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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14815 ***
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 14815-h.htm or 14815-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/8/1/14815/14815-h/14815-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/8/1/14815/14815-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN
+
+Comprising the Choicest Gems of Wit, Humor, Sarcasm and Pathos
+of America's Favorite Humorist,
+
+GEORGE W. PECK,
+
+Editor of "Peck's Sun" Milwaukee
+
+Illustrated by Eminent Artists
+
+Chicago
+
+1886
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+    About Hell
+    Another Dead Failure
+    Anna Dickinson
+    A Bald-headed Man Most Crazy
+    A Case of Paralysis
+    A Doctor of Laws
+    A Hot Box at a Picnic
+    A Lively Train Load
+    A Mad Minister
+    A Musical Critique
+    A Peck at the Cheese
+    A Plea for the Bull Head
+    A Sewing Machine Given to the Boss Girl
+    A Safe Investment
+    A Tony Slaughter-House
+    A Trying Situation
+    An Arm That is not Reliable
+    An Editor Burglarized
+    Banks and Banking
+    Bounced from Church for Dancing
+    Boys and Circuses
+    Boys will be Boys
+    Broke up a Prayer Meeting
+    Buying a Stone Crusher
+    "Cash!"
+    Camp Meetings in the Dark of the Moon
+    Church Keno
+    Colored Concert Troupes
+    Dogs and Human Beings
+    Effects of Mineral Water
+    Expedition in Search of a Doughnut
+    Failure of a Solid Institution
+    Fishing for Pieces of Women
+    Fooling with the Bible
+    George Washington
+    Granite Head Cheese
+    Internal Improvements
+    Joke on the Hat
+    Killing Big Game
+    Large Mouths are Fashionable
+    La Crosse Nebecudnezzer Water
+    Laying up Apples in Heaven
+    Mr. Peck's Sunday Lecture
+    Nearly Broke up the Ball
+    Our Blue-Coated Dog-Poisoners
+    Our Christian Neighbors Have Gone
+    Palace Cattle Cars
+
+    PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+      He Becomes a Druggist
+      He is too Healthy
+      He Quits the Drug Business
+      His Pa an Inventor
+      His Pa Dissected
+      His Pa Goes Calling
+      His Pa Goes Skating
+      His Pa Gets Boxed
+      His Pa Gets Mad
+      His Pa Joins a Temperance Society
+      His Pa Jokes Him
+      His Pa is Discouraged
+      His Pa Kills Him
+      His Pa Mortified
+
+    Religion and Fish
+    Rope Ladders
+    Sardineindianapolis
+    Seven Year Old Horses
+    Summer Resorting
+    Take Your Latin Straight
+    Terror in Church
+    The Bob-Tailed Badger
+    The Boy and the Goat
+    The Difference
+    The Difference in Horses
+    The Fire New Year's Day
+    The Giddy Girl's Quarrel
+    The Gospel Car
+    The Infidel and His Silver Mine
+    The Knight and the Bridal Chamber
+    The Legend of the Lake
+    The Man from Dubuque
+    The Mistake About It
+    The Naughty But Nice Church Choir
+    The New Coal Stove
+    The Sudden Fire-Works at Racine
+    The Uses of the Paper Bag
+    The Waters of La Crosse
+    The Way to Name Children
+    The Way Women Boss a Pillow
+    The Woodcock
+    Those Bold Bad Drummers
+    Those Step Ladders!
+    Tragedy on the Stage
+    Trains Without Conductors
+    Try to Save Two Shillings
+    Unscrewing the Top of a Fruit Jar
+    Why the Fever Did'nt Spread
+    Woman-Dozing a Democrat
+    Wonders of the Stage
+
+
+    ELECTRIC FLASHES.
+
+    Anna Dickinson as "Mazeppa"
+    A Black Bear at Onalaska
+    A Dead Sure Thing
+    A Fashion Item
+    A Good Land Enough
+    A Lecturer Should Know What He Talks About
+    A Loan Exhibition
+    A New Sparking Scheme
+    An Odorous Bohemian
+    Base Ingratitude
+    Buttermilk Bibbers
+    Cats on the Fence
+    Christmas Trees
+    Col. Ingersoll Praying
+    Comforting Compensations
+    Convenient Currency
+    Crushing Nihilism
+    Enterprising Chicago!
+    Fish Hatching in Wisconsin
+    Frozen Ears
+    Gathered Waists!
+    Geological Survey
+    Give us War
+    Good Templars on Ice
+    Hard on Fond Du Lac
+    He Would'nt Have His Father Called Names
+    How Farmers May Get Rich
+    "How Sharper Than a Hound's Tooth!"
+    How to Invest a Thousand Dollars
+    How to Reach Young Men
+    Hunting Dogs
+    Insecure Abodes
+    Lunch on the Cars
+    Mattie Mashes Minnesota
+    Merrie Christmas
+    More Dangerous Than Kerosene
+    Mrs. Langtry
+    One of Beecher's Converts
+    Preparing for War
+    Raising Elephants
+    Registry of Electors
+    Selling Clams
+    She was no Gentleman
+    Southern "Honaw"
+    Spurious Tripe
+    Sure of Heaven
+    Supreme Court Judges and U.S. Senators
+    Ten Days in Love
+    The Advent Preacher and the Balloon
+    The Day We Reached Canada
+    The Dog Law
+    The Glorious Fourth of July
+    The Mule not the Eagle
+    The Old Sweet Songs
+    The Political Outlook
+    The Power of Eloquence
+    The Thirsty Gopher
+    The Universalist Bath
+    The Universal Object
+    The Wicked Mon Kee
+    The Wrong Corpse
+    Three Inches of Leg
+    To What Vile Uses May We Come
+    Too Particular by Half
+    What the Country Needs
+    What the Democrats Will Do
+    We Will Celebrate
+    Why not Raise Wolves?
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+    A Scene in Paradise
+    "Ah, my Friends, Look Down Into That Burning Lake!"
+    An Intrusive Nigger
+    At the Telephone
+    Behind the Scenes
+    Bossing the Pillow
+    "Do not Pass me by!"
+    Drummers Trying to Pray
+    "Get Thee to a Nunnery!"
+    "Happy New Year, Mum!"
+    Hiawasamantha, the Dusky Daughter of the Golden West
+    "I Want to be an Angel"
+    It Looked Like an old Dripping Pan
+    "It is F-f-four Sizes too Big!"
+    John McCullough Killing a Texas Steer
+    "Just as I am"
+    "Keno!"
+    Martindale Climbs a Pole
+    "Me Long Lost Duke!"
+    Mystery of a Woman's Clothes
+    New Way of Taking Seidlitz Powders
+    No More Apples for the Minister
+    "Oh, That Will be all Right"
+    "Pa Grabbed Her by the Polonaise"
+    "Sard," and the Greek Slave
+    Sacred Memories
+    Slippery Oysters
+    Swallow-Tails on the Climb
+    The Lady of the Seventh Ward
+    The Old Back Number Girl
+    The Old Man Tries His Hand
+    The Resorter
+    The Rotund Urso
+    The Sexton in all His Glory
+    The Startled Cat
+    The Tenor Arrayed in all His Glory
+    The Wandering Oyster
+    "Thereby Hangs a Tail."
+    "This is too Allfired Much!"
+    "Too Late, Pa, I Die at the Hand of an Assassin!"
+    Turning the Proper Dingus
+    "Yell, or go Down!"
+
+
+
+
+PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.
+
+
+THE NEW COAL STOVE.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: TURNING THE PROPER DINGUS.]
+
+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 got to learn how to
+engineer it, or you may get roasted.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA IS DISCOURAGED.
+
+"Say, you leave here mighty quick," said the grocery man to the bad boy,
+as he came in, with his arm in a sling, and backed up against the stove to
+get warm. "Everything has gone wrong since you got to coming here, and I
+think you are a regular Jonah. I find sand in my sugar, kerosene in the
+butter, the codfish is all picked off, and there is something wrong every
+time you come here. Now you leave."
+
+"I aint no Joner," said the boy as he wiped his nose on his coat sleeve,
+and reached into a barrel for a snow apple. "I never swallered no whale.
+Say, do you believe that story about Joner being in the whale's belly, all
+night? I don't. The minister was telling about it at Sunday school last
+Sunday, and asked me what I thought Joner was doing while he was in there,
+and I told him I interpreted the story this way, that the whale was fixed
+up inside with upper and lower berths, like a sleeping car, and Joner had
+a lower berth, and the porter made up the berth as soon as Joner came in
+with his satchel, and Joner pulled off his boots and gave them to the
+porter to black, and put his watch under the pillow and turned in. The
+boys in Sunday school all laffed, and the minister said I was a bigger
+fool than Pa was, and that was useless. If you go back on me, now, I won't
+have a friend, except my chum and a dog, and I swear, by my halidom, that
+I never put no sand in your sugar, or kerosene in your butter. I admit the
+picking off of the codfish, but you can charge it to Pa, the same as you
+did the eggs that I pushed my chum over into last summer, though I thought
+you did wrong in charging Christmas prices for dog days eggs. When my
+chum's Ma scraped his pants she said there was not an egg represented on
+there that was less than two years old. The Sunday school folks
+have all gone back on me, since I put kyan pepper on the stove, when they
+were singing 'Little Drops of Water,' and they all had to go out doors and
+air themselves, but I didn't mean to let the pepper drop on the stove. I
+was just holding it over the stove to warm it, when my chum hit the funny
+bone of my elbow. Pa says I am a terror to cats. Every time Pa says
+anything, it gives me a new idea. I tell you Pa has got a great brain, but
+sometimes he don't have it with him. When he said I was a terror to cats I
+thought what fun there is in cats, and me and my chum went to stealing
+cats right off, and before night we had eleven cats caged. We had one in a
+canary bird cage, three in Pa's old hat boxes, three in Ma's band box,
+four in valises, two in a trunk, and the rest in a closet up stairs.
+
+"That night Pa said he wanted me to stay home because the committee that
+is going to get up a noyster supper in the church was going to meet at our
+house, and they might want to send me on errands. I asked him if my chum
+couldn't stay too, 'cause he is the healthiest infant to run after errands
+that ever was, and Pa said he could stay, but we must remember that there
+musn't be no monkey business going on. I told him there shouldn't be no
+monkey business, but I didn't promise nothing about cats. Well, sir, you'd
+a dide. The committee was in the library by the back stairs, and me and my
+chum got the cat boxes all together, at the top of the stairs, and we took
+them all out and put them in a clothes basket, and just as the minister
+was speaking, and telling what a great good was done by these oyster
+sociables, in bringing the young people together, and taking their minds
+from the wickedness of the world, and turning their thoughts into
+different channels, one of the old tom cats in the basket gave a 'purmeow'
+that sounded like the wail of a lost soul, or a challenge to battle. I
+told my chum that we couldn't hold the bread-board over the clothes basket
+much longer, when two or three cats began to yowl, and the minister
+stopped talking and Pa told Ma to open the stair door and tell the hired
+girl to see what was the matter up there. She thought our cat had got shut
+up in the storm door, and she opened the stair door to yell to the girl,
+and then I pushed the clothes basket, cats and all down the back stairs.
+Well, sir, I suppose no committee for a noyster supper, was ever more
+astonished. I heard Ma fall over a willow rocking chair, and say, 'scat,'
+and I heard Pa say, 'well. I'm dam'd,' and a girl that sings in the choir
+say, 'Heavens, I am stabbed,' then my chum and me ran to the front of the
+house and come down the front stairs looking as innocent as could be, and
+we went in the library, and I was just going to tell Pa if there was any
+errands he wanted run my chum and me was just aching to run them, when a
+yellow cat without any tail was walking over the minister, and Pa was
+throwing a hassock at two cats that were clawing each other under the
+piano, and Ma was trying to get her frizzes back on her head, and the
+choir girl was standing on the lounge with her dress pulled up, trying to
+scare cats with her striped stockings, and the minister was holding his
+hands up, and I guess he was asking a blessing on the cats, and my chum
+opened the front door and all the cats went out. Pa and Ma looked at me,
+and I said it wasn't me, and the minister wanted to know how so much cat
+hair got on my coat and vest, and I said a cat met me in the hall and
+kicked me, and Ma cried, and Pa said 'that boy beats hell,' and the
+minister said, I would be all right if I had been properly brought up, and
+then Ma was mad, and the committee broke up. Well, to tell the honest
+truth Pa basted me, and yanked me around until I had to have my arm in a
+sling, but what's the use of making such a fuss about a few cats. Ma said
+she never wanted to have my company again, 'cause I spoiled everything.
