minister, with red hair, who was present, and whose eyes twinkled some through the smoke, said to another:
“Charlie, you remember you were completely gone on the professor’s niece who was visiting there from Poughkeepsie? What become of her?”
Charlie put his feet on the table, struck a match on his trousers, and said:
“Well, I wasn’t gone on her, as you say, but just liked her. Not too well, you know, but just well enough. She had a color of hair that I could never stand—just the color of yours, Hank—and when she got to going with a printer I kind of let up, and they were married. I understand he is editing a paper somewhere in Illinois, and getting rich. It was better for her, as now she has a place to live, and does not have to board around like a country school ma’am, as she would if she had married me.” A dark-haired man, with a coat buttoned clear to the neck, and a countenance like a funeral sermon, with no more expression than a wooden decoy duck, who was smoking a briar-wood pipe that he had picked up on a what-not that belonged to the host, knocked the ashes out in a spittoon, and said:
“Boys, do you remember the time we stole that three-seated wagon and went out across the marsh to Kingsley’s farm, after watermelons?”
Four of them said they remembered it well enough, and Jim said all he asked was to live long enough to get even with Bill Smith, the Chicago preacher, for suggesting to him to steal a bee-hive on the trip. “Why,” said he, “before I had got twenty feet with that hive, every bee in it had stung me a dozen times. And do you remember how we played it on the professor, and made him believe that I had the chicken-pox? O, gentlemen, a glorious immortality awaits you beyond the grave for lying me out of that scrape.”
The fat man hitched around uneasy in his chair and said they all seemed to have forgotten the principal event of that excursion, and that was how he tried to lift a bull dog over the fence by the teeth, which had become entangled in a certain portion of his wardrobe that should not be mentioned, and how he left a sample of his trousers in the possession of the dog, and how the farmer came to the college the next day with his eyes blacked, and a piece of trousers cloth done up in a paper, and wanted the professor to try and match it with the pants of some of the divinity students, and how he had to put on a pair of nankeen pants and hide his cassimeres in the boat house until the watermelon scrape blew over and he could get them mended.
Then the small brunette minister asked if he was not entitled to some credit for blacking the farmer’s eyes. Says he: “When he got over the fence and grabbed the near horse by the bits, and said he would have the whole gang in jail, I felt as though something had got to be done, and I jumped out on the other side of the wagon and walked around to him and put up my hands and gave him ‘one, two, three’ about the nose, with my blessing, and he let go that horse and took his dog back to the house.”
“Well,” says the red haired minister, “those melons were green, anyway, but it was the fun of stealing them that we were after.”
At this point the door opened and the host entered, and, pushing the smoke away with his hands, he said: “Well, gentlemen, are you enjoying yourselves?”
They threw their cigar stubs in the spittoon, the solemn man laid the brier wood pipe where he got it, and the fat man said:
“Brother Drake, we have been discussing the evil effects of indulging in the weed, and we have come to the conclusion that while tobacco is always bound to be used to a certain extent by the thoughtless, it is a duty the clergy owe to the community to discountenance its use on all possible occasions. Perhaps we had better adjourn to the parlor, and after asking divine guidance take our departure.”
After they had gone the host looked at his cigar box, and came to the conclusion that somebody must have carried off some cigars in his pocket.
A young fellow about nineteen, who is going with his first girl, and who lives on the West Side, has got the symptoms awfully. He just thinks of nothing else but his girl, and when he can be with her,—which is seldom, on account of the old folks,—he is there, and when he cannot be there, he is there or thereabouts, in his mind. He had been trying for three months to think of something to give his girl for a Christmas present, but he couldn’t make up his mind what article would cause her to think of him the most, so the day before Christmas he unbosomed himself to his employer, and asked his advice as to the proper article to give. The old man is baldheaded and mean. “You want to give her something that will be a constant reminder of you?” “Yes,” he said, “that was what was the matter.” “Does she have any corns?” asked the old wretch. The boy said he had never inquired into the condition of her feet, and wanted to know what corns had to do with it. The old man said that if she had corns, a pair of shoes about two sizes too small would cause her mind to dwell on him a good deal. The boy said shoes wouldn’t do. The old man hesitated a moment, scratched his head, and finally said:
“I have it! I suppose, sir, when you are alone with her, in the parlor, you put your arm around her waist; do you not, sir?”
The young man blushed, and said that was about the size of it.
“I presume she enjoys that part of the discourse, eh?”
The boy said that, as near as he could tell, by the way she acted, she was not opposed to being held up.
“Then, sir, I can tell you of an article that will make her think of you in that position all the time, from the moment she gets up in the morning till she retires.”
“Is there any attachment to it that will make her dream of me all night?” asked the boy.
“No, sir! Don’t be a hog,” said the bad man.
“Then what is it?”
The old man said one word, “Corset!”
The young man was delighted, and he went to a store to buy a nice corset.
“What size do you want?” asked the girl who waited on him.
That was a puzzler. He didn’t know they came in sizes. He was about to tell her to pick out the smallest size, when he happened to think of something.
“Take a tape measure and measure my arm; that will just fit.”
The girl looked wise, as though she had been there herself, found that it was a twenty-two inch corset the boy wanted, and he went home and wrote a note and sent it with the corset to the girl. He didn’t hear anything about it till the following Sunday, when he called on her. She received him coldly, and handed him the corset, saying, with a tear in her eye, that she had never expected to be insulted by him. He told her he had no intention of insulting her; that he could think of nothing that would cause her to think of the gentle pressure of his arm around her waist as a corset, but if she felt insulted he would take his leave, give the corset to some poor family, and go drown himself.
He was about to go away, when she burst out crying, and sobbed out the following words, wet with salt brine:
“It was v-v-v-very thoughtful of y-y-you, but I couldn’t feel it! It is f-f-four sizes too b-b-big! Why didn’t you get number eighteen? You are silent, you cannot answer, enough!”
They instinctively found their way to the sofa; mutual explanations followed; he measured her waist again; saw where he had made a mistake by his fingers lapping over on the first turn, and he vowed, by the beard of the prophet, he would change it for another, if she had not worn it and got it soiled. They are better now.
The Presbyterian synod at Erie, Pa., has turned a lawyer named Donaldson out of the church. The charge against him was not that he was a lawyer, as might be supposed, but that he had danced a quadrille. It does not seem to us as though there could be anything more harmless than dancing a cold-blooded quadrille. It is a simple walk around, and is not even exercise. Of course a man can, if he chooses, get in extra steps enough to keep his feet warm, but we contend that no quadrille, where they only touch hands, go down in the middle, and alamand left, can work upon a man’s religion enough to cause him to backslide.
If it was this new “waltz quadrille” that Donaldson indulged in, where there is intermittent hugging, and where the head gets to whirling, and a man has to hang on to his partner quite considerable, to keep from falling all over himself, and where she looks up fondly into his eyes and as though telling him to squeeze just as hard as it seemed necessary for his convenience, we should not wonder so much at the synod hauling him over the coals for cruelty to himself, but a cold quadrille has no deviltry in it.
We presume the wicked and perverse Mr. Donaldson will join another church that allows dancing judiciously administered, and may yet get to heaven ahead of the Presbyterian synod, and he may be elected to some high position there, as Arthur was here, after the synod of Hayes and Sherman had bounced him from the Custom House for dancing the great spoils walk around.
It is often the case here, and we do not know why it may not be in heaven, that the ones that are turned over and shook up, and the dust knocked out of them, and their metaphorical coat tail filled with boots, find that the whirligig of time has placed them above the parties who smote them, and we can readily believe that if Donaldson gets a first-class position of power, above the skies, he will make it decidedly warm for his persecutors when they come up to the desk with their grip sacks and register and ask for a room with a bath, and a fire escape. He will be apt to look up at the key rack and tell them everything is full, but they can find pretty fair accommodations at the other house, down at the Hot Springs, on the European plan, by Mr. Devil, formerly of Chicago.
There is a movement on foot to provide for lady attendants at the Police Station, so that when a woman is arrested, and it is necessary to search her for concealed weapons, or money or incendiary documents, that duty can be performed by a person of the same sex as the prisoner. The Sun is anxious that this new departure be adopted at once, as it is very annoying for us to be called away from our business, every day or two, to aid the police—that is, of course, we are willing to be of assistance to anybody, but there are times—anybody will admit that.
The need of lady members of the police force was never illustrated any better than when the police arrested the women for passing counterfeit silver quarters, about six months ago. There was an oldish woman and a young woman, and when they were taken to the police office the reporters of the city papers were there, as usual, ready to lend a helping hand. The searching of the old lady was done in short order, by Detective Smith, who went about it in a business-like manner; but when it was time to search the young woman, and he looked into her soft, liquid eyes, and saw the emotion that she could not suppress, his heart failed him, and he sat down to write out his resignation. Tears came into his large, fawn-like eyes, and he called upon Mr. Northrop, correspondent of the Chicago Times, to assist him. Mr. Northrop had been inured to hardships, and knew much about the manner in which female persons conceal money, and being one of the “Willing Workers,” he told Mr. Smith that he would help him.
The lady was told to remove her outward apparel, and to look steadily out of the window. She got behind a curtain-cord, and, in less time than it takes to write it, she threw her dress to the men, from her concealment behind the curtain-cord. The two men found a pocket in the dress, but to save them they couldn’t find the pocket hole.. The dress was turned the other side out forty times, to find the pocket hole.
Mr. Yenowine, of the News, who was present, said if they would hang the dress up on a hook he could find the pocket hole in the dark. He said there couldn’t anybody fool him on finding a pocket hole in a dress.
The dress was hung in a closet, and Mr. Yenowine proceeded on the arctic exploring expedition, while Mr. Northrop and the detective were examining a corset that the young woman had thrown on the floor, looking for bogus quarters. The News man, with all his knowledge of dress pockets, came out unsuccessful, and said he must have lost the combination, and accused the janitor of giving it away. Mr. Smith suggested that they cut the pocket off, but the district attorney, Mr. McKenney, said it would be clearly against the law. He said that would be burglary. In the meantime the young woman had kept on shucking herself, until Mr. Neiman, of the Sentinel, became faint and went out on the steps to get a breath of fresh air, from which position he looked through the window.
While the gentlemen were wondering if there were no rules of etiquette published that would make it easy and polite to search a woman for bogus two shilling pieces, the woman threw an article of female wearing apparel out on the floor for them to examine that fairly frightened them.
“Merciful heavens,” said Mr. Yenowine, who was at that time a young and innocent person, unused to the ways of the world, “she has exploded.”
Northrop poked it with his cane and said, “No, those always come off,” and he put on an air of superiority over the boys which was annoying.
“What, always?” said Mr. Neiman, who had his fingers up before his face, and was blushing as though he had intermittent fever.
“Well, most always,” said Mr. Northrop, who had taken it up, and was examining it with a critic’s eye.
“I presume those are a bustle, are they not?” said innocent Yenowine.
“Go aff, till the divil wid yer bushtle,” said Mr. Smith, “I know bether. Gintlemen, I am a plain shpoken man, and for me age have seen many thrying situations, but if this was me lasht day on earth I should shwear that was no more a bushtle than I am. Bushtles are never twins.”
Mr. Harger, of the Wisconsin, who had hidden behind the stove pipe, was asked by Mr. Smith what he thought they were, whether it might not be an infernal machine. Mr. Harger said he had never known one to explode. He said when he was reporting legislative proceedings the members drew those with their stationery, from the superintendent of public property, but he had no idea what they did with them.
At this point Mr. Aldrich, who had just come in, was asked to examine it and tell what it was. Mr. Aldrich took it up like a thing of life, and gazed upon it as though trying to recall something to his mind. Placing his finger, the one with the diamond ring on, to his corrugated forehead, he paused for a moment and finally gave his opinion that they were life preservers. He said that in Boston all women wore them, especially when they were out on excursions, or picnics. “See,” says he, as he hefted it, and made an indentation in it, which resumed its natural position as soon as he took his finger off, “it is filled with wind. Now, in case of accident, that would float a woman on top of water until she could be rescued. Let us demonstrate this matter by putting it on Mr. Boyington, of the Sentinel, and taking him to the morgue and placing him in the bath tub and he proceeded to fasten the life preserver around the calf of Mr. Boyington’s leg.
“Say, where are you putting it?” says Mr. B., as he struggled to keep from laughing right out. “You fellows don’t know as much as Thompson’s colt. If I know my own heart, and I think I do, a life preserver goes on under the vest.”
Mr. Aldrich said he didn’t pretend to know any more than anybody else. All he knew about these things personally was that he had seen them hanging up in stores, for sale, and one day when he was shopping he asked one of the lady clerks what it was hanging up there, and she said it was a life preserver, and asked him if he wanted one, and he told her no, he was only inquiring for a friend of his, who rode a bicycle. He didn’t know but it might be something that went with a bicycle.
All the time this discussion was going on we sat by the safe in the police office. We never were so sorry for a lot of innocent young men, never. The girl looked at us and winked, as much as to say, “Old man, why do you not come to the rescue of these young hoodlums, who don’t know what they are talking about, and take the conceit out of them,” and so we explained to them, in the best language we could command, the uses and abuses of the garment they were examining, and showed them how it went on, and how the invention of it filled a want long felt by our American people. They all admitted that we were right, and that it was a counterfeit well calculated to deceive, and we believe now that the woman was convicted of counterfeiting mainly on the testimony of the reporters. However that may be, we desire to impress upon the authorities the importance of employing ladies at the police office to examine women who are arrested for crime. The police cannot always depend on having a newspaper man around.
An item is going the rounds of the papers, to illustrate how large the sun is, and how hot it is, which asserts that if an icicle a million miles long, and a hundred thousand miles through, should be thrust into one of the burning cavities of the sun, it would be melted in a hundredth part of a second, and that it would not cause as much “sissing” as a drop of water on a hot griddle.
By this comparison we can realize that the sun is a big thing, and we can form some idea of what kind of a place it would be to pass the summer months. In contemplating the terrible heat of the sun, we are led to wonder why those whose duty it is to preach a hell hereafter, have not argued that the sun is the place where sinners will go to when they die.
It is not our desire to inaugurate any reform in religious matters, but we realize what a discouraging thing it must be for preachers to preach hell and have nothing to show for it. As the business is now done, they are compelled to draw upon their imagination for a place of endless punishment, and a great many people, who would be frightened out of their boots if the minister could show them hell as he sees it, look upon his talk as a sort of dime novel romance.
They want something tangible on which they can base their belief, and while the ministers do everything in their power to encourage sinners by picturing to them the lake of fire and brimstone, where boat-riding is out of the question unless you paddle around in a cauldron kettle, it seems as though their labors would be lightened if they could point to the sun, on a hot day in August, and say to the wicked man that unless he gets down on his knees and says his now I lay me, and repents, and is sprinkled, and chips in pretty flush towards the running expenses of the church, and stands his assessments like a thoroughbred, that he will wake up some morning, and find himself in the sun, blistered from Genesis to Revelations, thirsty as a harvest hand and not a brewery within a million miles, begging for a zinc ulster to cool his parched hind legs.
Such an argument, with an illustration right on the blackboard of the sky, in plain sight, would strike terror to the sinner, and he would want to come into the fold too quick. What the religion of this country wants, to make it take the cake, is a hell that the wayfaring man, though a democrat or a greenbacker, can see with the naked eye. The way it is now, the sinner, if he wants to find out anything about the hereafter, has to take it second handed, from some minister or deacon who has not seen it himself, but has got his idea of it from some other fellow who maybe dreamed it out.
Some deacon tells a sinner all about the orthodox hell, and the sinner does not know whether to believe him or not. The deacon may have lied to the sinner some time in a horse trade, or in selling him goods, and beat him, and how does he know but the same deacon is playing a brace game on him on the hereafter, or playing him for a sardine.
Now, if the people who advance these ideas of heaven or hell, had a license to point to the moon, the nice, cool moon, as heaven, which would be plausible, to say the least, and say that it was heaven, and prove it, and could prove that the sun was the other place, which looks reasonable, according to all we have heard about ‘tother place, the moon would be so full there would not be standing room, and they would have to turn republicans away, while the sun would be playing to empty benches, and there would only be a few editors there who got in on passes.
Of course, during a cold winter, when the thermometer was forty or fifty degrees below zero, and everybody was blocked in, and coal was up to seventeen dollars a ton, the cause of religion would not prosper as much as it would in summer, because when you talked to a sinner about leading a different life or he would go to the sun, he would look at his coal pile and say that he didn’t care a continental how soon he got there, but these discouragements would not be any greater than some that the truly good people have to contend with now, and the average the year round would be largely in favor of going to the moon.
The moon is very popular now, even, and if it is properly advertised as a celestial paradise, where only good people could get their work in, and where the wicked could not enter on any terms, there would be a great desire to take the straight and narrow way to the moon, and the path to the wicked sun would be grown over with sand burs, and scorched with lava, and few would care to take passage by that route. Anyway, this thing is worth looking into.
There is one thing that there should be a law passed about, and that is, these glass fruit jars, with a top that screws on. It should be made a criminal offense, punishable with death or banishment to Chicago, for a person to manufacture a fruit jar, for preserving fruit, with a top that screws on. Those jars look nice when the fruit is put up in them, and the house-wife feels as though she was repaid for all her perspiration over a hot stove, as she looks at the glass jars of different berries, on the shelf in the cellar.
The trouble does not begin until she has company, and decides to tap a little of her choice fruit. After the supper is well under way, she sends for a jar, and tells the servant to unscrew the top, and pour the fruit into a dish. The girl brings it into the kitchen, and proceeds to unscrew the top. She works gently at first, then gets mad, wrenches at it, sprains her wrist, and begins to cry, with her nose on the underside of her apron, and skins her nose on the dried pancake batter that is hidden in the folds of the apron.
Then the little house-wife takes hold of the fruit can, smilingly, and says she will show the girl how to take off the top. She sits down on the wood-box, takes the glass jar between her knees, runs out her tongue, and twists. But the cover does not twist. The cover seems to feel as though it was placed there to keep guard over that fruit, and it is as immovable as the Egyptian pyramids. The little lady works until she is red in the face, and until her crimps all come down, and then she sets it down to wait for the old man to come home. He comes in tired, disgusted, and mad as a hornet, and when the case is laid before him, he goes out in the kitchen and pulls off his coat, and takes the jar.
He remarks that he is at a loss to know what women are made for, anyway. He says they are all right to sit around and do crochet work, but whenever strategy, brain, and muscle are required, then they can’t get along without a man. He tries to unscrew the cover, and his thumb slips off and knocks skin off the knuckle. He breathes a silent prayer and calls for the kerosene can, and pours a little of it into the crevice, and lets it soak, and then he tries again, and swears audibly.
Then he calls for a tack-hammer, and taps the cover gently on one side, the glass jar breaks, and the juice runs down his trousers leg, on the table and all around. Enough of the fruit is saved for supper, and the old man goes up the back stairs to tie his thumb up in a rag, and change his pants.
All come to the table smiling, as though nothing had happened, and the house-wife don’t allow any of the family to have any sauce for fear they will get broken glass into their stomachs, but the “company” is provided for generously, and all would be well only for a remark of a little boy who, when asked if he will have some more of the sauce, says he “don’t want no strawberries pickled in kerosene.” The smiling little hostess steals a smell of the sauce, while they are discussing politics, and believes she does smell kerosene, and she looks at the old man kind of spunky, when he glances at the rag on his thumb and asks if there is no liniment in the house. The preserving of fruit in glass jars is broken up in that house, and four dozen jars are down cellar to lay upon the lady’s mind till she gets a chance to send some of them to a charity picnic. The glass jar fruit can business is played out unless a scheme can be invented to get the top off.
The immense consumption of buttermilk as a drink, retailed over the bars of saloons, has caused temperance people to rejoice. It is said that over two thousand gallons a day are sold in Milwaukee. There is one thing about buttermilk, in its favor, and that is, it does not intoxicate, and it takes the place of liquor as a beverage. A man may drink a quart of buttermilk, and while he may feel like a calf that has been sucking, and want to stand in a fence corner and bleat, or kick up his heels and run around a pasture, he does not become intoxicated and throw a beer keg through a saloon window.
Another thing, buttermilk does not cause the nose to become red, and the consumer’s breath does not smell like the next day after a sangerfest. The complexion of the nose of a buttermilk drinker assues a pale hue which is enchanting, and while his breath may smell like a baby that has nursed too much and got sour, the smell does not debar his entrance to a temperance society.
The organization of the “Cosmos” Club, of Chicago women, for the purpose of discussing “æsthetic” business, ancient poetry and pottery ware, calls to mind the attempt to organize such a club here in Milwaukee. Our people here are too utterly full of business and domestic affairs to take to the “æsthetic” very generally, and the lady from Boston who tried to get up a class in the new wrinkle went away considerably disgusted. She called about fifty of our splendidest ladies together at the residence of one of them, and told them what the ladies of Eastern cities were doing in the study of higher arts. She elaborated considerably on the study of Norwegian literature, ceramics, bric-a-brac and so forth, and asked for an expression of the ladies present. One lady said she was willing to go into anything that would tend to elevate the tone of society, and make women better qualified for helpmates to their husbands, but she didn’t want any Norwegian literature in hers. She said her husband ran for an office once and the whole gang of Norwegian voters went back on him and he was everlastingly scooped.
The Boston lady held up her hands in holy horror, and was going to explain to the speaker how she was off her base, when another lady got up and said she wanted to take the full course or nothing. She wanted to be posted in ancient literature and ceramics. She had studied ceramics some already, and had got a good deal of information. She had found that in case of whooping cough, goose oil rubbed on the throat and lungs was just as good as it was in case of croup, and she felt that with a good teacher any lady would learn much that would be of incalculable value, and she, for one, was going for the whole hog or none.
The Boston lady saved herself from fainting by fanning herself vigorously, and was about to show the two ladies that they had a wrong idea of æsthetics, when a lady from the West Side, who had just been married, got up and said she felt that we were all too ignorant of æsthetics, and they should take every opportunity to become better informed. She said when she first went to keeping house she couldn’t tell baking powder that had alum in it from the pure article, and she had nearly ruined her husband’s stomach before she learned anything. And speaking of bric-a-brac, she felt that every lady should learn to economize, by occasionally serving a picked up dinner, of bric-a-brac that would otherwise be wasted.
The Boston lady found she could not speak understandingly, so she left-her chair and went around to the different groups of ladies, who were talking earnestly, to get them interested. The first group of four that she broke in on were talking of the best way to renovate seal-skin cloaks that had been moth eaten. One lady said that she had tried all the æsthetic insect powder that was advertised in the papers, and the moths would fairly get fat on it, and beg for more; but last spring she found out that moths were afraid of whisky.
Her husband worked in a wholesale whisky store, and his garments became saturated with the perfume, and you couldn’t hire a moth to go near him. So she got an empty whisky barrel and put in all her furs, and the moths never touched a thing. But she said the moths had a high old time all summer. They would get together in squads and go to the barrel and smell at the bung-hole, and lock arms and sashay around the room, staggering just as though there was an election, and about eleven o’clock they would walk up to a red spot in the carpet and take a lunch, just like men going to a saloon.
She said there was one drawback to the whisky barrel, as it gave her away when she first went out in company after taking her clothes out of the barrel. She wore her seal-skin cloak to the Good Templars’ Lodge, the first night after taking it out, and they were going to turn her out of the Lodge on the ground that she had violated her obligation.
“You may talk about your Scandinavian literature,” said she, turning to the Boston lady, “but when it comes to keeping moths out of furs, an empty whisky barrel knocks the everlasting socks off of anything I ever tried.”
The Boston lady put on her æsthetic hat, and was about to take her leave, satisfied that she had struck the wrong crowd, when a sweet little woman, with pouting lips, called her aside. The Boston lady thought she had found at last one congenial soul, and she said:
“What is it, my dear?”
The little lady hesitated a moment, and with a tear in her eye she asked:
“Madam, can you tell me what is good for worms? Fido has acted for a week as though he was ill, and——”
That settled it. The Boston lady went away, and has never been heard of since.
“A young fellow and his girl went out sleighing yesterday, and the lad returned with a frozen ear. There is nothing very startling in the simple fact of a frozen ear, but the idea is that it was the ear next to the girl that he was foolish enough to let freeze.”
A girl that will go out sleigh-riding with a young man and allow his ears to freeze, is no gentleman (“lady”??), and ought to be arrested. Why, here in Milwaukee, on the coldest days, we have seen a young man out riding with a girl, and his ears were so hot they would fairly “sis,” and there was not a man driving on the avenue but would have changed places with the young man, and allowed his ears to cool. Girls cannot sit too close during this weather. The climate is rigorous.
Reports from the stationers show that there is no demand at all for the revised edition of the Bible, and had it not been for the newspapers publishing the whole affair there would have been very few persons that took the trouble to even glance at it, and it is believed that not one reader of the daily papers in a hundred read any of the Bible, and not one in ten thousand read all of it which was published. Who originated this scheme of revising the Bible we do not know, but whoever it was made a miscue. There was no one suffering particularly for a revision of the Bible. It was good enough as it was. No literary sharp of the present day has got any license to change anything in the Bible.
Why, the cheeky ghouls have actually altered over the Lord’s Prayer, cut it biased, and thrown the parts about giving us this day our daily bread into the rag bag. How do they know that the Lord said more than he wanted to in that prayer? He wanted that daily bread in there, or He never would have put it in. The only wonder is that those revisers did not insert strawberry shortcake and ice cream in place of daily bread. Some of these ministers who are writing speeches for the Lord think they are smart. They have fooled with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount until He couldn’t tell it if He was to meet it in the Chicago Times.
This thing has gone on long enough, and we want a stop put to it. We have kept still about the piracy that has been going on in the Bible because people who are better than we are have seemed to endorse it, but now we are sick of it, and if there is going to be an annual clerical picnic to cut gashes in the Bible and stick new precepts and examples on where they will do the most hurt, we shall lock up our old Bible where the critters can’t get at it, and throw the first book agent down stairs head first that tries to shove off on to us one of these new fangled, go-as-you-please Bibles, with all the modern improvements, and hell left out.
Now, where was there a popular demand to have hell left out of the Bible? Were there any petitions from the people sent up to this self-constituted legislature of pinchbeck ministers, praying to have hell abolished, and “hades” inserted? Not a petition. And what is this hades? Where is it? Nobody knows. They have taken away our orthodox hell, that has stood by us since we first went to Sunday school, and given us a hades. Half of us wouldn’t know a hades if we should see it dead in the road, but they couldn’t fool us any on hell.
No, these revisers have done more harm to religion than they could have done by preaching all their lives. They have opened the ball, and now, every time a second-class dominie gets out of a job, he is going to cut and slash into the Bible. He will think up lots of things that will sound better than some things that are in there, and by and by we shall have our Bibles as we do our almanacs, annually, with weather probabilities on the margins.
This is all wrong. Infidels will laugh at us, and say our old Bible is worn out, and out of style, and tell us to have our measure taken for a new one every fall and spring, as we do for our clothes. If this revision is a good thing, why won’t another one be better? The woods are full of preachers who think they could go to work and improve the Bible, and if we don’t shut down on this thing, they will take a hand in it. If a man hauls down the American flag, we shoot him on the spot; and now we suggest that if any man mutilates the Bible, we run an umbrella into him and spread it.
The old Bible just filled the bill, and we hope every new one that is printed will lay on the shelves and get sour. This revision of the Bible is believed to be the work of an incendiary. It is a scheme got up by British book publishers to make money out of pious people. It is on the same principle that speculators get up a corner on pork or wheat. They got revision, and printed Bibles enough to supply the world, and would not let out one for love or money. None were genuine unless the name of this British firm was blown in the bottle.
Millions of Bibles were shipped to this country by the firm that was “long” on Bibles, and they were to be thrown on the market suddenly, after being locked up and guarded by the police until the people were made hungry for Bibles.
The edition was advertised like a circus, and doors were to be opened at six o’clock in the morning. American publishers who wanted to publish the Bible, too, got compositors ready to rush out a cheap Bible within twelve hours, and the Britons, who were running the corner on the Word of God, called these American publishers pirates. The idea of men being pirates for printing a Bible, which should be as free as salvation. The newspapers that had the Bibles telegraphed to them from the east, were also pirates.
O, the revision is a three-card monte speculation; that is all it is.
Geo. W. Peck, of the Sun, recently delivered an address before the Wisconsin State Dairyman’s Association. The following is an extract from the document:
Fellow creamationists: In calling upon me, on this occasion, to enlighten you upon a subject that is dear to the hearts of all Americans, you have got the right man in the right place. It makes me proud to come to my old home and unfold truths that have been folded since I can remember. It may be said by scoffers, and it has been said to-day, in my presence, that I didn’t know enough to even milk a cow. I deny the allegation; show me the allegator. If any gentleman present has got a cow here with him, and I can borrow a clothes-wringer, I will show you whether I can milk a cow or not. Or, if there is a cheese mine here handy, I will demonstrate that I can—runnet.
The manufacture of cheese and butter has been among the earliest industries. Away back in the history of the world, we find Adam and Eve conveying their milk from the garden of Eden, in a one-horse wagon to the cool spring cheese factory, to be weighed in the balance. Whatever may be said of Adam and Eve to their discredit in the marketing of the products of their orchard, it has never been charged that they stopped at the pump and put water in their milk cans. Doubtless you all remember how Cain killed his brother Abel because Abel would not let him do the churning. We can picture Cain and Abel driving mooly cows up to the house from the pasture in the southeast corner of the garden, and Adam standing at the bars with a tin pail and a three-legged stool, smoking a meerschaum pipe and singing “Hold the fort for I am coming through the rye,” while Eve sat on the verandah altering over her last year’s polonaise, and winking at the devil who stood behind the milk house singing, “I want to be an angel.” After he got through milking he came up and saw Eve blushing, and he said, “Madame, cheese it,” and she chose it.
But to come down to the present day, we find that cheese has become one of the most important branches of manufacture. It is next in importance to the silver interest. And, fellow cheese mongers, you are doing yourselves great injustice that you do not petition congress to pass a bill to remonetize cheese. There is more cheese raised in this country than there is silver, and it is more valuable. Suppose you had not eaten a mouthful in thirty days, and you should have placed on the table before you ten dollars stamped out of silver bullion on one plate and nine dollars stamped out of cheese bullion on another plate. Which would you take first? Though the face value of the nine cheese dollars would be ten per cent, below the face value of ten silver dollars, you would take the cheese. You could use it to better advantage in your business. Hence I say cheese is more valuable than silver, and it should be made legal tender for all debts, public and private, except pew rent. I may be in advance of other eminent financiers, who have studied the currency question, but I want to see the time come, and I trust the day is not far distant, when 412 1/2 grains of cheese will be equal to a dollar in codfish, and when the merry jingle of slices of cheese shall be heard in every pocket.
Then every cheese factory can make its own coin, money will be plenty, everybody will be happy, and there never will be any more war. It may be asked how this currency can be redeemed? I would have an incontrovertible bond, made of Limburger cheese, which is stronger and more durable. When this is done you can tell the rich from the poor man by the smell of his money. Now-a-days many of us do not even get a smell of money, but in the good days which are coming the gentle zephyr will waft to us the able-bodied Limburger, and we shall know that money is plenty.
The manufacture of cheese is a business that a poor man can engage in as well as a rich man. I say it, without fear of successful contradiction, and say it boldly, that a poor man with, say 200 cows, if he thoroughly understands his business, can market more cheese than a rich man who owns 300 oxen. This is susceptible of demonstration. If my boy showed a desire to become a statesman, I would say to him, “Young man, get married, buy a mooley cow, go to Sheboygan county, and start a cheese factory.”
Speaking of cows, did it ever occur to you, gentlemen, what a saving it would be to you if you should adopt mooley cows instead of horned cattle? It takes at least three tons of hay and a large quantity of ground feed annually to keep a pair of horns fat, and what earthly use are they? Statistics show that there are annually killed 45,000 grangers by cattle with horns. You pass laws to muzzle dogs, because one in ten thousand goes mad, and yet more people are killed by cattle horns than by dogs. What the country needs is more mooley cows.
Now that I am on the subject, it may be asked what is the best paying breed for the dairy. My opinion is divided between the south down and the cochin china. Some like one the best and some the other, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
There are many reforms that should be inaugurated in the manufacture of cheese. Why should cheese be made round? I am inclined to the belief that the making of cheese round is a superstition. Who had not rather buy a good square piece of cheese, than a wedge-shape chunk, all rind at one end, and as thin as a Congressman’s excuse for voting back pay at the other? Make your cheese square and the consumer will rise up and call you another.
Another reform that might be inaugurated would be to veneer the cheese with building paper or clapboards, instead of the time-honored piece of towel. I never saw cheese cut that I didn’t think that the cloth around it had seen service as a bandage on some other patient. But I may have been wrong. Another thing that does not seem to be right, is to see so many holes in cheese. It seems to me that solid cheese, one made by one of the old masters, with no holes in it—I do not accuse you of cheating, but don’t you feel a little ashamed when you see a cheese cut, and the holes are the biggest part of it? The little cells may be handy for the skipper, but the consumer feels the fraud in his innermost soul.
Among the improvements made in the manufacture of cheese I must not forget that of late years the cheese does not resemble the grindstone as much as it did years ago. The time has been when, if the farmer could not find his grindstone, all he had to do was to mortise a hole in the middle of a cheese, and turn it and grind his scythe. Before the invention of nitro-glycerine, it was a good day’s work to hew off cheese enough for a meal. Time has worked wonders in cheese.
Sometimes it seems as though the colored people ought to have a guardian appointed over them. Now, you take a colored concert troupe, and though they may have splendid voices, they do not know enough to take advantage of their opportunities. People go to hear them because they are colored people, and they want to hear old-fashioned negro melodies, and yet these mokes will tackle Italian opera and high toned music that they don’t know how to sing.
They will sing these fancy operas, and people will not pay any attention. Along toward the end of the programme they will sing some old nigger song, and the house fairly goes wild and calls them out half a dozen times. And yet they do not know enough to make up a programme of such music as they can sing, and such as the audience want.
They get too big, these colored people do, and can’t strike their level. People who have heard Kellogg, and Marie Roze, and Gerster, are sick when a black cat with a long red dress comes out and murders the same pieces the prima donnas have sung. We have seen a colored girl attempt a selection from some organ-grinder opera, and she would howl and screech, and catch her breath and come again, and wheel and fire vocal shrapnel, limber up her battery and take a new position, and unlimber and send volleys of soprano grape and cannister into the audience, and then she would catch on to the highest note she could reach and hang to it like a dog to a root, till you would think they would have to throw a pail of water on her to make her let go, and all the time she would be biting and shaking like a terrier with a rat, and finally give one kick at last at her red trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage looking as though she would have to be carried on a dustpan, and the people in the audience would look at each other in pity and never give her a cheer, when, if she had come out and patted her leg, and put one hand up to her ear, and sung, “Ise a Gwine to See Massa Jesus Early in de Mornin’,” they would have split the air wide open with cheers, and called her out five times.
The fact is, they haven’t got sense.
There was a hungry-looking, round-shouldered, sick-looking colored man in that same party, that was on the programme for a violin solo. When he came out the people looked at each other, as much as to say, “Now we will have some fun.” The moke struck an attitude as near Ole Bull as he could with his number eleven feet and his hollow chest, and played some diabolical selection from a foreign cat opera that would have been splendid if Wilhelmjor Ole Bull had played it, but the colored brother couldn’t get within a mile of the tune. He rasped his old violin for twenty minutes and tried to look grand, and closed his eyes and seemed to soar away to heaven,—and the audience wished to heaven he had,—and when he became exhausted and squeezed the last note oat, and the audience saw that he was in a profuse perspiration, they let him go and did not call him back. If he had come out and sat on the back of a chair and sawed off “The Devil’s Dream,” or “The Arkansaw Traveler,” that crowd would have cheered him till he thought he was a bigger man than Grant.
But he didn’t have any sense. If some one will send a marked copy of this paper to some of these colored concert troupes, and they will take the hint, and sing nigger songs, they will make a heap of money, where now they have to live on a free lunch route.
A good many may have wondered why we so suddenly quit speeding our horse on the avenue. For two or three days we couldn’t go down the avenue enough, and there is no person but will admit that our old pile driver trotted real spry. We did not get the idea that he was the fastest horse that ever was, but he seemed real soon. It takes a good deal of executive ability for a man who has a third-class horse to keep from going down the road with horses that are too fast. One must be a good judge, and when he finds a horse that he can beat, stick to him.
We got the thing down pretty fine, but one day a man drove along beside us, going up, who seemed bound to get into conversation. He was a red-faced man, with these side-bar whiskers, evidently a German. He was driving a sorrel horse to a long sled, with a box on behind the seat, a sort of delivery sleigh. He had a barrel in the sleigh, filled with intestines from a slaughter house, two baskets full of the same freight, a cow’s head, and two sheep heads. He was evidently owner of a sausage factory somewhere, and as he kept along beside us his company was somewhat annoying. Not that we were proud, but we feared the people on the avenue would think we were a silent partner in a sausage factory, and that we were talking business.
The man was real entertaining in his conversation, but the load he had was not congenial, and we were glad when the foot of the hill was reached, so we could turn around and go down, and get away from him. We turned and spit on our hands, and begun to pull up on the old horse, and he began to get his legs untangled and to go. We forgot about the sausage butcher, as we went down, the fresh air making every nerve get up and git.
Suddenly the nose of a sorrel horse began to work up by where we sat, and we looked around, and may we never live to make a million dollars if it wasn’t the red-faced sausage man, intestines, cow’s head, basket and all, and his old horse was coming for all that was out. We blush for our sex. It would look nice to get in the papers that we had been racing our blue-blooded thoroughbred against a sausage butcher, wouldn’t it? Our plan was formed in an instant. Great generals form plans suddenly, and we took out the whip and touched our horse on a raw spot, intending to go right away from the fertilizer.
The horse seemed to smell the load behind him, and to have his pride touched, for he snorted and let out another link. We don’t know as anyone would believe it, but the faster our beautiful and costly steed went, the faster that homely and cheap butcher horse climbed. People by the hundreds all along the line were watching the race. The baskets of sausage covets were slewing around from one side of his sled to the other, and we expected every moment one of them would flop over into our cutter.
Matters were becoming desperate, and we gave the horse one more cut and went the last block at a fearful rate, but the butcher was right beside us, so one mosquito bar would have covered us, and we came out neck and neck, the Dutchman a little ahead because his horse was unchecked, and the crowd yelled for the butcher. We turned to go up, when the butcher came up alongside just as a carriage of beautiful ladies were passing, and as they turned up their noses at his load, he said:
“Dot vas a nice race, ain’t it, Mister Beck?”
We could have killed him in cold blood. Not that we dislike to be beaten. We have always been beaten. It isn’t that. But we don’t want to trot horses with no delivery wagon. We are not calculated for associating, in the horse arena, with a load of slaughter house refuse. It is asking too much. We are willing to race with Deacon Van Schaick, or brother Antisdel, or Elder Hyde, or Elder Gordon, or any of those truly good men in whom there is no guile, and in whose cutters there is no foreign matter, but as long as reason maintains her throne we shall never go upon the track again with a butcher.
There should be a law passed making it a penal offence for a person with a delivery wagon to tackle onto a man who drives a thoroughbred. It is wrong, and will lead to trouble. We have not given up racing entirely, but hereafter we shall look the avenue over very close for butchers before we let out our four legged telescope. A butcher is just as good as anybody, understand us, but they must keep their distance. We don’t want to look into, the hind end of no cutter that is filled with slaughter house ornaments, and we won’t. It is not pride of birth, or anything of that kind, but such people ought to drive on Wells street, or have slower horses.
Lorillard, the New York tobacco man, had a poodle dog stolen, and has offered a reward of five hundred dollars for the arrest of the thief, and he informs a reporter that he will spend $10,000, if necessary, for the capture and conviction of the thief. [Applause.]
The applause marked in there will be from human skye terriers, who have forgotten that only a few weeks ago several hundred girls, who had been working in Lorillard’s factory, went on a strike because, as they allege, they were treated like dogs. We doubt if they were treated as well as this poodle was treated. We doubt, in case one of these poor, virtuous girls was kidnapped, if the great Lorillard would have offered as big a reward for the conviction of the human thief, as he has for the conviction of the person who has eloped with his poodle.
We hope that the aristocracy of this country will never get to valuing a dog higher than it does a human being. When it gets so that a rich person would not permit a poodle to do the work in a tobacco factory that a poor girl does to support a sick mother, hell had better be opened for summer boarders. When girls work ten hours a day stripping nasty tobacco, and find at the end of the week that the fines for speaking are larger than the wages, and the fines go for the conviction of thieves who steal the girls’ master’s dog, no one need come around here lecturing at a dollar a head and telling us there is no hell.
When a poor girl, who has gone creeping to her work at daylight, looks out of the window at noon to see her master’s carriage go by, in which there is a five hundred dollar dog with a hundred dollar blanket on, and a collar set with diamonds, lolling on satin cushions, and the girl is fined ten cents for looking out of the window, you don’t want to fool away any time trying to get us to go to a heaven where such heartless employers are expected.
It is seldom the Sun gets on its ear, but it can say with great fervency, “Damn a man that will work poor girls like slaves, and pay them next to nothing, and spend ten thousand dollars to catch a dog-thief!” If these sentiments are sinful, and for expressing them we are a candidate for fire and brimstone, it is all right, and the devil can stoke up and make up our bunk when he hears that we are on the through train.
It seems now—though we may change our mind the first day at the fire—as though we had rather be in hades with a hundred million people who have always done the square thing, than to be in any heaven that will pass a man in who has starved the poor and paid ten thousand dollars to catch a dog-thief. We could have a confounded sight better time, even if we had our ulster all burned off. It would be worth the price of admission to stand with our back to the fire, and as we began to smell woolen burning near the pistol pocket, to make up faces at the ten-thousand-dollar-dog millionaires that were putting on style at the other place.
Andrews’ Bazar says: “Gathered waists are very much worn.”
If the men would gather the waists carefully and not squeeze so like blazes, they would not be worn so much. Some men go to work gathering a waist just as they would go to work washing sheep, or raking and binding. They ought to gather as though it was eggs done up in a funnel-shaped brown paper at a grocery.
The Black River Falls Independent says: “If you have any old pants to give to the poor, take or send them to the Ladies’ Relief Society.”
Well, we have got plenty of them; but, bless you, we doubt if any member of the Ladies’ Relief Society could wear them. They don’t hook up.
It is announced by telegraph from Washington that Gen. Arthur will keep a cow at the White House during his term, to furnish milk for the family, rather than be obliged to depend upon a milk man who is in the habit of selling a mixed drink, though the customers, prefer to take it-straight. There is nothing that will do more to convince people of the true simplicity of a President than for him to keep a cow. No man who habitually associates with a cow, and stirs up a bran mash, and watches her plow her nose down to the bottom in search of a potato paring, can be wholly bad. If the President selects a good, honest cow we have no fears that he will be a tyrant in his administration of affairs. A man is very apt to absorb many of the characteristics and traits of the cow that he milks. If she is a good natured, honest, law abiding cow, that “hoists” at the word of command, stands firm and immovable while being milked, and “gives down” freely, so that the fingers are not cramped, and she does not switch her tail in the face of the milker, the man will be a good natured, generous, honest man, but if the cow is one of those communists, and has to be tied to the manger, and you have to hold one leg to keep her from kicking over the pail, and she tries to run a horn into you, and keeps stepping around, and her tail knocks your hat off and gets in your eyes, and your nerves are unstrung for fear she is thinking of some deviltry to play on you, the man whose duty it is to draw the milk from her udder will become harsh, suspicious, cruel, tricky, and mean; and he will grind the face of the poor.
The country will hope that Mr. Arthur, in selecting a cow, will use more judgment than in selecting a cabinet, and will bring his great mind to bear on the subject as though he appreciated the situation. We trust he will not buy a cow of a democrat. There may be good cows owned by democrats, but they are not for sale, and a democrat would sell him a kicking cow that was farrow, just to injure his administration. Let him go to some friend in his own party, some man who is interested in the success of his administration, and state his case, and if possible get a cow on trial.
This policy is wise from the fact that he could thus see if the cow was going to hold out as a good milker. Some cows give a good mess of milk when they first go to a new place, but in a week they let down and the first thing you know they dry up entirely. Mr. Arthur wants to look out for this. The country is full of bold, bad men, who would palm off a kicking cow, or one that was not a stayer, onto their best friends.
Another thing, we would advise Mr. Arthur not to use a milking stool with one leg, but to get one with three legs. It is undignified in any man to stretch out on a barn floor, with a one-legged milk stool kicking him in the pistol pocket, a pail of milk distributing itself over his person, and a frightened cow backed up in a stall threatening to hook his daylights out, and it would be more undignified in a President of the United States. Get a three-legged stool, by all means, or use an empty soap box to sit on.
If all this unsolicited but well meant advice is taken, the country will be in no danger from Arthur’s decision to keep a cow, and we shall hope to see him on some fine morning next summer, as the sun is tinging the eastern horizon with its ray as he slaps her on the rump with a piece of barrel stave, or we will accept an invitation to visit his barn and show him how to mix a bran mash that will wake to ecstacy the aforesaid cow, and cause her milk to flow like back pay from the treasury.
When it comes to cows we deserve a cabinet position.
The law-abiding people of this community were startled on Tuesday, and the greatest indignation prevailed at an editorial article in the Sentinel denouncing the practice of hugging in the public parks. The article went on to show that the placing of seats in the parks leads to hugging, and the editor denounced hugging in the most insane manner possible.
The Sun does not desire to enter politics, but when a great constitutional question like this comes up, it will be found on the side of the weak against the strong.
The Sentinel advises the removal of the seats from the park because hugging is done on them. Great heavens! has it come to this? Are the dearest rights of the American citizen to be abridged in this summary manner? Let us call the attention of that powerful paper to a clause in the Declaration of Independence, which asserts that “all men are created free and equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” When the framers of that great Declaration of Independence were at work on that clause, they must have had in view the pastime of hugging in the parks.
Hugging is certainly a “pursuit of happiness.” People do not hug for wages—that is, except on the stage. Nobody is obliged to hug. It is a sort of spontaneous combustion, as it were, of the feelings, and has to have proper conditions of the atmosphere to make it a success. Parties who object to hugging are old, usually, and have been satiated, and are like a lemon that has done duty in circus lemonade. If they had a job of hugging, they would want to hire a man to do it for them.
A man who objects to a little natural, soul-inspiring hugging on a back seat in a park, of an evening, with a fountain throwing water all over little cast-iron cupids, has probably got a soul, but he hasn’t got it with him. To the student of nature there is no sight more beautiful than to see a flock of young people take seats in the park, after the sun has gone to bed in the west, and the moon has pulled a fleecy cloud over her face for a veil, so as not to disturb the worshippers.
A couple, one a male and the other a female, will sit far apart on the cast-iron seat for a moment, when the young lady will try to fix her cloak over her shoulders, and she can’t fix it, and then the young man will help her, and when he has got it fixed he will go off and leave one arm around the small of her back. He will miss his arm, and wonder where he left it, and go back after it, and in the dark he will feel around with the other hand to find the hand he left, and suddenly the two hands will meet; they will express astonishment, and clasp each other, and be so glad that they will begin to squeeze, and the chances are that they will cut the girl in two, but they never do. Under such circumstances, a girl can exist on less atmosphere than she can when doing a washing.
There is just about so much hugging that has to be done, and the Sentinel should remember that very many people have not facilities at their homes for such soul-stirring work, and they are obliged to flee to the parks, or to the woods, where the beneficent city government has provided all of the modern improvements.
Hugging is as necessary to the youth of the land as medicine to the sick, and instead of old persons, whose days of kittenhood are over, throwing cold water upon the science of hugging, they should encourage it by all legitimate means.
When, in strolling through the parks, you run on to a case of sporadic hugging, instead of making a noise on the gravel walk, to cause the huggists to stop it, you should trace your steps noiselessly, get behind a tree, and see how long they can stand it without dying. Instead of removing the cast-iron seats from the parks, we should be in favor of furnishing reserved seats for old people, so they can sit and watch the hugging.
It doesn’t do any hurt to hug.
People think it is unhealthy, but nobody was ever known to catch cold while hugging. It is claimed by some that young people who stay out nights and hug, are not good for anything the next day. There is something to this, but if they didn’t get any hugging they wouldn’t be worth a cent any time. They would be all the time looking for it.
No, good Mr. Sentinel, on behalf of fifty thousand young people who have no organ to make known their wants, we ask you to stay your hand, and do not cause the seats to be removed from the parks. Remember how many there are who have yet to learn the noble art of hugging, and give them a chance.
The last legislature, having nothing else to do, passed a law providing for a change in the coat-of-arms of the State. There was no change, particularly, except to move the plows and shovels around a little, put on a few more bars of pig lead, put a new fashioned necktie on the sailor who holds the rope, the emblem of lynch law, tuck the miner’s breeches into his boots a little further, and amputate the tail of the badger. We do not care for the other changes, as they were only intended to give the engraver a job, but when an irresponsible legislature amputates the tail of the badger, the emblem of the democratic party that crawls into a hole and pulls the hole in after him, it touches us in our patriotism.
The badger, as nature made him, is a noble bird, and though he resembles a skunk too much to be very proud of, they had no right to cut off his tail and stick it up like a sore thumb. As it is now the new comer to our Garden of Eden will not know whether our emblem is a Scotch terrier smelling into the archives of the State for a rat, or a defalcation, or a sic semper Americanus scunch. We do not complain that the sailor with the Pinafore shirt on, on the new coat-of-arms, is made to resemble Senator Cameron, or that the miner looks like Senator Sawyer. These things are of minor importance, but the docking of that badger’s tail, and setting it up like a bob-tail horse, is an outrage upon every citizen of the State, and when the democrats get into power that tail shall be restored to its normal condition if it takes all the blood and treasure in the State, and this work of the republican incendiaries shall be undone. The idea of Wisconsin appearing among the galaxy of States with a bob-tailed badger is repugnant to all our finer feelings.
Great results are expected from an experiment recently tried by the American Missionary Society. Last fall they sent as missionary to the cannibal Islands a brother who had lost both arms and both legs in a railroad accident. He was provided with cork limbs, and his voice being, in good condition it was believed he could get in his work with the heathen as well as though he was a whole man. The idea was to allow the cannibals to kill him and eat him, believing that the heathen would see the error of their ways and swear off on human flesh.
A report has been received which is very encouraging. It seems that the cannibals killed the good missionary, and cut off his arms and legs for a sort of stew, or “boyaw,” thus falling directly into the trap set for them by the missionary society. The missionary stationed at the next town, who furnishes the society with the data, says it was the most laughable thing he ever witnessed, to see the heathen chew on those cork limbs. They boiled them all day and night, keeping up a sort of a go-as-you-please walk around, or fresh meat dance, and giving a sacred concert about like our national “Whoop it up, Liza Jane,” and when they stuck a fork into the boiling limbs, and found that the “meat” seemed water soaked, they set the table and sounded the loud timbrel for breakfast.
The surviving missionary says he shall never forget the look of pain on the face of a buck cannibal as he bit into the elbow joint of the late lamented and struck a brass hinge. He picked it out as an American would pick a buckshot out of a piece of venison, and laid it beside his plate in an abstracted manner, and began to chew on the cork elbow. Any person who has ever tried to draw a cork out of a beer bottle with his teeth can realize the feelings of these cannibals as they tried to draw sustenance from the remains of the cork man. They were saddened, and it is safe to say they are incensed against the missionary society.
Whether they will conclude that all Americans have become tough, and quit trying to masticate them, is not known, though that is the object sought to be attained by the society. One of the cannibals said he knew, when those legs and arms would not stay under water when they were boiling, and had to be loaded down with stones, that the meat wasn’t right, but his wife told him “some pork would bile so.”
The experiment is worth following up, and we suppose hereafter there will be a great demand for men with cork arms and legs to be sent as missionaries. After a few such experiences the cannibals may see the error of their ways and become Christians, and eat dog sausage and Limberg cheese.
Those who read the account of the trial of Rev. Carhart, at Oshkosh, are about as sick of true goodness as men can be. They open the ecclesiastical court by singing “A charge to keep I have,” and then Brother Haddock, after a prayer has been delivered, does not keep his charges, but fires them at the presiding elder. Good old tunes are sung previous to calling witnesses to testify to alleged three carde monte acts of a disciple of Christ. Sanctimonious looking men pray for divine guidance, and then try to prove that a dear brother has bilked another dear brother out of several hundred dollars on Texas lands, and that he tried to trade a wagon at double what it is worth to settle the matter.
They sing, “Take me just as I am,” and then try to prove that the one who made charges against the other is not altogether holy, because he is alleged to have confessed to passing the night in a room with a female church member, in silent devotion, when he swears it is a lie,—that he only laid on a lounge.
Prominent Methodists collect at the bull-fight in Oshkosh, take sides with one or the other, and lay their bottom prayer that their champion will come out on top, with not a stripe polluted nor a star erased:
One side sings, “Jesus caught me when a stranger,” and the other side smiles and winks and whispers that they are glad he was caught.
They sing, “Rock of ages, cleft for me,” and proceed to cleave the rock of each other’s character. They cast one eye heavenward in prayer, while with the other they watch the other side to see that they don’t steal the testimony.
Some one starts “Little drops of water,” and big drops of perspiration appear on truly good foreheads for fear proof will be adduced to show that money has been obtained under false pretenses.
And this goes by the name of religion!
There should be honor among ministers. Both of the principals in this suit should be bounced. If the charges are true, Carhart should emigrate. If they are not true, Haddock should emigrate.
Our readers have no doubt noticed in the papers that the Goodrich Transportation Company had secured a band from Waupun to make music on the boats of that line between Milwaukee and Chicago this summer. Well, there is trouble going on in consequence. Mr. Hurson, of the Goodrich line, entrusted the organization of the band to Mr. Nick Jarvis, of Waupun, a gentleman whose reputation as a scientific pounder of the bass drum has received encomiums from the crowned heads of Oshkosh and Hazen’s cheese factory.
Having such confidence in Mr. Jarvis, Mr. Hurson gave him a roving commission, with authority to secure the best talent in the known world. He organized the band, and then it occurred to Mr. Jarvis that the musicians had always been accustomed to playing on land, and they might be sick on the water, so he took measures to accustom them to a sea-faring life before leaving Waupun. He got them to practicing in a building, and hired some boys to throw water up on the side of the house, to see if they would be seasick. The band fellows would have stood the sea first-rate, only the villains who had been hired to throw the water used a lot of dirty stuff they found back of a hotel, which smelled powerful.
A number of the band members felt the swash of the waves against the bulwarks of the house, and smelled what they supposed to be salt sea air, and they leaned out of the windows and wanted to throw up their situations, but a German in the party had a lemon and some cheese, which was given around to taste and smell, and they came out of it all right.
Mr. Jarvis’ next idea, to accustom the prairie sailors to the vasty deep, was to take them out on the mill pond at Waupun in a skiff. They got out in the middle of the pond, and were playing a selection from the opera of “Solid Muldoon,” when a boy who had slipped into the boat with a fish-pole, got a bite from a bull-head, which caused the vessel to roll, and the utmost confusion prevailed. Ordering the snare drum player to “cut away the main bob-stay, and belay the cornet,” Mr. Jarvis took the bass drum between his teeth and jumped overboard, followed by the band, and they waded ashore.
On Monday last the band arrived in Milwaukee and reported on board the Goodrich steamer, in the river, ready for business. They were told to go as they pleased until evening, when they would be expected to play before the boat started, and also on the trip to Chicago. The men sat around on deck all the afternoon, and smelled of the river. It smelled different from any salt water they ever snuffed, and they wanted to go home.
At seven o’clock the band played a few tunes as the boat lay in the river, and finally she let go her ropes and steamed down toward the lake, the band whooping it up to the “Blue Danube.” As the boat struck blue water, and her bow raised out about sixteen feet and began to jump, the cornet player stopped to pour water out of his horn, and lean against a post. He was as pale as death, and the tuba player stopped to see what ailed the cornet player, and to lean over the railing to see a man down stairs. The baritone had eaten something that did not agree with him, and he stopped playing and laid down in a life boat, the alto became cold around the extremities and quit playing and went to the smoke stack to warm himself, the b-flat began to perspire and quit playing and fanned himself with the cymbals, and all of the horn blowers were e-flat and b-flat on the deck in less than two minutes.
The captain noticed that there was some discrepancy in the music and came on deck to see about it. Wading through the brass horns he came up to where the band had been, and found Nick Jarvis beating blazes out of the bass drum and Harve Hill carving the Blue Danube out of the snare drum, and that was all the music there was. The captain asked Jarvis what kind of a riot that was, and he told him it was the best they could do under the circumstances.
Restoratives were applied to the members, and they braced up enough to start in on “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,” but they couldn’t play it through, owing to dyspepsia. The captain got them into the cabin to play for the young folks to dance, but the only thing they could play without getting sick was “Home Again, from a Foreign Shore,” and the bass drum had to do it all. The horn blowers were out looking at the starlight, leaning over the railing, as the stars were reflected in the water.
At Racine it took some time to load, owing to rough water, and in the midst of it all a pale man, with a snare drum on his arm, rolled up against the captain. It was Harve Hill. He held his hand over his mouth and in a voice choked with emotion and fried potatoes he said:
“Captain, I am a poor man, but if you will land this boat and save me, I will give you nine dollars.”
The captain decided to dispense with the music the rest of the night, and let the band get on its sea legs.
At Chicago, the next morning, Jarvis, who had got a little sick, too, tried to induce the captain to allow the band to walk back to Milwaukee on the shore, beside the boat. He said they could play any tune that ever was played, on land, and the passengers could hear it just as well, if the boat kept alongside of the band. The captain wouldn’t let them off, and they have been kept on the boat all the week, so that now they are old sailors, and can play all right. But it was pretty tough the first night. Waupun is organizing a reception for the band when it comes home.
A fearful tale comes to us from Columbus. A party of prominent citizens of that place took a trip to the Dells of Wisconsin one day last week. It was composed of ladies and gentlemen of both political parties, and it was hoped that nothing would occur to mar the pleasure of the excursion.
When the party visited the Dells, Mr. Chapin, a lawyer of Democratic proclivities, went out upon a rock overhanging a precipice, or words to that effect, and he became so absorbed in the beauty of the scene that he did not notice a Republican lady who left the throng and waltzed softly up behind him. She had blood in her eye and gum in her mouth, and she grasped the lawyer, who is a weak man, by the arms, and hissed in his ear:
“Hurrah for Garfield, or I will plunge you headlong into the yawning gulf below!”
It was a trying moment. Chapin rather enjoyed being held by a woman, but not in such a position that, if she let go her hold to spit on her hands, he would go a hundred feet down, and become as flat as the Greenback party, and have to be carried home in a basket.
In a second he thought over all the sins of his past life, which was pretty quick work, as anybody will admit who knows the man. He thought of how he would be looked down upon by Gabe Bouck, and all the fellows, if it once got out that he had been frightened into going back on his party.
He made up his mind that he would die before he would hurrah for Garfield, but when the merciless woman pushed him towards the edge of the rock, and said, “Last call! Yell, or down you go!” he opened his mouth and yelled so they heard it in Kilbourn City:
“Hurrah for Garfield! Now lemme go!”
Though endowed with more than ordinary eloquence, no remarks that he had ever made before brought the applause that this did. Everybody yelled, and the woman smiled as pleasantly as though she had not crushed the young life out of her victim, and left him a bleeding sacrifice on the altar of his country, but when she had realized what she had done her heart smote her, and she felt bad.
Chapin will never be himself again. From that moment his proud spirit was broken, and all during the picnic he seemed to have lost his cud. He leaned listlessly against a tree, pale as death, and fanned himself with a skimmer. When the party had spread the lunch on the ground and gathered around, sitting on the ant-hills, he sat down with them mechanically, but his appetite was gone, and when that is gone there is not enough of him left for a quorum.
Friends rallied around him, passed the pickles, and drove the antmires out of a sandwich, and handed it to him on a piece of shingle, but he either passed or turned it down. He said he couldn’t take a trick. Later on, when the lemonade was brought on, the flies were skimmed off of some of it, and a little colored water was put in to make it look inviting, but his eyes were sot. He said they couldn’t fool him. After what had occurred, he didn’t feel as though any Democrat was safe. He expected to be poisoned on account of his politics, and all he asked was to live to get home.
Nothing was left undone to rally him, and cause him to forget the fearful scene through which he had passed. Only once did he partially come to himself, and show an interest in worldly affairs, and that was when it was found that he had sat down on some raspberry jam with his white pants on. When told of it, he smiled a ghastly smile, and said they were all welcome to his share of the jam.
They tried to interest him in conversation by drawing war maps with three-tined forks on the jam, but he never showed that he knew what they were about until Mr. Moak, of Watertown, took a brush, made of cauliflower preserved in mustard, and shaded the lines of the war map on Mr. Cha-pin’s trousers, which Mr. Butterfield had drawn in the jam. Then his artistic eye took in the incongruity of the colors, and he gasped for breath, and said:
“Moak, that is played out. People will notice it.”
But he relapsed again into semi-unconsciousness, and never spoke again, not a great deal, till he got home.
He has ordered that there be no more borrowing of sugar and drawings of tea back and forth between his house and that of the lady who broke his heart, and he has announced that he will go without saurkraut all winter rather than borrow a machine for cutting cabbage of a woman that would destroy the political prospects of a man who had never done a wrong in his life.
He has written to the chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee to suspend judgment on his case, until he can explain how it happened that a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat hurrahed for Garfield.
Last week a train load of insane persons were removed from the Oshkosh Asylum to the Madison Asylum. As the train was standing on the sidetrack at Watertown Junction it created considerable curiosity. People who have ever passed Watertown Junction have noticed the fine old gentleman who comes into the car with a large square basket, peddling popcorn. He is one of the most innocent and confiding men in the world. He is honest, and he believes that everybody else is honest.
He came up to the depot with his basket, and seeing the train he asked Pierce, the landlord there, what train it was. Pierce, who is a most diabolical person, told the old gentleman that it was a load of members of the legislature and female lobbyists going to Madison. With that beautiful confidence which the pop corn man has in all persons, he believed the story, and went in the car to sell pop corn.
Stopping at the first seat, where a middle-aged lady was sitting alone, the pop corn man passed out his basket and said, “fresh pop corn.” The lady took her foot down off the stove, looked at the man a moment with eyes glaring and wild, and said, “It is—no, it cannot be—and yet it is me long lost Duke of Oshkosh,” and she grabbed the old man by the necktie with one hand and pulled him down into the seat, and began to mow away corn into her mouth. The pop corn man blushed, looked at the rest of the passengers to see if they were looking, and said, as he replaced the necktie knot from under his left ear and pushed his collar down, “Madame, you are mistaken. I have never been a duke in Oshkosh. I live here at the Junction.” The woman looked at him as though she doubted his statement, but let him go.
He proceeded to the next seat, when a serious looking man rose up and bowed; the pop corn man also bowed and smiled as though he might have met him before. Taking a paper of pop corn and putting it in his coat tail pocket, the serious man said, “I was honestly elected President of the United States in 1876, but was counted out by the vilest conspiracy that ever was concocted on the earth, and I believe you are one of the conspirators,” and he spit on his hands and looked the pop corn man in the eye. The pop corn man said he never took any active part in politics, and had nothing to do with that Hayes business at all. Then the serious man sat down and began eating the pop corn, while two women on the other side of the car helped themselves to the corn in the basket.
The pop corn man held out his hand for the money, when a man two seats back came forward and shook hands with him, saying: “They told me you would not come, but you have come, Daniel, and now we will fight it out. I will take this razor, and you can arm yourself at your leisure.” The man reached into an inside, pocket of his coat, evidently for a razor, when the pop corn man started for the door, his eyes sticking out two inches. Every person he passed took a paper of pop corn, one man grabbed his coat and tore one tail off, another took his basket away and as he rushed out on the platform the basket was thrown at his head, and a female voice said, “I will be ready when the carriage calls at 8.”
As the old gentleman struck the platform and began to arrange his toilet he met Fitzgerald, the conductor, who asked him what was the matter. He said Pierce told him that crowd was going to the legislature, “but,” says he, as he picked some pieces of paper collar out of the back of his neck, “if those people are not delegates to a democratic convention, then I have been peddling pop corn on this road ten years for nothing, and don’t know my business.” Fitz told him they were patients going to the Insane Asylum.
The old man thought it over a moment, and then he picked up a coupling pin and went looking for Pierce. He says he will kill him. Pierce has not been out of the house since. This Pierce is the same man that lent us a runaway horse once.
Years ago we swore on a stack of red chips that we would never own another dog. Six promising pups that had been presented to us, blooded setters and pointers, had gone the way of all dog flesh, with the distemper and dog buttons, and by falling in the cistern, and we had been bereaved via dog misfortunes as often as John R. Bennett, of Janesville, has been bereaved on the nomination for attorney general. We could not look a pup in the face but it would get sick, and so we concluded never again to own a dog.
The vow has been religiously kept since. Men have promised us thousands of pups, but we have never taken them. One conductor has promised us at least seventy-five pups, but he has always failed to get us to take one. Dog lovers have set up nights to devise a way to induce us to accept a dog. We held out firmly until last week. One day we met Pierce, the Watertown Junction hotel man, and he told us he had a greyhound pup that was the finest bread dog—we think he said bread dog, though it might have been a sausage dog he said—anyway he told us it was blooded, and that when it grew up to be a man—that is, figuratively speaking—when it grew up to be a dog full size, it would be the handsomest canine in the Northwest.
We kicked on it, entirely, at first, but when he told us hundreds of men who had seen the pup had offered him thousands of dollars for it, but that he had rather give it to a friend than sell it to a stranger; we weakened, and told him to send it in.
Well—(excuse us while we go into a corner and mutter a silent remark)—it came in on the train Monday, and was taken to the barn. It is the confoundedest looking dog that a white man ever set eyes on. It is about the color of putty, and about seven feet long, though it is only six months old. The tail is longer than a whip lash, and when you speak sassy to that dog, the tail will begin to curl around under him, amongst his legs, double around over his neck and back over where the tail originally was hitched to the dog, and then there is tail enough left for four ordinary dogs.
It is the longest tail we have ever seen in one number. If that tail was cut up into ordinary tails, such as common dogs wear, there would be enough for all the dogs in the Seventh ward, with enough left for a white wire clothes line. When he lays down his tail curls up like a coil of telephone wire, and if you take hold of it and wring you can hear the dog at the central office. If that dog is as long in proportion, when he gets his growth, and his tail grows as much as his body does, the dog will reach from here to the Soldier’s home.
His head is about as big as a graham gem, and runs down to a point not bigger than a cambric needle, while his ears are about as big as a thumb to a glove, and they hang down as though the dog didn’t want to hear anything. How a head of that kind can contain brains enough to cause a dog to know enough to go in when it rains is a mystery. But he seems to be intelligent.
If a man comes along on the sidewalk, the dog will follow him off, follow him until he meets another man, and then he follows him till he meets another, and so on until he has followed the entire population. He is not an aristocratic dog, but will follow one person just as soon as another, and to see him going along the street, with his tail coiled up, apparently oblivious to every human sentiment, it is touching.
His legs are about the size of pipe stems, and his feet are as big as a base ball base. He wanders around, following a boy, then a middle aged man, then a little girl, then an old man, and finally, about meal time, the last person he follows seems to go by the barn and the dog wanders in and looks for a buffalo robe or a harness tug to chew. It does not cost anything to keep him, as he has only eaten one trotting harness and one fox skin robe since Monday, though it may not be right to judge of his appetite, as he may be a little off his feed.
Pierce said he would be a nice dog to run with a horse, or under a carriage. Why, bless you, he won’t go within twenty feet of a horse, and a horse would run away to look at him; besides, he gets right under a carriage wheel, and when the wheel runs over him he complains, and sings Pinafore.
What under the sun that dog is ever going to be good for is more than we know. He is too lean and bony for sausage. A piece of that dog as big as your finger in a sausage would ruin a butcher. It would be a dead give away. He looks as though he might point game, if the game was brought to his attention, but he would be just as liable to point a cow. He might do to stuff and place in a front yard to frighten burglars. If a burglar wouldn’t be frightened at that dog nothing would scare him.
Anyway, now we have got him, we will bring him up, though it seems as though he would resemble a truss bridge or a refrigerator car, as much as a dog, when he gets his growth. For fear he will follow off a wagon track we tie a knot in his tail. Parties who have never seen a very long dog can call at the barn about meal time and see him.
In response to a request from W. T. Vankirk, George W. Peck presented the Rock County Agricultural Society with a sewing machine, to be given to the “boss combination girl” of Rock County. With the machine he sent the following letter, which explains his meaning of a “combination girl,” etc.:
Milwaukee, June 7, 1881.
W. T. Vankirk—Dear Sir: Your letter, in reference to my giving some kind of a premium to somebody, at your County Fair, is received, and I have been thinking it over. I have brought my massive intellect to bear upon the subject, with the following result:
I ship you to-day, by express, a sewing machine, complete, with cover, drop leaf, hemmer, tucker, feller, drawers, and everything that a girl wants, except corsets and tall stockings. Now, I want you to give that to the best “combination girl” in Rock County, with the compliments of the Sun.
What I mean by a “combination,” is one that in the opinion of your Committee has all the modern improvements, and a few of the old-fashioned faults, such as health, etc. She must be good-looking, that is, not too handsome, but just handsome enough. You don’t want to give this machine to any female statue, or parlor ornament, who don’t know how to play a tune on it, or who is as cold as a refrigerator car, and has no heart concealed about her person. Our girl, that is, our “Fair Girl,” that takes this machine, must be “the boss.” She must be jolly and good-natured, such a girl as would make the young man that married her think that Rock County was the next door to heaven, anyway. She must be so healthy that nature’s roses will discount any preparation ever made by man, and so well-formed that nothing artificial is needed to—well, Van, you know what I mean.
You want to pick out a thoroughbred, that is, all wool, a yard wide—that is, understand me, I don’t want the girl to be a yard wide, but just right. Your Committee don’t want to get “mashed” on some ethereal creature whose belt is not big enough for a dog collar. This premium girl wants to be able to do a day’s work, if necessary, and one there is no danger of breaking in two if her intended should hug her.
After your Committee have got their eyes on a few girls that they think will fill the bill, then they want to find out what kind of girls they are around their home. Find if they honor their fathers and their mothers, and are helpful, and care as much for the happiness of those around them as they do for their own. If you find one who is handsome as Venus—I don’t know Venus, but I have heard that she takes the cake—I say, if you find one that is perfect in everything, but shirks her duties at home, and plays, “I Want to Be an Angel,” on the piano, while her mother is mending her stockings, or ironing her “picnic skirts,” then let her go ahead and be an angel as quick as she wants to, but don’t give her the machine.. You catch the idea?
Find a girl who has the elements of a noble woman; one whose heart is so large that she has to wear a little larger corset than some, but one who will make her home happy, and who is a friend to all; one who would walk further to do a good deed, and relieve suffering, than she would to patronize an ice cream saloon; one who would keep her mouth shut a month before she would say an unkind word, or cause a pang to another. Let your Committee settle on such a girl, and she is as welcome to that machine as possible.
Now, Van, you ought to have a Committee appointed at once, and no one should know who the Committee is. They should keep their eyes out from now till the time of the Fair, and they should compare notes once in a while. You have got some splendid judges of girls there in Janesville, but you better appoint married men. They are usually more unbiased. They should not let any girl know that she is suspected of being the premium girl, until the judgment is rendered, so no one will be embarrassed by feeling that she is competing tor a prize.
Now, Boss, I leave the constitution and the girls in your hands; and if this premium is the means of creating any additional interest in your Fair, and making people feel good natured and jolly, I shall be amply repaid.
Your friend,
Geo. W. Peck.
One of the members of the Humane Society, who lives in an aristocratic ward, had been annoyed at hearing sounds from a stable near his residence, which indicated that a boy who had charge of a horse was in the habit of pounding the animal vigorously every morning, while cleaning off the dirt. It seemed to the humane man that the boy must use a barrel stave or fence board to curry off the horse, and the way the animal danced around the barn was terrible.
It occurred every morning, and the humane man made up his mind that it was his duty to put a stop to it. He went to the barn one morning, just as the cotillion commenced. Looking through a knot hole he saw the horse tied so his head was away up to the top of the barn, so he could not use his teeth to defend himself. The boy stood with a curry comb in one hand and a piece of plank in the other, and he warmed the horse with both, and the animal kicked for all that was out.
The humane man thought this was the worst case of cruelty to animals that ever was, and he rapped for admission. The boy, covered with perspiration, horse tail, stable refuse and indignation, opened the door, and the humane man proceeded to read him a lecture about cruelty to dumb animals, called him a fiend in human form, and told him that kindness was what was necessary, instead of a club.
The boy couldn’t get in a word edgeways for a while, but when the man had exhausted his talk the boy told him that kindness might work on ordinary horses, but this horse was the meanest animal in the world. He would bite and kick without any provocation, and the present owner couldn’t sell him or give him away. He said that the only way he could be curried was to tie him up at both ends, and the only way he could be harnessed was to toss the harness on him with a pitch fork.
The horse, with his head tied up so high that he could not use it, looked down at the humane man with one eye filled with emotion—the other eye had been knocked out years ago—and seemed to be thanking the kind-hearted citizen for interfering in the matinee and causing hostilities to be suspended. The humane man was touched by the intelligent look of the horse, and insisted that the animal be untied and allowed its freedom. The boy said he didn’t dare untie him, for he would kick the side of the barn out, but the man insisted that he should release the horse, and went up to his head to do so, when the boy went through the manure hole in the side of the barn.
What happened when the humane citizen untied the halter will perhaps never be definitely known, but no sooner had the boy struck the ground through the hole, than there was a sound of revelry in the barn, there came a yell through the crevices, there seemed to be a company of cavalry drilling on the barn floor, there was a sound as of cloth tearing, and then it appeared as though something was climbing up the inside of the barn, and after which the hind heels of the horse could be heard playing the snare drum on the manger. The boy roused the neighbors and they armed themselves and entered the barn. They found the horse in the stall, with its head where its tail should be, with its mouth full of pantaloons cloth, and kicking away as though its heart would break.
And the humane man, where, O, where was he? Ask of the winds that far around with fragments of hat and coat tail strewed the barn floor.
“Shoot the horse.” said a faint voice from the upper part of the barn, and every eye was turned in that direction. The humane man was up there, clinging to a cross piece. He had evidently gone up the ladder which led to the hay loft, a little ahead of the horse, and as he clung to the cross piece, his coat tail gone, and the vital part of his pantaloons and some skin gone to that bourne from whence no pantaloons seat returns, his bald head covered with dust and cobwebs, he was a picture of meekness.
The crowd got the horse into another stall, head first, and put bars across, and the humane man came down from his perch. Seizing a barn shovel, and spitting on his hands, he asked his friends to wait and watch him curry off that horse just a minute for luck. He said he only wanted to live just long enough to maul every rib out of the animal, and if he was forgiven for interfering in somebody’s else’s business this time he would try and lead a different life in the future.
They put a horse blanket around his wounds and led him home, and he has given the boy five dollars to pound the horse an hour every morning for the next thirty days. You can’t make that man believe that a horse has any intelligence.
Newspaper reports of the proceedings of the Sunday School Association encamped on Lake Monona, at Madison, give about as many particulars of big catches of fish as of sinners. The delegates divide their time catching sinners on spoon-hooks and bringing pickerel to repentance. Some of the good men hurry up their prayers, and while the “Amen” is leaving their lips they snatch a fish-pole in one hand and a baking-powder box full of angle worms in the other, and light out for the Beautiful Beyond, where the rock bass turn up sideways, and the wicked cease from troubling.
Discussions on how to bring up children in the way they should go are broken into by a deacon with his nose peeled coming up the bank with a string of perch in one hand, a broken fish-pole in the other, and a pair of dropsical pantaloons dripping dirty water into his shoes.
It is said to be a beautiful sight to see a truly good man offering up supplications from under a wide-brimmed fishing hat, and as he talks of the worm that never, or hardly ever dies, red angle worms that have dug out of the piece of paper in which they were rolled up are crawling out of his vest pocket.
The good brothers compare notes of good places to do missionary work, where sinners are so thick you can knock them down with a club, and then they get boats and row to some place on the lake where a local liar has told them the fish are just sitting around on their haunches waiting for some one to throw in a hook.
This mixing religion with fishing for black bass and pickerel is a good thing for religion, and not a bad thing for the fish. Let these Christian statesmen get “mashed” on the sport of catching fish, and they will have more charity for the poor man who, after working hard twelve hours a day for six days, goes out on a lake Sunday and soaks a worm in the water and appeases the appetite of a few of God’s hungry pike, and gets dinner for himself in the bargain. While arguing that it is wrong to fish on Sunday, they will be brought right close to the fish, and can see better than before, that if a poor man is rowing a boat across a lake on Sunday, and his hook hangs over the stern, with a piece of liver on, and a fish that nature has made hungry tries to steal his line and pole and liver, it is a duty he owes to society to take that fish by the gills, put it in the boat and reason with it, and try to show it that in leaving its devotions on a Sunday and snapping at a poor man’s only hook, it was setting a bad example.
These Sunday school people will have a nice time, and do a great amount of good, if the fish continue to bite, and they can go home with their hearts full of the grace of God, their stomachs full of fish, their teeth full of bones; and if they fall out of the boats, and their suspenders hold out, they may catch a basin full of eels in the basement of their pantaloons.
But we trust they will not try to compete with the local sports in telling fish stories. That would break up a whole Sunday school system.
A doctor at Ashland is also a justice of the peace, and when he is called to visit a house he don’t know whether he is to physic or to marry. Several times he has been, called out in the night, to the country, and he supposed some one must be awful sick, and he took a cart load of medicines, only to find somebody wanted marrying. He has been fooled so much that when he is called out now he carries a pill-bag and a copy of the statutes, and tells them to take their choice.
He was called to one house and found a girl who seemed feverish. She was sitting up in a chair, dressed nicely, but he saw at once that the fatal flush was on her cheek, and her eyes looked peculiar. He felt of her pulse, and it was beating at the rate of two hundred a minute. He asked her to run out her tongue, and she run out eight or nine inches of the lower end of it. It was covered with a black coating, and he shook his head and looked sad. She had never been married any before, and supposed that it was necessary for a justice who was going to marry a couple to know all about their physical condition, so she kept quiet and answered questions.