+But I got even with Pa for basting me, this morning, and I dassent go
+home. You see Ma has got a great big bath sponge as big as a chair
+cushion, and this morning I took the sponge and filled it with warm water,
+and took the feather cushion out of the chair Pa sits in at the table, and
+put the sponge in its place, and covered it over with the cushion cover,
+and when we all got set down to the table Pa came in and sat down on it to
+ask a blessing. He started in by closing his eyes and placing his hands up
+in front of him like the letter V, and then he began to ask that the food
+we were about to partake off be blessed, and then he was going on to ask
+that all of us be made to see the error of our ways, when he began to
+hitch around, and he opened one eye and looked at me, and I looked as
+pious as a boy can look when he knows the pancakes are getting cold, and
+Pa he kind of sighed and said 'Amen' sort of snappish, and he got up and
+told Ma he didn't feel well, and she would have to take his place and pass
+around the sassidge and potatoes, and he looked kind of scart and went out
+with his hand on his pistol pocket, as though he would like to shoot, and
+Ma she got up and went around and sat in Pa's chair. The sponge didn't
+hold more than half a pail full of water, and I didn't want to play no
+joke on Ma, cause the cats nearly broke her up, but she sat down and was
+just going to help me, when she rung the bell and called the hired girl,
+and said she felt as though her neuralgia was coming on, and she would go
+to her room, and told the girl to sit down and help Hennery. The girl sat
+down and poured me out some coffee, and then she said, 'Howly Saint
+Patrick, but I blave those pancakes are burning,' and she went out in the
+kitchen. I drank my coffee, and then took the big sponge out of the chair
+and put the cushion in the place of it, and then I put the sponge in the
+bath room, and I went up to Pa and Ma's room, and asked them if I should
+go after the doctor, and Pa had changed his clothes and got on his Sunday
+pants, and he said, 'never mind the doctor, I guess we will pull through,'
+and for me to get out and go to the devil, and I came over here. Say,
+there is no harm in a little warm water, is there? Well, I'd like to know
+what Pa and Ma and the hired girl thought. I am the only real healthy one
+there is in our family."
+
+
+THREE INCHES OF LEG.
+
+Blanche Williams, of Philadelphia, who met with an accident at Fairmount
+Water-works, by which one leg was broken, and rendered three inches
+shorter than the rest of her legs, has recovered $10,000 damages. It would
+seem, to the student of nature, to be a pretty good price for three inches
+of ordinary leg, but then some people will make such a fuss.
+
+
+MORE DANGEROUS THAN KEROSENE.
+
+The regular weekly murder is reported from Peshtigo. Two men named Glass
+and Penrue, got to quarreling about a girl, in a hay loft, over a barn.
+Glass stabbed Penrue quite a number of times and he died. There is nothing
+much more dangerous, unless it is kerosene, than two men and a girl, in a
+hay loft quarreling.
+
+
+TEN DAYS IN LOVE.
+
+There is a fearfully harrowing story going the rounds of the papers headed
+"Ten Days in Love." It must have been dreadful, with no Sunday, no day of
+rest, no holiday, just nothing but love, for ten long days. By the way,
+did the person live?
+
+
+BOYS WILL BE BOYS.
+
+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 trouser 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 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
+horseflesh 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
+wordly-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?"
+
+[Illustration: SACRED MEMORIES]
+
+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, you are 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."
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HE BECOMES A DRUGGIST.
+
+"Whew! What is that smells so about this store? It seems as though
+everything had turned frowy," said the grocery man to his clerk in the
+presence of the bad boy, who was standing with his back to the stove, his
+coat-tails parted with his hands, and a cigarette in his mouth.
+
+"May be it is me that smells frowy," said the boy as he put his thumbs in
+the armholes of his vest, and spit at the keyhole in the door. "I have
+gone into business."
+
+"By thunder, I believe it is you," said the grocery man, as he went up to
+the boy and snuffed a couple of times and then held his hand to his nose.
+"The board of health will kerosene you if they ever smell that smell, and
+send you to the glue factory. What business have you gone into to make you
+smell so rank?"
+
+"Well, you see Pa began to think it was time I learned a trade, or a
+profession, and he saw a sign in a drug store window 'boy wanted,' and as
+he had a boy he didn't want, he went to the druggist and got a job for me.
+This smell on me will go off in a few weeks. You know I wanted to try all
+the perfumery in the store, and after I had got about forty different
+extracts on my clothes, another boy that worked there he fixed up a bottle
+of benzine and assafety and brimstone, and a whole lot of other horrid
+stuff, and labeled it 'rose geranium,' and I guess I just wallered in it.
+It _is_ awful, aint it? It kerflummixed Ma when I went into the
+dining-room the first night that I got home from the store, and broke Pa
+all up. He said I reminded him of the time they had a litter of skunks
+under the barn. The air seemed fixed around where I am, and everybody
+seems to know who fixed it. A girl came into the store yesterday to buy a
+satchet, and there wasn't anybody there but me, and I didn't know what it
+was, and I took down everything in the store pretty near before I found
+it, and then I wouldn't have found it only the proprietor came in. The
+girl asked the proprietor if there wasn't a good deal of sewer gas in the
+store, and he told me to go out and shake myself. I think the girl was mad
+at me because I got a nursing bottle out of the show case with a rubber
+muzzle, and asked her if that was what she wanted. Well, she told me a
+sachet was something for the stummick, and I thought a nursing bottle was
+the nearest thing to it."
+
+[Illustration: NEW WAY OF TAKING SEIDLITZ POWDERS]
+
+"I should think you would drive all the customers away from the store,"
+said the groceryman as he opened the door to let the fresh air in.
+
+"I don't know but I will, but I am hired for a month on trial, and I shall
+stay. You see, I sha'n't practice on anybody but Pa for a spell. I made up
+my mind to that when I gave a woman some salts instead of powdered borax,
+and she came back mad. Pa seems to want to encourage me, and is willing to
+take anything that I ask him to. He had a sore throat and wanted something
+for it, and the boss drugger told me to put some tannin and chlorate of
+potash in a mortar and grind it, and I let Pa pound it with the mortar,
+and while he was pounding I dropped in a couple of drops of sulphuric
+acid, and it exploded and blowed Pa's hat clear across the store, and Pa
+was whiter than a sheet. He said he guessed his throat was all right, and
+he wouldn't come near me again that day. The next day Pa came in, and I
+was laying for him. I took a white seidletz powder and a blue one, and
+dissolved them in separate glasses, and when Pa came in I asked him if he
+didn't want some lemonade, and he said he did, and I gave him the sour one
+and he drank it. He said it was too sour, and then I gave him the other
+glass that looked like water, to take the taste out of his mouth, and he
+drank it. Well, sir, when those two powders got together in Pa's
+stummick, and began to siz and steam and foam, Pa pretty near choked to
+death, and the suds came out of his nostrils, and his eyes stuck out, and
+as soon as he could get his breath he yelled 'fire,' and said he was
+poisoned, and called for a doctor, but I thought as long as we had a
+doctor right in the family there was no use of hiring one, so I got a
+stomach pump and would have baled him out in no time, only the proprietor
+came in and told me to go and wash some bottles, and he gave Pa a drink of
+brandy, and Pa said he felt better. Pa has learned where we keep the
+liquor, and he comes in two or three times a day with a pain in his
+stomach. They play awful mean tricks on a boy in a drug store. The first
+day they put a chunk of something blue into a mortar, and told me to
+pulverize it and then make it up into two grain pills. Well, sir, I
+pounded that chunk all the forenoon, and it never pulverized at all, and
+the boss told me to hurry up as the woman was waiting for the pills, and I
+mauled it till I was nearly dead, and when it was time to go to supper the
+boss came and looked in the mortar, and took out the chunk and said, 'You
+dum fool, you have been pounding all day on a chunk of India rubber,
+instead of blue mass!' Well, how did I know? But I will get even with them
+if I stay there long enough, and don't you forget it. If you have a
+prescription you want filled you can come down to the store and I will put
+it up for you myself, and then you will be sure to get what you pay for."
+
+"Yes," said the grocery man, as he cut off a piece of limberg cheese and
+put it on the stove to purify the air in the room, "I should laugh to see
+myself taking any medicine you put up. You will kill some one yet, by
+giving them poison instead of quinine. But what has your Pa got his nose
+tied up for? He looks as though he had had a fight."
+
+"O, that was from my treatment. He had a wart on his nose. You
+know that wart. You remember how the minister told him if other peoples'
+business had a button hole in it, Pa could button the wart in the
+button-hole, as he always had his nose there. Well, I told Pa I could cure
+that wart with caustic, and he said he would give five dollars if I could
+cure it, so I took a stick of caustic and burned the wart off, but I guess
+I burned down into the nose a little, for it swelled up as big as a
+lobster. Pa says he would rather have a whole nest of warts than such a
+nose, but it will be all right in a year or two."
+
+
+A LOAN EXHIBITION.
+
+"What is a loan exhibition?" asks a correspondent. Well, when a fellow
+borrows ten dollars of you, to be paid next Saturday, and he lets it run a
+year and a half, and don't pay it, and he meets you on the street and asks
+for five dollars more, and you turn him around and kick him right before
+the crowd, that is a loan exhibition.
+
+
+THE WICKED MON KEE.
+
+Mon Kee, a Chinaman that was converted to regular United States religious
+doctrines, and opened a mission in New York for the purpose of converting
+more heathens and shethens, has been arrested for stealing. This is a
+terrible blow, and Mon Kee was a terrible plower. A few weeks since the
+religious papers made more blow over the coming into the fold of that
+Chinaman than they did over all the editors in the country, who went not
+astray. Now they have shut up their yawp about him, since he has proved to
+be no better than Talmage or Beecher.
+
+
+UNSCREWING THE TOP OF A FRUIT JAR.
+
+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 away 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,
+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
+when 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 the skin off the knuckle. He breathes a silent prayer and calls for
+the kerosene can, and pours a little oil into the crevice, and lets it
+soak, and then he tries again, and swears audibly.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD MAN TRIES HIS HAND.]
+
+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.
+
+
+HE WOULDN'T HAVE HIS FATHER CALLED NAMES.
+
+A man died in Oshkosh who was over eighty years of age. After the funeral
+the minister who conducted the services, said to the son of the deceased,
+"your father was an octogenarian." The young man colored up, doubled up
+his fist, and said to the minister that he would like to have him repeat
+that remark. The minister said, "I say your father was an old
+octogenarian." He had not more than got the word out of his mouth before
+the young man struck him on the nose, knocked him down, kicked him in the
+ear, and when pulled off by a policeman, he said no holyghoster could call
+his dead father names, not around him. The minister said he couldn't have
+been more surprised if some one had paid a year's pew rent, than he was
+when that young man's fist hit him.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HE QUITS THE DRUG BUSINESS.
+
+"What are you loafing around here for," says the grocery man to the bad
+boy one day this week. "It is after nine o'clock, and I should think you
+would want to be down to the drug store. How do you know but there may be
+somebody dying for a dose of pills?"
+
+"O, darn the drug store. I have got sick of that business, and I have
+dissolved with the drugger. I have resigned. The policy of the store did
+not meet with my approval, and I have stepped out and am waiting for them
+to come and tender me a better position at an increased salary," said the
+boy, as he threw a cigar stub into a barrel of prunes and lit a fresh one.
+
+"Resigned, eh?" said the grocery man as he fished out the cigar stub and
+charged the boy's father with two pounds of prunes, didn't you and the
+boss agree?"
+
+"Not exactly, I gave an old lady some gin when she asked for camphor and
+water, and she made a show of herself. I thought I would fool her, but she
+knew mighty well what it was, and she drank about half a pint of gin, and
+got to tipping over bottles and kegs of paint, and when the drug man came
+in with his wife, the old woman threw her arms around his neck and called
+him her darling, and when he pushed her away, and told her she was drunk,
+she picked up a bottle of citrate of magnesia and pointed it at him, and
+the cork came out like a pistol, and he thought he was shot, and his wife
+fainted away, and the police came and took the old gin refrigerator away,
+and then the drug man told me to face the door, and, when I wasn't looking
+he kicked me four times, and I landed in the street, and he said if I ever
+came in sight of the store again he would kill me dead. That is the way I
+resigned. I tell you, they will send for me again. They never can run that
+store without me.
+
+"I guess they will worry along without you," said the grocery
+man. "How does your Pa take your being fired out? I should think it would
+brake him all up."
+
+"O, I think Pa rather likes it. At first he thought he had a soft snap
+with me in the drug store, cause he has got to drinking again, like a
+fish, and he has gone back on the church entirely; but after I had put a
+few things in his brandy he concluded it was cheaper to buy it, and he is
+now patronizing a barrel house down by the river.
+
+"One day I put some Castile soap in a drink of drandy, and Pa leaned over
+the back fence more than an hour, with his finger down his throat. The man
+that collects the ashes from the alley asked Pa if he had lost anything,
+and Pa said he was only 'sugaring off.' I don't know what that is. When Pa
+felt better he came in and wanted a little whisky to take the taste out of
+his mouth, and I gave him some, with about a teaspoonful of pulverized
+alum in it. Well, sir, you'd a dide. Pa's mouth and throat was so puckered
+up that he couldn't talk. I don't think that drugman will make anything by
+firing me out, because I shall turn all the trade that I control to
+another store. Why, sir, sometimes there were eight and nine girls in the
+store all at wonct, on account of my being there. They came to have me put
+extracts on their handkerchiefs, and to eat gum drops--he will lose all
+that trade now. My girl that went back on me for the telegraph messenger
+boy, she came with the rest of the girls, but she found that I could be as
+'hawty as a dook.' I got even with her, though. I pretended I wasn't mad,
+and when she wanted me to put some perfumery on her handkerchief I said
+'all right,' and I put on a little geranium and white rose, and then I got
+some tincture of assafety, and sprinkled it on her dress and cloak when
+she went out. That is about the worst smelling stuff that ever was, and I
+was glad when she went out and met the telegraph boy on the corner. They
+went off together; but he came back pretty soon, about the
+homesickest boy you ever saw, and he told my chum he would never go with
+that girl again because she smelled like spoiled oysters or sewer gas. Her
+folks noticed it, and made her go and wash her feet and soak herself, and
+her brother told my chum it didn't do any good, she smelled just like a
+glue factory, and my chum--the darn fool--told her brother that it was me
+who perfumed her, and he hit me in the eye with a frozen fish, down by the
+fish store, and that's what made my eye black; but I know how to cure a
+black eye. I have not been in a drug store eight days, and not know how to
+cure a black eye; and I guess I learned that girl not to go back on a boy
+'cause he smelled like a goat.
+
+"Well, what was it about your leaving the wrong medicine at houses? The
+policeman in this ward told me you come pretty near killing several people
+by leaving the wrong medicine."
+
+"The way of it was this. There was about a dozen different kinds of
+medicine to leave at different places, and I was in a hurry to go to the
+roller skating rink, so I got my chum to help me, and we just took the
+numbers of the houses, and when we rung the bell we would hand out the
+first package we come to, and I understand there was a good deal of
+complaint. One old maid who ordered powder for her face, her ticket drew
+some worm lozengers, and she kicked awfully, and a widow who was going to
+be married, she ordered a celluloid comb and brush, and she got a nursing
+bottle with a rubber nozzle, and a toothing ring, and she made quite a
+fuss; but the woman who was weaning her baby and wanted the nursing
+bottle, she got the comb and brush and some blue pills, and she never made
+any fuss at all. It makes a good deal of difference, I notice, whether a
+person gets a better thing than they order or not. But the drug business
+is too lively for me. I have got to have a quiet place, and I guess I will
+be a cash boy in a store. Pa says he thinks I was cut out for a bunko
+steerer, and I may look for that kind of a job. Pa he is a terror since he
+got to drinking again. He came home the other day, when the minister was
+calling on Ma, and just cause the minister was sitting on the sofa with
+Ma, and had his hand on her shoulder, where she said the pain was when the
+rheumatiz came on, Pa was mad and told the minister he would kick his
+liver clear around on the other side if he caught him there again, and Ma
+felt awful about it. After the minister had gone away, Ma told Pa he had
+got no feeling at all, and Pa said he had got enough feeling for one
+family, and he didn't want no sky-sharp to help him. He said he could cure
+all the rheumatiz there was around the house, and then he went down town
+and didn't get home till most breakfast time. Ma says she thinks I am
+responsible for Pa's falling into bad ways again, and now I am going to
+cure him. You watch me, and see if I don't have Pa in the church in less
+than a week, praying and singing, and going home with the choir singers,
+just as pious as ever. I am going to get a boy that writes a woman's hand
+to write to Pa, and--but I must not give it away. But you just watch Pa,
+that's all. Well, I must go and saw some wood. It is coming down a good
+deal, from a drug clerk to sawing wood, but I will get on top yet, and
+don't you forget it."
+
+
+GIVE US WAR!
+
+We are in receipt of a circular from the American peace society,
+requesting us to leave a sum of money, in our will, to the society to be
+applied to the interest of peace. We are opposed to peace, on such terms.
+Give us war, every time.
+
+
+THE FIRE NEW YEAR'S DAY.
+
+If there is anything the young men of Rescue Hose Company pride themselves
+upon, it is in getting themselves up, regardless of expense, on New Year's
+day, and calling upon their lady friends. On Monday last these young men
+arrayed themselves in their best clothes and sat around in stores and
+waited for the time to go calling. Solomon in all his glory, was not
+arrayed like one of these firemen.
+
+[Illustration: SWALLOW-TAILS ON THE CLIMB.]
+
+Just as the young gentlemen were about throwing away their last cigar at
+noon, preparatory to calling at the first place on the list, the fire-bell
+rang, and there was a lively procession followed the steamer down Fourth
+street in a few minutes. It looked as though a wedding had been broken up
+and bridegrooms were running around loose. The party arrived at the scene
+of the fire, which was Matt. Larsen's hotel on the corner of Second and
+King streets, and such a shinning of swallow-tailed coats up blue ladders
+was never seen. The fellows that belonged in the house threw out bedsteads
+and crockery on to stove-pipe hats, and emptied beds on to
+broadcloth coats. The wedding party disappeared in the third story window
+with the hose, in the smoke, and after half an hour's work they came out
+looking as though they had been in the Ashtabula railroad accident. Young
+Mr. Smith had a stream of dirty water sent up his trousers leg, which went
+clear up to his collar, and wilted it beyond repair. Mr. Hatch entwined
+his doeskin pants around the burnt ridge-pole of the roof, hung on to a
+rafter with his teeth, and chopped shingles, and the pipemen kept him wet,
+and he looked like a bundle of damp stuff in a paper mill. Mr. Spence was
+on the top of the ladder, and Mr. Drummond was next below him. In falling,
+Mr. D. caught hold of one tail of Mr. Spence's swallow hammer coat, and
+stretched the tail about two feet longer than the other. Mr. Foote was as
+dry as a bone, until the pipeman saw him, and they nailed him up against
+the wall with a stream and Foote was damp as a wet nurse in a minute.
+
+Young Mr. Osborne, confidential adviser of Hyde, Cargill & Co., got half
+way up the ladder, and a leak in the hose struck him and froze him to the
+ladder, and Mr. Watson had to strike a match and thaw him loose. He wet
+his pants from Genesis to Revelations, and had to go calling with an
+ulster overcoat on. The most of the young men, after returning from the
+fire, stood by the stove and dried themselves, and went calling all the
+same, but the girls said they smelt like burnt shingles. The boys were all
+dry enough at the dance in the evening.
+
+
+SOUTHERN "HONAW."
+
+Bennett and May fought a duel in Maryland the other day, and as near as
+the truth can be arrived at neither party received a scratch. But their
+"honaw" was satisfied.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA KILLS HIM.
+
+"For heaven's sake dry up that whistling," said the grocery man to the bad
+boy, as he sat on a bag of peanuts, whistling and filling his pockets.
+"There is no sense in such whistling. What do you whistle for, anyway?"
+
+"I am practicing my profession," said the boy, as he got up and stretched
+himself, and cut off a slice of cheese, and took a few crackers. "I have
+always been a good whistler, and I have decided to turn my talent to
+account. I am going to hire an office and put out a sign, 'Boy furnished
+to whistle for lost dogs.' You see there are dogs lost every day, and any
+man would give half a dollar to a boy to find his dog. I can hire out to
+whistle for dogs, and can go around whistling and enjoy myself, and make
+money. Don't you think it is a good scheme?" asked the boy of the grocery
+man.
+
+"Naw," said the grocery man, as he charged the cheese to the boy's father,
+and picked up his cigar stub, which he had left on the counter, and which
+the boy had rubbed on the kerosene barrel, "No, sir, that whistle would
+scare any dog that heard it. Say, what was your Pa running after the
+doctor in his shirt sleeves for last Sunday morning? He looked scared. Was
+your Ma sick again?"
+
+"O, no; Ma is healthy enough, now she has got a new fur lined cloak. She
+played consumption on Pa, and coughed so she liked to raise her lights and
+liver, and made Pa believe she couldn't live, and got the doctor to
+prescribe a fur lined circular, and Pa went and got one, and Ma has
+improved awfully. Her cough is all gone, and she can walk ten miles. I was
+the one that was sick. You see, I wanted to get Pa into the church again,
+and get him to stop drinking, so I got a boy to write a letter to
+him, in a female hand, and sign the name of a choir singer Pa was mashed
+on, and tell him she was yearning for him to come back to the church, and
+that the church seemed a blank without his smiling face, and benevolent
+heart, and to please come back for her sake. Pa got the letters Saturday
+night and he seemed tickled, but I guess he dreamed about it all night,
+and Sunday morning he was mad, and he took me by the ear and said I
+couldn't come no 'Daisy' business on him the second time. He said he knew
+I wrote the letter, and for me to go up to the store room and prepare for
+the almightiest licking a boy ever had, and he went down stairs and broke
+up an apple barrel and got a stave to whip me with. Well, I had to think
+mighty quick, but I was enough for him. I got a dried bladder in my room,
+one that me and my chum got to the slotter house, and I blowed it partly
+up, so it would be sort of flat like, and I put it down inside the back
+part of my pants, right about where Pa hits when he punishes me. I knowed
+when the barrel stave hit the bladder it would explode. Well, Pa came up
+and found me crying. I can cry just as easy as you can turn on the water
+at a faucet, and Pa took off his coat and looked sorry. I was afraid he
+would give up whipping me when he saw me cry, and I wanted the bladder
+experiment to go on, so I looked kind of hard, as if I was defying him to
+do his worst, and then he took me by the neck and laid me across a trunk.
+I didn't dare struggle much for fear the bladder would loose itself, and
+Pa said, 'Now, Hennery, I am going to break you of this damfoolishness, or
+I will break your back,' and he spit on his hands and brought the barrel
+stave down on my best pants. Well, you'd a dide if you had heard the
+explosion. It almost knocked me off the trunk. It sounded like firing a
+firecracker away down cellar in a barrel, and Pa looked scared. I rolled
+off the trunk, on the floor, and put some flour on my face, to make me
+look pale, and then I kind of kicked my legs like a fellow who is dying on
+the stage, after being stabbed with a piece of lath, and groaned, and
+said, 'Pa you have killed me, but I forgive you,' and then rolled around,
+and frothed at the mouth, cause I had a piece of soap in my mouth to make
+foam. Well, Pa was all broke up. He said, 'Great God, what have I done? I
+have broke his spinal column. O, my poor boy, do not die!' I kept chewing
+the soap and foaming at the mouth, and I drew my legs up and kicked them
+out, and clutched my hair, and rolled my eyes, and then kicked Pa in the
+stummick as he bent over me, and knocked his breath out of him, and then
+my limbs began to get rigid, and I said, 'Too late, Pa, I die at the hand
+of an assassin. Go for a doctor.' Pa throwed his coat over me, and started
+down stairs on a run, 'I have murdered my brave boy,' and he told Ma to go
+up stairs and stay with me, cause I had fallen off a trunk and ruptured a
+blood vessel, and he went after a doctor. When he went out the front door,
+I sat up and lit a cigarette, and Ma came up and I told her all about how
+I fooled Pa, and if she would take on and cry, when Pa got back, I would
+get him to go to church again, and swear off drinking, and she said she
+would.
+
+[Illustration: "TOO LATE, PA, I DIE AT THE HAND OF AN ASSASSIN!"]
+
+"So when Pa and the doc. came back, Ma was sitting on a velocipede I used
+to ride, which was in the store-room, and she had her apron over her face,
+and she just more than bellowed. Pa he was pale, and he told the doc. he
+was just playing with me with a little piece of board, and he heard
+something crack, and he guessed my spine got broke falling off the trunk.