She did not tell him that she had been eating huckleberry pie, so he laid the coating on her tongue to some disease that was undermining her constitution. He put his ear on her chest and listened to the beating of her heart, and shook his head again.
He asked her if she had been exposed to any contagious disease. She didn’t know what a contagious disease was, but on the hypothesis that he had reference to sparking, she blushed and said she had, but only two evenings, because John had only just got back from the woods where he had been chopping, and she had to sit up with him.
The doctor got out his pill-bags and made some quinine powders, and gave her some medicine in two tumblers, to be taken alternately, and told her to soak her feet and go to bed, and put a hot mustard poultice on her chest, and some onions around her neck.
She was mad, and flared right up, and said she wasn’t very well posted, and lived in the country, but if she knew her own heart she would not play such a trick as that on a new husband.
The doctor got mad, and asked her if she thought he didn’t understand his business; and he was about to go and let her die, when the bridegroom came in and told him to go ahead with the marrying. The doc said that altered the case. He said next time he came he should know what to bring, and then she blushed, and told him he was an old fool anyway, but he pronounced them man and wife, and said the prescription would be five dollars, the same as though there had been somebody sick.
But the doc had cheek. Just as he was leaving he asked the bridegroom if he didn’t want to ride up to Ashland with him, it was only eighteen miles, and the ride would be lonesome, but the bride said not if the court knew herself, and the bridegroom said now he was there he guessed he would stay. He said he didn’t care much about going to Ashland anyway.
There has been a great change in livery horses within the last twenty years. Years ago, if a young fellow wanted to take his girl out riding, and expected to enjoy himself, he had to hire an old horse, the worst in the livery stable, that would drive itself, or he never could get his arm around his girl to save him. If he took a decent looking team, to to put on style, he had to hang on to the lines with both hands, and if he even took his eyes off the team to look at the suffering girl beside him, with his mouth, the chances were that the team would jump over a ditch, or run away, at the concussion. Riding out with girls was shorn of much of its pleasure in those days.
We knew a young man that was going to put one arm around his girl if he did not lay up a cent, and it cost him over three hundred dollars. The team ran away, the buggy was wrecked, one horse was killed, the girl had her hind leg broken, and the girl’s father kicked the young man all over the orchard, and broke the mainspring of his watch.
It got so that the livery rig a young man drove was an index to his thoughts. If he had a stylish team that was right up on the bit, and full of vinegar, and he braced himself and pulled for all that was out, and the girl sat back in the corner of the buggy, looking as though she should faint away if a horse got his tail over a line, then people said that couple was all right, and there was no danger that they would be on familiar terms.
But if they started out with a slow old horse that looked as though all he wanted was to be left alone, however innocent the party might look, people knew just as well as though they had seen it, that when they got out on the road, or when night came on, that fellow’s arm would steal around her waist, and she would snug up to him, and—Oh, pshaw, you have heard it before.
Well, late years the livery men have “got onto the racket,” as they say at the church sociables. They have found that horses that know their business are in demand, and so horses are trained for this purpose They are trained on purpose for out door sparking. It is not an uncommon thing to see a young fellow drive up to the house where his girl lives with a team that is just tearing things. They prance, and champ the bit, and the young man seems to pull on them as though his liver was coming out. The horses will hardly stand still long enough for the girl to get in, and then they start off and seem to split the air wide open, and the neighbors say, “Them children will get all smashed up one of these days.”
The girl’s mother and father see the team start, and their minds experience a relief as they reflect that “as long as John drives that frisky team there can’t be no hugging a going on.” The girl’s older sister sighs and says, “That’s so,” and goes to her room and laughs right out loud.
It would be instructive to the scientists to watch that team for a few miles. The horses fairly foam, before they get out of town, but striking the country road, the fiery steeds come down to a walk, and they mope along as though they had always worked on a hearse. The shady woods are reached, and the carriage scarcely moves, and the horses seem to be walking in their sleep. The lines are loose on the dash board, and the left arm of the driver is around the pretty girl, and they are talking low. It is not necessary to talk loud, as they are so near each other that the faintest whisper can be heard.
But a change comes over them. A carriage appears in front, coming towards them. It may be some one that knows them. The young man picks up the lines, and the horses are in the air, and as they pass the other carriage it almost seems as though the team is running away, and the girl that was in sweet repose a moment before acts as though she wanted to get out. After passing the intruder the walk and conversation are continued.
If you meet the party on the Whitefish Bay road at 10 o’clock at night, the horses are walking as quietly as oxen, and they never wake up until coming into town, and then he pulls up the team and drives through town like a cyclone, and when he drives up to the house the old man is on the steps, and he thinks John must be awful tired trying to hold that team. And he is.
It is thought by some that horses have no intelligence, but a team that knows enough to take in a sporadic case of buggy sparking has got sense. These teams come high, but the boys have to have them.
During the investigation of Chief Kennedy one witness testified to something that ought to make it hot for the chief. When men stoop to do the things that Mr. Chapin testified to, an outraged public sentiment has got to step in. Mr. Chapin testified—and he is a man whose word is as good as our note—he said he met Kennedy in a street car, and his breath smelled of limburg cheese. That is enough. Carry his remains out.
Any man who will appear in a public place, among folks, with his breath smelling of limburg cheese, has got his opinion of us. It is simply damnable. We can see how a man who likes limburg cheese is liable, though he may have sworn off, to return to the mustard cup, and after the first taste, fill his skin full of cheese, arguing that one may as well die for an old sheep as a lamb.
It is a well known fact, agreed to by all scientists, that a single mouthful’ will tarnish an otherwise virtuous breath as much as a whole cheese. One mouthful of cheese leads on to another, and we are prepared to believe that if the chief smelled of cheese at all, he was full of it.
Men cannot be too careful of cheese. If a man feels that he is going to commit the dastardly act of eating limburg cheese, he has time to go out to a glue factory, or a slaughter house, or the house of correction, or some other place whose offense is rank.
The desire to eat cheese does not come upon a man suddenly, like the desire to take a drink, or stand off a creditor, and he is not taken possession of by the demon of appetite and pulled to the nearest saloon by a forty horse power devil, as is the man who has the jim jams.
The cheese does its work more quietly. It whispers to him about 11 o’clock a. m., and says there is nothing like cheese. He stands it off, and again in the afternoon the cheese takes possession of him and leads him on step by step, by green fields, and yet he does not fall. But about 9 o’clock p. m. the air seems full of cheese, and he smells it wherever he goes, and finally, after resisting for ten hours, he goes and orders a cheese sandwich.
Now, when the feeling first comes on, and he shuts his eyes and imagines he sees limburg cheese, if the victim would go and buy a slice and go away out in the country, by the fertilizer factory, he could eat his cheese and no one but the workmen in the fertilizer factory could complain. That is what ought to be done when a man is addicted to cheese.
But this chief of police has stood up in the face of public opinion, eaten limburg cheese with brazen effrontery that would do credit to a lawyer, and has gone into a public conveyance, breathing pestilence and cheese. There is no law on our statute books that is adequate to punish a man who will thus trample upon the usages of society.
However, the conviction of Kennedy of eating limburg cheese will be the means of acquitting him of the other charge, that of conversing with a lewd woman. We doubt if there is a lewd woman, though she be terribly lewd, who would allow a man to come within several blocks of her who had been eating that deceased cheese.
If we were in Kennedy’s place we would admit the cheese, and then bring ten thousand women to swear whether they would remain in the same room with a man who had been eating that cheese. There are men who do eat cheese, bad men, the wicked classes, who go into the presence of females, but that is one thing which causes so many suicides among the poor fallen girls. When we hear that another naughty but nice looking girl has been filling her skin full of paregoric and is standing off a doctor with a stomach pump, we instinctively feel as though some man with a smell of cheese about his garments had been paying attention to her, and she had become desperate.
If they discharge the chief on that cheese testimony it will be a lesson to all men hereafter.
There is something about the average Chicago young man that gives him away, and gives away anybody that gets in with him. He is full of practical jokes, and is a bad egg on general principles.
Last week Mr. Eppenetus Hoyt, of Fond du Lac, went to Chicago on a visit. He is a pious gentleman, whose candor would carry conviction to the mind of the seeker after righteousness, and his presence at the prayer meeting, at the sociable or the horse-race, is an evidence that everything will be conducted on the square.
Mr. Hoyt knew a young man named Johnny Darling, who was attending Rush Medical College, and through him was permitted to visit the dissecting-room, and gaze upon the missionary work being done there. Mr. Hoyt was introduced to a number of the wicked young men who were carving the late lamented, and after he got accustomed to the climate he rather enjoyed the performance.
Whether young Mr. Darling told the boys that Mr. Hoyt was “fresh” or not, will, perhaps, never be known; but, as Mr. Hoyt passed around among the slabs where they were at work, each made a contribution from the “stiff” he was at work upon to Mr. Hoyt’s coat pockets unbeknown to him. While one was calling his attention to a limb that he was dissecting, another would cut off an ear, or a finger, or a nose, or dig out an eye, and drop the same into Mr. Hoyt’s overcoat pockets. Finally, he bid the boys good-bye, thanked them for their courtesies in showing him around, told them if they ever came to Fond du Lac his pew in church was at their disposal, and he skipped for the train and got on board.
The seats were all occupied, and a middle aged lady, with a slim face and spectacles, and evidently an old maid, allowed him to sit beside her. The car was warm, and it was not long before the “remains” began to be heard from. He was talking to the lady about the “sweet by-and-by,” and the hope of a glorious immortality beyond the grave, and of the inducements held out by the good book to those who try to lead a different life here on earth, when he smelled something. The lady had been smelling it for some miles back, and she had got her eye on Mr. Hoyt, and had put her handkerchief to her nose. He took a long breath and said to the lady:
“The air seems sort o’ fixed here in this car, does it not?” and he looked up at the transom.
“Yes,” said the lady, as she turned pale, and asked him to let her out of the seat, “it is very much fixed, and I believe that you are the man that fixed it!” and she took her satchel and went to the rear of the car, where she glared at him as though he was a fat rendering establishment.
Mr. Hoyt devoted a few moments to silent prayer, and then his attention was called to a new married couple, in the seat ahead of him. They had been having their heads close together, when suddenly the bride said:
“Hennery, have you been drinking?”
He vowed by all that was great and glorious that he had not, when she told him there was something about his breath that reminded her of strong drink, or a packing-house.
He allowed that it was not him, but admitted that he had noticed there was something wrong, though he didn’t know but it was some of her teeth that needed filling.
They were both mad at the insinuations of the other, and the bride leaned on the window and cried, while the groom looked the other way, and acted cross.
Mr. Hoyt was very much annoyed at the smell.
The smell remained, and people all around him got up and went to the forward end of the car, or to the rear, and there were a dozen empty seats when the conductor came in, and lots of people standing up. The conductor got one sniff, and said:
“Whoever has got that piece of limberger cheese in his pocket, will have to go in the emigrant car!”
They all looked at Hoyt, and the conductor went up to him and asked him if he didn’t know any bettor than to be carrying around such cheese as that?
Hoyt said he hadn’t got no cheese.
The conductor insisted that he had, and told him to turn his pockets wrong side out.
Hoyt jabbed his hands into his pockets, and felt something cold and clammy. He drew his hands out empty, turned pale, and said he didn’t have any cheese.
The conductor insisted on his feeling again, and he brought to the surface a couple of human ears, a finger, and a thumb.
“What in the name of the Apostles have you got there?” says the conductor. “Do you belong to any canning establishment that sends canned missionary to the heathen cannibals?”
Hoyt told the conductor to come in the baggage car, and he would explain all; and as he passed by the passengers, with both hands full of the remains, the passengers were ready to lynch Hoyt. He told the conductor where he had been, and the boys had played it on him, and the fingers and things were thrown beside the track, where some one will find them and think a murder has been committed.
Afterwards Hoyt went into the car and tried to apologize to the old maid, but she said if he didn’t go away from her she would scream. Hoyt would always rather go away than have a woman scream.
He is trying to think of some way to get even with the boys of Rush Medical College.
There was one of those old fashioned mistakes occurred on the train from Monroe to Janesville a week or so ago. A traveling man and a girl who was going to Milton College sat in adjoining seats, and their satchels were exactly alike, and the traveling man took the wrong satchel and got off at Janesville, and the girl went on to Milton.
The drummer went down to Vankirk’s grocery and put his satchel on the counter, and asked Van how his liver was getting along, while he picked a piece off a codfish and ate it, and then smelled of his fingers and said “Whew!” Van said his liver was “not very torpid, thank you; how are you fixed for tea?” The drummer said he wished he had as many dollars as he was fixed for tea, and began to open his sample case. Van cut off a piece of cheese and was eating it while he walked along towards the drummer.
When the case was opened the drummer fell over against a barrel of brooms, and grasping a keg of maple syrup for support, turned pale and said he’d be dashed. Van looked in the sample case, and said, “Fixed for tea! I should think you was, but it wasn’t that kind of tea I want.”
There was a long female night-shirt, clapboarded up in front with trimming and starch, and buttoned from Genesis to Revelations. Van took a butter tryer and lifted it out, and there was more than a peck measure full of stuff that never belonged in no grocery. Van said: “If you are traveling for a millinery house I will send a boy to direct you to a millinery store.”
The drummer wiped the perspiration from his face with a coffee sack and told Van he would give him a million dollars if he never would let the house in Milwaukee know about it, and he chucked the things back in. “What is this?” said Van, as he held up a pair of giddy looking affairs that no drummer ever wore on his own person. “Don’t ask me” says the drummer, “I am not a married man.”
He took the satchel and went to Milton on the next train. The girl had opened the satchel which fell to her in the division to show her room-mate how to make a stitch in crochet, and when the brown sugar, coffee, tea, rice, bottles of syrup, maccaroni and a pack of cards came in sight, she fairly squealed. Along after dinner the drummer called and asked for an exchange, and they exchanged, and it was hard to tell which blushed the most.
You may organize a church choir and think you have got it down fine, and that every member of it is pious and full of true goodness, and in such a moment as you think not you will find that one or more of them are full of the old Harry, and it will break out when you least expect it. There is no more beautiful sight to the student of nature than a church choir. To see the members sitting together, demure, devoted and pious looking, you think that there is never a thought enters their mind that is not connected with singing anthems, but sometimes you get left.
There is one church choir in Milwaukee that is about as near perfect as a choir can be. It has been organized for a long time, and has never quarreled, and the congregation swears by it. When the choir strikes a devotional attitude it is enough to make an ordinary christian think of the angel band above, only the male singers wear whiskers, and the females wear fashionable clothes.
You would not think that this choir played tricks on each other during the sermon, but sometimes they do. The choir is furnished with the numbers of the hymns that are to be sung, by the minister, and they put a book mark in the book at the proper place. One morning they all got up to sing, when the soprano turned pale as an ace of spades dropped out of her hymn book, the alto nearly fainted when a queen of hearts dropped at her feet, and the rest of the pack was distributed around in the other books. They laid it onto the tenor, but he swore, while the minister was preaching, that he didn’t know one card from another.
One morning last summer, after the tenor had been playing tricks all Spring on the rest of the choir, the soprano brought a chunk of shoemaker’s wax to church. The tenor was arrayed like Solomon, in all his glory, with white pants, and a Seymour coat. The tenor got up to see who the girl was who came in with the old lady, and while he was up the soprano put the shoemakers’ wax on the chair, and the tenor sat down on it. They all saw it, and they waited for the result. It was an awful long prayer, and the church was hot, the tenor was no iceberg himself, and shoemakers’ wax melts at ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit.
The minister finally got to the amen, and read a hymn, the choir coughed and all rose up. The chair that the tenor was in stuck to him like a brother, and came right along and nearly broke his suspenders. It was the tenor to bat, and as the great organ struck up he pushed the chair off of his person, looked around to see if he had saved his pants, and began to sing, and the rest of the choir came near bursting. The tenor was called out on three strikes by the umpire, and the alto had to sail in, and while she was singing the tenor began to feel of first base to see what was the matter. When he got his hand on the shoemaker’s warm wax his heart smote him, and he looked daggers at the soprano, but she put on a pious look and got her mouth ready to sing “Hold the Fort.”
Well, the tenor sat down on a white handkerchief before he went home, and he got home without anybody seeing him, and he has been, as the old saying is, “laying” for the soprano ever since to get even.
It is customary in all first-class choirs for the male singers to furnish candy for the lady singers, and the other day the tenor went to a candy factory and had a peppermint lozenger made with about half a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper in the centre of it. On Christmas he took his lozenger to church and concluded to get even with the soprano if he died for it.
Candy had been passed around, and just before the hymn was given out in which the soprano was to sing a solo, “Nearer My God to Thee,” the wicked wretch gave her the loaded lozenger. She put it in her mouth and nibbed off the edges, and was rolling it as a sweet morsel under her tongue, when the organ struck up and they all arose. While the choir was skirmishing on the first part of the verse and getting scored up for the solo, she chewed what was left of the candy and swallowed it.
Well, if a democratic torch-light procession had marched unbidden down her throat she couldn’t have been any more astonished. She leaned over to pick up her handkerchief and spit the candy out, but there was enough pepper left around the selvage of her mouth to have pickled a peck of chow-chow.
It was her turn to sing, and as she rose and took the book, her eyes filled with tears, her voice trembled, her face was as red as a spanked lobster, and the way she sung that old hymn was a caution. With a sweet tremulo she sung, “A Charge to Keep I Have,” and the congregation was almost melted to tears.
As she stopped, while the organist got in a little work, she turned her head, opened her mouth and blew out her breath with a “whoosh,” to cool her mouth. The audience saw her wipe a tear away, but did not hear the sound of her voice as she “whooshed.” She wiped out some of the pepper with her handkerchief and sang the other verses with a good deal of fervor, and the choir sat down, all of the members looking at the soprano.
She called for water. The noble tenor went and got it for her, and after she had drank a couple of quarts, she whispered to him: “Young man, I will get even with you for that peppermint candy if I have to live a thousand years, and don’t you forget it,” and then they all sat down and looked pious, while the minister preached a most beautiful sermon on “Faith.” We expect that tenor will be blowed through the roof some Sunday morning, and the congregation will wonder what he is in such a hurry for.
There is a cockroach that makes his home on our desk that has got more sense than a delinquent subscriber. He—if it is a he one; we are not clear as to that—comes out and sits on the side, of the paste-dish, and draws in a long breath. If the paste is fresh he eats it, and wiggles his polonaise as much as to thank us, and goes away refreshed. If the paste is sour, and smells bad, he looks at us with a mournful expression, and goes away looking as though it was a mighty mean trick to play on a cockroach, and he runs about as though he was offended. When a package of wedding cake is placed on the desk he is the first one to find it out, and he sits and waits till we cut the string, when he goes into it and walks all over the cake till he strikes the bridal cake, when he gets onto it, stands on his head and seems to say, “Yum, yum,” and is tickled as a girl with a fresh beau.
There is human nature in a cockroach. When a man comes in and sits around with no business, on our busy day, and asks questions, and stays and keeps us from working, the cockroach will come out and sit on the inkstand and look across at the visitor as much as to say:
“Why don’t you go away about your business and leave the poor man alone, so he can get out some copy, and not keep us all standing around here doing nothing?”
But when the paper is out, and there is a look of cheerfulness about the place, and we are anxious to have friends call, the cockroach flies around over the papers and welcomes each caller as pleasantly as he can, and seems to enjoy it.
One day the paste smelled pretty bad, and we poured about a spoonful of whisky in it, and stirred it up. The cockroach came out to breakfast, and we never saw a person that seemed to enjoy the meal any more than the cockroach did. It seemed as though he couldn’t get enough paste. Pretty soon he put one hand to his head and looked crosseyed. He tried to climb down off the paste-dish, and fell over himself and turned a flip-flap on the blotting paper. Then he looked at us in a sort of mysterious way, winked one eye as much as to say: “You think you are smart, don’t you, old baldy?”
Then he put one hand to his forehead as if in meditation, and staggered off into a drawer, coming out presently with his arm around another cockroach, and he took him to the paste-pot, and he filled up, too, and then they locked arms and paraded up and down on the green cloth of the desk, as though singing, “We won’t go home till morning,” and they kicked over the steel pens, and acted a good deal like politicians after a caucus.
Finally, some remark was made by one of them that didn’t suit, and they pitched in and had the worst fight that ever was, after which one rushed off as if after a policeman, and the other, staggered into his hole, and we saw no more of our cockroach till the next morning, when he came out with one hand on his head and the other on his stomach, and after smelling of the paste and looking sick, he walked off to a bottle of seltzer water and crawled up to the cork and looked around with an expression so human that we uncorked the bottle and let him in, and he drank as though he had been eating codfish. Since that day he looks at us a little suspicious, and when the paste smells a little peculiar he goes and gets another cockroach to eat some of it first, and he watches the effect.
Now, you wouldn’t believe it, but that cockroach can tell, the minute he sees a man, whether the man has come in with a bill, or has come in to pay money. We don’t know how he does it, but when a man has a bill the cockroach begins to look solemn and mournful, and puts his hands to his eyes as though weeping. If a man comes in to pay money, the cockroach looks glad, a smile plays around his mouth, and he acts kitteny. He acts the most human when ladies come into the office. If a book agent comes in, he makes no attempt to show his disgust.
One day an old person came in with a life of Garfield and laid it on the table, opened to the picture of the candidate, and left it. The cockroach walked through the violet ink and got his feet all covered, and then he walked all over that book, and left his mark. The woman saw the tracks, and thought we had signed our name, and she said she was sorry we had written our signature there, because she had another book for subscribers’ names.
When a handsome lady comes in, the cockroach is in his element, and there is a good deal of proud flesh about him. He puts his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest and walks around.
One day we put our face up to a deaf young lady to speak to her, and the cockroach looked straight the other way, and seemed to be looking over an old copy of the Christian Statesman; but when he found we only yelled at the lady, he winked as much as to say:
“Well, how did I know?”
O, that cockroach is a thoroughbred!
The other day a business man who has one of the nicest houses in the nicest ward in the city, and who has horses and carriages in plenty, and who usually looks as clean as though just out of a band box and as happy as a schoolma’am at a vacation picnic, got on a street car near the depot, a picture of a total wreck. He had on a long linen duster, the collar tucked down under the neck band of his shirt, which had no collar on, his cuffs were sticking out of his coat pocket, his eyes looked heavy, and where the dirt had come off with the perspiration he looked pale, and he was cross as a bear.
A friend who was on the car, on the way up town, after a day’s work, with a clean shirt on, a white vest and a general look of coolness, accosted the traveler as follows:
“Been summer resorting, I hear?”
The dirty-looking man crossed his legs with a painful effort, as though his drawers stuck to his legs and almost peeled the bark off, and answered:
“Yes, I have been out two weeks. I have struck ten different hotels, and if you ever hear of my leaving town again during the hot weather, you can take my head for a soft thing,” and he wiped a cinder out of his eye with what was once a clean handkerchief.
“Had a good, cool time, I suppose, and enjoyed yourself,” said the man who had not been out of town.
“Cool time, hell,” said the man, who has a pew in two churches, as he kicked his limp satchel of dirty clothes under the car seat. “I had rather been sentenced to the house of correction for a month.”
“Why, what’s the trouble?”
“Well, there is no trouble, for people who like that kind of fun, but this lets me out. I do not blame people who live in Southern States for coming North, because they enjoy things as a luxury that we who live in Wisconsin have as a regular diet, but for a Chicago or Milwaukee man to go into the country to swelter and be kept awake nights is bald lunacy. Why, since I have been out I have slept in a room a size smaller than the closet my wife keeps her linen in, with one window that brought in air from a laundry, and I slept on a cot that shut up like a jack-knife and always caught me in the hinge where it hurt.
“At another hotel I had a broken-handled pitcher of water that had been used to rinse clothes in, and I can show you the indigo on my neck. I had a piece of soap that smelled like a tannery, and if the towel was not a recent damp diaper then I have never raised six children.
“At one hotel I was the first man at the table, and two families came in and were waited on before the Senegambian would look at me, and after an hour and thirty minutes I got a chance to order some roast beef and baked potatoes, but the perspiring, thick-headed pirate brought me some boiled mutton and potatoes that looked as though they had been put in a wash-tub and mashed by treading on them barefooted. I paid twenty-five cents for a lemonade made of water and vinegar, with a piece of something on top that might be lemon peel, and it might be pumpkin rind.
“The only night’s rest I got was one night when I slept in a car seat. At the hotel the regular guests were kept awake till 12 o’clock by number six headed boys and girls dancing until midnight to the music of a professional piano boxer, and then for two hours the young folks sat on the stair? and yelled and laughed, and after that the girls went to bed and talked two hours more, while the boys went and got drunk and sang ‘Allegezan and Kalamazoo.’
“Why, at one place I was woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning by what I thought was a chariot race in the hall outside, but it was only a lot of young bloods rolling ten pins down by the rooms, using empty wine bottles for pins and China cuspidores for balls. I would have gone out and shot enough drunken galoots for a mess, only I was afraid a cuspidore would carom on my jaw. Talk about rest, I would rather go to a boiler factory.
“Say, I don’t know as you would believe it, but at one place I sent some shirts and things to be washed, and they sent to my room a lot of female underclothes, and when I kicked about it to the landlord he said I would have to wear them, as they had no time to rectify mistakes. He said the season was short and they had to get in their work, and he charged me Fifth Avenue Hotel prices with a face that was child-like and bland, when he knew I had been wiping on diapers for two days in place of towels.
“But I must get off here and see if I can find water enough to bathe all over. I will see you down town after I bury these clothes.”
And the sticky, cross man got off swearing at summer hotels and pirates. We don’t see where he could have been traveling.
Because there are cars for the luxurious, and smoking cars for those who delight in tobacco, some of the religious people of Connecticut are petitioning the railway companies to fit up “Gospel cars.” Instead of the card tables they want an organ and piano, they want the seats arranged facing the centre of the car, so they can have a full view of whoever may conduct the services; instead of spittoons they will have a carpet, and instead of cards they want Bibles and Gospel song-books.—Chicago News.
There is an idea for you. Let some railroad company fit up a Gospel car according to the above prescription, and run it, and the porter on that car would be the most lonesome individual on the train. The Gospel hymn books would in a year appear as new as do now the Bibles that are put up in all cars. Of the millions of people who ride in the trains, many of them pious Christians, who has ever seen a man or woman take a Bible off the iron rack and read it a single minute? And yet you can often see ministers and other professing Christians in the smoking car, puffing a cigar and reading a daily paper.
Why, it is all they can do to get a congregation in a church on Sunday; and does any one suppose that when men and women are traveling for business or pleasure—and they do not travel for anything else—that they are going into a “Gospel car” to listen to some sky pirate who has been picked up for the purpose, talk about the prospects of landing the cargo in heaven?
Not much!
The women are too much engaged looking after their baggage, and keeping the cinders out of their eyes, and keeping the children’s heads out of the window, and keeping their fingers from being jammed, to look out for their immortal souls. And the men are too much absorbed in the object of their trip to listen to gospel truths. They are thinking about whether they will be able to get a room at the hotel, or whether they will have to sleep on a cot.
Nobody can sing gospel songs on a car, with their throats full of cinders, and their eyes full of dust, and the chances are if anybody should strike up, “A charge to keep I have,” some pious sinner who was trying to take a nap in the corner of the gospel car would say:
“O, go and hire a hall!”
It would be necessary to make an extra charge of half a dollar to those who occupied the gospel car, the same as is charged on the parlor car, and you wouldn’t get two persons on an average train full that would put up a nickel.
Why, we know a Wisconsin Christian, worth a million dollars, who, when he comes up from Chicago to the place where he lives, hangs up his overcoat in the parlor car, and then goes into the forward car and rides till the whistle blows for his town, when he goes in and gets his coat and never says thirty-five cents to the conductor, or ten cents to the porter. Do you think a gospel car would catch him for half a dollar? He would see you in Hades first.
The best way is to take a little eighteen carat religion along into the smoking car, or any other car you may happen to be in.
A man—as we understand religion from those who have had it—does not have to howl to the accompaniment of an asthmatic organ, pumped by a female with a cinder in her eye and smut on her nose, in order to enjoy religion, and he does not have to be in the exclusive company of other pious people to get the worth of his money. There is a great deal of religion in sitting in a smoking car, smoking dog-leg tobacco in a briar-wood pipe, and seeing happy faces in the smoke that curls up—faces of those you have made happy by kind words, good deeds, or half a dollar put where it will drive away hunger, instead of paying it out for a reserved seat in a gospel car. Take the half dollar you would pay for a seat in a gospel car and go into the smoker, and find some poor emigrant that is going west to grow up with the country, after having been beaten out of his money at Castle Garden, and give it to him, and see if the look of thankfulness and joy does not make you feel better than to listen to a discussion in the gospel car, as to whether the children of Israel went through the Red Sea with life-preservers, or wore rubber hunting boots.
Take your gospel-car half dollar and buy a vegetable ivory rattle of the train boy, and give it to the sick emigrant mother’s pale baby, and you make four persons happy—the baby, the mother, the train boy and yourself.
We know a man who gave a dollar to a prisoner on the way to State prison, to buy tobacco with, who has enjoyed more good square religion over it than he could get out of all the chin music and saw-filing singing he could hear in a gospel car in ten years. The prisoner was a bad man from Oshkosh, who was in a caboose in charge of the sheriff, on the way to Waupun. The attention of the citizen was called to the prisoner by his repulsive appearance, and his general don’t-care-a-damative appearance. The citizen asked the prisoner how he was fixed for money to buy tobacco in prison. He said he hadn’t a cent, and he knew it would be the worst punishment he could have to go without tobacco. The citizen gave him the dollar and said:
“Now, every time you take a chew of tobacco in prison, just make up your mind to be square when you get out.”
The prisoner reached out his hand-cuffed hands to take the dollar, the hands trembling so that the chains rattled, and a great tear as big as a shirt-button appeared in one eye—the other eye had been gouged out while “having some fun with the boys” at Oshkosh—and his lips trembled as he said:
“So help me God, I will!”
That man has been boss of a gang of hands in the pinery for two winters, and has a farm paid for on the Central Railroad, and is “squar.”
That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can occasionally practice without having a gospel car.
There were a great many ludicrous scenes about the Newhall House during the fire of last Saturday morning. When people were notified that there was a fire in the house, but that the danger was not great, though it was thought best to give them all plenty of time to prepare for the worst, many jumped right out of bed and started down stairs.
When we arrived on the scene, our first inquiry was for the safety of the lady members of the Rice Surprise Party, the young women who had been cutting up on the stage all the week with so little apparel. We did not expect to find them in a greater state of barefootedness than they were when we saw them last, but in some instances they were.
We were kindly yet firmly informed by Mr. Rankin that the ladies had been rescued. It seemed that everybody wanted to save the girls. Mr. Rankin knew this, and knew that if the young and thoughtless gentlemen were allowed to rescue the girls it would cause remark. He said he was an old line democrat, and that his days of kittenhood were over, and that it was proper that he should superintend the removal of the girls.
Mr. McKittrick, the conductor, argued the matter with him. He said he had been running a train a good many years, and had seen all phases of humanity, and that he was inured to a life of hardship, and had seen many sad sights, in the sleeping cars, and he insisted that he be allowed to superintend the removal of the girls.
The discussion became warm, and finally they compromised by agreeing that McKittrick should rush into the rooms and drag them out of the fire and smoke and hand them to Mr. Rankin at the foot of the first pair of stairs, who would dispose of them in safety. They both agreed that the first outside vandal who laid a hand on them should die.
The first trouble they had was with Prof. Haskins.
He came out of his room with nothing on but his glasses, an ascension robe and one boot. He rushed through the hall, and while in front of the room of the girl who wore the black tights with the crochet work on the limbs he ventured a joke. He is the telegraph manager and he said, “There is a line down here,” as a two inch stream struck him about the alleged pistol pocket. The girl, who was tying her wardrobe up in a napkin, heard him and said, “There is no lying down here, not much.” Prof. Haskins was shocked that any female should thus mistake him for a democrat, and falling over a zinc trunk head first, he went back to his room to send his son Harry out to help.
Mr. McKittrick rushed into a room and grabbed a corset in his arms and handed it down stairs to Rankin There is no person who can fool Rankin. He didn’t want to be rescued.
Just at this point a girl with a waterproof on came along the hall and Mr. Cole asked her if she didn’t want to be rescued. She said she had been carried down stairs six times already by a big granger, and she would shoot the next man that attempted to rescue ner. She said there was no danger, and wanted to know why the big galoots did not go and help put the fire out.
On inquiry it was found that the girl had been carried down stairs six times and left on the sidewalk. She described the man who carried her out, and said he was excited, and no sooner would she get up stairs than he would grab her and carry her down again, until she was almost froze. He told her the last time that he had saved six girls from a fiery grave.
Among the recent inventions is a pillow holder. It is explained that the pillow holder is for the purpose of holding a pillow while the case is being put on. We trust this new invention will not come into general use, as there is no sight more beautiful to the eyes of man than to see a woman hold a pillow in her teeth while she gently manipulates the pillow case over it.
We do not say that a woman is beautiful with her mouth full of pillows. No one can ever accuse us of saying that, but there is something home-like and old-fashioned about it that can not be replaced by any invention.
We know that certain over-fastidious women have long clamored for some new method of putting on a pillow case, but these people have either lost their teeth, or the new ones do not grasp the situation. They have tried several new methods, such as blowing the pillow case up, and trying to get the pillow in before the wind got out, and they have tried to get the pillow in by rolling up the pillow case until the bottom is reached, and then placing ‘the pillow on end and gently unrolling the pillow case, but all these schemes have their drawbacks.
The old style of chewing one end of the pillow, and holding it the way a retriever dog holds a duck, till the pillow case is on, and then spanking the pillow a couple of times on each side, is the best, and it gives the woman’s jaws about the only rest they get during the day.
If any invention drives this old custom away from us, and we no more see the matrons of our land with their hair full of feathers and their mouths full of striped bed-ticking, we shall feel that one of the dearest of our institutions has been ruthlessly torn from us, and the fabric of our national supremacy has received a sad blow, and that our liberties are in danger.
There is a woman on the West Side who has learned a lesson that will last her a lifetime. She has been for years wearing these paper bags, such as the green grocers use, for bustles. The paper is stiff, and sticks out splendid, and makes the dress look well. Last Sunday morning while she was dressing, her young son got in the room and blew the paper bag full of wind and tied a string around the mouth of it, and left it in a chair. The good lady took it and tied it on and dressed herself for church. She bribed her husband to go to church with her, though he is a sort of Bob Ingersoll christian.
As they went down the aisle the minister was reading a hymn about “Sounding the Loud Hosan-na,” and the lady went into the pew first, and sat down while her husband was putting his hat on the floor. There was a report like distant thunder. You have heard how those confounded paper bags explode when boys blow them up, and crush them between their hands.
Well, it was worse than that, and everybody looked at the innocent husband, who was standing there a perfect picture of astonishment. He looked at his wife as much as to say: “Now, this is the last time you will catch me in church, if you are going to play any of your tricks on me. You think you can scare me into getting religion?”
The minister stopped reading the hymn and looked over his spectacles at the new comers as though it would not surprise him if that bad man should blow the church up. The poor lady blushed and looked around as much as to say, “I did not know it was loaded,” and she looked the hymn book through for the hymn, and as the choir rose to sing she offered one side of the book to her husband, but he looked mad and pious, and stood at the other end of the pew and looked out of the stained glass window.
After the service they started home together, and as they turned the first corner he said to his wife, “Well, you played hell on your watch, didn’t you?” She told him there was no such thing as hell in the Bible now, but that she would make that boy think there had been no revision of the Bible that left hell out, when she got home. We only get the story from the husband.
He said he didn’t know what it was that made the noise until they got home, and after a little skirmishing around his wife held up a bursted paper bag, and asked the boy if he blew that bag up. He said he did, but he did not know there was anything wrong about it. The boy and his mother and a press board paid a visit to the back kitchen, and there was a sound of revelry. Boys will be boys.
The proposed duel between Senator Mahone and Jubal Early did not come off, for reasons that have not been made public. It is well known that Mahone is the thinnest man in Virginia. We do not allude to his politics, or his ability, in speaking of his being thin, but to his frame. He does not make a shadow. He could hide behind a wire fence. Gen. Early, after challenging Mahone, went to practicing at a piece of white wire clothes line, hung to the limb of a tree, but he could not hit it, and he felt that all the advantage would be on Mr. Mahone’s side, so he asked Mahone to do the only thing in his power that would make the thing even, and that was to eat a quantity of dried apples the day before the duel, in order to swell his stomach out so that a gentleman could stand some show of hitting him.
Gen. Early pledged himself, on the honor of a Virginia gentleman, that he would not shoot at Mahone’s stomach, but would aim at it, and then make a line shot either above or below.
Mahone replied that, while he appreciated the advantage he had over his opponent, and was willing to do anything reasonable to make the thing even, he could not consistently eat dried apples, as they would certainly kill him. He was willing to take his chances on the bullets of his opponent, because statistics showed that dueling was the most healthy business a man could engage in; and he pointed to the number of duellists that were now living at a ripe old age, who had fought hundreds of duels and never received a scratch or scratched an opponent, but on the other hand he could produce proof to show that many people had been injured, if not killed, by an over-indulgence in dried apples.
Mr. Mahone said he thought it was late in the day for him to produce any proof as to his own bravery, but in the face of the fact that he would be pointed at as one who had not sand, he should have to decline to eat dried apples in order to make himself a target.
Gen. Early said he appreciated the delicacy of his honorable and high-toned opponent, and respected his feelings, and would not insist on the dried apple act, but that he would go into training to reduce himself in flesh to the size of Mahone, and hoped that the affair might be declared off until he could diet himself. He said he should at once begin a course of treatment to reduce his flesh, by boarding at a summer resort hotel that he had heard of, where the desired effect might be produced.
So the duel is postponed for the present. Both Mahone and Early are high-toned gentlemen, and they will do nothing rash.
One of the great female writers on dress reform, in trying to illustrate how terrible the female dress is, says:
“Take a man and pin three or four table-cloths about him, fastened back with elastic and looped up with ribbons, draw all his hair to the middle of his head and tie it tight, and hairpin on five pounds of other hair and a big bow of ribbon. Keep the front locks on pins all night, and let them tickle his eyes all day, pinch his waist into a corset, and give him gloves a size too small and shoes the same, and a hat that will not stay on without torturing elastic, and a little lace veil to blind his eyes whenever he goes out to walk, and he will know what a woman’s dress is.”
Now you think you have done it, don’t you, sis? Why, bless you, that toggery would be heaven compared to what a man has to contend with. Take a woman and put a pair of men’s four-shilling drawers on her that are so tight that when they get damp, from perspiration, sis; they stick so you can’t cross your legs without an abrasion of the skin, the buckle in the back turning a somersault and sticking its points into your spinal menengitis; put on an undershirt that draws across the chest so you feel as though you must cut a hole in it, or two, and which is so short that it works up under your arms, and allows the starched upper shirt to sand paper around and file off the skin until you wish it was night, the tail of which will not stay tucked more than half a block, though you tuck, and tuck, and tuck; and then fasten a collar made of sheet zinc, two sizes too small for you, around your neck; put on vest and coat, and liver pad and lung pad and stomach pad, and a porous plaster, and a chemise shirt between the two others, and rub on some liniment, and put a bunch of keys and a jack-knife and a button-hook and a pocket-book and a pistol and a plug of tobacco in your pockets, so they will chafe your person, and then go and drink a few whisky cocktails, and walk around in the sun with tight boots on, sis, and then you will know what a man’s dress is.
Come to figure it up, it is about an even thing, sis,—isn’t it?
Another thing that is being largely counterfeited is tripe. Parties who buy tripe cannot be too careful. There is a manufactory that can make tripe so natural that no person on earth can detect the deception. They take a large sheet of rubber about a sixteenth of an inch thick for a background, and by a process only known to themselves veneer it with a Turkish towel, and put it in brine to soak. The unsuspecting boarding-house keeper, or restaurant man, buys it and cooks it, and the boarder or transient guest calls for tripe. A piece is cut off the damnable tripe with a pair of shears used in a tin shop for cutting sheet iron, and it is handed to the victim. He tries to cut it, and fails; he tries to gnaw it off, and if he succeeds in getting a mouthful, that settles him. He leaves his tripe on his plate, and it is gathered up and sewed on the original piece, and is kept for another banquet.
The tripe is expensive, owing to the royalty that has to be paid to the rubber company, and often the boarder succeeds in eating off some of the towel, so it has to be veneered over again; but take it the year round, and the tripe pays its way in a boarding-house.
About as mean a trick as we ever heard of was perpetrated by a doctor at Hudson last Sunday. The victim was a justice of the peace named Evans. Mr. Evans is a man who has the alfiredest biggest feet east of St. Paul, and when he gets a new pair of shoes it is an event that has its effect on the leather market.
Last winter he advertised for sealed proposals to erect a pair of shoes for him, and when the bids were opened it was found that a local architect in leather had secured the contract, and after mortgaging his house to a Milwaukee tannery, and borrowing some money on his diamonds of his “uncle,” John Comstock, who keeps a pawnbrokery there, he broke ground for the shoes.
Owing to the snow blockade and the freshets, and the trouble to get hands who would work on the dome, there were several delays, and Judge Evans was at one time inclined to cancel the contract, and put some strings in box cars and wear them in place of shoes, but sympathy for the contractor, who had his little awl invested in the material and labor, induced him to put up with the delay.
On Saturday the shoes were completed, all except laying the floor and putting on a couple of bay windows for corns, and conservatories for bunions, and the judge concluded to wear them on Sunday. He put them on, but got the right one on the left foot, and the left one on the right foot. As he walked down town the right foot was continually getting on the left side, and he stumbled over himself, and he felt pains in his feet. The judge was frightened in a minute. He is afraid of paralysis, all the boys know it, and when he told a wicked republican named Spencer how his feet felt, that degraded man told the judge that it was one of the surest symptoms of paralysis in the world, and advised him to hunt a doctor.
The judge pranced off, interfering at every step, skinning his shins, and found Dr. Hoyt. The doctor is one of the worst men in the world, and when he saw how the shoes were put on he told the judge that his case was hopeless unless something was done immediately. The judge turned pale, the sweat poured out of him, and taking out his purse he gave the doctor five dollars and asked him what he should do. The doctor felt his pulse, looked at his tongue, listened at his heart, shook his head, and then told the judge that he would be a dead man in less than sixty years if he didn’t change his shoes.
The judge looked down at the vast expanse of leather, both sections pointing inwardly, and said, “Well, dam a fool,” and “changed cars” at the junction. As he got them on the right feet, and hired a raftsman to tie them up for him, he said he would get even with the doctor if he had to catch the smallpox. O, we suppose they have more fun in some of these country towns than you can shake a stick at.
There has been a great deal of talk in the papers about arresting “mashers,” that is, young men who stand on the corners and pulverize women, and a great many good people got the idea that it was unsafe to travel the streets. This is not the case. A woman might travel all day and half the night and not be insulted. Of course, once in a great while, a woman will be insulted by a man, the same as a man will be by a woman.
No woman, unless she throws out one eye, kind of cunning, is in danger of having a male man throw out his other eye the same way. There has got to be two parties to a mashing match, and one must be a woman. Too many women act sort of queer just for fun, and the poor male man gets to acting improper before he realizes the enormity of the crime, and then it is everlastingly too late.
But a female masher, one who is thoroughly bad, like the male loafers that have been driven from the corners, is a terror. She will insult a respectable man and laugh at his blushes. One of them was arrested the other day for playing her act on a policeman who was disguised as a respectable granger from Stevens Point. These female mashers are a tornado.
Why, one of them met a respectable church member the other night, and asked him how his liver complaint was. He was a man who had been troubled with the liver complaint, and supposing she was some acquaintance, he stopped on the corner and talked with the pullet for about ten minutes, explaining to her the course of treatment he had used to cure him, and dozens of people passing by that knew him, and knew that she was clear off.
Finally she asked him if he wouldn’t take her to a restaurant and buy her a spring chicken and a small bottle. He told her if she would come up to his house she should have a hen, and there were lots of bottles, both large and small, that she was welcome to. She told him to go to Hades, and he went in a drug store and asked a clerk who that lady was he had been talking with, and when the clerk, who knew her, told him she was a road agent, a street walker, a female masher, the old man had to sit down on a box of drugs and fan himself with his hat.
We mention this to show that ladies are not the only portion of the population that is liable to be accosted and insulted. The other night a respectable merchant was going to the opera with a friend from the country, when a couple of sirens met them and one said to the other, “Look at his nibs,” and she locked arms with him and asked him if he was not her own darling. He said his name was not “Nibs,” and he would have to look at his memorandum book before he could tell whether he was her darling or not, but from the smell of gin about her person he would blush to extemporize.
We do not give his exact language, but in the heat of debate he shook her and told her if she ever clawed on him again he would everlastingly go and tell her parents. And while he was talking with her the other one had seated herself beside his country friend on a salt barrel in front of a grocery and was feeling in his vest pocket to see if he had any cloves.
A female masher is much worse than a male masher as you can imagine. Who ever heard of a male masher feeling in an unprotected female’s vest pocket for cloves? O, the men are simply unprotected, and at the mercy of wicked, designing women, and the police ought to protect them.
A First Ward man was told by his wife to bring home a quart of oysters on New Year’s night, to fry for supper. He drank a few prescriptions of egg nog, and then took a paper bag full of selects and started for home. He stopped at two or three saloons, and the bag began to melt, and when he left the last saloon the bottom fell out of the bag and the oysters were on the sidewalk.
We will leave the man there, gazing upon the wreck, and take the reader to the residence where he is expected.
A red-faced woman is putting the finishing touches to the supper table, and wondering why her husband does not come with the oysters. Presently a noise as of a lead pencil in the key-hole salutes her ear, and she goes to the door and opens it, and finds him taking the pencil out of the key-hole. Not seeing any oysters, she asks him if he has forgotten the oysters.
“Forgot noth(hic)ing,” says he.
He walks up to the table and asks for a plate, which is given him by the unsuspicious wife.
“Damsaccident you ever(hic)see,” said the truly good man, as he brought his hand out of his overcoat pocket, with four oysters, a little smoking tobacco, and a piece of cigar-stub.
“Slipperysoystersev (hic)er was,” said he, as he run his hands down in the other pocket, bringing up five oysters, a piece of envelope, and a piece of wire that was used as a bail to the pail.
“Got all my pock(hic)ets full,” said he, as he took a large oyster out of his vest pocket. Then he began to go down in his pants pocket, and finding a hole in it, he said:
“Six big oys(hic)ters gone down my trousers leg. S’posi’ll find them in my boot,” and he sat down to pull off his boot, when the lady took the plate of oysters and other stuff into the kitchen and threw them in the swill, and then she put him to bed, and all the time he was trying to tell her how the bag busted just as he was in front of All Saints Ca(hic)thedral.
Three distinct charges of heresy will be made against Rev. Dr. Thomas, of Chicago, at the trial next month. The amount of heresy that is going on in this country, and particularly among ministers, is truly alarming. The names of his partners in guilt are not mentioned, probably out of respect for their families. A minister that goes around practicing heresy ought to be watched, and when caught at it he should be bounced. There is no excuse for heresy, though a minister will occasionally meet a mighty attractive her, but he should say: “Git thee foreninst me, Susan, and when I have a convenient season I will send the police after thee.”
There should be an amendment to the constitution of the United States making it lawful for an ex-President to walk on grass. We have no great admiration for Hayes, but when we read that at Cleveland he was ordered off the grass by a thirteen dollar a month soldier, and had to shin it-over a fence real spry to save the shoulder of his pants from assault by a cheap bayonet, it makes us feel ashamed, and we blush for America. The spectacle of a man who has occupied the White House, and been the chief attraction of county fairs, being compelled to put his stomach on a fence, and flop over, heels over appetite, like a boy playing tag, to keep from being jabbed in a vital part, makes us sick.
We never had a coal stove around the house until last Saturday. Have always used pine slabs and pieces of our neighbor’s fence. They burn well, too, but the fence got all burned up, and the neighbor said he wouldn’t build a new one, so we went down to Jones’ and got a coal stove.
You see, we didn’t know anything about coal stoves. We filled the stove about half full of pine fence, and, when the stuff got well to going, we filled the artesian well on the top with coal. It simmered and sputtered about five or ten minutes, and all went out, and we put on an overcoat and a pair of buckskin mittens and “went out too”—to supper. We remarked, in the course of the frugal meal, that Jones was a “froad” for recommending such a confounded refrigerator to a man to get warm by.
After supper we took a piece of ice and rubbed our hands warm, and went in where that stove was, resolved to make her draw and burn if it took all the pine fence in the First Ward. Our better-half threw a quilt over her, and shiveringly remarked that she never knew what real solid comfort was until she got a coal stove.
Stung by the sarcasm in her remark, we turned every dingus on the stove that was movable, or looked like it had anything to do with the draft, and pretty soon the stove began to heave up heat. It was not long before she stuttered like the new Silsby steamer. Talk about your heat! In ten minutes that room was as much worse than a Turkish bath as Hades is hotter than Liverman’s ice-house. The perspiration fairly fried out of a tin water cooler in the next room. We opened the doors, and snow began to melt as far up Vine street as Hanscombe’s house, and people all round the neighborhood put on linen clothes. And we couldn’t stop the confounded thing.
We forgot what Jones told us about the dampers, and she kept a biling. The only thing we could do was to go to bed, and leave the thing to burn the house up if it wanted to. We stood off with a pole and turned the damper every way, and at every turn she just sent out heat enough to roast an ox. We went to bed, supposing that the coal would eventually burn out, but about 12 o’clock the whole family had to get up and sit on the fence.
Finally a man came along who had been brought up among coal stoves, and he put a wet blanket over him and crept up to the stove and turned the proper dingus, and she cooled off, and since that time has been just as comfortable as possible. If you buy a coal stove you want to learn how to engineer it, or you may get roasted.
Probably the most cold-blooded affair that ever occurred took place at a certain summer resort a couple of weeks ago. There was going to be a picnic, and a young man and the girl he was engaged to be married to started in a row-boat to cross the lake, taking an ice cream freezer full of frozen ice cream for the picnic. Just before arriving at the picnic the boat capsized. The boat was bottom side up, and the young man helped the girl on to the ice cream freezer, and he got on the boat, and after floating for half an hour they were rescued.
The girl did not complain at the time she was put on the freezer, as she was glad enough to get on anything that would float, but after they got ashore, and she had a chance to reflect on the matter, and talk with the other girls, she concluded that his getting on the boat, which was nice and warm, and putting her aboard the ice cream freezer, which was so cold and cheerless, was a breach of etiquette that would stamp any man as being a selfish, heartless villain, and she refuses to speak to him, and has declared the engagement off.
He is very much mortified over the affair, and tries to explain that he was more accustomed to a boat than she was, while he reasoned that she would naturally be more familiar with an ice cream freezer. It certainly looks to us to have been a cold-blooded transaction, and while the young man might have been rattled, and powerless to grasp the situation as he would if he had it to do over again, the girl is certainly justified in being indignant.
An ice cream freezer is a cold and cheerless companion even when empty, but filled with congealed cream and pounded ice, and in water, it cannot but have been an Arctic exploration on a small scale. Besides the ice, it is a notorious fact that ice cream freezers are made of zinc, the coldest metal in the world, if we bar women’s feet.
“Sheridan’s Ride” has been spoken of in poetry and in song, but it pales into insignificance by the side of this girl’s ride on the ice cream freezer. If the young man had exhibited foresight, and had a side saddle buckled on to the ice cream freezer, the experience would have been robbed of much of its frigidity, or if there had been a thick blanket under the saddle, but he failed to take even that precaution.
As it is we do not blame the girl for breaking off the engagement. In addition, we think any court would decide that he should pay for the ginger tea and cough lozenges that she had to take to cure her cold.
We know it is fashionable for people to talk about the great monopolies, the railroads, and show how they are sapping the life-blood from the farmers by arranging facilities for transporting wheat worth forty cents a bushel in store pay, without railroads, to a market where the farmer realizes nearly a dollar a bushel in cash.
Demagogues ring the changes on these monopolies, tell how the directors ride in palace cars and drink wine, from the proceeds of the millions of dollars invested in railroads, though they never mention the fact that the railroads have made it possible for farmers to give up driving ox teams and ride after horses that can trot in 2:40.
We presume that railroad managers like to get a pretty good dividend on their investments, but do they get a better dividend than farmers do on some of their investments? Do you know of any farmer that ever complained that his produce was selling too high? If you complain at paying eight dollars for a jag of crow’s nest wood during a snow blockade, does he argue with, you, to show that he is a monopoly, or does he tell you that if you don’t want the wood you needn’t have it?
Now, talking of railroad men manipulating stock, and taking advantage of a raise, how is it about eggs? Within the last two months there has been the worst corner on eggs that the world has ever seen, and the dividends that farmers have received on their investments have been so enormous that they must blush for shame, unless they are a soulless corporation.
Now, for instance, a farmer paid twenty-five cents for a good average hen the 1st of December. Before the 1st of February that hen has laid five dozen eggs, which are worth two dollars and a half. Take out five cents for feed, two cents for the society that the hen has enjoyed, and there is a clear profit of two dollars and forty-three cents, and the farmer has got the hen left. Did any railroad wrecker ever make a greater percentage than that? Talk about watering stock, is it any worse than feeding a hen, to make her lay four-shilling eggs?
We have it from good authority that some farmers have actually gone so far as to bribe legislators with eggs, to prevent their passing any law fixing a rate for the sale of eggs. This is a serious charge, and we do not vouch for it. It is probable that farmers who are sharp enough to get a corner on eggs, by which they can be run up to a fictitious value, are sharp enough not to lay themselves liable for bribery by giving eggs directly to the members, but there are ways to avoid that. They can send them to the residences of the members, where they are worth their weight in gold almost.
Rich railroad owners have submitted to this soulless monopoly of the egg business as long as they can, and we learn that they have organized a state grange, with grips and passwords, and will institute subordinate lodges all over the State to try and break up this vile business that is sapping their life-blood.
Already a bill has been prepared for introduction into the legislature to prohibit any manipulation of the egg market in the future. “Shall the farmers of the State be allowed to combine with hens and roosters and create a famine in eggs, an article of food on which so many people rely to keep soul and body together?” they ask.
Our heart has bled, in the last sixty days, as well as our pocket-book, while studying this question. We have seen men of wealth going about the streets crying for an egg to cool their parched tongues, and they have been turned away eggless, and gone to their palatial homes only to suffer untold agonies, the result of those unholy alliances between farmers and hens. They have tossed sleeplessly on their downy beds, wondering if there was no balm in Gilead, no rooster there. They have looked in vain for compassion on the part of the farmers, who haye only laughed at their sufferings, and put up the price of eggs.
The time has arrived for action on the part of the wealthy consumers of eggs, and we are glad the State grange has been formed. Let a few determined men get together in every community, and swear by the bald-headed profit that they will put down this hen monopoly or die, and after they have sworn, let them send to us for a charter for a lodge—enclosing two dollars in advance—and we will forward to them the ritual of the order.
If this thing is allowed to go on for five years these farmers will be beyond the power of the government to control. This is a grave question, and if the wealthy people do not get relief we might as well bid farewell to our American institutions, as the liberty for which our forefathers fought will not be worth paying taxes for.
There is no person in the world who is easier to overlook the inconsistencies that show themselves on the stage at theatres than we are, but once in a while there is something so glaring that it pains us. We have seen actors fight a duel in a piece of woods far away from any town, on the stage, and when one of them fell, pierced to the heart with a sword, we have noticed that he fell on a Brussels carpet. That is all wrong, but we have stood it manfully.
We have seen a woman, on the stage who was so beautiful that we could be easily mashed if we had any heart left to spare. Her eyes were of that heavenly color that has been written about heretofore, and her smile as sweet as ever was seen, but behind the scenes, through the wings, we have seen her trying to dig the cork out of a beer bottle with a pair of shears, and ask a supe, in harsh tones, where the cork-screw was, while she spread mustard on a piece of cheese, and finally drank the beer from the bottle, and spit the pieces of cork out on the floor, sitting astride of a stage chair, and her boot heels up on the top round, her trail rolled up into a ball, wrong side out, showing dirt from forty different stage floors.
These things hurt. But the worst thing that has ever occurred to knock the romance out of us, was to see a girl in the second act, after “twelve years is supposed to elapse,” with the same pair of red stockings on that she wore in the first act, twelve years before. Now, what kind of a way is that? It does not stand to reason that a girl would wear the same pair of stockings twelve years. Even if she had them washed once in six months, they would be worn out. People notice these things.
What the actresses of this country need is to change their stockings. To wear them twelve years, even in their minds, shows an inattention to the details and probabilities of a play, that must do the actresses an injury, if not give them corns. Let theatre-goers insist that the stockings be changed oftener, in these plays that sometimes cover half a century, and the stockings will not become moth-eaten. Girls, look to the little details. Look to the stockings, as your audiences do, and you will see how it is yourselves.
Last Wednesday the bell to our telephone rung violently at 8 o’clock in the morning, and when we put our ear to the earaphone, and our mouth to the mouthaphone, and asked what was the matter, a still small voice, evidently that of a lady, said, “Julia has got worms, doctor.”
We were somewhat taken back, but supposing Julia was going fishing, we were just going to tell her not to forget to spit on her bait, when a male voice said, “O, go to the devil, will you?” We couldn’t tell whose voice it was, but it sounded like the clerk at the Plankinton House, and we sat down.
There is no man who will go further to accommodate a friend than we will, but by the great ethereal there are some things we will not do to please anybody. As we sat and meditated, the bell rung once more, and then we knew the wires had got tangled, and that we were going to have trouble all day. It was a busy day, too, and to have a bell ringing beside one’s ear all day is no fun.
The telephone is a blessed thing when it is healthy, but when its liver is out of order it is the worst nuisance on record. When it is out of order that way you can hear lots of conversation that you are not entitled to. For instance, we answered the bell after it had rung several times, and a sweet little female voice said, “Are you going to receive to-morrow?” We answered that we were going to receive all the time. Then she asked what made us so hoarse? We told her that we had sat in a draft from the bank, and it made the cold chills run over us to pay it. That seemed to be satisfactory, and then she began to tell us what she was going to wear, and asked if we thought it was going to be too cold to wear a low neck dress and elbow sleeves. We told her that was what we were going to wear, and then she began to complain that her new dress was too tight in various places that she mentioned, and when the boys picked us up off the floor and bathed our temples, and we told them to take her away, they thought we were crazy.
If we have done wrong in talking with a total stranger, who took us for a lady friend, we are willing to die. We couldn’t help it. For an hour we would not answer the constant ringing of the bell, but finally the bell fluttered as though a tiny bird had lit upon the wire and was shaking its plumage. It was not a ring, but it was a tune, as though an angel, about eighteen years old, a blonde angel, was handling the other end of the transmitter, and we felt as though it was wrong for us to sit and keep her in suspense, when she was evidently dying to pour into our auricular appendage remarks that we ought to hear.
And still the bell did flut. We went to the cornucopia, put our ear to the toddy stick and said, “What ailest thou darling, why dost thy hand tremble? Whisper all thou feelest to thine old baldy.” Then there came over the wire and into our mansard by a side window the following touching remarks: “Matter enough. I have been ringing here till I have blistered my hands. We have got to have ten car loads of hogs by day after to-morrow or shut down.” Then there was a stuttering, and then another voice said, “Go over to Loomis’ pawn shop. A man shot in”—and another voice broke in, singing, “The sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful”—and another voice said—“girl I ever saw. She was riding with a duffer, and wiped her nose as I drove by in the street car, and I think she is struck after me.”
It was evident that the telephone was drunk, and we went out in the hall and wrote on a barrel all the afternoon, and gave it full possession of the office.
Mr. Peck was recently extended an invitation to be present at a meeting of the Iowa Commercial Travelers’ Association, at Des Moines, and respond to the toast: “Our Wives and Sweethearts, and Little Ones at Home.” He couldn’t be present, but he responded all the same, in the following manner:
“That is the sweetest toast that man was ever called upon to respond to. Very few traveling men who have good wives, loving sweethearts, and dear little children at home, sending loving messages to them, often ever stray very far from the straight and narrow path. There is no class of men on earth that has greater temptations and better opportunities to be ‘cusses on wheels’ than the traveling men of the Northwest; and when I say that they stand up under it a confounded sight better than the same number of ministers or editors would, I don’t want you to think I am giving you any confectionery from my sample case.
“Through snows of winter, mud of spring and fall, and heat of summer, the traveling man makes his connections and sends in his orders, and seems to enjoy religion with the best of them. But the happiest days for him and the shortest are those he spends at home with his wife, the children or sweet-heart. There can be more tears brought to the eyes of the traveling man by a little child putting its arms around his neck and saying, ‘My dear, precious papa,’ than could be brought out by any other press I know of, however powerful.
“I know there is occasionally a traveling man who always has his sign out ready to be mashed, but he never neglects his business for any foolish-ness. He would leave the finest country flirt that ever winked a wink to sell a bill of brown sugar on sixty days’ time.
“It is said that the average traveling man will keep a whole seat in a car, and never offer to give half of it to a man, when, if a handsome woman comes in, he will fly around and divide with her. Well, who the deuce wouldn’t? That shows that his heart is in the right place. A man can go into the smoking car and sit on the wood box, but a woman has got to sit down, at least that is the way I should explain it.
“Boys, may the trips become shorter each year, and the visits to the dear ones at home be extended, so that in time you may be detailed to stay at home always, with an increase of salary or an interest in the business; and, I am sure, when the time comes you will be the happiest fellows that ever had thousand mile tickets punched, and when your time comes to attend the grand banquet above, and you appear before St. Peter at the gate, and begin to open up your samples, he will simply look at your business card and turn to the clerk and say, ‘Give these boys all front rooms, and see that there is a fire escape and plenty of towels, and that the rooms are aired, and then step down to the box office and reserve them some seats for the sacred concert this evening. Pass right in now and get a check for your overshoes.’”
Sometimes our heart bleeds for actors and actresses, when we think what they have to go through with. The other night at Watertown, N. Y., Miss Ada Gray was playing “Camille,” and in the dying scene, where she breathes her last, to slow music, an accident occurred which broke her all up. She was surrounded by sorrowing friends, who were trying to do everything to make it pleasant for her, when the bed on which she was dying,—an impromptu sort of a bed got up by the stage carpenter,—tipped partly over, and the dying woman rolled over on the stage, tipped over a wash-stand filled with tumblers and bottles of medicine, and raised a deuce of a row. It would have been all right, and she could have propped the bed up and proceeded with her dying, had not the actress got rattled.
Most actresses get lost entirely when anything occurs that is not in the play, and Miss Gray was the scaredest female that ever lived. She thought it was a judgment on her for playing a dying character, and thought the whole theatre had been struck by lightning, and was going to fall down. To save herself was her first thought, so she grabbed her night-dress,—which was embroidered up and down the front, and had point lace on the yoke of the sleeves,—in both hands and started for the orchestra, the wildest corpse that ever lived.
The leader of the orchestra caught her, but not being an undertaker he did not undertake to hold her, and she fell over the bass viol and run one foot through the snare drum, and grasping the fiddle for a life-preserver she jumped into the raging scenery-back of the stage which represented a sea.
They had to pull her out with boat-hooks, and it was half an hour before she could be induced to go to bed again and proceed with her dying.
Actresses are often annoyed at the remarks made by foolish fellows in the audience. A remark by a person in the audience always causes people to laugh, whether the speaker says anything smart or not.
Recently, in the play of “Cinderella at School,” a girl came out with a sheet over her, as a ghost, to frighten a young fellow who was “mashed” on her. He looked at the ghost for a moment, and kept on lighting his cigarette, when a galloot up in the gallery said, so everybody could hear it, “He don’t scare worth a damn!” and the audience went fairly wild, while the pretty girl stood there and blushed as though her heart would break.
Such things are wrong.
Probably one of the meanest tricks that was ever, played was played on Mary Anderson. It will be remembered that in the play of “Ingomar,” Parthenia and the barbarian have several love scenes, where they lop on each other and hug some—that is, not too much hugging, but just hugging enough. Ingomar wears a huge fur garment, made of lion’s skin, or something. One day he noticed that the moths were getting into it, and he told his servant to see about the moths, and drive them out. The servant got some insect powder and blowed the hair of the garment full of it, and scrubbed the inside of it with benzine.
Ingomar put it on just before he went on the stage, and thought it didn’t smell just right, but he had no time to inquire into it. He had not got fairly in his position, before Parthenia came out on a hop, skip and jump, and threw herself all over him. She got one lung full of insect powder, and the other full of benzine, and as she said, “Wilt always love me, Ingomar?” she dropped her head over his shoulder, and said in an aside, “For the love of heaven, what have you been drinking?” and then sneezed a couple times.
Ingomar held her up the best he could, considering that his nose was full of insect powder, and he answered:
“I wilt “: and then he said to her quietly:
“Damfino what it is that smells so!”
They went on with the play between sneezes, and when the curtain went down she told Ingomar to go out and shake himself, which he did.
It was noticed in the next act that Ingomar had a linen duster on, and Mary snoze no more.
There was another mean trick played on a comedian a short time ago. In one of the plays he comes into a room as a tramp, and asks for something to drink. There is nothing to drink, and he asks if he may drink the kerosene in the lamp, which is on the table unlighted. The lamp has been filled with beer, and when he is told that he can slake his thirst at the lamp, he unscrews the top, takes out the wick, and drinks the contents. Everybody laughs, and the idea is a good one.
At Chicago, recently, some friend took out the beer and filled the lamp with a liquid of the same color, but the most sickish tasting stuff that ever was. The comedian drank about three swallows of the neatsfoot oil before he got onto the joke, and then he flew around like a dog that had been poisoned, and went off the stage saying something like “Noo Yoick.”
He has agreed to kill the fellow that loaded that lamp for him.
The time for getting to the Michigan Central depot at Chicago was so limited that no regularly prepared supper could be secured, and so it was necessary to take a sandwich at the central depot. There has been great improvement made in the sandwiches furnished in Chicago, in the last ten years. In 1870 it was customary to encase the sandwiches in pressed sole leather. The leather was prepared by a process only known to a Prussian, and the bread and ham were put in by hydraulic pressure, and the hole soldered up.
About four years ago, the Prussian who had the secret said something unkind to a pitcher of a baseball club, and the pitcher took up one of the sandwiches and pitched it curved at the Prussian’s eye. His funeral was quite largely attended, considering that he was a man who was retiring, and who made few acquaintances; but the secret of making the soles and uppers of railroad sandwiches died with him.
It was about this time that corrugated iron shutters were invented, and that material was at once utilized to make lids for sandwiches, while the under jaw of the appetite-destroying substance was made of common building paper, the whole-varnished with neats foot oil, and kiln dried in a lime kiln.
Our object in eating one of the sandwiches, was to transfer, if possible, the headache to the stomach, on the principle that the quack doctor cured a patient of paralysis by throwing him into fits, claiming that he was not much on paralysis, but he was hell on fits. The entrance of the piece of sandwich into the stomach—that is, the small pieces that we were able to blast off with the imperfect appliances at hand in the tool box of a wrecking car—was signaled by the worst rebellion that has been witnessed in this country since 1860. The stomach, liver, lungs, spleen and other patent insides got up an indignation meeting, with the stomach in the chair. In calling the meeting to order the stomach said unaccustumed as it was to public speaking, it felt as though the occasion demanded a protest, and that in no uncertain tone, against the habit the boss had of slinging anything into the stomach that came in his way, without stopping to consider the effect on the internals.
The chair remarked that it had heretofore had a good many hard doses to take, notably, army bacon, and later some black bread that the boss had shoved in while hunting out in Minnesota in 1876, and again last year when a pan full of beans from Bill Wall’s Wolf river boom boarding house was sent down without any introduction, the stomach said it had felt like throwing up the “sponge,” and drawing out of the game, but it had thought better of it, and had gone on trying to digest things till now. But this last outrage, this Chicago sandwich, was too much.
“See here,” says the stomach, holding up a piece of the iron lid of the sandwich so the liver could see it, “what kind of a junk shop does he take this place for?”
The liver got the floor and suggested that the stomach was making a terrible fuss about a little thing, and told the stomach it had evidently forgotten the good things that had been sent down from above in times gone by.
“You seem to forget,” says the liver, becoming warmed up, “the banquets the boss never fails to attend, the nice dinners he sometimes gets at home, and the wild canvas-back duck he sends down when he goes to Lake Koshkonong, as well as the Palmer House dinners that occasionally surprise us. I move that the stomach be reprimanded for kicking and trying to get up a muss, and that this meeting adjourn and we all go about our business.”
The stomach tried to get in a word edgewise, but it was of no use, and the thing was about to break up in a row, when we went to sleep in one of the elegant Michigan Central sleepers, and in the morning the stomach was coaxing for something more, and didn’t seem to care what it was.
No young man should ever take two girls to a picnic. We don’t care how attractive the girls are, or how enterprising a boy is, or how expansive or far-reaching a mind he has, he cannot do justice to the subject if he has two girls. There will be a clashing of interests that no young boy in his goslinghood, as most boys are when they take two girls to a picnic, has the diplomacy to prevent.
If we start the youth of the land out right in the first place, they will be all right, but if they start out by taking two girls to a picnic their whole lives are liable to become acidulated, and they will grow up hating themselves.
If a young man is good natured and tries to do the fair thing, and a picnic is got up, there is always some old back number of a girl who has no fellow who wants to go, and the boys, after they all get girls and buggies engaged, will canvass among themselves to see who will take this extra girl, and it always falls to this good natured young man. He says of course there is room for three in the buggy.
Sometimes he thinks maybe this old girl can be utilized to drive the horse, and then he can converse with his own sweet girl with both hands, but in such a moment as ye think not he finds that the extra girl is afraid of horses, dare not drive, and really requires some holding to keep her nerves quiet. He tries to drive with one hand and console his good girl, who is a little cross at the turn affairs have taken, with the other, but it is a failure, and finally his good girl says she will drive, and then he has to put an arm around them both, which gives more or less dissatisfaction the best way you can fix it.
If we had a boy who didn’t seem to have any more sense than to make a hat rack of himself to hang girls on in a buggy, we should labor with him and tell him of the agonies we had experienced in youth when the boys palmed off two girls on us to take to a country picnic, and we believe we can do no greater favor to the young men just entering the picnic of life than to impress upon them the importance of doing one thing at a time, and doing it well.
A young couple from Green county stopped at a Janesville hotel on their wedding tour, and when they went to bed they were in a hurry and blew out the gas instead of turning it off. In the night a terrible smell was heard around the house, and suspicion naturally pointed to the bridal chamber. The door was pounded on but there was no response, and the people feared the young folks had gone to heaven, so the door was broken down. They had not gone to heaven, but they were both senseless, and were dragged out into the open air, with little ceremony and less clothes. They were brought out of the stupor, when they looked at each other in a reproachful manner, and as they pulled on their clothes they each acted as though if they had known the horrors of married life they would have remained single all their lives.
The Duchess of Marlborough, who has charge of the fund that is being distributed to certain portions of Ireland’s suffering poor, has issued a circular pitching into Parnell and others for claiming that she is acting in the interest of the English landlords. She closes her circular as follows:
There is nothing that strikes me with more admiration than the generosity of the British nation. I have innumerable letters, all expressing good will and compassion for the calamities which a series of bad seasons have brought to the west of Ireland.
To the family that is suffering for the necessaries of life, that would look upon a large sized potato as a bonanza, there is nothing that is pleasanter than to read a letter from an Englishman expressing compassion. How it tones up the stomach to read of the good will that, by a large majority, occupies the heart of the Briton who writes the letter to the Duchess of Marlborough.
You take two plates, and put on one of them the letters expressing good will and compassion, and on the other plate you put some of the food sent by Americans, and offer the two plates to an Irish mother whose famishing children are tugging at her scanty skirts, and let her take her choice. How her trembling hand would clutch the plate containing the letters of compassion. Eh? She wouldn’t take that plate, do you say? She would take the plate with the good, honest, star-spangled food on it, eh? O, you are mistaken. There is so much sustenance and warmth in a letter of compassion, that the famine stricken person would no doubt take it and make soup of it.
But if you think she wouldn’t we won’t argue the case. However, you will admit that the Irish are very queer, and if they went back on their English benefactors and took the rebellious American food, they would be guilty of treason, of course you will. We are not astonished that there is nothing that Strikes the Duchess with more admiration than the generosity of the British nation. It is the most remarkable thing we ever heard of.
Every day we see that some new avenue has been opened to women, by which they can earn a livelihood. We see by the papers that a woman in Cleveland has been arrested as a burglar. We have no objections to female pickpockets, for if a man must have his pockets picked, it will be much more enjoyable to feel the delicate hand of a beautiful woman fluttering around his pockets than a rough male hand.
Many a man who would object to having his pockets picked by a man, would be willing to lose ten or fifteen dollars just to have a female pickpocket go through him.
There is a field open for women as confidence men. To have a female confidence game played on a man would leave less of a sting than to be bilked by a male. But, as burglars, the idea seems revolting. To think of women going about nights with a jimmy and a dark lantern, and opening doors, or windows, and sneaking about rooms, is degrading. If a male burglar gets in your house, and he is discovered, you can shoot him, if you get the drop on him, or kick him down stairs; but who wants to shoot a female burglar, or kick her over the banisters? It would be unnatural. You would almost rather let her go ahead and burgle, and let her go away with your money, than to shoot her.
Besides, you could not hit her with a bullet from an ordinary pistol in a vital part. The heart and other vital organs are covered with bullet-proof corsets, liver and lung pads and porous plasters. You take a corset and tie it around a sack of flour, and try to fire a bullet through it, and you will find that the bullet will fall to the ground. Try to fire a ball through a bed quilt, and you will discover that the ball becomes wound and twisted in the cotton batting, from the rifling of the barrel of the pistol, and stops as it goes through.
A liver pad is as good as boiler iron to protect the form, so you see there is no place to shoot a female burglar, except in the head and legs. No gentleman would want to shoot a beautiful woman in the face, and with a long dress on he might as well shut his eyes and shoot at a hop-yard, and expect to hit a pole, as to expect to hit a woman’s leg.
So it is seen plainly that a female burglar would be perfectly safe from a pistol shot.
Then, again, the natural gallantry of a man would prevent his making much of a fuss if he found a female burglar in his house. If the average man—and most men are average men—should wake up in the night and see a woman burglar feeling in his pants, rifling the pockets, or rummaging in the drawers of the bureau, he would lay still and let her burgle, as long as she would keep still and not wake up his wife. Were it a male burglar, he would jump up, regardless of his nocturnal costume, and tell him to get out of there, but he would hesitate to get up before a female burglar. He would not feel like accosting the female burglar without an introduction. If he spoke to her familiarly, she would be justified in being indignant, and saying, “Sir, I do not remember that we have ever met before,” and very likely she would turn her back on him, and say she was insulted.
It places a man of gallantry in a very embarrassing situation to have a female burglar rob his house because he would be no gentleman if he did not offer to see her safe home. No true gentleman would like to see a female burglar go home alone at three or four o’clock in the morning, and while he might feel the loss of his property, it would be courtesy for him to offer to see her home, and help carry the swag.
If women become burglars, there is going to be more or less annoyance.
We are sorry to see so many of the humorous papers find any fun in the incident of the girl at Keokuk who was hugged to death by her lover. He had proposed to her, in her father’s parlor, and she had accepted him, and in a moment of ecstacy he hugged her to his breast, and she died at once. The young man was horror stricken, and called her parents. It is supposed that she died of heart disease. The case was very sad, indeed, and papers should not make fun of an occurrence that brings so much sadness.
However, while this case is fresh in the minds of old and young, we will embrace the opportunity, and embrace it gently, for fear we will kill it, to again impress upon young people what we have so often advised, and that is to be unusually careful about how they hug girls. Many a young man hugs a girl almost to death, and he never knows how near he comes to being a murderer.
Girls now-a-days are not what they used to be when you and I were young, Maggie. They cannot stand as much grief now as girls did twenty years ago. Somehow, they don’t seem to be put up for hugging. If a man puts his arm around a seven-teen-year-old girl of the present day, and sort of closes in on the belt, he expects to hear something break. Many a humane man lets go before he has got a girl half hugged because the girl looks so frail that he is afraid he will break her in two.
Of course there are exceptions to the frail girls, but the majority are too much like a bundle of asparagus. Some of the girls of the present day are robust, and seem to be offended if a person lets up on the hugging on their account, and it is said they hug back with a vigor which reminds a man of the days of long ago, but they are few and far between.
Too much care cannot be exercised in putting arms around the young girls of to-day, and we would wish to impress this fact upon the minds of the young men who are just coming upon the stage of action. Of course, men along in years do not need advice. The boys are apt to put more force into the right arm than they are aware of, a hundred per cent, more than they would be apt to do in sawing wood, or in carrying up a scuttle of coal.
They should bear in mind that girls are too valuable to be used in developing the muscles, as you would a gymnasium. You don’t have to squeeze a girl till her liver is forced from its normal position, and she chokes and catches her breath, to show her that you love her. A gentle squeeze of the hand, the stealing of the arm around her waist when she is not looking, and the least pressure upon her belt is all that the law requires.
She can tell by your face whether you love her, as you sit there in the twilight looking into the guiding star eyes, as well as though you grabbed her as you would a sack of wheat, and hung on like a dog to a root.
Anna Dickinson is going upon the stage again and is to play male characters, such as “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and “Claude Melnotte.” We have insisted for years that Anna Dickinson was a man, and we dare anybody to prove to the contrary.