+The doctor wanted to feel where my spine got broke, but I opened my eyes
+and had a vacant kind of stare, like a woman who leads a dog by a string,
+and looked as though my mind was wandering, and I told the doctor there
+was no use setting my spine, as it was broke in several places,
+and I wouldn't let him feel of the dried bladder. I told Pa I was going to
+die, and I wanted him to promise me two things on my dying bed. He cried
+and said he would, and I told him to promise me he would quit drinking,
+and attend church regular, and he said he would never drink another drop,
+and would go to church every Sunday. I made him get down on his knees
+beside me and swear it, and the doc. witnessed it, and Ma said she was so
+glad, and Ma called the doctor out in the hall and told him the joke, and
+the doc. came in and told Pa he was afraid Pa's presence would excite the
+patient, and for him to put on his coat and go out and walk around the
+block, or go to church, and Ma and he would remove me to another room, and
+do all that was possible to make my last hours pleasant. Pa he cried, and
+said he would put on his plug hat and go to church, and he kissed me, and
+got flour on his nose, and I came near laughing right out, to see the
+white flour on his red nose, when I thought how the people in church would
+laugh at Pa. But he went out feeling mighty bad, and then I got up and
+pulled the bladder out of my pants, and Ma and the doc. laughed awful.
+When Pa got back from church and asked for me, Ma said that I had gone
+down town. She said the doctor found my spine was only uncoupled and he
+coupled it together, and I was all right. Pa was nervous all the
+afternoon, and Ma thinks he suspects that we played it on him. Say, you
+don't think there is any harm in playing it on an old man a little for a
+good cause, do you?"
+
+The grocery man said he supposed, in the interest of reform it was all
+right, but if it was his boy that played such tricks he would take an ax
+to him, and the boy went out, apparently encouraged, saying he hadn't seen
+the old man since the day before, and he was almost afraid to meet him.
+
+
+A MUSICAL CRITIQUE.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROTUND URSO.]
+
+The second lecture of the Library Association course was delivered on
+Tuesday evening by a female lecturer named Camilla Urso, on a fiddle. The
+lecturer was supported by a female singer, two male clamsellers, and a
+piano masher, all of them decidedly talented in their particular lines.
+The lecture on the fiddle gave the most unbounded satisfaction, and the
+Association in taking this new departure, has struck a popular chord.
+Scarcely a person in the vast audience but would prefer such an
+entertainment to a dry lecture by some dictionary sharp. Of the
+performance, it is unnecessary to go into details, as all our readers were
+there, with few exceptions. The fat female, Urso, more than carved the
+fiddle. She dug sweet morsels of music out of it, all the way from the
+wish-bone to the part that goes over the fence last. She made it talk
+Norwegian, and squeezed little notes out of it not bigger than a cambric
+needle, and as smooth as a book agent. The female singer was fair, though
+nothing to brag on, while the male grasshopper sufferers sang as well as
+was necessary. But the most agile flea-catcher that has been here since
+Anna Dickinson's time, was sixteen-fingered Jack, the sandhill
+crane that had the disturbance with the piano. We never knew what the row
+was about, but when he walked up to the piano smiling, and shied his
+castor into the ring, everybody could see there was going to be trouble.
+He spit on his hands, sparred a little, and suddenly landed a stunning
+blow right on the ivory, which staggered the piano, and caused an
+exclamation of agony. First knock down for Jack. He paused a moment and
+then began putting in blows right and left, in such a cruel manner that
+the spectators came near breaking into the ring. Whenever a key showed its
+head he mauled it. We never saw a piano stand so much punishment, and
+live, and Jack never got a scratch. The whole concert was a success, and
+the troupe can always get a good house here.
+
+
+A DEAD SURE THING.
+
+The only persons that are real sure that their calling and election is
+sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots, are the men who are
+hung for murder. They always announce that they have got a dead thing on
+it, just before the drop falls. How encouraging it must be to children to
+listen to the prayers of our ministers in churches, who admit that they
+are miserable sinners living on God's charity, and doubtful if they would
+be allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of their
+unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then let the children
+read an account of a hanging bee, and see how happy the condemned man is,
+how he shouts glory hallelujah, and confesses that, though he killed his
+man, he is going to heaven. A child will naturally ask why don't the
+ministers murder somebody and make a dead sure thing of it?
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA MORTIFIED.
+
+"What was the health officer doing over to your house this morning?" said
+the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth was firing frozen potatoes at
+the man who collects garbage in the alley.
+
+"O, they are searching for sewer gas and such things, and they have got
+plumbers and other society experts till you can't rest, and I came away
+for fear they would find the sewer gas and warm my jacket. Say, do you
+think it is right when anything smells awfully, to always lay it to a
+boy?"
+
+"Well, in nine cases out of ten they would hit it right, but what do you
+think is the trouble over to your house, honest?"
+
+"S-h-h! Now don't breathe a word of it to a living soul, or I am a dead
+boy. You see I was over to the dairy fair at the Exposition building
+Saturday night, and when they were breaking up me and my chum helped to
+carry boxes of cheese and firkins of butter, and a cheese man gave each of
+us a piece of limberger cheese, wrapped up in tin foil. Sunday morning I
+opened my piece, and it made me tired. O, it was the offulest smell I ever
+heard of, except the smell when they found a tramp who hung himself in the
+woods on the Whitefish Bay road, and had been dead three weeks. It was
+just like an old back number funeral. Pa and Ma were just getting ready to
+go to church, and I cut off a piece of cheese and put it in the inside
+pocket of Pa's vest, and I put another in the lining of Ma's muff, and
+they went to church. I went down to church too, and sat on a back seat
+with my chum, looking just as pious as though I was taking up a
+collection. The church was pretty warm, and by the time they got up to
+sing the first hymn Pa's cheese began to smell a match against
+Ma's cheese. Pa held one side of the hymn book and Ma held the other, and
+Pa he always sings for all that is out, and when he braced himself and
+sang 'Just as I am,' Ma thought Pa's voice was tinctured a little with
+biliousness, and she looked at him and hunched him, and told him to stop
+singing and breathe through his nose, cause his breath was enough to stop
+a clock. Pa stopped singing and turned around kind of cross towards Ma,
+and then he smelled Ma's cheese and he turned his head the other way and
+said, 'whew,' and they didn't sing any more, but they looked at each other
+as though they smelled frowy. When they sat down they sat as far apart as
+they could get, and Pa sat next to a woman who used to be a nurse in a
+hospital, and when she smelled Pa's cheese she looked at him as though she
+thought he had the small pox, and she held her handkerchief to her nose.
+The man in the other end of the pew, that Ma sat near, he was a stranger
+from Racine, who belongs to our church, and he looked at Ma sort of queer,
+and after the minister prayed, and they got up to sing again, the man took
+his hat and went out, and when he came by me he said something in a
+whisper about a female glue factory.
+
+[Illustration: "JUST AS I AM."]
+
+"Well, sir, before the sermon was over everybody in that part of the
+church had their handkerchiefs to their noses, and they looked at Pa and
+Ma scandalous, and the two ushers they came around in the pews looking for
+a dog, and when the minister got over his sermon, and wiped the
+prespiration off his face, he said he would like to have the trustees of
+the church stay after meeting, as there was some business of importance to
+transact. He said the question of proper ventilation and sewerage for the
+church would be brought up, and that he presumed the congregation had
+noticed this morning that the church was unusually full of sewer gas. He
+said he had spoken of the matter before, and expected it would be attended
+to before this. He said he was a meek and humble follower of the lamb, and
+was willing to cast his lot wherever the Master decided, but he would be
+blessed if he would preach any longer in a church that smelled like a bone
+boiling establishment. He said religion was a good thing, but no person
+could enjoy religion as well in a fat rendering establishment as he could
+in a flower garden, and as far as he was concerned he had got enough.
+Everybody looked at everybody else, and Pa looked at Ma as though he knew
+where the sewer gas came from, and Ma looked at Pa real mad, and me and my
+chum lit out, and I went home and distributed my cheese all around. I put
+a slice in Ma's bureau drawer, down under her underclothes, and a piece in
+the spare room, under the bed, and a piece in the bath-room in the soap
+dish, and a slice in the album on the parlor table, and a piece in the
+library in a book, and I went to the dining room and put some under the
+table, and dropped a piece under the range in the kitchen. I tell you the
+house was loaded for bear. Ma came home from church first, and when I
+asked where Pa was, she said she hoped he had gone to walk around the
+block to air hisself. Pa came home to dinner and when he got a smell of
+the house he opened all the doors, and Ma put a comfortable around her
+shoulders, and told Pa he was a disgrace to civilization. She tried to get
+Pa to drink some carbolic acid. Pa finally convinced Ma that it was not
+him, and then they decided it was the house that smelled so, as well as
+the church, and all Sunday afternoon they went visiting, and this morning
+Pa went down to the health office and got the inspector of nuisances to
+come up to the house, and when he smelled around a spell he said there was
+dead rats in the main sewer pipe, and they sent for plumbers, and Ma went
+out to a neighbors to borry some fresh air, and when the plumbers began to
+dig up the floor in the basement I came over here. If they find any of
+that limberger cheese it will go hard with me. The hired girls have both
+quit, and Ma says she is going to break up keeping house and board. That
+is just into my hand. I want to board at a hotel, where you can have a
+bill-of-fare, and tooth picks, and billiards, and everything. Well I guess
+I will go over to the house and stand in the back door and listen to the
+mocking bird. If you see me come flying out of the alley with my coat tail
+full of boots you can bet they have discovered the sewer gas."
+
+
+MRS. LANGTRY.
+
+America is to be visited by the most beautiful woman in all England, Mrs.
+Langtry. It is said that she is so sweet that when you look at her you
+feel caterpillars crawling up the small of your back, your heart begins to
+jump like a box car, and a streak of lightning goes down one trousers leg
+and up the other, and escapes up the back of your neck, causing the hair
+to raise and be filled with electricity enough to light a circus tent, and
+that when looking at her your hands clutch nervously as though you wanted
+to grasp something to hold you up, a sense of faintness comes over you,
+your eyes roll heavenward, your head falls helpless on your breast, your
+left side becomes numb, your liver quits working, your breath comes hot
+and heavy, your lips turn livid and tremble, your teeth chew on imaginary
+taffy, and you look around imploringly for somebody to take her away. If
+all this occurs to a person from looking at her, it would be sudden death
+or six months illness, to shake hands with her. If she comes to Milwaukee,
+there is one bald headed man going to the country where they are not so
+bad. You bet!
+
+
+A PECK AT THE CHEESE.
+
+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 Cremationists:_ 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 will 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.
+
+[Illustration: A SCENE IN PARADISE.]
+
+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 from 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 with 300
+oxen. This is susceptible of demonstration. If any boy showed a desire to
+become a statesman, I would say to him, "Young man, get married, buy a
+mooly 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-shaped 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.
+
+
+SELLING CLAMS.
+
+At the concert Wednesday night, the last piece sung was a trio, by Marie
+Rose, Brignoli, and Carleton. The men stood on each side of the girl and
+began to jaw at her. It was in some other language, and we could only
+understand by the motion of their mouths and their actions. It seemed as
+though the men were trying to sell clams to her. First Brignoli began to
+whoop it up, and describe the clams he had to sell, and tried to get her
+to invest. He yelled at her, and seemed really put out, and she was as
+spunky as any girl we ever saw. When Brignoli got out of breath, Carleton
+began to tell her that Brig had been lying to her, that his clams were
+made of India rubber, and that she could never digest them in the wide
+world, and he wound up by telling her that she could have his clams at ten
+per cent discount for cash. By this time she was about as mad as she could
+be, and she pitched into both of them, looking cross, and sung like
+blazes, went away up the musical ladder to zero, and wound up by telling
+them both, to their face, that she would see them in Chicago before she
+would buy a condemned clam. And then they all went off the stage as though
+they had been having a regular fight, and Brignoli acted as though he
+would like to eat her raw. That's the way it seemed to us, but we are no
+musician.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GOES SKATING.
+
+"What is that stuff on your shirt bosom, that looks like soap grease?"
+said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came into the grocery the
+morning after Christmas.
+
+The boy looked at his shirt front, put his finger on the stuff and smelled
+of his fingers, and then said, "O, that is nothing but a little of the
+turkey dressing and gravy. You see after Pa and I got back from the roller
+skating rink yesterday, Pa was all broke up and he couldn't carve the
+turkey, and I had to do it, and Pa sat in a stuffed chair with his head
+tied up, and a pillow amongst his legs, and he kept complaining that I
+didn't do it right. Gol darn a turkey any way. I should think they would
+make a turkey flat on the back, so he would lay on a greasy platter
+without skating all around the table. It looks easy to see Pa carve a
+turkey, but when I speared into the bosom of that turkey, and began to saw
+on it, the turkey rolled around as though it was on castors, and it was
+all I could do to keep it out of Ma's lap. But I rasseled with it till I
+got off enough white meat for Pa and Ma and dark meat enough for me, and I
+dug out the dressing, but most of it flew into my shirt bosom, cause the
+string that tied up the place where the dressing was concealed about the
+person of the turkey, broke prematurely, and one oyster hit Pa in the eye,
+and he said I was as awkward as a cross-eyed girl trying to kiss a man
+with a hair lip. If I ever get to be the head of a family I shall carve
+turkeys with a corn sheller.
+
+"But what broke your Pa up at the roller skating rink?" asked the grocery
+man.
+
+"O, everything broke him up. He is split up so Ma buttons the top of his
+pants to his collar button, like a bicycle rider. Well, he had no business
+to have told me and my chum that he used to be the best skater in
+North America, when he was a boy. He said he skated once from Albany to
+New York in an hour and eighty minutes. Me and my chum thought if Pa was
+such a terror on skates we would get him to put on a pair of roller skates
+and enter him as the 'great unknown,' and clean out the whole gang. We
+told Pa that he must remember that roller skates were different from ice
+skates, and that maybe he couldn't skate on them, but he said it didn't
+make any difference what they were as long as they were skates, and he
+would just paralyze the whole crowd. So we got a pair of big roller skates
+for him, and while we were strapping them on, Pa looked at the skaters
+glide around on the smooth wax floor just as though they were greased. Pa
+looked at the skates on his feet, after they were fastened, sort of
+forlorn like, the way a horse thief does when they put shackles on his
+legs, and I told him if he was afraid he couldn't skate with them we would
+take them off, but he said he would beat anybody there was there, or bust
+a suspender. Then we straightened Pa up, and pointed him towards the
+middle of the room, and he said, 'leggo,' and we just give him a little
+push to start him, and he began to go. Well, by gosh, you'd a dide to have
+seen Pa try to stop. You see, you can't stick in your heel and stop, like
+you can on ice skates, and Pa soon found that out, and he began to turn
+sideways, and then he threw his arms and walked on his heels, and he lost
+his hat, and his eyes began to stick out, cause he was going right towards
+an iron post. One arm caught the post and he circled around it a few
+times, and then he let go and began to fall, and, sir, he kept falling all
+across the room, and everybody got out of the way, except a girl, and Pa
+grabbed her by the polonaise, like a drowning man grabs at straws, though
+there wasn't any straws in her polonaise as I know of, but Pa just pulled
+her along as though she was done up in a shawl-strap, and his
+feet went out from under him and he struck on his shoulders and kept a
+going, with the girl dragging along like a bundle of clothes. If Pa had
+had another pair of roller skates on his shoulders, and castors on his
+ears, he couldn't have slid along any better. Pa is a short, big man, and
+as he was rolling along on his back, he looked like a sofa with castors on
+being pushed across a room by a girl. Finally Pa came to the wall and had
+to stop, and the girl fell right across him, with her roller skates in his
+neck, and she called him an old brute, and told him if he didn't let go of
+her polonaise she would murder him. Just then my chum and me got there and
+we amputated Pa from the girl, and lifted him up, and told him for
+heaven's sake to let us take off the skates, cause he couldn't skate any
+more than a cow, and Pa was mad and said for us to 'let him alone,' and he
+could skate all right, and we let go and he struck out again. Well, sir, I
+was ashamed. An old man like Pa ought to knonv better than to try to be a
+boy. This last time Pa said he was going to spread himself, and if I am
+any judge of a big spread, he did spread himself. Some how the skates had
+got turned around side-ways on his feet, and his feet got to going in
+different directions, and Pa's feet were getting so far apart that I was
+afraid I would have two Pa's, half the size, with one leg apiece.
+
+[Illustration: "PA GRABBED HER BY THE POLONAISE."]
+
+"I tried to get him to take up a collection of his legs, and get them in
+the same ward but his arm flew around and hit me on the nose, and I
+thought if he wanted to strike the best friend he had, he could
+run his old legs his self. When he began to separate I could hear the
+bones crack, but maybe it was his pants, but anyway he came down on the
+floor like one of these fellows in a circus who spreads hisself, and he
+kept agoing and finally he surrounded an iron post with his legs, and
+stopped and looked pale, and the proprietor of the rink told Pa if he
+wanted to give a flying trapeze performance he would have to go to the
+gymnasium, and he couldn't skate on his shoulders any more, cause other
+skaters were afraid of him. Then Pa said he would kick the liver out of
+the proprietor of the rink, and he got up and steaded himself, and then he
+tried to kick the man, but both heels went up to wonct, and Pa turned a
+back summersault and struck right on his vest in front. I guess it knocked
+the breath out of him, for he didn't speak for a few minutes, and then he
+wanted to go home, and we put him in a street car, and he laid down on the
+hay and rode home. O, the work we had to get Pa's clothes off. He had
+cricks in his back, and everywhere, and Ma was away to one of the
+neighbors, to look at the presents, and I had to put liniment on Pa, and I
+made a mistake and got a bottle of furniture polish, and put it on Pa and
+rubbed it in, and when Ma came home, Pa smelled like a coffin at a charity
+funeral, and Ma said there was no way of getting that varnish off of Pa
+till it wore off: Pa says holidays are a condemned nuisance anyway. He
+will have to stay in the house all this week.
+
+"You are pretty rough on the old man," said the grocery man, "after he has
+been so kind to you and given you nice presents."
+
+"Nice presents nothin. All I got was a 'Come to Jesus' Christmas card,
+with brindle fringe, from Ma, and Pa gave me a pair of his old suspenders,
+and a calender with mottoes for every month, some quotations from
+scripture, such as 'honor thy father and mother,' and 'evil communications
+corrupt two in the bush,' and a bird in the hand beats two pair.' Such
+things don't help a boy to be good. What a boy wants is club skates, and
+seven shot revolvers, and such things. Well, I must go and help Pa roll
+over in bed, and put on a new porous plaster. Good bye."
+
+
+TRYING TO SAVE TWO SHILLINGS.
+
+No person ever wants to tell us again how to save two shillings. When we
+started for Chippewa Falls, to attend the celebration, we only had a few
+hundred dollars along, and we felt like saving all that was possible. Just
+before arriving at Sparta, where we were to take supper, Dan McDonald got
+to telling about how to save twenty-five cents on meals at these eating
+houses, when traveling. He said that all you had to do when you come out
+from supper was to look like a bummer, or "traveling man," hand the
+door-keeper fifty cents and wink twice with the left eye, and he would
+pass you right out, as though you had paid seventy-five cents. If you
+handed out a dollar bill, and he only gave you back twenty-five cents, you
+only had to hold out your hand and wink a couple of times, and the man
+would give you the other quarter. Dan said he always did that way, and he
+had saved hundreds of dollars. He said these bummers only paid fifty cents
+a meal, and there was no use of anybody else paying more, if they had
+cheek enough to play it on the landlord.
+
+[Illustration: "OH, THAT WILL BE ALL RIGHT!"]
+
+We never had anything strike us any more reasonable than the statement of
+Mr. McDonald, and we determined to try it. To a man who was traveling a
+good deal lecturing, a saving of twenty-five cents a meal was worth
+looking into, and we made up our mind to begin to economize that very
+night. The train stopped and we walked across the platform as near like a
+bummer as possible. With our hat on one side, we threw a cigar stub into
+the parlor window, said "Hello, old tapeworm," to the landlord in a
+familiar sort of way, chucked our hat into a chair; rushed into the
+dining-room, took a seat at the head of the table, and told a girl to cart
+out all she had got. The landlord looked at us as though he thought we
+were one of Field, Leiter & Co.'s bummers, his good wife looked
+frightened, as though she feared we would kick a leg off the table and
+spill things. However, there is no use of describing the meal, and how we
+went through brook trout and strawberry shortcake, and things. We couldn't
+help feeling sorry for the man that was destined to furnish all that for
+fifty cents. Finally we went out. We felt a sort of palpitation of the
+heart when we approached the hungry-looking man at the door, taking the
+money. He looked as though he was a sick orphan trying to save money
+enough to get to a water cure. Picking our teeth with our finger, like a
+Chicago bummer, and pulling our handkerchief out of our pistol pocket and
+blowing our nose like a thirty-two pounder, just as we had heard a Chicago
+fellow do, we handed the man fifty cents, winked a couple of times and
+started to go by. The tobacco sign standing there said, "twenty-five cents
+more, please." We looked at him, winked, and said, "O, that will be all
+right." "Two shillings more, my friend," said the summer resort. We winked
+some more, and punched him in the ribs with our thumb, and said, "O, now,
+old tapeworm, don't try to play it on us boys." And we laughed a sickly
+sort of laugh. The fact of it was, we began to have doubts about the thing
+working, and had a suspicion that the twinkle in Dan McDonald's eye meant
+that he had been playing it on us. The landlord said he should have to
+have two shillings more, and that we were blocking up the thoroughfare,
+and we fumbled around and found it and paid him, and went out, probably
+the most disgusted excursionist that ever was. Dan, who had watched the
+whole business, slapped us on the shoulder, and said, "How did it work?"
+Though not particularly hungry, we could have eaten him raw. When we go
+east now, we take a lunch along, and when the other passengers are in to
+supper, we sit on the woodpile at Sparta, eat our lunch and gaze at the
+fountains, talk with the brakemen, and wonder if the landlord would know
+us if we should go in and take a toothpick off the counter. Not any more
+bummer for us, and no man must ever tell us how to save two shillings on a
+meal.
+
+
+HOW TO REACH YOUNG MEN.
+
+"How to reach young men," was the topic at the young men's prayer meeting
+on Thursday. An old gentleman on the East Side who broke a toe nail by
+kicking the gate post just as the young man went down the sidewalk, would
+also like to know. Bait your hook with a mighty good looking girl that
+wears a sealskin cloak, and you can reach the young men.
+
+
+CRUSHING NIHILISM.
+
+The Russian government is making an average of four thousand arrests a day
+of persons charged with nihilism. At this rate it is only a question of
+time when the last of the conspirators will be in prison, and the emperor
+can walk out without fear of assassination from his wife and children, as
+these will probably be all the people that will be left.
+
+
+WOMAN-DOZING A DEMOCRAT.
+
+A fearful tale conies 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,
+"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.
+
+[Illustration: "YELL, OR GO DOWN!"]
+
+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 folks 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. Chapin'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 be 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-wood Democrat hurrahed for Garfield.
+
+
+THE WRONG CORPSE.
+
+A corpse got a good joke on the people of Quebec the other day. It came
+there by express, and was only an ordinary, every-day man, but the Kanucks
+were looking for a military corpse, and supposing our ordinary corpse to
+be he, they got up a Fifth avenue funeral, and buried it with military
+honors. The corpse, who didn't know a thing about military matters, must
+have many a good laugh over the mistake. And how the military corpse must
+have felt, when HE came!
+
+
+THE DAY WE REACHED CANADA.
+
+D.H. Pulcifer, of Shawano, announces that he is about to prepare a
+biography of all the members of the territorial legislature and subsequent
+legislatures, state officers, members of congress, etc., and desires all
+men who may have been great or may be so now, to send in the particulars.
+Well, you can get our record at the adjutant general's office, though
+there is one mistake in that record. It was in June, 1862 that we arrived
+in Canada, the day before the draft.
+
+
+A LIVELY TRAIN LOAD.
+
+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 into 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 never have 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 popcorn 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 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.
+
+[Illustration: ME LONG LOST DUKE.]
+
+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.
+
+
+CATS ON THE FENCE.
+
+Some idiot has invented a "cat teaser" to put on fences to keep cats from
+sitting there and singing. It consists of a three-cornered piece of tin,
+nailed on the top of the fence. We hope none of our friends will invest in
+the patent, for statistics show that while cats very often sit on fences
+to meditate, yet when they get it all mediated and get ready to sing a
+duet, they get down off the fence and get under a currant bush. We
+challenge any cat scientist to disprove the assertion.