There is one way to settle this matter, and that is when she plays Hamlet. Let the stage manager put a large spider in the skull of Yorick, and when Hamlet takes up the skull and says, “Alas, poor Yorick, I was pretty solid with him,” let the spider crawl out of one of the eye holes onto Hamlet’s hand, and proceed to walk up Miss Dickinson’s sleeve. If Hamlet simply shakes the spider off, and goes on with the funeral, unconcerned, then Miss Dickinson is a man. But if Hamlet screams bloody murder, throws the skull at the grave digger, falls over into the grave, tears his shirt, jumps out of the grave and shakes his imaginary skirts, gathers them all up in his hands and begins to climb up the scenes like a Samantha cat chased by a dog, and gets on top of the first fly and raises Hamlet’s back and spits, then Miss Dickinson is a woman. The country will watch eagerly for the result of the test, which we trust will be made at the Boston Theatre next week.
It pains us to announce that the Young Men’s Christian Association, which has had rooms on two sides of our office for more than a year, has moved away. We do not know why they moved, as we have tried to do everything that it was possible to do for their comfort, and to cheer them in their lonely life. That their proximity to the Sun office has been beneficial to them we are assured, and the closeness has not done us any hurt as we know of. Many times when something has happened that, had it happened in La Crosse, might have caused us to be semi-profane, instead of giving way to the fiery spirit within us, and whooping it up, we have thought of our neighbors who were truly good, and have turned the matter over to our business manager, who would do the subject justice or burst a flue.
When the young Christians have given a sociable, we have always put on a resigned and pious expression and gone amongst them about the time the good bald-headed brother brought up the pail full of coffee, and the cheerful sister cut the cake.
No one has been more punctual at these free feeds than we have, though we have often noticed that we never got a fair divide of the cake that was left, when they were dividing it up to carry home for the poor. We have been as little annoyed by our neighbors as we could have been by anybody that might have occupied the rooms.
It is true that at times the singing of a church tune in there when we were writing a worldly editorial has caused us to get tangled, but the piety that we have smuggled into our readers through the church music will more than atone for the wrath we have felt at the discordant music, and we have hopes the good brothers will not be averse to saying a good word for us when they feel like it.
When we lent the young Christians our sanctum as a reception room for the ladies when they gave the winter picnic to the dry goods clerks, we did feel a little hurt at finding so many different kinds of hair pins on the carpet the next morning, and the different colors of long hair on our plush chairs and raw silk ottoman would have been a dead give away on any other occasion, but for this, even, we have forgiven the young Christians, though if we ever do so again they have got to agree to comb the lounge and the chairs before we shall ever occupy the rooms again.
There is nothing that is so hard to explain as a long hair of another color, or hair pins and blue bows, and pieces of switch. They are gone, and we miss them. No more shall we hear the young Christian slip up on the golden stairs and roll down with his boot heel pointing heavenward, while the wail of a soul in anguish comes over the banisters, and the brother puts his hand on his pistol pocket and goes out the front door muttering a silent prayer, with blood in his eyes.
No more will the young Christian faint by the wayside as he brings back our borrowed chairs and finds a bottle and six glasses on our center table, when he has been importuning us to deliver a temperance speech in his lecture room. Never again shall we witness the look of agony on the face of the good brother when we refuse to give five dollars towards helping discharged criminals to get a soft thing, while poor people who never committed a crime and have never been supported by the State are amongst us feeling the pangs of hunger. No more shall we be compelled to watch the hard looking citizens who frequent the reading room of the association for fear they will enter our office in the still watches of the night and sleep on the carpet with their boots on.
They are all gone. They have gone across the beautiful river, and have camped near the Christian Statesman office, where all is pure and good except the houses over on Second street, beyond the livery stable, where they never will be molested if they do not go there.
Will they be treated any better in their new home than they have been with us? Will they have that confidence in their new neighbors that they have always seemed to have in us? Well, we hope they may be always happy, and continue to do good, and when they come to die and go to St. Peter’s gate, if there is any back talk, and they have any trouble about getting in, the good old doorkeeper is hereby assured that we will vouch for the true goodness and self-sacrificing devotion of the Milwaukee Young Men’s Christian association, and he is asked to pass them in and charge it up to the Sun.
One of those Fourth of July accidents that are always looked for but seldom occur, happened at Racine, Monday night, which struck terror to the hearts and other portions of the bodies of many eminent citizens, and that none were killed we can all thank Providence, who tempers the fire-works to the sweaty citizen in his shirt sleeves. The enterprising citizens had contributed a large sum of money, which had been judiciously expended in all kinds of fire-works, and one side of the public square was given up to the display.
Thousands of citizens had gathered there, from city and country, and bright Roman candles shone o’er fair men and brave women, and sixteen thousand nine hundred and twelve hearts beat happy, while music arose with its voluptuous swell, and soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, or words to that effect. At least that was what a young fellow from Racine told us, who was there to see a specialist to have a splinter from a rocket stick removed from his ear.
A few pieces had been shot off, a few bunches of crackers had had their tails tied together and been hung over a wire clothes line, like cats, to fight it out, and the crowd was holding its breath for the next boom, when there was an explosion; the earth seemed to tremble, and the air was full of all kinds of fire-works. The whole supply of fire-works had become ignited, and were blowing off where they listeth, without regard to anybody’s feelings.
The crowd became panic stricken, and there never was another such a scene, and never will be until the last great day, when a few thousand people suddenly find that they have got into hell, by mistake, when they thought they were ticketed through to the other place. It was perfectly awful. Prominent citizens who usually display great pluck, became fearfully rattled.
A man named Martindale, a railroad man who weighs over two hundred pounds, was standing near a telegraph pole, and as the firing commenced he climbed up the pole as easy as a squirrel would climb a tree, and when it was over they had to get a fire ladder to get him down, as his pants had got caught over the glass telegraph knob, and he had forgotten the combination, and besides he said he didn’t want to take off his clothes up there and come down, even if it was dark, because it would be just his luck to have some one fire off a Roman candle when he got down.
The Hon. Norton J. Field was another man who lost his nerve. He was explaining to some ladies one of the pieces that was to be fired off, which was an allegorical picture representing the revolution, when the whole business blew up. He thought at the time, that the explosion was in the programme, and was just reassuring the ladies, by telling them it reminded him of battle scenes he had witnessed when he was on the military committee in the assembly, when he noticed a girl near him whose polonaise had caught fire, and he rushed up to her, caught her by the dress, intending, with his cool hands, to put out the fire.
The girl felt some one feeling, as she supposed, for her pocket-book, and she started to run, yelling, “pickpocket,” and left the burning polonaise in Mr. Field’s hands. He blushed, and was about to explain to his lady friends how the best of us are liable to have our motives misconstrued, when somebody threw a box of four dozen of those large firecrackers right at his feet, and they were all on fire. Ten of them exploded at once, and he grabbed the polonaise in one hand and his burning coat tail in the other, and started West on a run.
The steward of the Gideon’s Band Club House, at Burlington, said he arrived there at daylight on the morning of the 5th, and he still held the pieces of dress, but the whole back of his coat was burned off, and his suspenders just held by a thread. He said the comet struck the earth at Racine, at 9:30 the night before, and knocked the town into the lake, and he and another fellow were all that escaped.
The narrowest escape was that of young Mr. Oberman. He is a small man, all except his heart and feet, and when the air began to fill with patriotic missiles, he started to run. On passing the News office he had to jump over the old coal stove that stood there, and while he was in the air, six feet from the sidewalk, a sky rocket stick passed through his coat tail and pinned him to the building, where he hung suspended, while other rocket sticks were striking all around him, Roman candle colored balls were falling on his unprotected head, etc., and one of these nigger chasers, that run all over the ground, climbed up the side of the building and tried to get in his pants pocket.
Mr. Oberman begged Mr. Wright, the postmaster, to cut him down, but Mr. Wright, who was using both hands and his voice trying to disengage a package of pin-wheels from the back portion of his coat, which were on fire and throwing out colored sparks, said he hadn’t got time, as he was going down to the river to take a sitz bath for his health.
The man that keeps the hotel next door to the News office came out with a pail of water, yelled “fire,” and threw the water on Mr. Curt Treat’s head. Mr. Treat was very much vexed, and told the hotel man if he couldn’t tell the difference between an auburn haired young man and a pin-wheel, he’d better go and hire somebody that could. Friends of Mr. Treat say that he would be justified in going into the hotel and ordering a bottle of pop, and then refusing to pay for it, as the water took all the starch out of his shirt.
Those who saw the explosion say it was one of the most magnificent, yet awful and terrible sights ever witnessed, and the only wonder is that somebody was not hurt. What added to the terror of the scene was when they went to the artesian well to get water to put out the fire and found that the well had ceased flowing. On investigation they found that Mr. Sage, the Assemblyman, had crawled into the pipe.
By the way, Mr. Oberman finally got down from his terrible position by the aid of the editor of the Journal, to whom Mr. Oberman promised coal enough to run his engine for a year. Very few men displayed any coolness except Mr. Treat and Mr. Sage.
An exchange has the following item which may seem all right, but it will get some young fellow’s back broke yet:
“An Illinois justice has decided that courting is a public necessity, and must not be interrupted; therefore, if a young man wanted to kiss a girl he might put her father out of the room first if he liked.”
The publication of the above may cause some smart youth to do something he will regret. The lame, sickly-looking father of a girl may come into the parlor some night and find the warm-haired youth on the sofa with the girl, and when the old man speaks of it being time to stop such nonsense, the young man, with this judicial decision in his mind, will tell his prospective father-in-law to wipe off his vest and go to bed.
The old man will spit on his hands and grasp the warm-haired young man by the county seat and tie him up in a double bow knot, and pin a scarf on him, and throw him out on the path to the gate, and then he will turn and slap the girl across where the dress is plaited, and she will go up stairs with her hand on her heart, as it were, and the old man will jump up and say “Whoop?”
The young men of this country have got gall enough about visiting girls in the evening at their homes without filling their heads with any such ideas in regard to their legal rights. There are very few fathers who would quietly submit to being told to go away by a youth with a striped neck tie and pants too short at the bottom.
These sparkers are looked upon by parents generally as a nuisance, and often they are right. Nine-tenths of the sparking is done by boys who haven’t got their growth, and they look so green that it is laughable for old folks to look at them. They haven’t generally got a second shirt, and they are no more qualified to get married than a steer is to preach. And yet marrying is about the first thing they think of.
A green boy, without a dollar, present or prospective, sparking a girl regularly and talking of marrying is a spectacle for gods and men. He should be reasoned with, and if he will not quit it until he is able to support a wife, and to know who he loves, and the difference between love and passion, he should be quarantined or put in a convent erected on purpose for such cases.
Nine-tenths of the unhappy marriages are the result of green human calves being allowed to run at large in the society pasture without any pokes on them. They marry and have children before they do moustaches; they are fathers of twins before they are proprietors of two pairs of pants, and the little girls they marry are old women before they are twenty years old. Occasionally one of these gosling marriages turns out all right, but it is a clear case of luck.
If there was a law against young galoots sparking and marrying before they have all their teeth cut, we suppose the little cusses would evade it some way, but there ought to be a sentiment against it. It is time enough for these bantams to think of finding a pullet when they have raised money enough by their own work to buy a bundle of laths to build a hen house. But they see a girl who looks cunning, and they are afraid there is not going to be girls enough to go around, and they begin their work real spry; and before they are aware of the sanctity of the marriage relation, they are hitched for life, and before they own a cook-stove or a bedstead they have to get up in the night and go for a doctor, so frightened that they run themselves out of breath and abuse the doctor because he does not run too; and when the doctor gets there he finds that there is not enough linen in the house to wrap up a doll baby.
It is about this time that a young man begins to realize that he has been a colossal fool, as he flies around to heat water and bring in the bath tub, and as he goes whooping after his mother or her mother, he turns pale around the gills, his hair turns red in a single night, and he calls high heaven to witness that if he lives till morning, which he has doubts about, he will turn over a new leaf and never get married again until he is older. And in the morning the green-looking “father” is around before a drug store is open, with no collar on, his hair sticking every way, his eyes blood-shot and his frame nervous, waiting for the clerk to open the door so he can get some saffron to make tea of.
Less than a year ago he thought he was the greatest man there was anywhere, but he sits there in the house that morning, with his wedding coat rusty and shiny, his pants frayed at the bottom and patched in the seat, and the nurse puts in his arm a little bundle of flannel with a baby hid in it, and he holds it as he would a banana, and as he looks at his girl wife on the bed, nearly dead from pain and exhaustion, and he thinks that there are not provisions enough in the house to feed a canary, a lump comes in his throat and he says to himself that if he had it to do over again he would leave that little girl at home with her mother; and he would, till he had six dollars to buy baby flannel and ten dollars to pay the doctor.
The fashion papers, which are authority on the styles, claim that ladies with large mouths are all the fashion now, and that those whose mouths are small and rosebud-like are all out of style. It is singular the freaks that are taken by fashion. Years ago a red-headed girl, with a mouth like a slice cut out of a muskmelon, would have been laughed at, and now such a girl is worth going miles to see.
It is easier to color the hair red, and be in fashion, than it is to enlarge the mouth, though a mouth that has any give to it can be helped by the constant application of a glove stretcher during the day, and by holding the cover to a tin blacking box while sleeping. What in the world the leaders of fashion wanted to declare large mouths the style for, the heavens only can tell.
Take a pretty face and mortise about a third of it for mouth, and it seems to us as though it is a great waste of raw material. There is no use that a large mouth can be put to that a small mouth would not do better, unless it is used for a pigeon hole to file away old sets of false teeth. They can’t, certainly, be any better for kissing.
You all remember the traveling man who attended the church fair at Kalamazoo, where one of the sisters would give a kiss for ten cents. He went up and paid his ten cents, and was about to kiss her when he noticed that her mouth was one of those large, open face, cylinder escapement, to be continued mouths. It commenced at the chin and went about four chains and three links in a northwesterly direction, then around by her ear, across under the nose and back by the other ear to the place of beginning, and containing twelve acres, more or less.
The traveling man said he was only a poor orphan, and had a family to support, and if he never came out alive it would be a great hardship upon those dependent upon him for support, and he asked her as a special favor that she take her hand and take a reef in one side of the mouth so it would be smaller. She consented, and puckered in a handful of what would have been cheek, had it not been mouth. He looked at her again and found that the mouth had become a very one-sided affair, and he said he had just one more favor to ask.
He was not a man that was counted hard to suit when he was at home in Chicago, but he would always feel as though he had got his money’s worth, and go away with pleasanter recollections of Kalamazoo, if she would kindly take her other hand and draw the other side of her mouth together, and he would be content to take his ten cents’ worth out of what was left unemployed.
This was too much, and she gave him a terrible look, and returned him his ten cents, saying, “Do you think, sir, because you are a Chicago drummer, that for ten cents you can take a kiss right out of the best part of it? Go! Get thee to a nunnery,” and he went and bought a lemonade with the money.
We would not advise any lady whose mouth is small to worry about this new fashion, and try to enlarge the one nature has given her. Large mouths will have their run in a few brief months and will be much sought after by the followers of fashion, but in a short time the little ones that pout, and look cunning, will come to the front and the large ones will be for rent. The best kind of a mouth to have is a middling sized one, that has a dimple by its sides, which is always in style.
It is painful to read the remarks made by some of the papers in regard to the wicked stories told about a minister named Atwater, up in Dunn county, who was walking in the woods with a young lady. Some editors would believe anything that was told of a minister, if they knew it was untrue.
The truth of the matter seems to be that the elder called to visit a Miss Northrop, a member of his church, who taught school at Knapp. She seemed to have something on her mind, which she wanted to unfold to him, and as there were other people in the house where she boarded, it was suggested that they walk up a hill, into a piece of woods, where they could talk more freely.
They started out, and a lot of saw mill hands saw them, and immediately concluded that something was wrong, and after the truly good people had got into the brush the men followed. How natural it is for bad men to think there is something wrong, where two persons of the opposite sex are congregated together. The elder and the schoolma’am went in the grubs and sat down on a log, and there she unfolded to him her tale of woe.
It appears that she had violated one of the rules of the church by dancing, and she felt that she ought to confess, and did confess. She cried like a child, and seemed to be weak, and the elder put his arm around her to keep her from falling off the log. Everybody knows how easy it is to roll off a log, if they are not looking, and any man that wouldn’t put his arm around a girl, to keep her from falling off a log, would be a fool whom it would be base flattery to call another.
She continued to weep—even the girl admits that—and he put his hand up to her forehead and stroked her hair, and told her to be calm, and her head may have fallen upon his breast. The number of heads that wouldn’t, under the circumstances, are mighty few. She was overcome with grief and he with pity, and he tried to show her that if she braced up and tried to lead a different life, and shook the dancing hall and the wicked people who would put their arms around her, she might yet be saved.
One can imagine that he was displeased at her going into a giddy throng, to be hugged in plain sight, to the music of a band, and pointed out to her how much more beautiful it would be to go into the woods, on a log.
He had, it is alleged, got through soothing her, and she was about to wipe her nose on her handkerchief, and he was about to remove his arm from about her waist, when those wicked and perverse men from the saw mill came whooping into the thicket where they sat, looking for a mooley cow with one horn broke.
Now, the elder and the girl knew in a moment that they were not looking for a mooley cow, but that they were scoffers, and when they asked the elder if he had seen such an animal, he rose up with much dignity, buttoned up his coat, and in a pious manner said that he had not seen the cow. He did not upbraid them for breaking into the solitude of the sacred confessional, looking for a mooley cow, but seemed to act the perfect gentleman all the way through.
Nothing had transpired that might not have transpired in a parlor, if there had not been so many people in the house, and yet these illiterate and ungodly saw mill hands went off and told a story that would make angels blush. It is possible that the elder did wrong in not offering to go with them and look for the mooley cow, but we should not chide him for that. He probably had not time to take up a collection of his thoughts, and no doubt after he thought it over he was sorry he did not offer his services to them as a herder of mooley cows, but it was then everlastingly too late.
They had gone and told the old, old story, and nothing remained to be done but to call a church meeting, which was done, and the elder and the girl were acquitted of any wrong doing. This was right. If men are to be deposed from the ministry for sitting down on a log and consoling a female parishioner, what is to become of the world?
We don’t believe the elder had any wrong motive, or that a thought entered his head that might not have entered any man’s head under the circumstances. And yet it was unfortunate, it is so confounded hard to explain what they walked a mile for to get into the woods where there was a log.
Geo. W. Peck, of Peck’s Sun, knows more about the harmful hammock, both by experience and observation, than any other man in America. His testimony runs as follows:
A young couple who were sitting in a hammock at one of the watering places in this State were severely injured by tipping over backwards and striking on the cheek of a head waiter. There is something about a hammock that is indescribable, and there is no rule that can be made that will insure safety while sitting in one of the queer things. There are people who believe that a hammock understands what is going on, and occasionally indulges in a joke.
It is certain that an old person with a lame back can swing in a hammock half the day and it will never kick up. Servant girls and children can get in a hammock as thick as three in a bed and there is no danger, but let a spoony young couple sit down in a hammock ever so carefully and it seems as though the confounded thing was alive, and had taken a contract to spill them out on the ground in all sorts of embarrassing shapes. What it is that causes the commotion will, perhaps, never be known, without an investigation by some middle aged person, and if the season was not so near over we would investigate the blasted thing ourself, in the interest of our young readers who are in the full blush of hammockhood.
There can be nothing much more annoying to a young couple than to be sitting side by side or facing each other in a hammock, looking into each other’s eyes, and allowing the love they dare not speak to show itself in those orbs, and just as they are feeling as though they couldn’t live a minute unless they clasped each other to each other’s heaving bosoms, or at least one heaving bosom and one boiled shirt, and then have the hammock turn bottom side up and land them on the back of their necks, on the ground, with legs pointed towards the crab apples on the trees to which the hammock is hitched, arms flinging wildly to pull down pantaloon legs, and hands convulsively clawing gravel and muslin and delaine, while blushes suffuse faces that but a moment before were a background for the picture of love’s young dream, and a crowd of spectators on the hotel verandah laughing and saying, “Set ‘em up again.” The hammock shakes itself and turns right side up for other victims, as though it knew what it had been doing, and enjoyed it.
There are young men all over the land who have been through such experiences, and had to walk backwards all the way to the house, owing to fissure veins being discovered in the wearing apparel below the suspenders, while the number of girls that have been mortified by having to go to the house with their back hair in one hand, their skirts in the other, while six places between the polonaise and the ear-rings were aching like the toothache from contact with the gravel path, are legion, and we call upon the authorities to suppress the hammock as a nuisance.
More matches have been broken up by hammocks than by all the Sunday schools in the world, and no girl who is bow-legged, or has an ankle like a rutabaga, should ever trust herself in a hammock, even though it is held by half a dozen friends, as the hammock will shy at a piece of paper as quick as a skittish horse, and in such a moment as ye think not you are on all fours, your head dizzy, and if there is a hole in your stocking as small as a Democrat’s hope of election, it will look to outsiders as big as the gate to a fair ground. O, a hammock is worse than a bicycle.
There is one thing the American people have got to learn, and that is to give scholars in schools a half holiday when there is a circus in town. We know that we are in advance of many of the prominent educators of the country when we advocate such a policy, but sooner or later the people whose duty it is to superintend schools will learn that we are right, and they will have to catch up with us or resign.
In the first place, a boy is going to attend a circus, if there is one in town, and the question before teachers and superintendents should be, not how to prevent him from going to the circus, but how to keep his mind on his books the day before the circus and the day after. There have been several million boys made into liars by school officials attempting to prevent their going to circuses, and we contend that it is the duty of teachers to place as few temptations to lie as possible in the way of boys.
If a boy knows that there will be no school on the afternoon of circus day, he will study like a whitehead all the forenoon, and learn twice as much as he will in all day if he can’t go. If he knows that there is a conspiracy on foot between his parents and the teachers to keep him from the circus, he begins to think of some lie to get out of school. He will be sick, or run away, or something.
He will get there, if possible. And after the first lie succeeds in getting him out of school, he is a liar from the word go. There is something, some sort of electricity that runs from a boy to a circus, and all the teachers in the world cannot break the connection. A circus is the boys’ heaven.
You may talk to him about the beautiful gates ajar, and the angel band in heaven that plays around the great white throne, and he can’t understand it, but the least hint about the circus tent, with the flap pulled to one side to get in, and the band wagon, and the girls jumping through hoops, and the clown, and he is onto your racket at a jump.
You may try to paralyze him by the story of Daniel in the den of lions, and how he was saved by his faith in a power above, and the boy’s mind will revert to the circus, where a man in tights and spangles goes in and bosses the lions and tigers around, and he will wonder if Daniel had a rawhide, and backed out of the cage with his eye on the boss lion.
At a certain age a circus can hold over heaven or anything else, in a boy’s mind, and as long as the circus does not hurt him, why not shut up shop a half a day and let him go? If you keep him in school he won’t learn anything, and he will go to the circus in the evening, and be up half the night seeing the canvas men tear down the tent and load up, and the next day he is all played out and not worth a continental. To some it would look foolish to dismiss school for a circus, but it will cement a friendship between teachers and scholars that nothing else could.
Suppose, a day or two before a circus arrives, the teacher should say to the school: “Now I want you kids to go through your studies like a tramp through a boiled dinner, and when the circus comes we will close up this ranch and all go the circus, and if any of you can’t raise the money to go, leave your names on my desk and I will see you inside the tent if I have to pawn my shirt.”
Of course it is a male teacher we are supposing said this. Well, don’t you suppose those boys and girls would study? They would fairly whoop it up. And then suppose the teacher found forty boys that hadn’t any money to go, and he had no school funds to be used for such a purpose.
How long would it take him to collect the money by going around among business men who had been boys themselves? He would go into a store and say he was trying to raise money to take some of the poor children to the circus, and a dozen hands would go down into a dozen pockets in two jerks of a continued story, and they would all chip in.
O, we are too smart. We are trying to fire education into boys with a shotgun, when we ought to get it into them inside of sugar coated pills. Let us turn over a new leaf now, and show these boys that we have got souls in us, and that we want them to have a good time if we don’t lay up a cent.
It was along in the winter, and the prominent church members were having a business meeting in the basement of the church to devise ways and means to pay for the pulpit furniture. The question of an oyster sociable had been decided, and they got to talking about oysters, and one old deaconess asked a deacon if he didn’t think raw oysters would go further, at a sociable, than stewed oysters.
He said he thought raw oysters would go further but they wouldn’t be as satisfying. And then he went on to tell how far a raw oyster went once with him. He said he was at a swell dinner party, with a lady on each side of him, and he was trying to talk to both of them, or carry on two conversations, on two different subjects, at the same time.
They had some shell oysters, and he took up one on a fork—a large, fat one—and was about to put it in his mouth, when the lady on his left called his attention, and when the cold fork struck his teeth, and no oyster on it, he felt as though it had escaped, but he made no sign. He went on talking with the lady as though nothing had happened. He glanced down at his shirt bosom, and was at once on the trail of the oyster, though the insect had got about two minutes start of him. It had gone down his vest, under the waistband of his clothing, and he was powerless to arrest its progress.
He said he never felt how powerless he was until he tried to grab that oyster by placing his hand on his person, outside his clothes; then, as the oyster slipped around from one place to another, he felt that man was only a poor, weak creature.
The oyster, he observed, had very cold feet, and the more he tried to be calm and collected, the more the oyster seemed to walk around among his vitals.
He says he does not know whether the ladies noticed the oyster when it started on its travels, or not, but he thought as he leaned back and tried to loosen up his clothing, so it would hurry down towards his shoes, that they winked at each other, though they might have been winking at something else.
The oyster seemed to be real spry until it got out of reach, and then it got to going slow, as the slickery covering wore off, and by the time it had worked into his trousers leg, it was going very slow, though it remained cold to the last, and he hailed the arrival of that oyster into the heel of his stocking with more delight than he did the raising of the American flag over Vicksburg, after the long siege.
The sleeping car companies are discussing the idea advanced by the Sun, of placing safes in the cars, or iron drawers with locks, into which passengers can place their watches and money. We trust the iron drawers will be adopted, as the flannel drawers now used are not safe by any means. It is true they are sometimes tied with a string in the small of the back, but the combination is not difficult for even a stranger to unlock, unless it is tied in a hard knot. Give us iron drawers in a sleeping car by all means. To be sure they will be cold; but everything is cold in a sleeping car except the colored porter.
Several proprietors of eastern resorts have announced that only adults will be entertained, and that no children will be admitted as guests on any terms. At first we would be inclined to say that a hotel proprietor who would make such a distinction could have no soul, but when we reflect that the proprietor is catering to the pleasure of a majority of his guests, then we conclude that the guests are devoid of souls.
What kind of a place would a summer resort be without happy children? It would be a hospital for decayed roues, very old maids, women who hated children, smart Alecks who were mashers, dead beats and sour curmudgeons. The day would be put in in gossiping, exercising old flirts with stiff joints, drinking at somebody’s expense, and fishing for rich husbands with graveyard coughs, and angling for women who wanted to be caught and didn’t care a continental who caught them.
The atmosphere about such a place would be a blizzard of heat and cold, filled with fine sand, and would make a person with a heart, who loved children, think he or she was in hell looking for an artesian well.
A hotel proprietor who will thus insult the better part of the human race, should be ignored entirely by all who love children, and he should be compelled to stand on his deserted verandah all the season and see his rival across the way, who entertains children, surrounded by the richest and best guests, and the soulless creature, and the few soulless, dyspeptic boarders that he has, should be obliged to listen to the laughter of thousands of happy children running races and playing tag up and down the lawn of the man who has a soul.
No one who would patronize a summer hotel that refuses little children a breath of God’s fresh air should enjoy a moment’s pleasure. Mosquitoes should bore them, and country dogs should bark all night and keep them awake. Be they male or female resorters, we pray for ants to crawl up them, for bugs and worms to go down them, for snakes to frighten them out of their boots or gaiters, for country cows to run them out of pastures, and fleas to get inside their night gowns and practice the lancers all night. May their food disagree with them, their clothes fail to come back from the laundry, and their bandoline lose its staying qualities.
And may those at the house where children are welcome have health and happiness, and may they get to heaven, eventually, with the children, and while on the way up there may they throw a bundle of prepared kindling wood into the pit below where the child haters are sighing for zinc ulsters.
A dispatch from Long Branch announces that “Dr. Bliss goes to New York for a few hours today.” That is encouraging. If the doctors had kept away from the President more he would have been better. He has had from one to six doctors in sight, night and day, for over ten weeks. Take a man here at home that is sick, and let a doctor go and stay with him night and day, and how long do you suppose the man would live?
What a sick man wants is to have a doctor go around practicing on other people, and come in once or twice a day, blow off a little steam, slap the patient on the leg and say, “Well, boss, how’s your liver?” A sick man wants to have a doctor forget to come some time when he is expected, and get nervous about it, instead of getting nervous because the pill-bags is there all the time, smelling of everything.
Let a doctor that is due at the bedside at 4 o’clock, say, stay away till 6, and then come in and tell about being down on the South Side to see about somebody’s having a sick baby, or to sew up a man that has been to a circus, and the cross patient that has been waiting for the doctor till he got mad, is better at once. It cheers him to know that somebody else has a baby or had a gash cut in him in a fight, and changes his mind about swearing at the doctor, and feels better.
Why, some of our best doctors never think of curing a man until they get him mad a few times. It braces a man up to get mad and think, “Now that confounded old pill-bags has forgotten all about me, and I’ll bet he is in a saloon somewhere shaking the dice for the drinks.” A sick man gains strength, actually, lying in bed and thinking how he would like to kick the stuffin’ out of a doctor.
A doctor who has only one patient is a damage to the patient, and Garfield has suffered more by having those doctors around when he ought to have been left alone till he yearned for them, than anybody imagines. Why, the feeling of a man’s pulse for half an hour, and timing it as you would a trotting horse, is enough to make a well man sick. What a doctor wants to do is to feel of a man’s pulse about one second, and then throw the patient’s hand down and say: “O, you are all right. We will have you entered in a walking match next week.”
He wants to say something of this kind if the man is dying. A doctor has got to be a good deal of a liar, to succeed. We do not mean to say Bliss is not a liar, but somehow he does not seem to display judgment. He is too much of a stayer. Bliss is too frequent.
A celebrated writer on the state of the country, has an article in a magazine, in which occurs the following paragraph:
“The defects of the New England girl may be done away with by giving less prominence to the purely intellectual or purely practical side of her education.”
In the first place, we do not admit that there are any defects in the Boston girl, but if there are defects, as is alleged by the writer above, and by other scientific persons, we do not see how giving less prominence to her intellectuality is going to do away with them. For instance, there is a defect in the girl whereby she has a shin on both sides of her lower limb, or an indentation where there should be the customary calf—we say calf advisedly, because it is a calf, and no person need be ashamed of it, even if it is terrible slim—we don’t see how that defect can be done away with by giving less prominence to the purely practical side of her education. It does not stand to reason. Sawdust, or bran would be worth two of it.
Or, again, suppose the New England girl has no hips to speak of, or her stomach is caved in where there should be a fullness, is the giving of less prominence to the purely intellectual side of her education going to do away with these defects, or fill up the waste places and make them glad? Not much! A sack of canary seed, or a rubber air cushion, or a bale of cotton, beats the Boston idea all hollow, and we will leave it to anybody that knows anything.
Now, as to hair. Suppose the Boston girl has no more natural hair than one of these Mexican dogs, is education going to raise a crop of hair? Not by any means—she has got to buy it.
No, you Boston magazine critters can theoretically take a plain, unvarnished New England girl with these defects, and give all the prominence you want to to the practical side of her education, and you may imagine you can do away with these defects and make her pass muster in a crowd, but when you get all through she will be homely as a stone fence, and some western girl, with no defects at all, just a natural born jolly girl, with not too much education and intellectuality, will come along there, and all Boston will go crazy after her.
You fellows don’t seem to know what you are talking about. Well, we don’t know what we are talking about either, but we had to write something to fill up with, and girls are the easiest things in the world to write about.
The little town of Clyde, Kansas, is mighty full of vinegar for a place of its size. The principal amusement the boys have is to scare the daylights out of visitors from the States by telling big stories about cyclones.
There are two young fellows in business there named Will May and Charley Armstrong. They have a store where they buy butter, and eggs, and things, and pack them for the Eastern market. Last June, Uncle Armstrong, father of Charley, and a young fellow named Charley Farmer, were out there visiting. The hosts entertained the guests to the most hair-standing stories about cyclones, until they were so nervous they couldn’t sleep at night.
One night the guests had retired, and the zephyr was pretty loud. Will and Charley got into the room adjoining that occupied by the guests, and began to talk about funnel-shaped clouds, trees torn up by the roots, horses flying through the air, and wagons being taken up bodily and carried away—talking so the guests could hear them. Then they prayed for strength to pull them through the fearful ordeal; and, pretending that a cyclone was upon them, they started down stairs head over appetite, to get into the refrigerator, in the cellar, for safety, yelling to the guests to fly for their lives.
Uncle Armstrong is getting pretty well along in years, but he got down to the cellar about ten stairs ahead of young Farmer, and asked to be allowed to get into the refrigerator first. It seemed a little cruel to the boys to let the guests get in there with nothing on but their undershirts, but they were going to have some fun, so they put them in among the cakes of ice, and Uncle Armstrong sat down on the zinc floor and allowed that if his life was spared till morning, he would never set foot in Kansas again.
Young Farmer sat on a firkin of butter, and leaned against the zinc lined side of the refrigerator, and tried to pray, but he had forgotten the combination; and couldn’t make a first payment.
Will and Charley went up stairs ostensibly to lock the safe, but really to go on with the programme. The first thing they did was to fire off a shotgun, and roll a keg of shingle-nails down the cellar stairs, and yell to the guests in the refrigerator to look out for God’s sake, as the house was struck by lightning.
Young Farmer got down off the firkin, and got on his knees, and tried to repeat some Sunday school lesson, but all he could think of was, “Evil communications corrupt two in the bush.” The old gentleman, who was struck in the small of the back by a piece of ice that fell off some butter, thought he was struck by lightning; so he began to sing, “A charge to keep I have.”
The boys up stairs got a bag of buckshot, and opened it, and every little while would throw a handful onto the outside cellar door, right above the heads of the freezing occupants of the refrigerator, at the same time pounding a piece of sheet iron to make thunder. They kept this up for an hour, and then got a barrel and filled it with broken glass and pieces of crockery, and they would roll it across the floor above, while one would take an ax and pound on some bar iron that was leaning against the wall, making a most hideous noise.
Charley Farmer said he supposed he was as well prepared to die as he ever would be, but he said he would give ten dollars if he had his pants down there.
Uncle Armstrong asked him what difference it made whether he had his pants on or not, and Charley said he didn’t want to be ushered into the New Jerusalem with all his sins on his head, before the angels, and nothing on but a knit undershirt.
They were discussing this question when they gave vent to a dying groan, closed their eyes, and then all was still.
The prisoners thought it was all over, and they didn’t stir for about ten minutes. They thought the house had blown away, and left them alive, and they were inclined to be thankful even for that; when Charley and Will came down and opened the refrigerator, and told them the storm was over, but that it was the almightiest cyclone that ever passed over Kansas.
The accounts of the capture of Jeff Davis, in his wife’s clothes, which have been published ever since the war, have caused many to laugh, and has surrounded the last days of the confederacy with a halo of ludicrousness that has caused much hard feeling between Mr. Davis and the American people. His friends would have been much better pleased if he had bared his breast to the cavalryman who captured him, and been run through with a sabre, and died with some proud last words on his lips, such as, “Who will care for mother now,” or “The cause is lost. Send out a search warrant to find it.”
It was a terribly ridiculous ending to a great struggle, the way we have been in the habit of reading the story, but now we have a new light on the subject. Mr. Davis has written a book on the war, and in it he gives the following particulars of his capture and the bravery he displayed. Instead of sneaking off in his wife’s petticoat, after a pail of spring water, Mr. Davis describes that escape as being almost a bloody encounter. He says:
“I had gone perhaps fifteen or twenty yards when a trooper galloped up and ordered me to halt and surrender, to which I gave a defiant answer, and, dropping the shawl and raglan from my shoulders, advanced toward him. He leveled his carbine at me, but I expected if he fired he would miss me, and my intention was, in that event, to put my hand under his foot, tumble him off on the other side, spring into his saddle and attempt to escape. My wife, who had been watching, when she saw the soldier aim his carbine at me, ran forward and threw her arms around me. Success depended on instantaneous action, and, recognizing that the opportunity had been lost, I turned back, and, the morning being damp and chilly, passed on to a fire beyond the tent.”
This puts an entirely different face on the affair, and instead of being a childish coward, he represents himself to have been an arch conspirator, who disguised himself as a female to get a good chance to throw a boy off his horse and steal the horse. We can only admire the calm determination of the man, as he stood there waiting for the boy to shoot, so he could rush up, unarmed, put his hand under the soldier’s foot, tip him off the horse, get on himself, without receipting to the government for the horse, and skedaddle.
It is not necessary to inquire what the boy would have been doing all the time Jeff was pulling him off the horse. We all know how easy it is for an unarmed old man to spill a healthy soldier off a horse. We can readily see that the soldier could not have whacked the old fellow over the head with the empty carbine, or drawn his sabre and run him through, or given him a few shots out of a revolver.
Jeff had, no doubt, arranged in his own mind to chloroform the bold Michigan cavalryman, but his wife broke it all up by throwing her arms around him at an inopportune moment, thus pinioning the President of the Confederacy so he could not whip the Union army. And so, like Adam, Jeff lays the whole business to the woman. What would we do without women to lay everything to?
And while Jeff must ever doubt the judgment of his wife in breaking up his plans at that trying moment, when so much was at stake, how that soldier, whose life was saved by her act, must revere her, memory! Had the woman not held Jeff the soldier must have been pitched off his horse, and striking on his head, he must have been killed.
Mr. Davis does not say so, but we have no doubt his plan was to have the soldier strike on his head on a projecting root or stone, so he would be killed. If there should be another war, we should never join the cavalry branch of the service unless there was an understanding that no old men, armed with petticoats and tin water pails, should be allowed to charge on cavalrymen and throw them off their horses.
It is said that during the late war no man ever saw a dead cavalryman, but if the tactics of Mr. Davis had been adopted early in the war, the mortality must have been fearful, and perhaps the result of the war would have been different. We cannot be too thankful that Jeff didn’t think of that way of demoralizing cavalry before.
About seventy-five traveling men were snowed in at Green Bay during a late blockade, and they were pretty lively around the hotels, having quiet fun Friday and Saturday, and passing away the time the best they could, some playing seven up, others playing billiards, and others looking on. Some of the truly good people in town thought the boys were pretty tough, and they wore long faces and prayed for the blockade to raise so the spruce looking chaps could go away.
The boys noticed that occasionally a lantern-jawed fellow would look pious at them, as though afraid he would be contaminated, so Sunday morning they decided to go to church in a body. Seventy-five of them slicked up and marched to the Rev. Dr. Morgan’s church, where the reverend gentleman was going to deliver a sermon on temperance. No minister ever had a more attentive audience, or a more intelligent one, and when the collection plate was passed every last one of the travelers chipped in a silver dollar.
When the sexton had received the first ten dollars the perspiration stood out on his forehead as though he had been caught in something. It was getting heavy, something that never occurred before in the history of church collections at the Bay. As he passed by the boys, and dollar after dollar was added to his burden, he felt like he was at a picnic, and when twenty-five dollars had accumulated on the plate he had to hold it with both hands, and finally the plate was full, and he had to go and empty it on the table in front of the pulpit, though he was careful to remember where he left off, so he wouldn’t go twice to the same drummer.
As he poured the shekels out on the table, as still as he could, every person in the audience almost raised up to look at the pile, and there was a smile on every face, and every eye turned to the part of the church where sat the seventy-five solemn looking traveling men, who never smole a smile. The sexton looked up to the minister, who was picking out a hymn, as much as to say, “Boss, we have struck it rich, and I am going back to work the lead some more.” The minister looked at the boys, and then at the sexton as though saying, “Verily, I would rather preach to seventy-five Milwaukee and Chicago drummers than to own a brewery. Go, thou, and reap some more trade dollars in my vineyard.”
The sexton went back and commenced where he left off. He had his misgivings, thinking maybe some of the boys would glide out in his absence, or think better of the affair and only put in nickels on the second heat, but the first man the sexton held out the platter to planked down his dollar, and all the boys followed suit, not a man “passed” or “ra nigged,” and when the last drummer had been interviewed the sexton carried the biggest load of silver back to the table that he ever saw.
Some of the silver dollars rolled off on the floor, and he had to put some in his coat pockets, but he got them all, and looked around at the congregation with a smile and wiped the perspiration off his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief and winked, as much as to say, “The first man that speaks disrespectfully of a traveling man in my presence will get thumped, and don’t you forget it.”
The minister rose up in the pulpit, looked at the wealth on the table, and read the hymn, “A charge to keep I have,” and the congregation joined, the travelers swelling the glad anthem as though they belonged to a Pinafore chorus. They all bowed their heads while the minister, with one eye on the dollars, pronounced the benediction, and the services were over.
The traveling men filed out through the smiles of the ladies and went to the hotel, while half the congregation went forward to the anxious seat, to “view the remains.” It is safe to say that it will be unsafe, in the future, to speak disparagingly of traveling men in Green Bay, as long as the memory of that blockade Sunday remains green with the good people there.
We are told that in the revision of the Bible the passage, “And I beheld an angel flying through the midst of heaven,” has been changed to “eagle,” and that all allusions to angels have been changed to “eagles.” This knocks the everlasting spots out of the angel business, and the poetry of wanting to be an angel, “and with the angels stand,” has become the veriest prose.
We have never had any particular desire to stand with angels, not this year, but there was a certain beauty in the idea that we would all be angels when we got through whooping it up down here and went to heaven.
Particularly was this the case with children and women, and old persons, and to have the angel business wiped out by a lot of white chokered revisers is too much. There are many of us that would never make very attractive angels, unless we were altered over a good deal, and made smaller.
Some of us, to pass current among angels, would have to wear wigs. How would a male bald-headed angel, with a red nose, and one eye gone, look flying a match through the blue ethereal space with a trim built girl angel? The other angels would just sit around on the ground, picking pin feathers out of their wings, and laugh so a fellow would want to go off somewhere and get behind a tree and condemn his luck.
There are few men who would be improved by fastening wings on their shoulder blades, and we never believed they could make the thing work, but the preachers have kept pounding it into us until we all got an idea there would be some process that could transform us into angels that would pass in a crowd.
Now, you take Long John Wentworth, of Chicago, a man seven feet high, and weighing four hundred pounds. What kind of an angel would he make? They would have to put wings on him as big as a side show tent, or he never could make any headway. Just imagine John circling around over the New Jerusalem, until he saw a twenty dollar gold piece loose in the pavement of the golden streets. He would cut loose and go down there so quick it would break him all up.
And then suppose angel Storey, of the Times, and angel Medill, of the Tribune, should have got their eyes on that loose gold piece, and got there about the same time before angel John arrived, and should be quarreling over it? John would knock Storey over onto a hydrant with one wing, and mash angel Medill in the gutter with the other, and take the gold piece in his toes and fly off to where the choir was singing, and break them all up singing, “You’ll never miss the water till the well runs dry.”
We have never taken a great deal of stock in the angel doctrine, because we knew pretty well what kind of material they would have to be made of, but we had rather be an angel than an eagle. Who the deuce wants to die and be an eagle, like “Old Abe,” and eat rats? In a heaven full of eagles there would be the worst clawing that ever was, and the air would be full of feathers. Eagles won’t do, and the revisers ought to have known it.
If we have got to be anything let us insist on being angels, via the Bible, and then we can have some fun. With big flocks of angels, and good weather, and nothing to do but to sing praises and browse around to pass away the time, and no rent to pay, and no bills of any kind to keep track of, it does seem as though some of us could think of some tableaux, or picnic, or something to have a good time, but let us strike on being eagles, revisers or no revisers.
A most ridiculous scene occurred at a church in Newcastle, Penn., one Sunday, a short time ago. A policeman was passing the church as a gentleman came out. The man jokingly accosted the policeman and said he was wanted inside meaning that he would be glad to have him turn from the error of his ways, and seek the truth and enjoy a peace that passeth all understanding. The stupid policeman thought there was some trouble in the church, so he went in.
The sexton, seeing a policeman, was anxious to give him a favorable seat, so he said, “Come right in here,” and he took him into a pew and waved his hand as much as to say, “Help yourself.” There was another man in the pew, a deacon with a sinister expression, as the policeman thought, and he supposed that was the man they wanted arrested, so he tapped the deacon on the arm and told him to go into the aisle. The deacon struggled, thinking the policeman was crazy, and tried to get away, but he was dragged along. Many of the congregation thought that the deacon had been doing something wrong, and some of them got behind the deacon and helped the officer fire him out.
Arriving at the lock-up, the policeman saw the man who told him he was wanted in the church and asked him what the charge was against the deacon, and he didn’t know, so the sexton was appealed to, and he didn’t know, and finally the prisoner was asked what it was all about, and he didn’t know.
The policeman was asked what he arrested the man for, and he didn’t know, and after awhile the matter was explained, and the policeman, who had to arrest somebody, took the man into custody who told him he was wanted in the church, and he was fined five dollars and costs.
He says he will never try to convert a policeman again, and the policeman says he will never go into a church again if they get to knocking each other down with hymn books.
The trouble that is usually experienced by prize fighters in finding a place where they can fight unmolested must have been apparent to all, and The Sun would suggest a way out of the difficulty.
Let the government set apart a portion of the public domain, near some military post, and enact a law that prize fighting shall be no more unlawful than polygamy, or stealing from the government. If prize fighters can have the same immunity from arrest and punishment that polygamists and defaulters have, it is all they ask, and it seems not unreasonable to ask it.
Certainly a prize fighter in whipping a friend to raise money to support one wife and one set of children, when the other fellow is willing to take the chances of being whipped, is not as bad as a praying old cuss who marries from twenty to forty feeble minded females and raises a flock of narrow headed children to turn loose after a while, with not much more brain than goslings.
If two men want to go out and enjoy “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” by mauling each others faces, why should they be pulled, and let an official who steals half a million dollars from the government, give a New Year’s reception? The thing does not look right to a man who believes that this is a free country, and that every man is endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which is the right to pay his debts.
Another thing, the government, if it decided to set apart certain ground for prize fights, might create the office of “referee,” and appoint some honest, square man, who applied for a consulship and there was no vacancy, to the position, with a good salary. What prize fighters need is a referee that can be depended on, and it would be no worse to appoint a government referee than it would to give breech loading arms and ammunition to Indians to go on the war-path with.
Prize fighting does not do any harm. If one of the principals is killed, which does not often occur, the government is so much ahead. The government would furnish the poison if Mormons would kill themselves. Why not furnish prize fighters an opportunity to climb the golden stairs? The fact of it is, as a people we oppose prize fighting because it is “brutal,” and we go to a wrestling match where men hurt themselves twice as much as they would if they stood up and knocked each other down. We cry out against prize fights, and yet a majority of the male population would walk ten miles to see a prize fight when they wouldn’t ride a mile to attend church.
We wish men would not fight, but if they want to they should either be allowed to, or else all other kinds of foolishness should be suppressed. If every respectable business man in this country could box as well as Sullivan there would not be as much crime as there is to-day. Suppose all the men that have been robbed in the past year by cowardly sand baggers, could have “put up their hands,” and knocked the robbers into the middle of next week, wouldn’t there be fewer headaches and heartaches, fewer widows mourning their murdered husbands, and fewer orphans?
It is against the law to carry weapons, and yet if a man opens a boxing-school to teach men to defend themselves, and fit them so they can knock the hind sights off a robber, he is frowned upon. We want to see the time when every young man has got muscle, and knows how to use it, and then there will be fewer outrages. If a respectable citizen has a daughter that is the pride of his heart, he had rather she would go to a theatre or a party with a man who can protect her with his strong arm than with an effeminate curiosity that has his brain parted in the middle, and who would be afraid to meet a dwarf in the dark.
We advise every boy who reads The Sun to throw away the revolver he has bought to carry in his pistol pocket, or sell it to some coward, and use the money to hire somebody to teach him to box, and to strike a blow that will make any person sick to his stomach who insults the boy’s sister. Just depend your muscle to get through the world. If the boy’s people are truly good and want him to go to Sunday-school he should do it, and learn all that is good, but he should want a little exercise with his hands between meals, and learn the efficacy of two fists, for sometimes they come handy.
We have heard of cases in prayer meetings where deacons got to fighting, even in this State, and a fellow that could use his fists best stood up the longest, though a chair was used by the opponent. We know ministers in Wisconsin who are good boxers, and while they would not teach boxing from the pulpit, they would not object to see every boy know how. Since the tramps have been knocking people down in Indianapolis, we have been anxious to hear that one of them has tackled our old friend, Rev. Myron Reed; as we know that tramp would go to the hospital dead sure. Boys, learn to box.
There is one thing about sleeping cars that should be changed, and that is the number of the berth should be on the curtain, so when a man gets up in the night to go out to the back end of the car and look out into the night to see if the stars are shining, and he gets through seeing if the stars are shining, and goes back, he will not get into the wrong berth.
Since the other night we have not wondered that on a similar occasion, at the dead hour of night, as it is reported, the truly good Mr. Beecher, who left his berth to see the porter, and ask him about how long it would be before they got there, returned to what he supposed was his own berth, and sat down on the side of it to remove his trouserloons, and by a scream was notified that he was in the wrong pew. We attach no blame to Mr. Beecher, and would defend him to the last breath, because to a man whose mind is occupied with great thoughts, the berths all look alike. Neither do we blame Miss Anthony for screaming. She could not know in the imperfect light that was vouchsafed her in a sleeping car, that it was a mistake. She had no time to argue; it was a case where immediate decision was necessary, and she did right to scream—she could not do otherwise. But when vile men tell us, as they draw down their eyelids and wink, that it was “a mistake the way the woman kept tavern in Michigan,” they do an injustice to a noble preacher who has been lied about, and who has better judgment than to do so knowingly.
So we say that anybody is liable to err; but if anybody had told us, when that woman from Pere Marquette, with a hare lip, and a foot like a fiddle box, got into the berth next to ours, that in the dead hour of night we should be sitting down on the selvage of her berth, we should have killed him.
We are more than ever struck by the old adage that the ways of Providence are inscrutable, and past finding the right berth. We had gone out to the back part of the car, and stood in our stocking feet on the cold zinc floor for a couple or three minutes, looking out upon the beautiful Michigan landscape and waterscape, as the train passed Michigan City, and had asked the porter if there was any bar on the train, and had returned up the aisle to find our berth.
Pulling aside the curtains we sat down, and were about to throw our hind leg up into the sheets, when a cold, hard hand, calloused like a horn spoon, grabbed hold of the small of our back, and two piercing eyes shot sharp glances at our human frame.
One look was enough to show that we had opened the wrong curtains. Every second we expected that a female scream would split the air wide open, that the passengers would tumble out of the berths, and that the conductor would have us arrested for coalition with intent to deceive. It seemed years that we sat there with that cold hand grasping the situation, and we would have given half our fortune to have been in the bunk just one remove towards Canada.
All things have an end, and just as we were imagining that the woman with the hare lip was feeling around with her disengaged hand to draw from its concealment in her corset, a carving knife, with which to cut a couple of slices off our liver, a voice said, “Well, what in Kalamazoo are you doing in this berth, anyway?”
The porter came along with a lantern, and we looked at the woman with a hare lip and a bass voice, and it was not a woman at all, but a Detroit drummer for a stove house. Finding that we were not a midnight assassin, nor a woman, the drummer let go of the small of our back, and we got into our own berth; but it was a narrow escape; the woman with the hare lip was in the upper berth. We found that out in the morning when she talked through her nose at the porter about fetching a step ladder for her to climb down on.
Inasmuch as there seems to be no other business before the house, we desire, Mr. Speaker, to arise to a personal explanation. There was something occurred at the Opera House, the last night that the Rice Surprise Party played “Revels,” that placed us in a wrong position before the public.
Mr. Gunning, the scene painter, had prided himself that the transformation scene that he had fixed up for the play was about as nice as could be, and as we confessed that we had only got an imperfect view of it, the night before, from one side of the house, he insisted that we take a seat right in front of the stage, in the parquette, and get a good view of it.
There were a good many legs in the show, and we didn’t want to sit right down in front all the evening, so we compromised the matter by agreeing to sit in the dress circle until it was about time for the transformation scene, and then, after the giddy girls had all been behind the scenes, we would go down and take a front seat, right back of the orchestra, and take in the transformation scene.
Well, they had got through with the high kicking, and all gone off, except one girl, a gipsy, who was going to sing a song, and then a bell would ring and the whole stage effects would change as if by magic. When she had got to the end of her song and had waltzed off to the left, we got up and walked down in front, and took one of a whole row of vacant seats, put on our spectacles, and were ready. Do you know, every cuss in that audience saw us go down there? They all thought we had gone there to be nearer the dizzy tights, and they began to clap their hands and cheer. We think Chapin, the lawyer, who doesn’t like us very well, started it, and every kid in the gallery took it up, and the house fairly rung with applause at the sight of our bald head well down in front. We never felt so mean since we quit stealing sheep.
The crowd laughed and hi-hi’d, and the stage manager took the applause for an encore, and ordered the girl to go out and sing some more. She knew better, knew they were guying the bald-headed man in front, and all the troupe knew it, and the girls put their heads out from the wings and laughed; but the girl came out and sung again. If she didn’t wink at us when she came out, then we don’t know what a wink is, and we have been around some, too.
She sang some confounded love song, such as “Darling, Kiss My Eye Winkers Down,” or “Hold the Fort,” or something, and kept looking at us every moment, and smiling like a church sociable. The crowd took it all in, too. Her dress was cut decolette, or low necked at the bottom, and we were nearer to the angelic choir than a bald headed man of family ever ought to be, but there was no help for it. She was the only girl in the troupe that wore black tights, and we thanked our stars for that, but even with all those mitigating circumstances in our favor the affair had a bad look, and we admit it. Of course any one would know that we wouldn’t go out of our way to see any black stockings, but it looked as though we had, to the crowd.
We have faced death on many a field of carnage, but we never knew what it was to want to be away from a place quite so much as then. If you know how a man feels when he is stricken with paralysis, or a piece of a brick house, you can imagine something about it. We tried to put on a pious look, a deaconish sort of expression, like a man who is passing a collection plate in church, but the blushes on our face did not look deaconish at all. We tried to look far away, and think of the hereafter, or the heretofore, but that Gipsy warbling “Darling Eyes of Marine Blue,” and forty girls in the wings making up faces, and five hundred people back of us having fun at our expense was too much, and we just wanted to die. If there had been a trap door to let us down into the beer saloon below, we would have taken passage on it in a minute.
But she finally got through singing, the transformation scene came on, and we went back to our seat in the dress circle, a changed man, and we never looked at a person in the audience after that, but when the performance was over and we came out, and Chapin said, “Hello, old man, guess we got even with you that time,” we felt like murdering somebody in cold blood and feathers. Hereafter if anybody ever catches us taking a front seat at a leg drama, they can take it out of our wages. Mr. Speaker, we have spoken.
There is a case in Chicago where a young man is going to apply to have his name changed. The man’s name is Easus, and he is now about eighteen years old, and just beginning to go into society. It is alleged that he was engaged to be married to an heiress, but she has broken off the engagement until he can get his name changed. She was not very much mashed on the name, anyway, and Monday night, as she was with him coming out of Haverly’s Theatre, something happened that broke her all up.
The young man’s father was a pious man, and he named his son Abijah. His companion nicknamed him “Bige.” Coming out of the theatre with his intended on his arm, an old friend, a drummer for a Chicago grocery house, happened to see him, and he went up to him and said, “Why, Bije Easus, how are you?” Young Mr. Easus shook hands with his friend, and introduced him to his girl, and she looked at the profane drummer out of one corner of her eye and trembled for his soul as she thought how he would be sure to go to hell when he died.
Mr. Easus explained to his friend as they walked out of the building, that he was engaged to the girl, and when they parted at the platform of the street car the drummer grabbed her by the hand and shook it as a terrier would a rat and said, “Well, Mrs. Bije Easus, that is to be, let me wish you many happy returns.”
Mr. Easus colored up, the girl was as mad as a wet hen when she pried her fingers apart, and they rode home in silence. At the gate she said to him, “Bije Easus, I never till to-night knew what a horrid name I was going to take upon myself, and I have made up my mind that I cannot go through the remainder of my natural life in Chicago, being alluded to as a ‘little female Bije Easus.’ Mr. Easus, I trust we part friends. If you can come to me by any other name, you would be sweet, but Bije Easus I will never have on my calling cards.” The young man has employed a lawyer and will have his name changed. The girl had a narrow escape, and she may thank the drummer for calling her attention to it.
While the most of our traveling men, our commercial tourists, are nice Christian gentlemen, there is occasionally one that is as full of the old Nick as an egg at this time of year is full of malaria. There was one of them stopped at a country town a few nights ago where there was a church fair. He is a blonde, good-natured looking, serious talking chap, and having stopped at that town every month for a dozen years, everybody knows him. He always chips in towards a collection, a wake or a rooster fight, and the town swears by him.
He attended the fair, and a jolly little sister of the church, a married lady, took him by the hand and led him through green fields, where the girls sold him ten cent chances in saw dust dolls, and beside still waters, where a girl sold him sweetened water with a sour stomach, for lemonade, from Rebecca’s well. The sister finally stood beside him while the deacon was reading off numbers. They were drawing a quilt, and as the numbers were drawn all were anxious to know who drew it. Finally, after several numbers were drawn it was announced by the deacon that number fifteen drew the quilt, and the little sister turned to the traveling man and said, “My! that is my number. I have drawn it. What shall I do?” “Hold up your ticket and shout keno,” said he.
The little deaconess did not stop to think that there might be guile lurking in the traveling man, but being full of joy at drawing the quilt, and ice cream because the traveling man bought it, she rushed into the crowd towards the deacon, holding her number, and shouted so they could hear it all over the house, “Keno!”
If a bank had burst in the building there couldn’t have been so much astonishment. The deacon turned pale and looked at the poor little sister as though she had fallen from grace, and all the church people looked sadly at her, while the worldly minded people snickered. The little woman saw that she had got her foot into something, and she blushed and backed out, and asked the traveling man what keno meant. He said he didn’t know exactly, but he had always seen people, when they won anything at that game, yell “keno.” She isn’t exactly clear yet what keno is, but she says she has sworn off on taking advice from pious looking traveling men. They call her “Little Keno” now.
There occasionally occurs an incident in this world that will make a person laugh though the laughing may border on the sacrilegious. For instance, there is not a Christian but will smile at the ignorance of the Advent preacher up in Jackson county who, when he saw the balloon of King, the balloonist, going through the air, thought it was the second coming of Christ, and got down on his knees and shouted to King, who was throwing out a sand bag, while his companion was opening a bottle of export beer, “O, Jesus, do not pass me by.”
And yet it is wrong to laugh at the poor man, who took an advertising agent for a Chicago clothing store for the Savior, who he supposed was making his second farewell tour. The minister had been preaching the second coming of Christ until he looked for Him every minute. He would have been as apt to think, living as he did in the back woods, that a fellow riding a bicycle, with his hair and legs parted in the middle, along the country road, was the object of his search.
We should pity the poor man for his ignorance, we who believe that when Christ does come He will come in the old fashioned way, and not in a palace car, or straddle of the basket of a balloon. But we can’t help wondering what the Adventist must have thought, when he appealed to his Savior, as he supposed, and the balloonist shied a sand bag at him and the other fellow in the basket threw out a beer bottle and asked, “Where in ——— are we?”
The Adventist must have thought that the Savior of mankind was traveling in mighty queer company, or that He had taken the other fellow along as a frightful example. And what could the Adventist have thought when he saw a message thrown out of the balloon, and went with trembling limbs and beating heart to pick it up, believing that it was a command from on high to sinners, and found that it was nothing but a hand bill for a Chicago hand-me-down clothing store.
He must have come to the conclusion that the Son o Man had got pretty low down to take a job of bill posting for a reversible ulster and paper collar bazar. It must have been food for reflection for the Advent preacher, as he picked up the empty beer bottle, shied at him from the chariot that he supposed carried to earth the redeemer of man. He must have wondered if some-Milwaukee brewer ad not gone to heaven and opened a brewery.
Of course we who are intelligent, and who would know a balloon if we saw it, would not have had any such thoughts, but we must remember that this poor Advent preacher thought that the day had come that had been promised so long, and that Christ was going to make a landing in a strong Republican county. We may laugh at the Adventist’s disappointment that the balloon did not tie up to a stump and take him on board, but it was a serious matter to him.
He had been waiting for the wagon, full of hope, and when it came, and he saw the helmet on King’s head and thought it was a crown of glory, his heart beat with joy, and he plead in piteous accents not to be passed by, and the confounded gas bag went on and landed in a cranberry marsh, and the poor, foolish, weak, short-sighted man had to get in his work mighty lively to dodge the sand bags, beer bottles, and rolls of clothing store posters.
The Adventist would have been justified in renouncing his religion and joining the Democratic party. It is sad, indeed.
One of the most remarkable things in medical science is a discovery recently made by a Philadelphia physician When so many hundreds of years pass over without any new discovery being made, and when one is made, like vaccination, and they are not dead sure whether it amounts to anything or not, a new discovery that the discoverer will swear by is a big thing. This Philadelphia doctor has discovered that rheumatism is the direct result of cold feet.
There is no discovery that has ever been made in the human anatomy that stands to reason any more than this. Many thousands of men are going around crippled and bent with rheumatism, and suffering untold agonies, and they have never known what caused their bones to ache. Of course they knew that their wives had cold feet, but they had no idea that every time those No. 2 icicles were placed in the small of the back to get warm that they were sowing the seeds of rheumatism.
We presume there is a hundred pounds of male rheumatism to every square inch of cold female foot, and the Philadelphia doctor should be thanked by men of rheumatic tendencies as well as by women of arctic pedal extremities for this timely discovery. There is no woman who enjoys seeing her husband in the throes of rheumatic pains, and now that they know that their cold feet have brought about so much suffering, we trust they will try and lead a different life.
Of course we do not expect any woman is going to bed and leave her feet out on the floor, or under a coal stove. This could not be expected. But they can adopt some method to soften the rigors of a hard winter. They can paint their feet a nice warm color or have a summer sunset painted on the instep, or a fire-place on the bottom of their feet. Anything that will make their feet seem warm will be a relief to their rheumatic husbands. A pair of zinc overshoes to wear in bed would help some very cold feet several degrees.
Men are too valuable to be crippled up with rheumatism just for the temporary comfort they can confer upon their wives by allowing the small of their backs to be used in lieu of a grate fire. We trust that the cold footed portion of our female population will look at this matter in its true light, and if necessary leave their feet in the porter’s room at bed time and get a check for them.
The shooting of the grocery man at Appleton, by the man to whom he presented a bill, reminds us of the only grocery man we ever maimed for presenting a bill. His name was Smith, and he lived at La Crosse. We presume there have been meaner men built than this man Smith was at that time, though how it could be possible we cannot see. We had run up quite a bill at his grocery, and were willing to keep trading right along, but somehow he got wormy, and said that this thing had to stop.
We told him we never traded with him because we wanted his goods, but just to give him the benefit of our society, and we pointed out to him the injury it would be to his business to have us quit trading at his store. We told him that people would think that he had cheated us, and they would not come there any more. He said he knew it would be pretty tough, but he would try and struggle along under it.
Well, there was no use arguing, and finally by helping him do his chores we got the bill all paid but a dollar and a half, and then he began his persecutions. He called us a baldheaded old catamaran. He would follow us into a saloon, when some one treated, and take our glass of beer, and say he would give us credit on account. He would catch our dog and propose to cut a piece of his tail off, and give us credit at so much an inch.
He would meet us coming out of church, and right before folks he would ask us to go down to the brewery and play pedro. He would say he would come up to our house for dinner some time, and everything wicked. One day we stopped at his store to enjoy his society, and eat crackers and cheese—for be it known we never took offence at him, in fact we sort of liked the old cuss—when he told us to take a seat and talk it over.
We sat down on a cracker box that had bees wax on it, and after a heated discussion on finances, found that we had melted about two pounds of wax on our trousers, and Smith insisted on charging it up to us. This was the last hair, and when he called us a diabolical, hot-headed guthoogen our warm southern blood began to boil. We seized a codfish that had been hanging in front of the store until it had become as hard and sharp as a cleaver, and we struck him.
The sharp edge of the codfish struck him on the second joint of the forefinger, and cut the finger off as clean as it could have been done with a razor.
He said that settled it, and he gave us a receipt in full, and ever afterwards we were firm friends.
One thing he insists on, even now, and that is in telling people who ask him how he lost his finger, that he wore it off rubbing out seven-up marks on a table while playing pedro.
He is now trying to lead a different life, being city clerk of La Crosse, but this article will remind him of old times, and he can remember with what an air of injured innocence we wiped the blood off that codfish and hung it up for a sign, and how Smith sold it the next day to Frank Hatch for a liver pad. No, thank you, we don’t drink.
A Dartford man, who has been attending a camp meeting at that place, inquires of the Brandon Times why it is that camp meetings are always held when the moon does not shine. The Times man gives it up, and refers the question to The Sun. We give it up.
It does not seem as though managers of camp meetings deliberately consult the almanac in order to pick out a week for camp meeting in the dark of the moon, though such meetings are always held when the moon is of no account. If they do, then there is a reason for it. It is well known that pickerel bite best in the dark of the moon, and it is barely possible that sinners “catch on” better at that time.
There may be something in the atmosphere, in the dark of the moon, that makes a camp meeting more enjoyable. Certainly brethren and sisterin’ can mingle as well if not better when there is no glaring moon to molest and make them afraid, and they can relate their experience as well as though it was too light.
The prayers of the righteous avail as much in the darkness of the closet as they do in an exposition building, with an electric light, and as long as sinners will do many things which they ought not to do, and undo many, things that they never ought to have done, the dark of the moon is probably the most healthy.
People don’t want to be sunburnt in the night. It seems to us as though the work of converting could be done as well in a full moon, but statistics show that such is not the case, and we are willing to give the camp meeting attendants the benefit of the doubt.
Again, it may be that the moon is to blame. No one would blame the moon, if it was full, and looked down on an ordinary camp meeting, if it got sick at the stomach, staggered behind a cloud, turned pale and refused to come out until the camp meeting was pulled by the police.
A new face has been put on the killing of old Mr. Utley, in Green Lake county, by his son, since the son has made his statement. At the time the first news was received we felt inclined to lay it up against young Mr. Utley, as there is nothing that hurts our feelings worse than to hear that a boy in the first flush of manhood, when the pin feathers are just appearing on his upper jaw and when the world is all before him to conquer and lay at his feet, has deliberately shot six No. 40 calibre bullets into various places in the person of his venerable father, who has nurtured him from childhood, stored his mind with useful knowledge, or perchance played mumblety peg with a shingle across the place where in later years another father may plant oblong pieces of leather, because of his habit of leaning his youthful stomach across the gate whereon swings a gentle maiden belonging to this other father, the while giving her glucose in regard to a beautiful castle that he will rear with his own hands on a commanding eminence, surrounded with vines and roses, into the golden portals of which he will usher her and empty into her lap the precious treasures of the orient, when the cuss knows that he will never be able to earn more than twelve shillings a day on a farm the longest day he lives, and that if she marries him she will have to take in stairs to scrub and cook liver over an oil stove, and wear the same dress she is married in till it will stand alone. We say that we are opposed to young men killing their fathers. It has never seemed right to us. But since the supplemental returns in this case are all in, and we learn that old Mr. Utley was a drunken bulldozer who would take the farm horses and go off to town on a three days’ drunk, leaving the young man to do all the work, and come back complaining because the work was not done, and if the boy attempted to explain, he would be knocked down with a stick of cord wood, and that on this occasion he was engaged in trying to dissect young Utley with a butcher knife, claiming that he was going to hang his hide on the fence, and cut out his liver and stomach, and other things that Dr. Tanner has given a furlough, and that the young man shot his father just to keep peace in the family, and to save his own life, and that there were four quarts of raw whisky in the old man’s panjandrum when he turned up his toes, we feel like apologizing to the young man and telling him that he did his country a great service in wiping out his sire, baby mine. When an old man gets so he can’t enjoy himself without filling up with whisky and cutting slices off the livers of live people, the sooner he climbs the golden stair the better.
One of those incidents that cause a pious man to damn the whole animal creation occurred at Janesville last week. A business man that we all know, got up last Tuesday morning and took a walk down by Monterey, to view the beauties of nature and get up an appetite for breakfast. He is a man who weighs close onto 150 pounds, though he is as kitteny as anybody when occasion calls for kittenishness.
Gazing into the crystal waters of Rock River, it occurred to him that he would take a bath, so he disrobed himself, laid his clothes upon the ground and plunged in. He had been sporting with the wavelets, and waving with the sportlets for some minutes, when he heard a bellowing on shore, and he looked up to see a cow pawing the ground and running her horns into his clothes. You know how the smell of blood or carrion will cause the mildest mannered cow to get on her ear and paw the ground and bellow. Not that there was any blood or carrion there, but the cow acted that way. She may have got the smell of a Democrat from his clothes. Anyway she made Monterey howl, and the large man in the water dove down for stones to throw at the cow. She had run one horn through one leg of his pants, and the other horn through the broad part, and was engaged in chewing his shirt, when a rock struck her on the rump and she started off with those two garments for the blind asylum, where she evidently belonged, shaking her head to get the pants off her horns, and chewing the shirt as though it was a bran mash..
The pious man rushed out of the water towards the cow and said “co-boss, co-boss,” but she took one look at his shape and turned away and didn’t co-boss very much. A war map of the thoughts of this Janesville business man, as he saw the cow go away, would sell well, if it was illustrated by a picture of a native Zulu picking buchu leaves. He said he was a pious man, and had always tried to lead a different life, and do the fair thing, but hereafter he would be blanked if he wouldn’t kill every blanked cow that he came across.
The only things the cow had left were his hat, vest and shoes and stockings. He put them on and started after the cow. The vest was one of these grandfather’s clock vests, that stop short, never to go again, a sort of emigrant vest, that comes high. It was not a long, lingering, emotional vest; it was not what would be called a charitable vest, because charity begins at home, and covers a multitude of back pay into the treasury. He tried to remember some of the ten commandments, to repeat, but the only one he could call to mind was “Pull down Thy Vest.”
His eyes swept the horizon to see if anybody was looking, and he could see that the grounds about the blind asylum were alive with people of both sexes. He thanked heaven that by the inscrutable ways of Providence, people were made blind, but his joy at the calamity was mingled with sorrow when he thought that the teachers at the asylum were endowed with the most perfect eyesight.
As the cow neared the gate of the grounds he made one effort to head her off, but she run by him, and then he attempted to take his pistol from the hind pocket of his pants to kill himself, when he realized again that he was indeed barefooted from his vest to his stockings, and he sat down under a tree to die of slow starvation, but before he began to starve he got up again and resumed an upright attitude, on account of ants. It is a picnic for a nest of ants to partake of a human being who has lost his or her trousers, as the case may be, and he followed the cow, saying “co-boss” in the most pitiful accents that were ever used by a Janesville man.
The cow looked around, and as she did so the pants caught on a sapling and were pulled off her horns and dropped upon the ground. The pious man looked upon this as a direct interposition of Providence, and he was sorry he swore. He got into his trousers so quick that it made his head swim, and just as the crowd at the asylum had come down to the gate to see what strange looking calf was following the cow home, the man started on a run for town, leaving the shirt with the cow.
The people at the asylum have the shirt, and it has the initials of the man worked in the neck band, but he will never call for it. One sleeve is chewed off, and the bosom is rent with conflicting emotions and cow’s teeth. The man sells nails and skimmers with a far off expression, and don’t want cows to run at large any more.
The New York Humane Society has at last taken action, looking to the destruction of improper, immoral and friendless cats, and agents are at work capturing the nocturnal prowlers, and turning them over to the proper authorities of the society, who cause them to be killed.
This action cannot but be favorably commented upon by all loyal citizens, and as the Milwaukee Humane Society is a branch of the New York society, it is only reasonable to suppose that it will not be long before our home society will be engaged in cat extermination. There is a great field here for such a society, and applause awaits the humane people who have banded together to put these cats out of their misery.
We know there are those who will say that cats are not in misery when they give vent to those soul-stirring passages from unwritten opera, under the currant bushes, but we cannot but think that they are in the most crushing misery which it would be a charity to put them out of, or they would not chew their words so, and expectorate imaginary tobacco juice, mingled with hair and profanity. We know that human beings when they are enjoying each others society do not groan, and scratch, and Samantha around with their backs up, and their eyes sot, and run up board fences, and it is a safe inference to draw that these after dark cats are in pain. Of course cats are not human, though they are endowed with certain human instincts, such as staying out nights, and following other cats.
Sitting on the sharp edge of a board fence for hours, gazing at a neighboring cat, and occasionally purmowing, may be likened by the student of nature, to human beings who sit for hours on a cast iron seat in the park, with arms around each other; but it is far different. We have yet to hear of instances where quantities of hair have been found on the ground in the parks, and no young man or young woman, after an evening in the park, comes to his place of business in the morning, with eyes clawed out, ears chewed, or so stiff as to be unable to get up from under the stove without being kicked. Weighing this matter carefully and in an unbiased manner, we must give the chromo for good conduct, correct deportment, and good citizenship, to the human beings who frequent the parks at night, over the cats who picnic under our gooseberry bustes, and play Copenhagen on our area fences, when those who have brought them up from innocent kittenhood think they are abed and asleep.
So it is plain that the humane society has got work to do. We, as a people, have got tired of seeing a Thomas cat that never paid any taxes, get upon a pile of wood, swell his tail up to the size of a rolling pin, bid defiance to all laws, spit on his hands and say in ribald language to a Mariar cat, of a modest and retiring disposition, “Lay on, Mac Duff, and blanked be he who first cries purmeow.” This thing has got to cease. The humane society will soon be on the track of the enemy.
We know that the war is about to commence, because Mr. Holton has resigned the presidency of the society. But there are bold men in the society that are not so tender-hearted as Brother Holton, and they will fight this cat question to the bitter end.
We can almost see Mr. Oliver, with his trusty shot gun, going through back alleys at midnight, his white plume always to be found where cat hair is the thickest. John Woodhull will meet him, after the enemy is driven over the fence in disorder, and taken refuge under the shrubbery, and they will compare notes and cats. Good Mr. Spencer sees the handwriting on the wall, and his voice will be still for cats. Winfield Smith and Chas. Ray will go out in the pale moonlight with stuffed clubs and sell cats short, while Prof. McAllister and Chaplain Gordon, of the Light House, will sing a solemn requiem for the repose of the alleged souls of the midnight opera performers on the back fence, and a grateful people will pass resolutions of thanks that where once all was chaos and cat hair, all will be peace and good will towards morning. And may grace, mercy, peace and plenty of cat scalps abide with the bold night riders of the Humane society of Milwaukee. Scat!
There was one of those things occurred at a Chicago hotel during the conclave that is so near a fight and yet so ridiculously laughable that you don’t know whether you are on foot or a horseback. Of course some of the Knights in attendance were from the back woods, and while they were well up in all the secret workings of the order, they were awful “new” in regard to city ways.
There was one Sir Knight from the Wisconsin pineries, who had never been to a large town before, and his freshness was the subject of remark. He was a large hearted gentleman, and a friend that any person might be proud to have. But he was fresh. He went to the Palmer House Tuesday night, after the big ball, tired nearly to death, and registered his name and called for a bed.
The clerk told him that he might have to sleep on a red lounge, in a room with two other parties, but that was the best that could be done. He said that was all right, he “had tried to sleep on one of them cots down to camp, but it nearly broke his back,” and he would be mighty glad to strike a lounge. The clerk called a bell boy and said, “Show the gentleman to 253.”
The boy took the Knight’s keister and went to the elevator, the door opened and the Knight went in and began to pull off his coat, when he looked around and saw a woman on the plush upholstered seat of the elevator, leaning against the wall with her head on her hand. She was dressed in ball costume, with one of those white Oxford tie dresses, cut low in the instep, which looked, in the mussed and bedraggled condition in which she had escaped from the exposition ball, very much to the Knight like a Knight shirt. The astonished pinery man stopped pulling off his coat and turned pale. He looked at the woman, and then at the elevator boy, whom he supposed was the bridegroom, and said:
“By gaul, they told me I would have to sleep with a couple of other folks, but I had no idea that I should strike a wedding party in a cussed little bridal chamber not bigger than a hen coop. But there ain’t nothing mean about me, only I swear it’s pretty cramped quarters, ain’t it, miss?” and he sat down on one end of the seat and put the toe of one boot against the calf of his leg, took hold of the heel with the other hand and began to pull it off.
“Sir!” says the lady, as she opened her eyes and began to take in the situation, and she jumped up and glared at the Knight as though she would eat him.
He stopped pulling on the boot heel, looked up at the woman, as she threw a loose shawl over her low neck shoulders, and said:
“Now don’t take on. The bookkeeper told me I could sleep on the lounge, but you can have it, and I will turn in on the floor. I ain’t no hog. Sometimes they think we are a little rough up in Wausau, but we always give the best places to the wimmen, and don’t you forget it,” and he began tugging on the boot again.
By this time the elevator had reached the next floor, and as the door opened the woman shot out of the door, and the elevator boy asked the Knight what floor he wanted to go to. He said he “didn’t want to go to no floor,” unless that woman wanted the lounge, but if she was huffy, and didn’t want to stay there, he was going to sleep on the lounge, and he began to unbutton his vest.
Just then a dozen ladies and gentlemen got into the elevator from the parlor floor, and they all looked at the Knight in astonishment. Five of the ladies sat down on the plush seat, and he looked around at them, picked up his boots and keister and started for the door, saying:
“O, say, this is too allfired much. I could get along well enough with one woman and a man, but when they palm off twelve grown persons onto a granger, in a sweat box like this, I had rather go to camp,” and he strode out, to be met by a policeman and the manager of the house and two clerks, who had been called by the lady who got out first and who said there was a drunken man in the elevator. They found that he was sober, and all that ailed him was that he had not been salted, and explanations followed and he was sent to his room by the stairs.
The next day some of the Knights heard the story, and it cost the Wausau man several dollars to foot the bill at the bar, and they say he is treating yet. Such accidents will happen in these large towns.