+
+
+HOW SHARPER THAN A HOUND'S TOOTH.
+
+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 till last week. One day we met Pierce, the Watertown
+Junction hotel man, and he told us that he had a greyhound pup that was
+the finest bread dog--we think he said bread dog, though it might have
+been 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.
+
+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, the dog will reach from here to the Soldier's home.
+
+[Illustration: 'THEREBY HANGS A TAIL'.]
+
+His head is about as big as a graham gem, and runs down to a point no
+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 fall off a wagon track we
+tie a knot in his tail.
+
+
+A SAFE INVESTMENT.
+
+Up to the present time the _Sun_ has struggled along from infancy to
+middle age without a safe in its office. It has never needed one. It does
+not need one now, but custom has to do with these things. The associations
+that surround one, go far towards making these changes. When we look at
+the immense safes in the office of out neighbor, filled with bonds and
+mortgages, we feel that a safe will look well. So we purchased a sort of
+an iron range, with a nickle plated knob, and a lock with as many figures
+on it as a tax list or a lottery advertisement, and placed it where it
+will strike the visitor on his first entrance. Ah, what an imposing affair
+it is! As we lean back in a chair and 1ook at it, and close our eyes, we
+can see millions in it, in our mind. It is a cross between Alex.
+Mitchell's safe and a child's bank. It is not full, but it has evidently
+been taking something. It is a grand feeling to walk along the streets and
+feel that your head contains the secret which opens the safe. No one but
+yourself and your maker, and the maker of the safe knows the three numbers
+which will cause it to open. The numbers are safe with you, and the All
+Seeing Eye you have confidence will not give it away, so that the only
+show a burglar has is to get solid with the maker of the safe.
+
+What a piece of mechanism is the lock of a safe! The man we bought it of
+gave us the programme that opens it. You go to the dial turn the knob, put
+your finger by your nose and wink. If you leave out the wink, the safe
+will not open, but we never leave out the wink. The trouble is, if there
+is a lady customer in with a bill, and we go to open the safe, we wink too
+many times and have to go all over it again. Then we place the numbers in
+their order, 4-11-44, and when the "four" is exactly opposite the
+dipthong, we turn the knob back three revolutions, light a cigar,
+and walk three times around the room. That is to give the mechanism in the
+Inside time to coalesce. Then we put the "eleven" in its place, turn the
+knob forward one revolution, and put on our hat and go out and take a
+drink. That is in the programme, and we sometimes think the inventor of
+the lock is interested in a brewery. Then we come back, wipe our mustache
+on the tail of a linen coat, place the figures "44" directly over the
+pointer, whistle "There's a land that is fairer than this," place the
+right foot forward, then turn the knob, the door swings on its hinges, and
+the untold wealth of the Indies lies before us, in our alleged mind.
+
+O, safe, are you honest? Are you true to us? You look pure and chaste, and
+your new overskirt of varnish, and your puffed ruching of gold and blue
+sets you off to good advantage, but you may not be impregnable. You have
+always gone in good society, and no scandal has ever been attached to your
+name. Your purity and innocence has been remarked by all who have met you,
+and there are none who would dare to intimate but that you would maintain
+your reputation against any attack, but sometimes we think we should
+hesitate to leave you all alone, with the light turned down all night and
+over Sunday, in the company of an eloquent, persuasive, good-looking
+burglar armed with a jimmy, and we fear that his warm hearted can of
+powder would strike a responsive chord in your impulsive nature, and that
+you would yield up the jewels confined to you, and your honor, your
+reputation, your standing among safes would be forever ruined. And yet we
+may be wrong.
+
+But what would it profit a burglar to gain the whole contents and wear out
+his soles. If he got in that safe, he would find a package of bills that
+we tried for a year to collect, and we would give him the bills if he
+asked for them, and he could save his powder. He would find one bill of
+sixteen dollars, with an indorsement that one dollar is paid,
+after thirteen dollars worth of shoe leather had been worn out. And yet
+the burglar would have a soft thing on cigars with that bill, for every
+time he visited the doctor he would tell him when to come again, and give
+him a cigar. Another thing the burglar would find would be a protested
+draft from a great Philadelphia patent medicine advertiser. The burglar
+could take a tie pass that is in the safe, and walk to Philadelphia, and
+trade out the twenty-five dollar draft by taking buchu on account.
+
+But no burglar that has any respect for himself, we feel sure, will ever
+do us the injury to scrape the paint off of that safe.
+
+
+A FASHION ITEM.
+
+A fashion item says, "The drawers this year are made very short, and some
+have lace ruffles." Some fashion reporter has evidently been looking over
+our back fence at the clothes line. But they got awfully fooled. The
+shortness of those drawers was caused by the flannel shrinking and the
+"lace ruffles" the reporter noticed is where a calf chewed them when they
+were hanging out to dry last fall on Black Hawk Island, when a gun kicked
+us out of a boat. Some of these fashion reporters think they are smart.
+
+
+A LECTURER SHOULD KNOW WHAT HE TALKS ABOUT.
+
+A man down east is lecturing on "Hell, Ingersoll, and Whisky." If the
+lecturer is at all familiar with his subjects, we wouldn't believe him
+under oath.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GOES CALLING.
+
+"Say, you are getting too alfired smart," said the grocery man to the bad
+boy as he pushed him into a corner by the molasses barrel, and took him by
+the neck and choked him so his eyes stuck out. "You have driven away
+several of my best customers, and now, confound you, I am going to have
+your life," and he took up a cheese knife and began to sharpen it on his
+boot.
+
+"What's the--gurgle--matter?" asked the choking boy, as the grocery man's
+finger let up on his throat a little, so he could speak. "I haint done
+nothing."
+
+"Didn't you hang up that gray torn cat by the heels, in front of my store,
+with the rabbits I had for sale? I didn't notice it until the minister
+called me out in front of the store, and pointing to the rabbits, asked
+what good fat cats were selling for. By crimus, this thing has got to
+stop. You have got to move out of this ward or I will."
+
+The boy got his breath and said it wasn't him that put the cat up there.
+He said it was the policeman, and he and his chum saw him do it, and he
+just come in to tell the grocery man about it, and before he could speak
+he had his neck nearly pulled off. The boy began to cry, and the grocery
+man said he was only joking, and gave him a box of sardines, and they made
+up. Then he asked the boy how his Pa put in his New Years, and the boy
+sighed and said:
+
+"We had a sad time at our house New Years. Pa insisted on making calls,
+and Ma and me tried to prevent it, but he said he was of age, and guessed
+he could make calls if he wanted to, so he looked at the morning paper and
+got the names of all the places where they were going to receive, and he
+turned his paper collar, and changed ends with his cuffs, and put some
+arnica on his handkerchief, and started out. Ma told him not to
+drink anything, and he said he wouldn't, but he did. He was full the third
+place he went to. O, so full. Some men can get full and not show it, but
+when Pa gets full, he gets so full his back teeth float, and the liquor
+crowds his eyes out, and his mouth gets loose and wiggles all over his
+face, and he laughs all the time, and the perspiration just oozes out of
+him, and his face gets red, and he walks so wide. O, he disgraced us all.
+At one place he wished the hired girl 'a happy new year' more than twenty
+times, and hung his hat on her elbow, and tried to put on a rubber hall
+mat for his over shoes. At another place he walked up a lady's train, and
+carried away a card basket full of bananas and oranges. Ma wanted my chum
+and me to follow Pa and bring him home, and about dark we found him in the
+door yard of a house where they have statues in front of the house, and he
+grabbed me by the arm, and mistook me for another caller, and insisted on
+introducing me to a marble statue without any clothes on. He said it was a
+friend of his, and it was a winter picnic. He hung his hat on an
+evergreen, and put his overcoat on the iron fence, and I was so mortified
+I almost cried. My chum said if his Pa made such a circus of himself he
+would sand bag him. That gave me an idea, and when we got Pa most home I
+went and got a paper box covered with red paper, so it looked just like a
+brick, and a bottle of tomato ketchup, and when we got Pa up on the steps
+at home I hit him with the paper brick, and my chum squirted the ketchup
+on his head, and we demanded his money, and then he yelled murder, and we
+lit out, and Ma and the minister, who was making a call on her, all the
+afternoon, they came to the door and pulled Pa in. He said he had been
+attacked by a band of robbers, and they knocked his brains out, but he
+whipped them, and then Ma saw the ketchup brains oozing out of his head,
+and she screamed, and the minister said. 'Good heavens, he is murdered!'
+and just then I came in the back door and they sent after the
+doctor, and they put Pa on the lounge, and tied up his head with a towel
+to keep the brains in, and Pa began to snore, and when the doctor came in
+it took them half an hour to wake him, and then he was awful sick to his
+stummick, and then Ma asked the doctor if he would live, and the doc.
+analyzed the ketchup and smelled of it and told Ma he would be all right
+if he had a little Worcester sauce to put on with the ketchup, and when he
+said Pa would pull through, Ma looked awful sad. Then Pa opened his eyes
+and saw the minister and said that was one of the robbers that jumped on
+him, and he wanted to whip the minister, but the doc. held Pa's arms and
+Ma sat on his legs, and the minister said he had got some other calls to
+make, and he wished Ma a happy new year in the hall, much as fifteen
+minutes. His happy new year to Ma is most as long as his prayers. Well, we
+got Pa to bed, and when we undressed him we found nine napkins in the
+bosom of his vest, that he had picked up at the places where he had
+called. He is all right this morning, but he says it is the last time he
+will drink coffee when he makes New Years calls.
+
+"Well, then you didn't have much fun yourself on New Years. That's too
+bad," said the grocery man, as he looked at the sad eyed youth. "But you
+look hard. If you were old enough I should say you had been drunk, your
+eyes are red."
+
+[Illustration: HAPPY NEW YEAR, MUM!]
+
+"Didn't have any fun eh? Well, I wish I had as many dollars as I had fun.
+You see, after Pa got to sleep Ma wanted me and my chum to go to the
+houses that Pa had called at and return the napkins he had kleptomaniaced,
+so we dressed up and went. The first house we called at the girls were
+sort of demoralized. I don't know as I ever saw a girl drunk, but those
+girls acted queer. The callers had stopped coming, and the girls were
+drinking something out of shaving cups that looked like lather, and they
+said it was 'aignogg.' They laffed and kicked up their heels wuss nor a
+circus, and their collars got unpinned, and their faces was red, and they
+put their arms around me and my chum and hugged us and asked us if we
+didn't want some of the custard. You'd a dide to see me and my chum drink
+that lather. It looked just like soap suds with nutmaig in it, but by gosh
+it got in its work sudden. At first I was afraid when the girls hugged me,
+but after I had drank a couple of shaving cups full of the 'aignogg' I
+wasn't afraid no more, and I hugged a girl so hard she catched her breath
+and panted and said, 'O, don't.' Then I kissed her, and she is a great big
+girl, bigger'n me, but she didn't care. Say, did you ever kiss a girl full
+of aignogg? If you did it would break up your grocery business. You would
+want to waller in bliss instead of selling mackerel. My chum ain't no
+slouch either. He was sitting in a stuffed chair holding another New
+Year's girl, and I could hear him kiss her so it sounded like a cutter
+scraping on bare ground. But the girl's Pa came in and said he guessed it
+was time to close the place, unless they had a license for an all night
+house, and me and my chum went out. But _wasn't_ we sick when we got out
+doors. O, it seemed as though the pegs in my boots was the only thing that
+kept them down, and my chum he like to dide. He had been to dinner and
+supper and I had only been skating all day, so he had more to contend with
+than I did. O, my, but that lets me out on aignogg. I don't know how I got
+home, but I got in bed with Pa, cause Ma was called away to attend a baby
+matinee in the night. I don't know how it is, but there never is anybody
+in our part of town that has a baby but they have it in the night, and
+they send for Ma. I don't know what she has to be sent for every time for.
+Ma ain't to blame for all the young ones in this town, but she has got up
+a reputashun, and when we hear the bell ring in the night Ma gets up and
+begins to put on her clothes, and the next morning she comes in the dining
+room with a shawl over her head, and says, 'its a girl and weighs ten
+pounds,' or 'a boy,' if it's a boy baby. Ma was out on one of her
+professional engagements, and I got in bed with Pa. I had heard Pa blame
+Ma about her cold feet, so I got a piece of ice about as big as a raisin
+box, just zactly like one of Ma's feet, and laid it right against the
+small of Pa's back. I couldn't help laffing, but pretty soon Pa began to
+squirm and he said, 'Why'n 'ell don't you warm them feet before you come
+to bed,' and then he hauled back his leg and kicked me clear out in the
+middle of the floor, and said if he married again he would marry a woman
+who had lost both her feet in a railroad accident. Then I put the ice back
+in the bed with Pa and went to my room, and in the morning Pa said he
+sweat more'n a pail full in the night. Well, you must excuse me. I have an
+engagement to shovel snow off the sidewalk. But before I go, let me advise
+you not to drink aignogg, and don't sell tom cats for rabbits," and he got
+out of the door just in time to miss the rutabaga that the grocery man
+threw at him.
+
+
+WHAT THE DEMOCRATS WILL DO.
+
+The _Wisconsin_ asks, "What will the Democrats do?" We trust it is not
+betraying a confidence reposed in us by the manager of a party, but we can
+not allow our neighbor to remain in such dense ignorance, as long as we
+are possessed of the desired information. "What will the Democrats do?"
+The Democrats will prove an _alibi!_
+
+
+A SEWING MACHINE GIVEN TO THE BOSS GIRL.
+
+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 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 follow 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.
+
+[Illustration: I WANT TO BE AN ANGEL.]
+
+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 open 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 for 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.
+
+
+SHE WAS NO GENTLEMAN.
+
+From an article in the _Leader_ we gather that Frank Drake, editor of the
+Rushford _Star_, was horsewhipped by a woman who was dissatisfied with
+some article of his that appeared against her, in the _Star_. A woman that
+cowhides an editor is no gentleman.
+
+
+JOKE ON THE HAT.
+
+Somehow, during the election excitement, Frank Hatch happened to bet right
+just once. He bet a hat, and on Monday he went to Putnam & Philbrick and
+selected one of the finest silk ones. When he went out in the street every
+body noticed it, and a reception was held. They all congratulated Frank,
+except Ike Usher. Ike's hat was a year old, and the contrast was so
+remarkable that Ike would not walk on the street with Hatch. Frank said
+that Ike's hat used to be a very fine looking hat, but at present it was a
+disgrace to the force. Mr. Usher was offended, and he swore revenge. He
+went to a professional drunkard on Division street, and said that if he
+should happen to get drunk Monday night and Hatch should happen to arrest
+him, he would give the drunkard five dollars if the drunkard would mash
+Frank's new hat. The fellow said he would flatten it flatter than flatness
+itself. Just after dark Mr. Hatch was walking down Third street, "Whoop,
+hurrah for Tilden, (hic) 'endrix." The remark seemed so out of place that
+Frank went down there. The man was lying on the sidewalk, and telling the
+barrel to roll over and not take up all the bed. Mr. Hatch accosted the
+man gently, telling him he would catch cold there, and that he had better
+go with him to the city hotel. The man said he would--be counted in if he
+did, and Hatch bent over him to take him by the lily white hand, when a
+drunken boot came down on the top of that hat, and drove it clean down to
+Frank's nose. Of course it could go no further. Then the man pulled Frank
+down, and the hat struck the end of a salt barrel, knocked it off, and the
+man raised up and sat down on it, and kicked it into the street. Frank got
+the man away, and a boy brought his hat to the police station, just as
+Usher and Littlejohn and Knutson, and all the policeman entered. It is
+said that all stood on the corner over by Kevin's watching the
+arrest. The hat was a sight to behold, as it laid in state on the safe,
+and all the boys making comments on it. It looked like a six-inch stove
+pipe elbow that a profane man had been attempting to fit to a five-inch
+stove pipe. It looked like some old dripping pan that had been thrown out
+in the street, and had been run over by wagons. It looked like the very
+dickens. And yet we have no doubt Hatch will say this is a lie, because he
+now wears a good hat, but we know the hat he now wears he got by trading a
+flannel shirt to a grasshopper sufferer, and it no more resembles the
+beautiful new hat he won on election than nothing. After Hatch went out of
+the office, Usher let the man "escape," and he is five dollars ahead, and
+Ike has got even with Hatch.
+
+[Illustration: IT LOOKED LIKE AN OLD DRIPPING PAN.]
+
+
+THE THIRSTY GOPHER.
+
+A Minnesota town got a fire steamer on trial, and tested it by trying to
+drown out a gopher. After working it six hours, the gopher came out to get
+a drink. He would have died of thirst if they had kept the hole closed
+much longer.
+
+
+COLORED CONCERT TROUPES.
+
+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 Rose, 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 her red
+trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage looking as though she
+would have to be carried on a dust pan, 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
+the 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
+Wilhelmj or 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 out, 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.
+
+
+MATTIE MASHES MINNESOTA.
+
+Mrs. Mattie A. Bridge is meeting with great success in Minnesota. In some
+places she is retained until she lectures four times. She says the heart
+of Minnesota is warm towards her. We shall feel inclined to put a head on
+Minnesota, if it don't quit allowing its heart to get warm.
+
+
+WHY THE FEVER DIDN'T SPREAD.
+
+Portage City has had a sensation which, though at one time it looked
+serious, turned out to be a farce. A girl was taken sick, and a physician
+was called who pronounced it a case of yellow fever, and he made out a
+prescription for that disease. Mr. Brannan, editor of the Portage
+Register, who lives near, got the news, and imparted it to all whom he
+met, and they in turn told it to others, and a stampede was looked for.
+Fox turned the Fox House over to Bunker, and had his trunks checked for
+the Hot Springs. Corning and Jack Turner hired a wagon to take them to
+Briggsville. Hærtel, the brewery man, offered to sell out his brewery and
+all his property for eight hundred dollars, and he bought a ticket for
+Germany. Bunker left the Fox House to run itself, and went to Devil's
+Lake. Sam. Branuan, telegraphed to George Clinton, at Denver, not
+to come home, as the yellow fever was raging, and people were dying off
+like rotton sheep. And Sam got vaccinated and went to Beaver Dam. The
+excitement was intense. Men became perfectly wild, and were going to rush
+off and leave the women and children to the mercies of the dead plague.
+Chicago and Milwaukee bummers could be seen at the hotels, kneeling beside
+their sample cases trying to pray, but they couldn't. Just before the
+train started that was to carry away the frightened populace, the doctor
+came up town and said that the girl with the yellow fever was better, and
+that she was the mother of a fine nine pound boy. The authorities took
+every precaution to prevent the spread of the yellow fever, by arresting
+the brakemen whom the girl said was the cause of all the trouble. All is
+quiet on the Wisconse now.
+
+[Illustration: DRUMMERS TRYING TO PRAY.]
+
+
+TOO PARTICULAR BY HALF.
+
+It is one of the mottoes of THE SUN never to publish anything that would
+cause a blush to mantle the cheek of innocence, or anybody. And yet,
+occasionally, a person finds fault. Not long since a man said he liked THE
+SUN well enough, only it had too much to say about patched breeches, which
+was offensive to some. Well, some people are so confounded high toned that
+if they were going to have a patch put on they would have it way up on the
+small of their back. Some of the best women in the world have sat up
+nights to sew a patch on their husband's pants. Martha Washington used to
+do it. But, G. Lordy, a family newspaper must not speak of a patch. When
+you take patches away from the people you strike a blow at their
+liberties. Don't be too nice.
+
+
+THE WAY TO NAME CHILDREN.
+
+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 to 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 to the door
+when the grocery delivery wagon was there, he would name the child "Boy
+from Dickson'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 Soltaire 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.
+
+
+AN EDITOR BURGLARIZED.
+
+The residence of John Turner, of the Mauston _Star_, was entered by
+burglars a few nights since, and his clothes were stolen, containing all
+his money and his railroad pass. We can imagine an editor around bare as
+to legs, etcetery, and out of money, but to be without a railroad pass
+must indeed be a sad state of affairs. When burglars burgle an editor it
+is a sign that confidence is restored under Hayes' administration. We
+trust that editors throughout the State who are blessed with this world's
+goods to the extent of more than one pair of pants, will send one pair at
+least to John Turner, Mauston, Wis., by express. We are probably as poor
+as any editor, but we have sent him those alligator pants that have
+created such a sensation in years gone by. It is true they are a little
+bit fringy about the bottoms, and the knees are worn through, and
+concealment, like a worm in the bud, has gnawed the foundation all out of
+them, but in a little town like Mauston, such things will not be noticed.
+John, take them, in welcome, and when the cold winds--but you better carry
+bricks in your coat tail pockets. That is the way we wore them the last
+three or four years.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA DISSECTED.
+
+"I understand your Pa has got to drinking again like a fish," says the
+grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth came in the grocery and took a
+handful of dried apples. The boy ate a dried apple and then made up a
+terrible face, and the grocery man asked him what he was trying to do with
+his face. The boy caught his breath and then said:
+
+"Say, don't you know any better than to keep dried apples where a boy can
+get hold of them when he has got the mumps? You will kill some boy yet by
+such dum carelessness. I thought these were sweet dried apples, but they
+are sour as a boarding house keeper, and they make me tired. Didn't you
+ever have the mumps? Gosh, but don't it hurt though? You have got to be
+darn careful when you have the mumps, and not go out bob-sledding, or
+skating, or you will have your neck swell up biggern a milk pail. Pa says
+he had the mumps once when he was a boy and it broke him all up."
+
+"Well, never mind the mumps, how about your Pa spreeing it. Try one of
+those pickles in the jar there, won't you. I always like to have a boy
+enjoy himself when he comes to see me," said the grocery man, winking to a
+man who was filling an old fashioned tin box with tobacco out of the pail,
+who winked back as much as to say, "if that boy eats a pickle on top of
+them mumps we will have a circus, sure."
+
+"You can't play no pickle on me, not when I have the mumps. Ma passed the
+pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the
+lockjaw. But Ma didn't do it on purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps
+and didn't know how discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn't feel as
+though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But
+about Pa. He has been fuller'n a goose ever since New Year's day. I think
+its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New
+Year's. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone. We
+have got brain, and know when we have got enough, but Pa, when he gets to
+going don't ever stop until he gets so sick that he can't keep his
+stummick inside of hisself. It is getting so they look to me to brace Pa
+up every time he gets on a tear, and I guess I fixed him this time so he
+will never touch liquor again. I scared him so his bald head turned gray
+in a single night."
+
+"What under the heavens have you done to him now?" says the grocery man,
+in astonishment. "I hope you haven't done anything you will regret in
+after years."
+
+"Regret nothing," said the boy, as he turned the lid of the cheese box
+back and took the knife and sliced off a piece of cheese, and took a few
+crackers out of a barrel, and sat down on a soap box by the stove, "You
+see Ma was annoyed to death with Pa. He would come home full, when she had
+company, and lay down on the sofa and snore, and he would smell like a
+distillery. It hurt me to see Ma cry, and I told her I would break Pa of
+drinking if she would let me, and she said if I would promise not to hurt
+Pa to go ahead, and I promised not to. Then I got my chum and another boy,
+to help, and Pa is all right. We went down to the place where they sell
+arms and legs, to folks who have served in the army, or a saw mill, or a
+threshing machine, and lose their limbs, and we borrowed some arms and
+legs, and fixed up a dissecting room. We fixed a long table in the
+basement, big enough to lay Pa out on you know, and then we got false
+whiskers and moustaches, and when Pa came in the house drunk and lay down
+on the sofa, and got to sleep, we took him and laid him out on the table,
+and took some trunk straps, and a circingle and strapped him down
+to the table. He slept right along all through it, and we had another
+table with the false arms and legs on, and we rolled up our sleeves, and
+smoked pipes, just like I read that medical students do when they cut up a
+man.
+
+"Well, you'd a dide to see Pa look at us when he woke up. I saw him open
+his eyes, and then we began to talk about cutting up dead men. We put
+hickery nuts in our mouths so our voices would sound different, so he
+wouldn't know us, and was telling the other boys about what a time we had
+cutting up the last man we bought. I said he was awful tough, and when we
+had got his legs off and had taken out his brain, his friends came to the
+dissecting room and claimed the body, and we had to give it up, but I
+saved the legs. I looked at Pa on the table and he began to turn pale, and
+he squirmed around to get up, but found he was fast. I had pulled his
+shirt up under his arms, while he was asleep, and as he began to move I
+took an icicle, and in the dim light of the candles, that were sitting on
+the table in beer botles, I drew the icicle across Pa's stummick and I
+said to my chum, 'Doc, I guess we had better cut open this old duffer and
+see if he died from inflamation of the stummick, from hard drinking, as
+the coroner said he did.' Pa shuddered all over when he felt the icicle
+going over his bare stummick, and he said, 'For God's sake, gentlemen,
+what does this mean? I am not dead.'