The Minneapolis fair has been for some months advertising a race of twenty miles between a California and a Minnesota girl, on horseback, and on Wednesday it occurred. The girls were splendid horsewomen, but they had to change horses each mile, and the horses were strangers to the girls, and excited, and the crowd of 30,000 was excited, and the girls were kicked, trampled on and jammed into saddles by main strength, and away the horses would go, the crowd howling, the horses flying and the poor girls sighing and holding on with their teeth and toe nails, expecting every moment to be thrown off and galloped over by the horses and the crowd.
The pandemonium was kept up until the seventh round, when the saddle of Miss Jewett, the Minnesota girl, slipped, and she was thrown to the ground on the back stretch, and the crowd clamored for the master of ceremonies to send her another horse, while the California girl whooped it up around the track. They had to send a stretcher for the girl, and she was brought to the judge’s stand as near a cold corpse as could be, her pale face showing through the dirt, and her limber form telling its own story.
Then people that had been enjoying the “fun” looked at each other as much as to say, “We are the biggest fools outside of congress, to enjoy coldblooded murder, and call it fun.” The girl will live, though some of her bones are warped. This whole subject of lady horseback riding is wrong. The same foolish side saddles are used that were used before the flood, with no improvement since Eve used to ride to town after the doctor when Adam had the rheumatiz.
Women can ride as well as men, if they are given a show, but to place them on a horse with both legs on one side of the animal, so they have to allow for the same weight of other portions of the body on the other side to balance them, is awkward and dangerous, and it is a wonder that more do not fall off and squash themselves, A well built woman is as able to ride as a man. Her legs are strong enough to keep her on a horse—we say legs understandingly, because that is the right name for them—if she can have one on each side, but to shut one leg up like a jack-knife and hang it up on a pommel, and get a check for it, and forget that she has got a leg, and to let the other one hang down listlessly beside the horse, the heel of the foot pounding him in the sixth rib, is all nonsense, and those two legs, that ought to be the main support of the rider, are of no more use than two base ball clubs would be hung to the saddle. For all the good legs do on a side saddle they might as well be taken off and left at home.
Of course they are handy to have along if a lady wants to dismount, out in the woods, and pick flowers, or climb a tree after a squirrel, but the minute she gets in the saddle her legs are not worth the powder to blow them up. And talk about exercise and developing muscle, walking a mile is better than riding all summer.
In walking, the legs and all the muscles of the body are brought into action, and the blood courses through the veins, and a girl looks like a thoroughbred, but in horseback riding the legs lay dormant, get to sleep and have to be waked up when the owner dismounts, and all the exercise is got by portions of the human frame that never has seemed to us as though there was absolute need of greater development.
It is true that horseback riding makes the cheeks-red. Well, blood that wouldn’t rush to the head after being churned that way wouldn’t be worth having. It has to go somewhere. It can’t go to the legs, because they are paralyzed, being curled up like a tailor, mending trousers. Horseback exercise for ladies, on a side saddle, is a delusion and a snare, and does not amount to a row of pins, and it never will be worth a cent until women can ride like men. Then the lower limbs—now it is limbs—will be developed and health will be the result, and there will be no danger of a saddle turning and a helpless woman being dragged to her death.
There is nothing indelicate about riding on both sides of a horse, if they once get used to it. But they have got to get over this superstition that to ride on horseback a woman must put her limbs up in curl papers.
A dispatch from Chicago says that Wilbur F. Storey, of the Times, is in a bad state, and that he gets around by leaning on his young wife with one hand and a cane with the other, that he believes his latter end is approaching, and that he is giving liberally to churches and has quit abusing ministers, and is trying to lead a different life.
We should have no objections to Mr. Storey’s going to heaven. However much he might try to revolutionize things there, and run the place, there will be enough of us there to hold the balance of power and prevent him from doing any particular damage. Besides, we do not believe he is responsible for the cussedness of his newspaper. It is the wicked young men he keeps. The four that we know, Wilkie, Snowdon, Seymour and Doc Hinman, are enough to make the truly good Mr. Storey have night sweats. They never refuse when you ask them up, and they are full of guile.
Storey got fooled the worst on Snowdon. Snow-don is a graduate of a nice Christian college at Ripon, a beautiful blonde young man with the most resigned and pious countenance we ever saw, one that seems to draw people to him. His heart is tender and he weeps at the recital of suffering. A stranger, to look at his face in repose, would say that he was an evangelist and the pillar of some church, and that he associated only with the truly good, but he plays the almightiest game of draw poker of any man in Chicago.
The boys say that when Storey engaged Snowdon, after the fire, he got him to attend to the Sunday school department, and to keep track of the church sociables and to report the noon prayer meetings, but that while he was giving him instructions in the duties that he would be expected to perform, Storey suggested that as the evening was well advanced that they play a game of “old maid,” an innocent game played with cards.
Mr. Snowdon hesitated at first, said it was something he never allowed himself to do, to touch a card, as he had promised his old professor, Mr. Merrill, of Ripon college, that he never would do anything that would bring reproach upon his almira mater, but seeing it was Storey he would play one game, just for luck. Well, you know how it is. One word brought on another, they drifted, by easy stages, into draw poker, and before Snowdon left he had won two hundred and eighty dollars and, an oroide watch chain of Storey.
Mr. Storey told his wife the next morning that he never was so deceived in a pious looking young person in his life. “Why,” said he, as he was thumbing over the Bible to read a chapter before morning prayers, “the tow headed cuss would draw to a pair of deuces and get an ace full. Let us unite in prayer.”
However, he was not going to see any other paper secure Snowdon’s talent, so he gave him a box stall up in the top of the Times building, and any day, after 3 o’clock in the afternoon, you can go there and borrow a couple of dollars of him, if you are in Chicago hard up.
The Sun hopes Mr. Storey may live as long as he can make it pay, and when he dies that he may go to the celestial regions, but he must not go and build any temporary seats and charge a dollar a head for us fellows from the country to see the procession go by. We can stand those things here on earth, but when we get over there we must have a square deal, or jump the game.
The tendency of the stage is to present practical, everyday affairs in plays, and those are the most successful which are the most natural. The shoeing of a horse on the stage in a play attracts the attention of the audience wonderfully, and draws well. The inner workings of a brewery, or a mill, is a big card, but there is hardly enough tragedy about it. If they could run a man or two through the wheel, and have them cut up into hash, or have them crowned in a beer vat? audiences could applaud as they do when eight or nine persons are stabbed, poisoned or beheaded in the Hamlets and Three Richards, where corpses are piled up on top of each other.
What the people want is a compromise between old tragedy and new comedy. Now, if some manager could have a love play, where the heroine goes into a slaughter house to talk love to the butcher, instead of a blacksmith shop or a brewery, it would take. A scene could be set for a slaughter house, with all the paraphernalia for killing cattle, and supe butchers to stand around the star butcher with cleavers and knives.
The star butcher could sit on a barrel of pigs’ feet, or a pile of heads and horns, and soliloquize over his unrequited love, as he sharpened a butcher knife on his boot. The hour for slaughtering having arrived, cattle could be driven upon the stage, the star could knock down a steer and cut its throat, and hang it up by the hind legs and skin it, with the audience looking on breathlessly.
As he was about to cut open the body of the dead animal, the orchestra could suddenly break the stillness, and the heroine could waltz out from behind a lot of dried meat hanging up at one side, dressed in a lavender satin princess dress, en train, with a white reception hat with ostrich feathers, and, wading through the Blood of the steer on the carpet, shout, “Stay your hand, Reginald!”
The star butcher could stop, wipe his knife on his apron, motion to the supe butchers to leave, and he would take three strides through the blood and hair, to the side of the heroine, take her by the wrist with his bloody hand, and shout, “What wiltest thou, Mary Anderson de Montmorence?” Then they could sit down on a box of intestines and liver and things and talk it over, and the curtain could go down with the heroine swooning in the arms of the butcher.
Seven years could elapse between that act and the next, and a scene could be laid in a boarding house, and some of the same beef could be on the table, and all that. Of course we do not desire to go into details. We are no play writer, but we know what takes. People have got tired of imitation blood on the stage. They kick on seeing a man killed in one act, and come out as good as new in the next. Any good play writer can take the cue from this article and give the country a play that will take the biscuit.
Imagine John McCullough, or Barrett, instead of killing Roman supes with night gowns on, and bare legs, killing a Texas steer. There’s where you would get the worth of your money. It would make them show the metal within them, and they would have to dance around to keep from getting a horn in their trousers. It does not require any pluck to go out behind the scenes with a sword and kill enough supes for a mess. Give us some slaughter house tragedy, right away.
There is nothing that is more touching than the gallantry of men, total strangers, to a lady who has met with an accident. Any man who has a heart in him, who sees a lady whose apparel has become disarranged in such a manner that she cannot see it, will, though she be a total stranger, tell her of her misfortune, so she can fix up and not be stared at. But sometimes these efforts to do a kindly action are not appreciated, and men get fooled.
This was illustrated at Watertown last week. People have no doubt noticed that one of the late fashions among women is to wear at the bottom of the dress a strip of red, which goes clear around. To the initiated it looks real nice, but a man who is not posted in the fashions would swear that the woman’s petticoat was dropping off, and if she was not notified, and allowed to fix it, she would soon be in a terrible fix on the street.
It was a week ago Monday that a lady from Oshkosh was at Watertown on a visit, and she wore a black silk dress with a red strip on the bottom. As she walked across the bridge Mr. Calvin Cheeney, a gentleman whose heart is in the right place, saw what he supposed would soon be a terrible accident, which would tend to embarrass the lady, so he stepped up to her in the politest manner possible, took off his hat and said:
“Excuse me, madame, but I think your wearing apparel is becoming disarranged. You might step right into Clark’s, here, and fix it,” and he pointed to the bottom of her dress.
She gave him a look which froze his blood, and shaking her dress out she went on. He said it was the last time he would ever try to help a woman in distress.
She sailed along down to a grocery store and stopped to look at some grapes, when the practiced eye of Hon. Peter Brook saw that something was wrong. To think is to act with Peter, and he at once said:
“Miss, your petticoat seems to be dropping off. You can go in the store and get behind that box of codfish and fix it if you want to.”
Now that was a kind thing for Peter to do, and an act that any gentleman might be proud of, but he was amazed at her when she told him to mind his own business, and she would attend to her own petticoat, and she marched off just a trifle mad.
She went into the postoffice to mail a postal card, just as Mr. Moak, the postmaster, came out of his private office with Hon. L. B. Caswell, the congressman. Mr. Moak, without the aid of his glasses, saw that there was liable to be trouble, so he asked Caswell to excuse him a moment, and turning to the delivery window where she was asking the clerk what time the mail came in, he said:
“I beg a thousand pardons, madame. It ill becomes a stranger to speak to one so fair without an introduction, but I believe that I am not violating the civil service rules laid down by Mr. Hayes for the guidance of postmasters when I tell you, lady, that something has broke loose and that the red garment that you fain would hide from the gaze of the world has asserted itself and appears to the naked eye about two chains and three links below your dress. I am going abroad, to visit Joe Lindon, the independent candidate for sheriff, and you can step into the back office and take a reef in it.”
He did not see the look of fire in her eyes as he went out, because he was not looking at her eye. She passed out, and Doc Spaulding, who has got a heart in him as big as a box car, saw it, and touching his broad brimmed felt hat he said, in a whisper:
“Madame, you better drop into a millinery store and fasten up your—”
But she passed him on a run, and was just going into a hardware store, with her hand on her pistol pocket, when Jule Keyes happened along. Now, Jule would consider himself a horse thief if he should allow a woman to go along the street with anything the matter with her clothes, and he not warn her of the consequences, so he stopped and told her that she must excuse him, a perfect stranger, for mentioning her petticoat, but the fact was that it was coming off.
By this time the woman was mad. She bought a pistol and started for the depot, firmly resolved to kill the first man that molested her. She did not meet anybody until she arrived at the Junction, and she sat down in the depot to rest before the train came.
Pierce, the hotel man, is one of the most noticin’ persons anywhere, and she hadn’t been seated a York minute before his eye caught the discrepancy in her apparel. He tried to get the telegraph operator and the express man to go and tell her about it, but they wouldn’t, so he went and took a seat near her.
“It is a warm day, madame,” said Pierce, looking at the red strip at the bottom of her dress.
She drew her pistol, cocked it, and pointed it at Pierce, who was trembling in every leg, and said:
“Look-a-here, you young cuss. I have had half a dozen grown persons down town tell me my petticoat was coming off, and I have stood it because I thought they were old enough to know what they were talking about, but when it comes to boys of your age coming around thinking they know all about women’s clothes it is too much, and the shooting is going to commence.”
Mr. Pierce made one bound and reached the door, and then got behind a white grey hound and waited for her to go away, which she soon did. As she was stepping on the car the conductor, Jake Sazerowski, said to her:
“Your apparel, madame, seems to be demoralized,” but she rushed into the car, and was seen no more.
Since then these gentlemen have all learned that the fashion calls for a red strip at the bottom of a dress, and they will make no more mistakes. But they were all serious enough, and their interference was prompted by pure kindness of heart, and not from any wicked thoughts.
Last week, a young man from the country west of here came in on the evening train and walked up to Grand avenue, with a fresh looking young woman hanging on to one handle of a satchel while he held the other. They turned into the Plankinton House, and with a wild light in his eye the man went to the book and registered his name and that of the lady with him.
While the clerk was picking out a couple of rooms that were near together, the man looked around at the colored man who had the satchel, and as the clerk said, “Show the gentleman to No. 65 and the lady to 67,” he said, “Hold on, ‘squire! One room will do.”
On being shown to the room, the bridegroom came right out with the bell boy and appeared at the office. Picking out a benevolent looking gentleman, with a good place to raise hair on his head, who was behind the counter, the groom said:
“Say, can a man enjoy religion in this house?”
Mr. White said a man could if he brought it with him. They had none on hand to issue out to guests, but they never interfered with those who had it when they arrived.
“Why,” says the manager of the house, “has anybody interfered with your devotions here?”
“No, not here,” said the man, wiping his fore-head with a red handkerchief. “But they have at Dubuque. I’ll tell you how it was. I was married a couple of days ago, and night before last I put up at a Dubuque hotel. My wife never had been married before, any at all, and she is timid, and thinks everybody is watching us, and making fun of us.
“She jumps at the slightest sound. Well, we went to our room in the afternoon, and she began to cry, and said if she wasn’t married she never would be the longest day she lived. I sort of put my arm around her, and was just telling her that everybody had to get married, when there was a knock on the door, and she jumped more than thirty feet. “You see that finger. Well, a pin in her belt stuck clear through, and came near making me faint away. I held my finger in my mouth, and telling her the house was not on fire, I went to the door and there was a porter there who wanted to know if I wanted any more coal on the fire. I drove him away, and sat down in a big rocking chair with my wife in my lap, and was stroking her hair and telling her that if she would forgive me for marrying I never would do so again, and trying to make her feel more at home, when there came another knock at the door, and she jumped clear across the room and knocked over a water pitcher.
“This seal ring on my finger caught in her frizzes and I’ll be cussed if the whole top of her head didn’t come off. I was a little flurried and went to the door, and a chambermaid was there with an armful of towels and she handed me a couple and went off. My wife came into camp again, and began to cry and accuse me of pulling her hair, when I went up to her and put my arm around her waist, and was just going to kiss her, just as any man would be justified in kissing his wife under the circumstances, when she screamed murder and fell against the bureau.
“I looked around and the door had opened, and there was a colored man coming into the room with a kerosene lamp, and he chuckled and said he begged my pardon. Now, I am a man that don’t let my temper get away with me, but as it was three hours before dark I didn’t see what was the use of a lamp, and I told him to get out of there. Before 6 o’clock that evening there had been twenty raps at the door, and we got sick. My wife said she would not stay in that house for a million dollars. So we started for Milwaukee.
“I tried to get a little sleep on the cars, but every little while a conductor would wake me up and roll me over in the seat to look at my ticket, and brake-men would run against my legs in the aisle of the car, and shout the names of stations till I was sorry I ever left home. Now, I want to have rest and quietude. Can I have it here?”
The manager told him to go to his room, and if he wanted any coal or ice water to ring for it, and if anybody knocked at his door without being sent for, to begin shooting bullets through the door. That settled it, and when the parties returned to Iowa they said this country was a mighty sight different from Dubuque.
A dispatch from Brooklyn states that at the conclusion of a performance at the theatre, Fanny Davenport’s wardrobe was attached by Anna Dickinson and the remark is made that Fanny will contest the matter. Well, we should think she would. What girl would sit down silently and allow another to attach her wardrobe without contesting? It is no light thing for an actress to have her wardrobe attached after the theatre is out. Of course Fanny could throw something over her, a piece of scenery, or a curtain, and go to her hotel, but how would she look? Miss Davenport always looked well with her wardrobe on, but it may have been all in the wardrobe. Without a wardrobe she may look very plain and unattractive.
Anna Dickinson has done very wrong. She has struck Fanny in a vital part. An actress with a wardrobe is one of the noblest works of nature. She is the next thing to an honest man, which is the noblest work, though we do not say it boastingly. We say she is next to an honest man, with a wardrobe, but if she has no wardrobe it is not right.
However, we will change the subject before it gets too deep for us.
Now, the question is, what is Anna Dickinson going to do with Fanny’s wardrobe? She may think Fanny’s talent goes with it, but if she will carefully search the pockets she will find that Fanny retains her talent, and has probably hid it under a bushel, or an umbrella; or something, before this time. Anna cannot wear Fanny’s wardrobe to play on the stage, because she is not bigger than a banana, while Fanny is nearly six feet long, from tip to tip. If Anna should come out on a stage with the Davenport wardrobe, the boys would throw rolls of cotton batting at her.
Fanny’s dress, accustomed to so much talent, would have to be stuffed full of stuff. There would be room in Fanny’s dress, if Anna had it on, as we remember the two, to put in a feather bed, eleven rolls of cotton batting, twelve pounds of bird seed, four rubber air cushions, two dozen towels, two brass bird cages, a bundle of old papers, a sack of bran and a bale of hay. That is, in different places. Of course all this truck wouldn’t go in the dress in any one given locality. If Anna should put on Fanny’s dress, and have it filled up so it would look any way decent, and attempt to go to Canada, she would be arrested for smuggling.
Why, if Dickinson should put on a pair of Davenport’s stockings, now for instance, it would be necessary to get out a search warrant to find her. She could pin the tops of them at her throat with a brooch, and her whole frame would not fill one stocking half as well as they have been filled before being attached, and Anna would look like a Santa Claus present of a crying doll, hung on to a mantel piece.
Fanny Davenport is one of the handsomest and splendidest formed women on the American stage, and a perfect lady, while Dickinson, who succeeds to her old clothes through the law, is small, not handsome, and a quarrelsome female who thinks she has a mission. The people of this country had rather see Fanny Davenport without any wardrobe to speak of than to see Dickinson with clothes enough to start a second hand store.
A woman at Wyocena, who chews gum, laid her “quid” on a green paper box, and when she came to chew it again was poisoned and it was with difficulty her life was saved. This reminds us of an accident that happened to Mary Anderson when she was here last. Mary will remember that in the second scene of “Ingomar,” just when Parthenia was winding herself around the heart of the barbarian, she looked pale, and whenever she would try to say sweet words to him, she acted as though she was on a lake excursion.
During some of the love passages we remember a far away look in her eyes, as though she was searching for the unfathomable, or looking for a friendly railing to lean over, and when her bosom heaved with emotion she acted as though she expected to hear from down country, and doubted whether her boots would remain on her feet or throw up their situation. Those who sat in the left box will remember that when she threw her head on Ingomar’s shoulder, that she spit cotton over towards the back of the stage, and acted like the little girl that had been eating tomatoes.
Ingomar seemed to notice that something was the matter, and he kept his face as far from Parthenia as the rules of polite society would admit, and the theory that she had been eating onions, which was advanced by a bald-headed man in the dress circle, found many believers. However, that was not the case, as we found by inquiring of a gentlemanly supe. It is well known that Miss Anderson is addicted to the gum chewing habit, and that when she goes upon the stage she sticks her chew of gum on an old castle painted on the scenery.
There was a wicked young man playing a minor part in the play, who had been treated scornfully by Mary, as he thought, and he had been heard to say he would make her sick. He did. He took her chew of gum and spread it out so it was as thin as paper, then placed a chew of tobacco inside, neatly wrapped it up, and stuck it back on the old castle. Mary came off, when the curtain went down, and going up to the castle she bit like a bass. Putting the gum, which she had no idea was loaded, into her mouth, she mashed it between her ivories and rolled it as a sweet morsel under her tongue. It is said by those who happened to be behind the scenes, that when the tobacco began to get in its work there was the worst transformation scene that ever appeared on the stage. The air, one supe said, seemed to be full of fine cut tobacco and spruce gum, and Mary stood there and leaned against a painted rock, a picture of homesickness.
She was pale about the gills, and trembled like ap aspen leaf shaken by the wind. She was calm as a summer’s morning, and while concealment, like a worm in an apple, gnawed at her stomach, and tore her corset strings, she did not upbraid the wretch who had smuggled the vile pill into her countenance. All she said, as she turned her pale face to the painted ivy on the rock, and grasped a painted mantel piece with her left hand, as her right hand rested on her heaving stomach, was, “I die by the hand of an assassin.” And the soft scenic moon rose up slowly, and calmly she looked down from the flies, and Mary was saved. Women can’t be too careful where they put their gum.
The names of Indians are sometimes so peculiar that people are made to wonder how the red men became possessed of them. That of “Sitting Bull,” “Crazy Horse,” “Man Afraid of his Horses,” “Red Cloud,” etc., cause a good deal of thought to those who do not know how the names are given. The fact of the matter is that after a child of the forest is born the medicine man goes to the door and looks out and the first object that attracts his attention is made use of to name the child. When the mother of that great warrior gave birth to her child the medicine man looked out and saw a bull seated on its haunches; hence the name “Sitting Bull.” It is an evidence of our superior civilization that we name children on a different plan, taking the name of some eminent man or woman, some uncle or aunt to fasten on to the unsuspecting stranger. Suppose that the custom that is in vogue among the Indians should be in use among us, we would have, instead of “George Washington” and “Hanner Jane,” and such beautiful names, some of the worst jaw-breakers that ever was. Suppose the attending physician should go the door after a child was born and name it after the first object he saw. We might have some future statesman named “Red Headed Servant Girl with a Rubber Bag of Hot Water” or “Bald-headed Husband Walking Up and Down the Alley with His Hands in His Pockets swearing this thing shall never Happen Again.” If the doctor happened to go the door when the grocery delivery wagon was there he would name the child “Boy from Dixon’s Grocery with a Codfish by the Tail and a Bag of Oatmeal,” or if the ice man was the first object the doctor saw some beautiful girl might go down to history with the name, “Pirate with a Lump of Ice About as Big as a Solitaire Diamond.” Or suppose it was about election time, and the doctor should look out, he might name a child that had a right to grow up a minister, “Candidate for office so Full of Bug Juice that His Back Teeth are Afloat;” or suppose he should look out and see a woman crossing a muddy street, he might name a child “Woman with a Sealskin Cloak and a Hole in Her Stocking going Down Town to Buy a Red Hat.” It wouldn’t do at all to name children the way Indians do, because the doctors would have the whole business in their hands, and the directories are big enough now.
About the time the Wisconsin Central conductors were being hauled over the coals, some paper did a very unjust thing by insinuating that there was about to be a general overhauling on the old established roads, and carried the idea that there was crookedness among conductors who have been trusted employees for more years than the reporters of the papers making the insinuations have lived.
This is entirely wrong. It is well enough to joke conductors about “dividing with the company,” and all that, and the conductors take such jokes all right, and laugh about them, but when a serious charge is made by a newspaper it is no joking matter.
Men who have held responsible positions for fifteen years under managers who are the sharpest men in this country, are not apt to be crooked, and we notice that when there is a chance they are promoted, and if they leave the railroad it is always to enter into a better business, and they are honored everywhere.
We hold that no man can occupy a position on one of our great railroads for ten years if he is crooked. It would not pay a conductor to steal, if he had the desire. They are all men of families, well connected, and many of them have children grown up. Would they do an act that would bring disgrace not only upon themselves but their relatives, wives, children, and forever debar them from society for a paltry few dollars that they could bilk a railroad company out of? The idea is preposterous, and an insult to their intelligence.
As well say that the bookkeepers of our business houses, the managers of our manufactories, were systematically stealing from employers. The conductors have got sense. This talk about stealing is disgusting. You send your wives and children off on a train liable to meet with accident. The first thing you do if you are acquainted with the road is to find out what conductor is going to run the train. If it is one you know, you feel just as secure as though the wife and children were under the escort of your brother.
You know that if anything happens the first thought of the conductor is the safety of the women and children, at the expense of his own safety. And when your loved ones come home safe, and you meet them at the train, and the conductor stands upon the platform as the train backs into the depot, looking at nobody, but his eye fixed upon the chances of accident, you always feel as though you wanted to put your arm around him and say, “Bully for you, old boy.”
If your wife gets out of money on a journey the conductor goes down into his own pocket, and not into the railroad company’s, and tells her not to worry, as he hands her what money she wants. If your child is taken sick on the journey, who but the conductor sees to sending a dispatch to you quicker than lightning, and who brings a pillow in from the sleeper and makes the little one as comfortable as he would his own little one at home?
You appreciate these things at the time, but some day you will say, “How can a man drive a fast horse on eighty dollars a month?” Then you think you are smart. We will tell you. The conductors are pretty sharp business men. They can’t travel all the time, and come in contact with all the world, and not be sharp. They see chances to make money outside of their business.
For instance, one of them who is a good judge sees a horse at some interior town that he knows is worth three times as much in Milwaukee or Chicago as the owner asks for it. He would be a fool if he did not buy it. We have known a conductor to make more money on two horse trades than his salary would amount to for three months. Would you object to his doing it? He did not neglect the business the company paid him to perform.
Sometimes a conductor feels in his inmost heart that the indications are that wheat is going up. Is it any worse for him to take a deal in wheat than it is for the deacon in his church? If he makes five hundred dollars on the deal, and puts an addition on his house, is it the square thing for you to say he stole it out of the company? Their knowledge of railroads and business frequently gives them an idea that stocks are liable to go up or down, and often they invest with good results.
We will take the chances with conductors, as square men, by the side of any business men, and it makes us as mad as a wet hen to hear people talk about their stealing. As well say that because one bank cashier steals that they are all robbing the banks. Quit this, now.
An Oshkosh young man started for a picnic in a buggy with two girls, and when they got half way they got a hot box to the hind wheel of the buggy, and they remained there all the afternoon pouring water on the wheel, missing the picnic. There is nothing that will cause a hot box in a buggy so quick as going to a picnic with girls. Particularly is this the case when one has two girls. No young man should ever take two girls to a picnic. He may think one cannot have too much of a good thing, and that he holds over the most of the boys who have only one girl, but before the picnic is over he will note the look of satisfaction on the faces of the other boys as they stray off in the vernal shade, and he will look around at his two girls as though his stomach was overloaded. We don’t care how attractive the girls are, or how enterprising a boy he is, or how expansive or far-reaching a mind he has, he cannot do justice to the subject if he has two girls. There will be a certain clashing of interests that no young boy in his goslinghood, as most boys are when they take two girls to a picnic, has the diplomacy to prevent. Now, this may seem a trifling thing to write about and for a great pious paper to publish, but there is more at the bottom of it than is generally believed. If we start the youth of the land out right in the first place they will be all right, but if they start out by taking two girls to a picnic their whole lives are liable to become acidulated, and they will grow up hating themselves. If a young man is good-natured and tries to do the fair thing, and a picnic is got up, the rest of the boys are liable to play it on him. There is always some old back number of a girl who has no fellow, who wants to go, and the boys, after they all get girls and buggies engaged, will canvass among themselves to see who shall take this extra girl, and it always falls to the good-natured young man. He says of course there is room for three in the buggy. Sometimes he thinks may be this old girl can be utilized to drive the horse, and then he can converse with his own sweet girl, with both hands, but in such a moment as ye think not he finds out that the extra girl is afraid of horses, dare not drive, and really requires some holding to keep her nerves quiet. The young man begins to realize by this time that life is one great disappointment. He tries to drive with one hand hand, and consoles his good girl, who is a little cross at the turn affairs have taken, with the other, but it is a failure, and finally his good girl says she will drive, and then he has to put an arm around them both, which will give more or less dissatisfaction, the best way you can fix it. If we had a boy that didn’t seem to have any more sense than to make a hat rack of himself to hang girls on in a buggy we should labor with him and tell him of the agonies we had experienced in youth, when the boys palmed off two girls on us to take to a country picnic, and we believe we can do no greater favor to the young men who are just entering the picnic of life than to impress upon them the importance of doing one thing at a time, and doing it well. Start right at first, and life will be one continued picnic buggy ride, but if your mind is divided in youth you will always be looking for hot boxes and annoyance.
A few months ago the spectacle presented itself of a very respectable lady of the Seventh Ward, wearing a black eye. There never was a case of ante-election that was any more perfect than the one this lady carried.
We have seen millions of black eyes in our time, some of which were observed in a mirror, but we never saw one that suggested a row any plainer than the one the Seventh Ward lady wore. It was cut biased, that being the latest style of black eye, and was fluted with purple and orange shade, and trimmed with the same. Probably we never should have known about the black eye had not the lady asked, as she held her hand over one eye, if there was any truth in the story that a raw oyster would cure a black eye. She came to us as an expert. When we told her that a piece of beefsteak was worth two oysters she uncovered the eye.
It looked as though painted by one of the old masters.
Rather than have anybody think she had been having a row she explained how it happened. She was sitting with her husband and little girl in the parlor, and while the two were reading, the little one disappeared. The mother went to the girl’s room, on tip-toe, to see if she was asleep. She found the girl with all her dolls on the floor, having a doll’s prayer meeting. She had them all down on their knees, and would let them pray one at a time, then sing. One of the dolls that squeaked when pressed on the stomach was leader of the singing, and the little girl bossed the job. There was one old maid doll that the little girl seemed to be disgusted with because the doll talked too much, and she would say:
“There, Miss, you sit down and let some of the other sisters get in a word edgeways. Sister Perkins, won’t you relate your experience?”
After listening to this for a few moments the mother heard the girl say:
“Now, Polly, you pass the collection plate, and nobody must put in lozengers, and then we will all go to the dancing school.”
The whole thing was so ridiculous that the mother attempted to rush down stairs three at a time, to have her husband come up to prayer meeting, when she stubbed herself on a stair rod, and—well, she got the black eye on the journey down stairs, though what hit her she will probably never know. But she said when she began to roll down stairs she felt in her innermost soul as though she had broke up that prayer meeting prematurely.
There is nothing in the world that is so beautiful as to see a sporting man, one who loves to shoot the wild prairie chicken and chase the bounding duck over the plains, have a respect for the Sabbath day. There are too many of our sporting friends who, if they are out for a week’s shooting, forget that they should lay away the deadly breech loader on Sunday, after oiling it, and busy themselves reading good books, or loading cartridges.
However, we are proud to number among our acquaintances one sporting gentleman who would sooner cut a dog in two than to hunt on Sunday. It is related of him that on one occasion while in camp in a deer country, that his hounds got after a buck one Sunday morning, and that our friend was so incensed at the dogs that he seized his gun and shot one of the dogs dead, besides wounding the deer, and that he had to follow the deer over four miles before he could overtake the animal and put it out of its misery.
A wicked companion said that he shot at the deer and killed the dog accidentally, but those who know Mr. Van Brunt would not believe the story for a moment. Not long since this gentleman left his home at Horicon and went to Owatonna, Minn., for a few weeks’ hunt. He hunted a good deal in town, and became somewhat acquainted with the fair sex as well as the chickens and other ducks of the prairies. However, Sunday came, and while the other wretches went out snooting on Sunday, our friend hied himself to the Sabbath school. His presence was observed by a teacher, and he, by the way, observed her presence, and being a stranger and a pious looking man, she invited him to help her teach her class. He accepted, and seated beside the fair teacher, he chipped in an occasional remark to the class, while he looked into the soulful, pious eyes of the handsome teacher. She introduced him to the superintendent as a pious young man from Wisconsin, and the superintendent invited him to address the school.
It was new business to our friend, but he said he never had anything sawed off onto him unless he stood it like a man, so he got up, with the girl’s eyes on him, and told the children the beautiful story of the cross, and how Samson went up in a chariot of fire, and Adam was found in the bullrushes by a Sunday school teacher, while he was shooting blue wing teal, and how Noah and Sat Clark built an ark and coasted around Uoricon lake and landed on Iron Ridge and sent out a canvas-back duck to see if there was any living thing this side of Schleisingerville, and how the duck came back with a sprig of wild celery in its bill which it had found at Lake Koshkonong.
He told how the locusts came down on the democratic party and lected Garfield, and counseled the children to be good and they would have a soft thing. He said evil communications corrupted two of a kind, and they could not be too careful with their pennies, and advised them to give up the soul destroying habit of buying taffy, and try and lead a different life, and put their money into the missionary box, where the wicked cease from troubling, and give us a rest.
He would have gone on all the afternoon, only the superintendent of the Sunday school told the children that the exercises would close with “Little Drops of Water,” and our friend sat down and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
The teacher said that his words had opened new beauties to her in the Scriptures, though he was a little off on some of his statistics. He told her, by way of apology, that she couldn’t expect much religion from a man that came from so strong a democratic county as Dodge county. This may be all a lie, but if it is, we got it from one of the best liars of the State.
When Mr. and Mrs. Hayes returned to Washington from the far west their Ohio friends got up a surprise party for them. They had just retired for the night, rather early on account of fatigue, when the door bell rung violently. Mr. Hayes put on his pants, and throwing one suspender over his shoulder and holding on to it with his hands, he went to the door and asked who was there. On being answered that John Sherman was there, Mr. Hayes supposed there was something important, and he opened the door.
Mr. Sherman came in with a market basket of sandwiches, followed by about a hundred ladies and gentlemen, loaded down with articles usually taken to surprise parties. Mr. Hayes was taken entirely by surprise, and as he buttoned his trousers and tucked in his night shirt behind he said he hoped they would excuse him for a moment till he went up stairs and put on a collar and some stockings, and called Mrs. Hayes, who was in bed.
Matt Carpenter said never mind; he would call Mrs. Hayes, and he gave a hop, skip and jump and went up stairs three at a time, followed by Mr. Hayes, who was shivering from the contact of his bare feet with the oil cloth in the hall.
“What is the trouble, Rutherford?” said Mrs. Hayes, as Mr. Carpenter rushed into the room.
“Get up and dress yourself, you are surrounded, and escape is impossible.”
Mrs. Hayes screamed as she saw the bold buccaneer, pulled the bed clothes over her head and said, “We are lost.”
At this point Hayes, who had got on a pair of woolen stockings, and was buttoning on a paper collar, said: “I say, Matt, of course this is all right, and I don’t want you to be offended, but won’t you just step out into the hall so Mrs. Hayes can get her clothes on.”
“Why, to be sure,” said Matt, as he got up out of a rocking chair, on which there were three skirts, a red petticoat, an emancipation corset, and a pair of striped stockings with long suspenders arranged to button on the waist, “of course I will go out, but you need not mind me. I am near sighted.”
Matt went down stairs with the crowd, and when he was gone Mrs. Hayes got her head out from under the clothes and wanted to know what the trouble was, and if they could not fly.
Hayes told her not to be alarmed, as it was only one of those d—d surprise parties. He said there were two hundred hungry people down stairs, with baskets of sandwiches and pickles, and the chances were that they would eat up everything there was in the house, and mash crumbs and cold tongue into the carpet.
Mrs. Hayes got up and sent Rutherford into the linen closet after a clean white skirt, and he returned with a night gown and had to be sent back. While she was taking her hair down out of the curl papers, and putting bandoline over her ears, she gave Mr. Hayes her opinion of surprise parties. She said that little shrimp, Alexander Stephens, would sit on the piano keys, and knock his boot heels against the piano case, and that Dave Davis would fall over the music rack, and sit down in her best rocking chair and break it.
Just then she touched her nose with a curling iron that she had heated in a gas jet, and screamed and woke Mr. Hayes up, and he wanted to know what was the matter. She rolled over in bed, felt of her nose to see if it was there, and told Mr. Hayes she had been dreaming there was a surprise party came to the house.
He said: “My dear, I trust there is no such fate in store for us. You are nervous. Try a little of that crab apple cider, and lay on your face, and see if you can’t go to sleep.”
There is something about the practice of “practical joking” that is mighty pleasant and enjoyable, if the joke is on somebody else. It was about six years ago that we quit practical joking, and the reason was that the boys played one on us that fairly broke our back. We had always been full of it, and an opportunity to play a joke on a friend was a picnic for us, but this time we had all the tuck taken out and fairly unraveled.
A party consisting of Hogan, Hatch, Root, Wood and Webb had been down from La Crosse to the marshes shooting ducks for a week. We had prepared to break camp and take the train to Brownsville at 2 o’clock, from which we took a little steamer for La Crosse.
We were out shooting and did not get to camp until everything was packed up, and just had time to catch the train with our hunting clothes on. The rest of the fellows had been in camp an hour, and had put on their good clothes, and washed up and looked like gentlemen, as they were, while we looked like a tramp, which we were not. All got on the little steamboat, and hugged around the boiler with the other passengers, for it was a cold night.
We felt a little ashamed of the old hunting clothes that had been worn so many years, and were covered with blood and dirt, but there was no chance to change, and we sat down with the boys. Finally Root, who was the biggest hector in the world, and a fine looking gentleman, turned to the captain of the boat and said, pointing to us:
“I wish, captain, you would ask this red-headed muskrat trapper to sit on the other side of me. He smells bad.”
If lightning had struck us we could not have been more astonished. The passengers all looked at the dirty looking “muskrat trapper,” and stuck up their noses. The captain asked us in a polite manner if we would not please move and get on the “lee side” of the passengers. He said he didn’t mean any offence, but the smell of muskrats oftentimes made people sick.
Well, it was a pretty tight fix, but we forced a laugh and looked around at the rest of the boys in a familiar way, and began talking to them. Not a man of them would recognize us. The captain turned to Hogan and said, “Is this a friend of yours?” Hogan put on a look of disgust, and said he had never seen us before. “However,” says Jim, “he may be a very deserving person of his class.”
The captain said we had better go to the other end of the boiler and lay down with the dogs where it was warm. We tried to pass it off as a joke, and turned to Hatch and tried to get into conversation with him about a goose he had killed the day before, but he wouldn’t have it. He said we could get the smell out of our clothes by burying them, and then he went on to tell how he shot a skunk once, and spoiled a suit of clothes.
We spoke to Colonel Wood, one of our party, as a last resort, and all he said was to draw in his breath with a “Whoosh,” and put his handkerchief to his nose. We never felt so mean in the world. The whole gang had combined against us, and we got up to leave them, meditating revenge, when Walt Webb said, “Let’s throw the cuss overboard.” We went and laid down on the valises, and tried to think of some way to get even with the boys, when Root told the captain that they had got some valuables in those valises, and they didn’t want any tramp laying down on them, and he came along and actually drove us off of our own valise. 4
To make the matter still worse, a homely looking Norwegian dog that we had borrowed to take on the hunt, and which was the worst looking brute that ever was, and which had been the laughing stock of the camp for a week, at this point came up to us, wagged his tail and followed us, and the boys said, “Look at the dog the muskrat trapper owns.” That was the worst give away.
We walked around on deck, and would occasionally stop and speak to one of the boys, hoping they had given us enough and would relent, but all the way to La Crosse not one of them would speak to us, and when the boat arrived at the landing Root handed us a quarter, in the presence of the passengers, and asked if we wouldn’t help Mike Doyle, the cook, carry the baggage ashore.
It was the worst joke we ever had perpetrated on us, and even after we got ashore, and Hatch said, “Come, old sorrel top, let’s go and get a glass of beer,” we could hardly smile. Since then when we go hunting we wear the best clothes we have got.
For years afterwards when fellows were joking, some of the party would ask us “if the trapping was good this season.” We got so we could not look a myskrat in the face. So we say that practical joking is splendid if it is on the other fellow. Always quit when they get it on to you.
There was probably the most astonished temperance man up above Stevens Point the other day that ever was. The name of the temperance man is Sutherland.
He is a nice gentleman, but, like many another man, he can never see a person with his keg full of bug juice without giving him a talking to.
The other day Sutherland was driving along the road when he overtook an Indian who asked for a ride. He was allowed to get in the wagon, when Sutherland discovered that the Indian had a breath that would stop a temperance clock. He smelled like a sidewalk in front of a wholesale liquor store. The Indian was comfortably full, so full that his back teeth were floating.
Sutherland thought it was a good time to get in his work, so he began talking to the Indian about the wickedness of looking upon the whisky when it was bay, and when it giveth its color in the nose. He told the Indian of the wrecked homes, the poverty, the disgrace and death that followed the use of liquor, and wound up by pleading with him to give up his cups and join the angel band and shout hosannas in a temperance lodge. The Indian did not understand a word that Suthland was saying, but supposing by the looks of his nose and pleading eyes that he wanted a drink, the Indian drew a large black bottle from under his blanket and handed it to Sutherland, remarking: “Ugh! Dam firewater.”
Sutherland thought that he had made a convert, and telling the Indian that he was glad he had resolved to lead a different life, took the bottle and dashed it upon the ground, smashing it into a thousand pieces.
Well, the air seemed full of Indians. If Sutherland had torn out the Indian’s heart he could not have hurt the red man worse.
With a war whoop the Indian jumped on the seat, took Sutherland by the hair and yanked him out on the ground. Sutherland yelled and the Indian galloped over him. The team ran away, and the Indian mauled Sutherland. He cut open his face, italicised his nose, put a roof over his eye and felt for his knife to stab him.
Sutherland got away and run to Stevens Point, where his wounds were bound up. He says if any gentleman wants to take the job of reforming Indians he will give up his situation. He meant well, but lacked judgment.
An item in the La Crosse Chronicle says: “Two cats and a dog were killed at the high school yesterday for inspection by the class in physiology.”
In preparing the youth of the land for a business career there is nothing that tends more to ripen the mind and to prepare it for overcoming the obstacles that will naturally be found in after life than to learn to cut a dog in two.
The ignorance of some of the business men of the present day is largely to be attributed to the fact that the instructors of the youth in the olden time never taught them how to carve a dog. How many times have we been in positions since arriving at man’s estate, when poring over some great problem of science, where we would have given ten years of the front end of our life if we knew how to make both ends meat, even if it was dog meat?
The knowledge that the students of the present day obtain in their study of the dog will be valuable to them if ever they are caught in a melon patch, and a dog fastens his teeth into their garments. They will know how to go to work scientifically to unhinge the jaws of a dog, instead of pulling one way, while the dog pulls the other, until the cloth or the skin tears out.
It will be a great thing to know all about how a dog is put together. And if these students are taught how to kill cats they will more than get their money back when they grow up.
Ignorant people who have never had the advantages of studying the cat when it is dead, attempt to kill them with boot-jacks and empty ale bottles and tomato cans, but the next generation will know how to do it scientifically, and not hurt the cat.
This is certainly an age of improvement, and the Sun desires that school children shall know all about the anatomy of the festive dog and the nocturnal cat, if they don’t even know how to spell their own names.
The newspaper correspondents about the White House, echoing the remarks made by the doctors, are continually talking of Mrs. Garfield’s bravery, and we frequently see the statement made that she is “the bravest woman in the world,” and all that. While expressing great admiration for the gifted lady, in the trying ordeal through which she has passed, and admitting that she is brave as an American woman ought to be, and that by her conduct she greatly braced up her beloved husband when his liver was knocked around into the small of his back by the assassin’s bullet, and he didn’t know whether he was going to live till morning, we must say that Mrs. Garfield is no braver than thousands of other good women.
She simply took the chances on his dying, as thousands of other wives do every day, and for his good she put on the best face possible, and kept her tears back. But how many obscure women have done the same thing, as they sat by the side of their dying husbands, and made the patient believe that he was getting better, and smiled while their hearts were breaking? Was Mrs. Garfield braver than the sister of charity, God bless her, who goes from the North to nurse total strangers in a stricken southern city, when she knows that within a week the deadly fever will kill her?
Compare the President’s wife for a moment with the wife of a drunken husband, who points a revolver at her heart, and his nervous finger on the trigger, while he announces that he will kill her. The wife looks him in the eye and says, “Kill me, John, but kiss me first,” and the drunken brute breaks down and cries, and she takes the revolver from him, puts him to bed, soaks his feet and brings him a good supper. That is bravery.
Think of a frail little woman whose life has been one bed of thorns, and whose happy hours have been so few that if an hour seems to open to her with happiness she dare not enjoy it for fear there is a mistake, and it is not hers to enjoy. In the wreck of her life’s ambitions and hopes she has saved only a dear little girl and her heart is so bound up in her that it ceases to beat when she thinks that God may forget that the little one is all she has, and call her home.
One day the little one comes home with fever, takes to her bed, and for weeks is just on the line between earth and heaven. The little mother, hardly able to be upon her feet, believes as firmly as she believes that she lives, that her darling will die, and that two hearts will be buried in the coffin, and yet she watches beside her night and day with smiles on her face, sings to her as though her heart were filled with happiness, and occasionally gives expression to a jolly laugh, just to brace up her little darling, and make her believe there is no danger, and when the doctor says “she will live,” the brave little mother goes to her room and cries for the first time, and faints away.
Ah, gentlemen correspondents, you do well to speak of the bravery of the President’s wife, but you know that these incidents we have related, and incidents you have seen in your own experiences, show as great, if not greater bravery and heroism than that of the first woman of the land. O, the country is full of women who are braver than the bravest man that ever walked.
It is singular how a great calamity like the attempted assassination of the President will bring people together on terms of familiarity, and cause them to discuss things that they never knew anything about before. People who never thought of such things before, except during the cucumber season, have become familiar with their livers and internal improvements, and talk as glibly of the abdomen, the umbilicus—as well as the cuss who shot him—the peritonitis, the colon, the ilium, the diaphragm, the alacumbumbletop and the diaphaneous cholagogue as though they had been attending a Chicago meat cutting match at a students’ dissecting room. Men talk of little else, and this is noticeable more particularly among men who have nothing to do.
There were two old men who loaf a good deal around a grocery, discussing the wound of the President, and one was trying to illustrate to the other how it was. He put on his glasses and took up a butter tryer and walked up to a lady customer who was leaning over the counter smelling of some boarding-house prunes. She was a large lady, and perhaps as good a subject as could have been found. The first old man called the other up behind the woman, and said:
“There, the assassin stood about as you do, and looked, probably, the same as you do. Now, you take this spigot and point to the woman, about here—” and he put the butter tryer on her back, near the belt.
“Yes, I see,” said the second old man, as he nibbled a piece off a soda cracker, and pointed the wooden spigot at the woman, with his finger on the trigger. The woman was busy looking to see if there were any worms in the prunes, and she didn’t notice what was going on.
“There,” said the first old man, as he pushed the end of the butter tryer a little harder against the woman. “The bullet went in here, and went around here close to the liver, though probably it didn’t touch the liver, passed through the thin membrane, and is probably lodged in here,” and he reached around the woman with his left hand to where her apron was tied on. “Now, if they cannot extract the ball the great danger is from peritonitis—”
At this point the woman observed what was going on, and she was about as mad as a woman can be. Seizing a codfish that was on the head of a sugar barrel by the tail she whacked the first old gent, who held the butter tryer, over the head, and said:
“Peritonitis is beginning to set in, you bald-headed old villain, and general prostration will be the result. I will teach you to put your arm around me. I am no manikin. Do you take me for a dissecting room? Put down that gun, you idiot,” said she, as she wafted the codfish toward the second old man, who still held up the spigot.
The grocery man, who was cutting a cheese, came around the counter with the cheese knife in his hand, and said he hoped there would be no more bloodshed, and asked the old man to put down the butter tryer and go out. The two old men went out on the sidewalk, when the woman told the grocery man that no woman was safe a moment when those old reprobates were allowed to run at large, and when she got so low down as to allow people to practice assassination on her with wooden faucets and butter tryers she would join a circus. When the two old men got out on the walk the second one said to the first:
“Didn’t you know the woman?”
“Know her? No. I didn’t think it was necessary for a formal introduction in a trying time like this, when we all want all the information we can get about the great tragedy. There is no accommodation about some people. But she has gone out now, so let us carry back the spigot and butter tryer, and may be the grocery man will treat to the cider.”
And the two old setters went in and sat down on the barrels and talked about how they had known people along in 1837 to be shot all to pieces and recover.
It is announced in the papers that Colonel Ingersoll, the dollar a ticket infidel, has struck it rich in a silver mine, and is now worth a million dollars. Here is another evidence of the goodness of God. Ingersoll has treated God with the greatest contempt, called Him all the names he could think of, called Him a liar, a heartless wretch, and stood on a stump and dared God to knock a chip off his shoulder, and instead of God’s letting him have one below the belt and knocking seven kinds of cold victuals out of him, God gives him a pointer on a silver mine, and the infidel rakes in a cool million, and laughs in his sleeve, while thousands of poor workers in the vineyard are depending for a livelihood on collections that pan out more gun wads and brass pants buttons to the ton of ore than they do silver. This may be all right, and we hope it is, and we don’t want to give any advice on anybody else’s business, but it would please Christians a good deal better to see that bold man taken by the slack of the pants and lifted into a poor house, while the silver he has had fall to him was distributed among the charitable societies, mission schools and churches, so a minister could get his salary and buy a new pair of trousers to replace those that he has worn the knees out of kneeling down on the rough floor to pray.
It is mighty poor consolation to the ladies of a church society, to give sociables, ice creameries, strawberry festivals and all kinds of things to raise money to buy a carpet for a church or lecture room, and wash their own dishes, and then hear that some infidel who is around the country calling God a pirate and a horse thief, at a dollar a head, to full houses, has miraculously struck a million dollar silver mine.
To the toiling minister who prays without ceasing, and eats codfish and buys clothes at a second hand store, it looks pretty rough to see Bob Inger-soll steered onto a million dollar silver mine. But it may be all right, and we presume it is. Maybe God has got the hook in Bob’s mouth, and is letting him play around the way a fisherman does a black bass, and when he thinks he is running the whole business, and flops around and scares the other fish, it is possible Bob may be reeled in, and he will find himself on the bottom of the boat with a finger and thumb in his gills and a big boot on his paunch, and he will be compelled to disgorge the hook and the bait and all, and he will lay there and try to flop out of the boat, and wonder what kind of a game this is that is being played on him.
Everything turns out right some time, and from what we have heard of God, off and on, we don’t believe He is going to let no ordinary man, bald headed and apoplectic, carry off all the persimmons, and put his fingers to his nose and dare the ruler of the universe to tread on the tail of his coat.
Bob Ingersoll has got the bulge on all the Christians now, and draws more water than anybody, but He who notes the sparrow’s fall has no doubt got an eye on the fat rascal, and some day will close two or three fingers around Bob’s throat, when his eyes will stick out so you can hang your hat on them, and he will blat like a calf and get down on his knees and say:
“Please, Mr. God, don’t choke so, and I will give it all back and go around and tell the boys that I am the almightiest liar that ever charged a dollar a head to listen to the escaping wind from a blown up bladder. O, good God, don’t hurt so. My neck is all chafed.”
And then he will die, and God will continue business at the old stand.
There is an association of old fossils at New York calling themselves the “Anti-Monopoly League,” that has taken the job on their hands of saving the country from eternal and everlasting ruin at the hands of the gigantic monopolies, the railroads, and this league, through its President, L. E. Chittenden, is sending editorials and extracts from speeches delivered by great men who have been refused passes, or who have not been retained by railroads to conduct law suits as much as they think they ought to be, to newspapers all over the country requesting their publication.
The Sun gets its regular share of these documents each week, which go into the waste basket with a regularity that is truly remarkable, considering that we are not a railroad monopoly. But there is something so ridiculous about these articles that one cannot help laughing. They claim that the country is in the grasp of the gigantic monopolies, and that they will choke the country to death and ruin everybody, though what the object can be in running the country and everybody in it, is not stated.
These monopolies have taken the country when it was as weak as gruel, and hoisted it by the slack of the pants to the leading position among nations. The monopolies have built their track all over God’s creation, where land could not be given away, have hauled emigrants out there and set them up in business, and made the waste land of the government valuable. They have made transportation so cheap that the emigrant from Germany of last year can send wheat from Dakota to the Fatherland, and Bismarck and King William can get it cheaper than they can wheat grown within a mile of their castles.
These monopolies that the played out nine-spot anti-monopoly leagues are howling against have made the country what it is, and if there is anybody in this country that don’t like it, they can get emigrant tickets and go to Germany or Norway and take the places of the men that the monopolies are causing to settle here. Of course we could all run railroads better than the owners run them, but as long as we have not got money enough to buy them we better shut up our yap and let Jay Gould and his fellows do what they please with their own, as long as they permit the country to prosper as it is prospering now. The anti-monopoly leaguers had better go to driving street cars.
Again we are called upon to apologize to our readers for advertising what we had reason to expect would occur at the time advertised, but which failed to show up. We allude to the end of the world which was to have taken place last Sunday.
It is with humility that we confess that we were again misled into believing that the long postponed event would take place, and with others we got our things together that we intended to take along, only to be compelled to unpack them Monday morning.
Now this thing is played out, and the next time any party advertises that the world will come to an end, we shall take no stock in it. And then it will be just our luck to have the thing come to an end, when we are not prepared. There is the worst sort of mismanagement about this business somewhere, and we are not sure but it is best to allow God to go ahead and attend to the closing up of earthly affairs, and give these fellows that figure out the end of all things with a slate and pencil the grand bounce.
It is a dead loss to this country of millions of dollars every time there is a prediction that the world will come to an end, because there are lots of men who quit business weeks beforehand and do not try to earn a living, but go lunching around. We lost over fifteen dollars’ worth of advertising last week from people who thought if the thing was going up the flue on Sunday there was no use of advertising any more, and we refused twenty dollars’ worth more because we thought if that was the last paper we were going to get out we might as well knock off work Friday and Saturday and go and catch a string of perch. The people have been fooled about this thing enough, and the first man that comes around with any more predictions ought to be arrested.
People have got enough to worry about, paying taxes, and buying strawberries and sugar, to can, without feeling that if they get a tax receipt the money will be a dead loss, or if they put up a cellar full of canned fruit the world will tip over on it and break every jar and bust every tin can.
Hereafter we propose to go right along as though the world was going to stay right side up, have our hair cut, and try and behave, and then if old mother earth shoots off into space without any warning we will take our chances with the rest in catching on to the corner of some passing star and throw our leg over and get acquainted with the people there, and maybe start a funny paper and split the star wide open.
“Papa, the cruel policeman has murdered little Gip! He sneaked up and frowed a nice piece of meat to Gip, and Gip he eated it, and fanked the policeman with his tail, and runned after him and teased for more, but the policeman fought Gip had enough, and then Gip stopped and looked sorry he had eaten it, and pretty soon he laid down and died, and the policeman laughed and went off feeling good. If Dan Sheehan was the policeman any more he wouldn’t poison my dog, would he, pa?”
The above was the greeting the bald-headed Sun man received on Thursday, and a pair of four-year-old brown eyes were full enough of tears to break the heart of a policeman of many years’ standing, and the little, crushed master of the dead King Charles spaniel went to sleep sobbing and believing that policemen were the greatest blot upon the civilization of the nineteenth century.
Here was a little fellow that had from the day he first stood on his feet after the scarlet fever had left him alive, been allowing his heart to become entwined with love for that poor little dog. For nearly a year the dog had been ready to play with the child when everybody else was tired out, and never once had the dog been cross or backed out of a romp, and the laughter and the barking has many a time been the only sound of happiness in the neighborhood.
If the boy slept too long after dinner, the dog went and rooted around him as much as to say, “Look a here, Mr. Roy, you can’t play this on your partner any longer. You get up here and we will have a high old time, and don’t you forget it.” And pretty soon the sound of baby feet and dog’s toe nails would be heard on the stairs, and the circus would commence.
If the dog slept too long of an afternoon, the boy would hunt him out, take hold of his tail with one hand, and an ear with the other, and lug him into the parlor, saying, “Gip, too much sleep is what is ruining the dogs in this country. Now, brace up and play horse with me.” And then there was fun.
Well, it is all over; but while we write there is a little fellow sleeping on a tear-stained pillow, dreaming, perhaps, of a heaven where the woods are full of King Charles’ spaniel dogs, and a doorkeeper stands with a club to keep out policemen. And still we cannot blame policemen—it is the law that is to blame—the wise men who go to the legislature, and make months with one day too much, pass laws that a dog shall be muzzled and wear a brass check, or he is liable to go mad. Statistics show that not one dog in a million ever goes mad, and that they are more liable to go mad in winter than in summer; but several hundred years ago somebody said that summer was “dog days,” and the law-makers of this enlightened nineteenth century still insist on a wire muzzle at a season of the year when a dog wants air and water, and wants his tongue out.
So we compel our guardians of the peace to go around assassinating dogs. Men, who as citizens, would cut their hands off before they would injure a neighbor’s property, or speak harsh to his dog, when they hire out to the city must stifle all feelings of humanity, and descend to the level of Paris scavengers. We compel them to do this. If they would get on their ears and say to the city of Milwaukee, “We will guard your city, and protect you from insult, and die for you if it becomes necessary; but we will see you in hades before we will go around assassinating dogs,” we as a people, would think more of them, and perhaps build them a decent station house to rest in.
The dog law is as foolish as the anti-treating law, and if it were not enforced, no harm would be done. Our legislators have to pass about so many laws anyway, and we should use our judgment about enforcing them.
But the dog is dead, and the little man meditates a terrible revenge. He is going to have a goat that can whip a policeman, he says; then there will be fun around the parsonage.
As a general thing railroad men are “pretty fly,” as the saying is, and not very apt to be scared. But a case occurred up on the La Crosse division of the St. Paul road last week that caused a good deal of hair to stand.
The train from St. Paul east runs to La Crosse, where all hands are changed, and the new gang run to Chicago. On the trip of which we speak there was placed in the baggage car at St. Paul a coffin, and at Lake City a parrot in a cage was put in. Before the train got to Winona other baggage was piled on top, so the coffin only showed one end, and the parrot cage was behind a trunk, next to the barrel of drinking water, out of sight, and where the cage would not get jammed. At La Crosse the hands were changed, and conductor Fred Cornes, as 6:35 arrived, shouted his cheery “All aboard,” and the train moved off. The coffin was seen by all the men in the baggage car, and a solemnity took possession of everybody. Railroad men never feel ‘entirely happy when a corpse is on the train.
The run to Sparta was made, and Fred went to the baggage car, and noticing the coffin and the mournful appearance of the boys, he told them to brace up and have some style about them He said it was what we had all to come to, sooner or later, and for his part a corpse or two, more or less, in a car made no difference to him. He said he had rather have a car load of dead people than go into an emigrant train when some were eating cheese and others were taking off their shoes and feeding infants.
He sat down in a chair and was counting over his tickets, and wondering where all the passes come from, when the Legislature is not in session. The train was just going through the tunnel near Greenfield, and Fred says.
“Boys, we are now in the bowels of the earth, way down deeper than a grave. Whew! how close it smells.”
Just then the baggagemaster had taken a dipper of water from the barrel, and was drinking it, when a sepulchral voice, that seemed to come from the coffin, said:
“Dammit, let me out!”
The baggage man had his mouth fall of water, and when he heard the voice from the tombs, he squirted the water clear across the car, onto the express messenger, turned pale, and leaned against a trunk.
Fred Cornes heard the noise, and, chucking the tickets into his pocket and grabbing his lantern, he said, as he looked at the coffin:
“Who said that! Now, no ventriloquism on me, boys. I’m an old traveler, and don’t you fool with me.”
The baggage man had by this time got his breath, and he swore upon his sacred honor that the corpse in there was alive, and asked to be let out.
Fred went out of the car to register at Greenfield, and the express messenger opened the door to put out some egg cases, and the baggage man pulled out a trunk. He was so weak he couldn’t lift it. They were all as pale as a whitewashed fence.
After the train left Greenfield they all gathered in the car and listened at a respectful distance from the coffin. All was as still as a car can be that is running twenty-five miles an hour. They gathered a little nearer, but no noise, when Cornes said they were all off their base, and had better soak their heads.
“You fellows are overworked, and are nervous, The company ought to give you a furlough, and pay your expenses to the sea shore.”
Just then there was a rustling as if somebody had rolled over in bed and a voice said, as plainly as possible:
“O, how I suffer!”
If a nitro-glycerine bomb had exploded there could not have been more commotion. The express man rushed forward, and was going to climb over into the tender of the engine, the baggage man started for the emigrant car to see if there was anybody from the place in Germany that his hired girl came from, and Cornes happened to think that he had not collected fare from an Indian that got on at Greenfield with a lot of muskrat skins. In less than four seconds the corpse and parrot were the sole occupants of the car. The three train men and a brakeman met in the emigrant car and looked at each other.
They never said a word for about two minutes, when Fred opened the ball. He said there was no use of being scared, if the man was dead he was not dangerous, and if he was alive the four of them could whip him, if he undertook to run things. What they were in duty bound to do was to let him out. No man could enjoy life screwed down in a sarcophagus like that.
“Now,” says Cornes, “there is a doctor from Milwaukee in the sleeper. I will go and ask him to come in the baggage car, and you fellows go in and pull the trunks off that coffin, and we will take a screw driver and a can-opener and give the man air. That’s doing as a fellow would be done by.”
So he went and got the doctor and told him he had got a case for him. He wanted him to practice on a dead man. The doctor put on his pants and overcoat, and went with Fred. As they came into the baggage car the boys were lifting a big trunk off the coffin, when the voice said:
“Go easy. Glory hallelujah!”
Then they all turned pale again, but all took hold of the baggage and worked with a will, while the doctor held a screw driver he had fished out of a tool box.
The doctor said the man was evidently alive, but the chances were that he might die from suffocation before they could unscrew all the screws of the outside box and the coffin, and he said he didn’t know but the best way would be to take an ax and break it open.
Fred said that was his idea, and he was just going for the ax when the brakeman moved the water barrel, tipped over the parrot cage, and the parrot shook himself and looked mad and said. “There, butterfingers! Polly wants a cracker.”
Cornes had just come up with the axe, and was about to tell the brakeman to chop the box, when the parrot spoke.
“Well, by——-,” said the baggageman. The doctor laughed, the brakeman looked out the door to see how the weather was, and the conductor said, “I knew it was a parrot all the time, but you fellows were so anxious to chop into the box that I was going to let you. I never saw a lot of men with so much curiosity.” Then they all united in trying to bribe the doctor not to tell the story in Milwaukee.
When the Young Men’s Christian Association left our bed and board, without just cause or provocation, and took up its abode in Bon Accord Hall, we felt as though we had been bereaved of a fruitful source of items, and at first we were inclined to advertise the association, and warn dealers not to trust them on our account, as their credit was as good as ours, but almost every day we hear of something that will do to write up.
The new hall of the association was formerly used by Prof. Sherman as a dancing academy, and the other night when young Mr. Collingbourne agreed to go around to the dancing school and escort a lady friend home, about half past nine, he did not know of the change. At the appointed time he went to the place he had always found the dancing school, and at the bottom of the stairs he met a solemn looking sort of person who handed him a circular and said, “Come in, brother, and partake freely of the waters of life.”
“You bet your boots,” says Collingbourne, as he threw his cigar into the street, “but don’t we get anything but water?”
Mr. Collingbourne is the last man in the world who would appear irreverent, but he thought it was a dancing school, and when a mournful looking man on the first landing took him by the arm and said, “Come all ye who are weary and heavy laden,” he felt that there was an effort being made to snatch his watch, so he jerked away from the brother and told him he didn’t want any taffy, and if he wasn’t careful he would get kicked so his head would ache.
The good brother thought Collingbourne was a brand that it would be creditable to pluck from the burning, so he followed him up stairs, telling him there was salvation for all, only to meet with the reply that he better mind his own business or he would get salivated so his folks would not know him.
At the top of the stairs he met two men that he had never seen at the dancing school, and he felt as though he was being cornered for no good, as the other fellow had closed in on his rear. The two new brothers each took hold of one of his hands, and were telling him how glad they were that he had shown a disposition to turn over a new leaf and try to lead a different life, and they began to picture to him the beauty of faith, when he backed up against the railing and said, “I don’t know who you fellows are, but you have tackled the wrong boy. I have been brought up in this town, and I know all the games, and you can’t get me on any racket,” and then he looked at the door, as the piano sounded the beautiful tune, “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” and asked, “What time does the cotillion break up?” The good brother told him it was early yet, and “while the lamp holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return.”
The visitor said he would go in, he guessed, and shake his foot once, just for luck, and he opened the door. Such a sight met his eyes as he never saw in a dancing school before. The whole congregation nearly, was on its knees, and a good man was offering up a prayer that was indeed beautiful. Collingborne began to sweat in three different languages, but being a gentleman who had the most unbounded respect for religion in all its forms, he uncovered his head and bowed reverently while the prayer was being uttered.
When it was through he turned to one of the truly good people in the hall, that had watched his devotion, and said, “Say, boss, this is evidently a new scheme. I thought this was Sherman’s dancing school. You must excuse my seeming irreverence. If you will kick me down stairs I will consider it a special dispensation of providence,” and he went down into the wicked world and asked a policeman where the dancing school was. All the way home the lady friend asked him what made him so solemn, but he only said his boots fit him too quick. He never goes to a dancing school now without finding out if it is there yet.
The papers are publishing accounts of the arrival east of a train of palace cattle cars, and illustrating how much better the cattle feel after a trip in one of these cars, than cattle did when they made the journey in the ordinary cattle cars.
As we understand it the cars are fitted up in the most gorgeous manner, in mahogany and rosewood, and the upholstering is something perfectly grand, and never before undertaken except in the palaces of the old world.
As you enter the car there is a reception room, with a few chairs, a lounge and an ottoman, and a Texas steer gently waves you to a seat with his horns, while he switches off your hat with his tail. If there is any particular cow, or steer, or ox, that you wish to see, you give your card to the attendant steer, and he excuses himself and trots off to find the one you desire to see. You do not have long to wait, for the animal courteously rises, humps up his or her back, stretches, yawns, and with the remark, “the galoot wants to interview me, probably, and I wish he would keep away,” the particular one sought for comes to the reception room and puts out its front foot for a shake, smiles and says, “Glad you came. Was afraid you would let us go away and not call.”
Then the cow or steer sits down on its haunches and the conversation flows in easy channels. You ask how they like the country, and if they have good times, and if they are not hard worked, and all that; and they yawn and say the country is splendid at this season of the year, and that when passing along the road they feel as though they would like to get out in some meadow, and eat grass and switch flies.
The steer asks the visitor if he does not want to look through the car, when he says he would like to if it is not too much trouble. The steer says it is no trouble at all, at the same time shaking his horns as though he was mad, and kicking some of the gilding off of a stateroom.
“This,” says the steer who is doing the honors, “is the stateroom occupied by old Brindle, who is being shipped from St. Joseph, Mo. Brindle weighs 1,600 on foot—Brindle, get up and show yourself to the gentleman.”
Brindle kicks off the red blanket, rolls her eyes in a lazy sort of way, bellows, and stands up in the berth, humps up her back so it raises the upper berth and causes a heifer that is trying to sleep off a debauch of bran mash, to kick like a steer, and then looks at the interviewer as much as to say, “O, go on now and give us a rest.” Brindle turns her head to a fountain that is near, in which Apollinaris water is flowing, perfumed with new mown hay, drinks, turns her head, and licks her back, and stops and thinks, and then looking around as much as to say, “Gentlemen, you will have to excuse me,” lays down with her head on a pillow, pulls the coverlid over her and begins to snore.
The attendant steer steers the visitor along the next apartment, which is a large one, filled with cattle in all positions. One is lying in a hammock, with her feet on the window, reading the Chicago Times article on “Oleomargerine, or Bull Butter,” at intervals stopping the reading to curse the writer, who claims that oleomargarine is an unlawful preparation, containing deleterious substances.
A party of four oxen are seated around a table playing seven-up for the drinks, and as the attendant steer passes along, a speckled ox with one horn broken, orders four pails full of Waukesha water with a dash of oatmeal in it, “and make it hot,” says the ox, as he counts up high, low, jack and the game.
Passing the card players the visitor notices an upright piano, and asks what that is for, and the attendant steer says they are all fond of music, and asks if he would not like to hear some of the cattle play. He says he would, and the steer calls out a white cow who is sketching, and asks her to warble a few notes. The cow seats herself on her haunches on the piano stool, after saying she has such a cold she can’t sing, and, besides, has left her notes at home in the pasture. Turning over a few leaves with her forward hoof, she finds something familiar, and proceeds to walk on the piano keys with her forward feet and bellow, “Meat me in the slaughterhouse when the due bill falls,” or something of that kind, when the visitor says he has got to go up to the stock yards and attend a reception of Colorado cattle, and he lights out.
We should think these parlor cattle cars would be a success, and that cattle would enjoy them very much. It is said that parties desiring to charter these cars for excursions for human beings, can be accommodated at any time when they are not needed to transport cattle, if they will give bonds to return them in as good order as they find them.
There is nothing that gives pious people more annoyance than to hear shooting on Sunday on some adjacent marsh while they are worshipping, and there is nothing much more annoying to wicked Sunday, hunters than to have ducks fly habitually in the vicinity of a church.
Winneconne, up on the Wolf river, is about evenly divided between-church going people and those who take more pleasure in standing behind a shot gun. When ducks fly about Winneconne in the Spring they follow the river up and down, and the bridge in town is a favorite place for hunters to stand and pepper the ducks with shot.
One Sunday about three weeks ago the ducks were flying terrible, and when the bell rung for church the bridge was pretty well covered with hunters, and many worshippers entered the church hard by with the smell of powder in their spring bonnets. The hunters were so interested in the ducks of the air that they did not notice the ducks on the way to church.
Finally the church people all got seated and the minister gave them an excellent sermon, which was only occasionally interrupted by the good man dodging down behind the pulpit to escape a stray charge of No. 4 shot which came through the open window. No complaint was made, and no sarcastic remarks were made about the wicked men who were out of meat, and were shooting up a little for dinner, though there were silent prayers offered for the Sabbath breakers.
At last the services were over, and the chair was singing, “A charge to keep I have,” as the minister was picking some duck shot out of his trousers, when there was a commotion. A wounded duck had fallen on the door step of the church and being only “winged” had fluttered into the church, and crawled under the seats, when a couple of retriever dogs belonging to a German rushed into the sacred edifice and went howling under the seats after the duck, while the owner’s voice could be heard outside yelling, “Rouse mit em!”
Well, some of them, those who had clock work stockings, held their feet up in the air to get them away from the dogs, while others jumped up on the pews and yelled bloody murder. Some went for the windows, and a brakeman tells us that the senior deacon fainted away.
The dogs retrieved the duck, and as the congregation came out of the church the German went down toward the bridge wringing the neck of the duck and kicking the dogs for not having more sense than to go right into a church during service.
The hunters of Winneconne should be talked to by the presiding elder. They do very wrong to shoot on Sunday.
Nobody knows who is to blame for bringing the first Guinea pig to this country, but certainly he didn’t do anything very creditable. A Guinea pig does not know anything, and never-learns anything. It is quite a neat little plaything for children, and if it had any sense would become a pet, but it never learns a thing.
A lady living near a theatre in this city bought a Guinea pig in Chicago recently and brought it home, and it has been in the family ever since, and it has never learned anything except when it is hungry it goes to the lady and nibbles her foot, and how it learned that nobody knows.
One day it got away and strayed into the theatre, where it ran around until the audience got seated for the evening performance, when the pig began to fool around under the seats, probably looking for the lady that owned it. On the front row in the dress circle was a young man and woman from Waukesha. Whether the Guinea pig mistook the girl for its owner or not is not positively known, but the animal was seen to go under the seat occupied by the young woman.
Her attendant was leaning over her shoulder whispering in her ear, when suddenly she jumped about two feet high, and grabbed her dress with both hands. Her feller had his chin scratched by a pin that held a bow on her shoulder, and as he wiped it off he asked her, as she came down into the seat again, if she had them often.
A bald-headed citizen who sat next to her looked around at the woman in astonishment, and took up his overcoat and moved to another seat. She looked sassy at the bald-headed man, and told her escort the man had insulted her. He said he would attend to the man after the show was out.
About three seats further down toward the stage there was a girl from the West Side, with a young fellow, and they were very sociable. Suddenly he leaned over to pick up a programme he had dropped, just as the Guinea pig nibbled her instep. She drew herself away from her escort, blushing, and indignation depicted on every feature, looked the other way, and would not speak to him again during the whole evening. He thought she was flirting with somebody else, and he was mad, and they sat there all the evening looking as though they were married.
The Guinea pig went on down the row, and presently another woman hopped up clear out of the seat, said, “For heaven’s sake what was that?” and looked around at a man who sat in the seat behind her as though she could eat him raw.
Just before the curtain rose the pig got into a lady’s rubber and went to sleep, and when the performance was over and she went to put on the shoe, she screamed a little and jumped up on the seat, and said something about rats, which brought an usher to her assistance, and he took the Guinea pig and sent it to its owner. For a few minutes there was almost as much commotion as there would be at a picnic if a boy should break up a nest of hornets.
We are astonished to see that a Boston dealer in canned goods has failed. If there is one branch of business that ought to be solid it is that of canning fruits and things, for there must be the almightiest profit on it that there is on anything. It must be remembered that the stuff is canned when it is not salable in its natural state.
If the canners took tomatoes, for instance, when they first came around, at half a dollar for six, and canned them, there would be some excuse for charging twenty-five cents for a tin thing full, but they wait until the vines are so full of tomatoes that the producer will pay the cartage if you will haul them away, and then the tomatoes are dipped into hot water so the skin will drop off, and they are chucked into cans that cost two cents each, and you pay two shillings for them, when you get hungry for tomatoes. The same way with peas, and peaches, and everything.
Did you ever try to eat canned peas? They are always old back numbers that are as hard and tasteless as chips, and are canned after they have been dried for seed. We bought a can of peas once for two shillings and couldn’t crack them with a nut cracker. But they were not a dead loss, as we used them the next fall for buck shot. Actually, we shot a coon with a charge of those peas, and he came down and struck the water, and died of the cholera morbus the next day.
Talk of canned peaches; in the course of a brilliant career of forty years we have never seen only six cans of peaches that were worth the powder to blast them open. A man that will invent a can opener that will split open one of these pale, sickly, hard hearted canned peaches, that swim around in a pint of slippery elm juice in a tin can, has got a fortune. And they have got to canning pumpkin, and charging money for it.
Why, for a dollar a canning firm can buy pumpkins enough to fill all the tin cans that they can make in a year, and yet they charge a fellow twenty cents for a can of pumpkin, and then the canning establishment fails. It must be that some raw pumpkin has soured on the hands of the Boston firm, or may be, and now we think we are on the right track to ferret out the failure, it may be that the canning of Boston baked beans is what caused the stoppage.
We had read of Boston baked beans since school days, and had never seen any till four years ago, when we went to a picnic and bought a can to take along. We new how baked beans ought to be cooked from years’ experience, but supposed the Boston bean must hold over every other bean, so when the can was opened and we found that every bean was separate from every other bean, and seemed to be out on its own recognizance, and that they were as hard as a flint, we gave them to the children to play marbles with, and soured on Boston baked beans. Probably it was canning Boston beans that broke up the canning establishment.
The Decoration Day exercises at Appleton were somewhat marred by a discussion as to whether the graves of Confederate soldiers should be decorated, and one man—Prof. Sawyer—a soldier who lost a leg in the army, said that if anybody should attempt to decorate a rebel soldier’s grave in his vicinity, it would have to be done over his—Sawyer’s—dead body.
Notwithstanding this heartrending recital, the graves of rebel soldiers in many places in this state and throughout the north, were decorated by Union soldiers. What hurt does it do to throw a few flowers on the clay that covers one who was once your enemy? Nobody thinks less of the Union soldier for it, and it would make the southern mother or sister of the dead boy feel so much better to know that kind hands at the north had done a noble act.
Suppose this Professor Sawyer had been killed and buried down south, and the Confederate people should be decorating the graves of their own dead, and they should throw a few flowers on his grave, and some hot-headed vindictive rebel should get on his ear and say that the man who laid that bouquet on the Yankee’s grave would have to take it off or fight. The professor, if he laid there and heard it, would feel like getting out of the grave, and taking a crutch and mauling the liver out of the bigoted rebel.
It is not the rebel’s cause that we decorate, but we put a few flowers above his remains to show the people who loved him at home, that there is nothing so confounded mean about us after all, and that we do as we would be done by, and that while we were mad, and sassy, and full of fight, eighteen years ago, we want to be friends, and shake hands over the respective graves of our loved ones, and quit making fools of ourselves.
A Ridiculous scene occurred a Palmyra, the other day. The furnace in the basement of the church is reached by a trap door, which is right beside the pulpit. There was a new preacher there from abroad, and he did not know anything about the trap door, and the sexton went down there to fix the fire, before the new minister arrived. The minister had just got warmed up in his sermon, and was picturing to his hearers hell in all its heat. He had got excited and told of the lake of burning brimstone below, where the devil was the stoker, and where the heat was ten thousand times hotter than a political campaign, and where the souls of the wicked would roast, and fry, and stew until the place froze over.
Wiping the perspiration from his face, he said, pointing to the floor, “Ah, my friends, look down into that seething, burning lake, and—” Just at this point the trap door raised a little, and the sexton’s face, with coal smut all over it, appeared. He wanted to come up and hear the sermon.
If hell had broke loose, the new minister could not have been more astonished. He stepped back, grasped his manuscript, and was just about to jump from the pulpit, when a deacon on the front seat said, “It’s all right, brother, he has only been down below to see about the fire.” The sexton came up and shut down the trap door, the color came back to the face of the minister, and he went on, though the incident seemed to take the tuck all out of him.
A traveling man who happened to be at the church tells us that he knows the minister was scared, for he sweat so that the perspiration run right down on the carpet and made a puddle as though a dipper of water had been tipped over there. The minister says he was not scared, but we don’t see how he could help it.
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