+
+"The other boys looked at Pa with astonishment, and I said 'Well, we
+bought you for dead, and the coroner's jury said you were dead, and by the
+eternal we ain't going to be fooled out of a corpse when we buy one, are
+we Doc?' My chum said not if he knowed his self, and the other students
+said, 'Of course he is dead. He thinks he is alive, but he died day before
+yesterday, fell dead on the street, and his folks said he had been a
+nuisance and they wouldn't claim the corpse, and we bought it at the
+morgue.' Then I drew the icicle across him again, and I said, 'I don't
+know about this, doctor. I find that blood follows the scalpel as I cut
+through the cuticle. Hand me the blood sponge please.' Pa began to wiggle
+around, and we looked at him, and my chum raised his eye-lid, and looked
+solemn, and Pa said, 'Hold on gentlemen. Don't cut into me any more, and I
+can explain this matter. This is all a mistake. I was only drunk.' We went
+in a corner and whispered, and Pa kept talking all the time. He said if we
+would postpone the hog killing he could send and get witnesses to prove
+that he was not dead, but that he was a respectable citizen, and had a
+family. After we held a consultation I went to Pa and told him that what
+he said about being alive might possibly be true, though we had our
+doubts. We had found such cases before in our practice east, where men
+seemed to be alive, but it was only temporary. Before we had got them cut
+up they were dead enough for all practical purposes. Then I laid the
+icicle across Pa's abdomen, and went on to tell him that even if he _was_
+alive it would be better for him to play that he _was_ dead, because he
+was such a nuisance to his family that they did not want him, and I was
+telling him that I had heard that in his lifetime he was very cruel to his
+boy, a bright little fellow who was at the head of his class in Sunday
+school and a pet wherever he was known, when Pa interrupted me and said,
+'Doctor, please take that carving knife off my stomach, for it makes me
+nervous. As for that boy of mine, he is the condemndest little whelp in
+town, and he isn't no pet anywhere. Now, you let up on this dissectin'
+business, and I will make it all right with you.' We held another
+consultation and then I told Pa that we did not feel that it was doing
+justice to society to give up the body of a notorious drunkard, after we
+had paid twenty dollars for the corpse. If there was any hopes that he
+would reform and try and lead a different life, it would be different, and
+I said to the boys, 'gentlemen, we must do our duty. Doc, you dismember
+that leg, and I will attend to the stomach and the upper part of body. He
+will be dead before we are done with him. We must remember that society
+has some claim on us, and not let our better natures be worked upon by the
+_post mortem_ promises of a dead drunkard.' Then I took my icicle and
+began fumbling around the abdomen portion of Pa's remains, and my chum
+took a rough piece of ice and began to saw his leg off, while the other
+boy took hold of the leg and said he would catch it when it dropped off.
+Well, Pa kicked like a steer. He said he wanted to make one more appeal to
+us, and we acted sort of impatent but we let up to hear what he had to
+say. He said if we would turn him loose he would give us ten dollars more
+than we paid for his body, and that he would never drink another drop as
+long as he lived. Then we whispered some more and then told him we thought
+favorably of his last proposition, but he must swear, with his hand on the
+leg of a corpse we were then dissecting that he would never drink again,
+and then he must be blindfolded and be conducted several blocks away from
+the dissecting room, before we could turn him loose. He said that was all
+right, and so we blindfolded him, and made him take a bloody oath, with
+his hand on a piece of ice that we told him was a piece of another corpse,
+and then we took him out of the house and walked him around the block four
+times, and left him on a corner, after he had promised to send the money
+to an address that I gave him. We told him to stand still five minutes
+after we left him, then remove the blindfold, and go home. We watched him,
+from behind a board fence, and he took off the handkerchief, looked at the
+name on a street lamp, and found he was not far from home. He started off
+saying 'That's a pretty narrow escape old man. No more whisky for you.' I
+did not see him again until this morning, and when I asked him where he
+was last night he shuddered and said 'none of your darn business. But I
+never drink any more, you remember that.' Ma was tickled and she told me I
+was worth my weight in gold. Well, good day. That cheese is musty." And
+the boy went and caught on a passing sleigh.
+
+
+COL. INGERSOLL PRAYING.
+
+Bob. Ingersoll is taking a rest from his persecutions of the Creator, and
+is traveling in the Yo Semite region of California. Bob does not believe
+there is a God, but if he was riding a kicking mule, down the precipice
+near the big trees, and the saddle should turn over with him, and his foot
+should be caught in the stirrup, after the mule had kicked him a few times
+in the judgement seat, which is the bowels, in his case, he would be very
+apt to bellow like a calf, and say "O, Lord, please unbuckle that cussed
+strap." We should like to hear Bob had met with some such accident, just
+so he would recognize the foreign government of the Lord, which at present
+he totally ignores. Not that we have anything against Ingersoll.
+
+
+HOW TO INVEST A THOUSAND DOLLARS.
+
+A young man advertises in a Milwaukee paper for a partnership. He wants to
+invest one thousand dollars in some established business. Go to La Crosse
+and go to betting on election. It pays, and is an established business.
+There's millions in it.
+
+
+BOYS AND CIRCUSES.
+
+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 circusses, 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 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 faith in the 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 wont 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 the 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 to 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 shot
+gun, 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.
+
+
+THE WATERS OF LA CROSSE.
+
+We have heretofore entirely overlooked the magnetic qualities of the La
+Crosse water. It will be remembered that the Fond du Lac water is
+advertised as magnetic water, and it has been said that a knife blade,
+after being soaked in the water will take up a watch key or a steel pen.
+That is nothing compared to the La Crosse water. Last week a man who had
+been soaked in La Crosse water, took up a watch, key and all, and a
+policeman who had been using the water took up the man, with the watch. A
+pair of ice tongs, made of steel, on being soaked in water, took up a
+piece of ice weighing over a hundred pounds, and a farmer named Dawson,
+after drinking the water took up a stray colt. A young couple stopped the
+other evening and took a drink of water and up Fourth street, and before
+they got to Seymour's corner they were walking so close together that you
+couldn't tell which the bustle was on. We have never seen water that had
+so much magnetism in as this. A pot of it on a house is better than a
+lightning rod.
+
+
+SARDINEINDIANAPOLIS.
+
+In company with a couple of hundred others who were firm in the belief
+that the Sardinapalus troupe were under the auspices of the Young Men's
+Christian Association, we attended the performance on Monday evening. It
+was heralded as coming from Booth's theater, N.Y., where it had a run of
+four months. Most of them got away while on the trip here, and only a few
+appeared. The scenery, which was also extensively advertised, was no more
+than could have been fixed up with a whitewash brush in half a day, by
+home talent. The play, what there was of it was well rendered, though many
+doubted the propriety of the king calling around him a lot of La Crosse
+soldiers, to hear him tell the Greek slave how he loved her. There was
+much dissatisfaction about the Greek slave. All marble statues of the
+Greek slave represent her with nothing on but a trace chain around one arm
+and one leg. But the party who got up this play went behind the returns
+and invested her with a white night gown, which detracted very much from
+history. The "soldiers" were picked up among the La Crosse boys, and they
+got tangled up, and couldn't form a line to save themselves, and when they
+stood against the wall it was a melancholy fact that they tickled the
+ballet girls in the ribs as they passed by. This was highly wrong. It
+takes the romance out of the affair to gaze upon an Assyrian soldier,
+covered with armor, and carrying a cover to a wash boiler in his hand, and
+to think that he is covered with scars won in battle, and then look at him
+through a glass and have him wink at you, and you find that you have seen
+him thousands of times standing on the postoffice corner, spitting tobacco
+juice across the sidewalk at the hydrant. Mrs. Sardinapalus did not
+appear, having gone to visit her uncle, but "Sard." stuck to the Greek
+slave like a sand burr to a boy's trousers. They laid down
+together on a bale of paper rags and looked at the dance. The dance was
+pretty good. First there came out about a dozen girls in tights, with
+skirts as short as pie crust. Their legs were all round and well got up,
+showing that the sawdust was evenly distributed, with no chance for
+dissatisfaction. They capered around, and smiled at the reflection of the
+red lights in the gallery upon the bald heads before them, and kicked up
+like all possessed, and then they backed up against the wings and fooled
+with the La Cross Assyrians, who came down like a wolf on the fold. Then
+there came out two first-class dancers, one short, fat, plump, but mighty
+small, so small that she didn't look as though she was big enough for a
+cork to a jug. But she could dance. Well, she ought to, as she had no
+clothes to bother her. Next came a brunette, evidently of French
+extraction, with a face that was a protection against assault with intent
+to kill, and legs of the Gothic style. Smith said she was spavined, but
+that's a lie. She danced better than all of them, and walked on her big
+toes till the audience yelled. Then the dancers all got tangled up
+together, the brunette fell over on the little blonde, stuck her hind foot
+right in the air as straight as a liberty pole struck by lightning,
+somebody said "Tableau," and the curtain went down, and the audience
+looked at each other as much as to say, "Let's go home." The boys in the
+gallery cheered, and the curtain was rung up again, but her flag was still
+there. Then they had a fighting scene, where everybody gets mad and goes
+out into the dressing room and clashes old swords together, and come back
+wounded. The king, after killing up a lot ahead, got a furlough and came
+in and lallygaged with the Greek slave a spell, and then the battle was
+lost, and "Sardine." said he might as well die for an old sheep as a lamb.
+So he ordered a funeral pile built of red fire, and he got on it to be
+burned up. The Greek slave said if that was the game she wanted a hand
+dealt to her, as wherever "Sard." went she was going, as she had
+an insurance policy against fire in the Northwestern Mutual. So he invited
+her on to the kindling wood, and after hugging enough to last them through
+perdition--and mighty good hugging it was too--the pile of slabs was
+touched off, the flames rolled, and "Sard." and the Greek slave went down
+to hell clasped in each other's embrace, and we went to the People's store
+and bought a mackerel and went home and told our wife we had been to a
+democratic caucus. We don't know what all the other fellows told their
+wives, but there has been a heap of lying, we know that much.
+
+[Illustration: "SARD." AND THE GREEK SLAVE.]
+
+
+INSECURE ABODES.
+
+Four men fell out of the Oshkosh jail the other day. If Oshkosh would only
+imitate Fond du lac, and paper the county jail with wall paper, it might
+become safe.
+
+
+THE KNIGHT AND THE BRIDAL CHAMBER.
+
+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 backwoods, 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, 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 swow 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 book-keeper 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 in 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.
+
+[Illustration: "THIS IS TOO ALLFIRED MUCH!"]
+
+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.
+
+
+SEVEN YEAR OLD HORSES.
+
+An old farmer once said, "What a year it must have been for colts seven
+years ago this spring." No person who has never attempted to buy a horse
+can appreciate the remark, but if he will let it be known that he wants to
+buy a good horse, he will be struck with the circumstance that all the
+horses that are of any particular account were born seven years ago.
+Occasionally there is one that is six years old, but they are not plenty,
+Now, those of us who lived around here seven years ago did not have our
+attention called to the fact that the country was flooded with colts.
+There were very few twin colts, and it was seldom that a mother had half a
+dozen colts following her. Farmers and stock raisers did not go round
+worrying about what they were going to do with so many colts. The papers,
+if we recollect right, were not filled with accounts of the extraordinary
+number of colts born. And yet it must have been a terrible year for colts,
+because there are only six horses in Milwaukee that are over seven years
+old, but one of them was found to have been pretty well along in years
+when he worked in Burnham's brick yard in 1848, and finally the owner
+owned up that he was mistaken twenty-six years. What a mortality there
+must have been among horses that would now be eight, nine or ten years
+old. There are none of them left. And a year from now, when our present
+stock of horses would naturally be eight years old they will all be dead,
+and a new lot of seven years old horses will take their places. It is
+singular, but it is true. That is, it is true unless horse dealers lie,
+and THE SUN would be slow to charge so grave a crime upon a useful and
+enterprising class of citizens. No, it cannot be, and yet, don't it seem
+peculiar that all the horses in this broad land are seven years old this
+spring? We leave the suject for the youth of the land to wonder over,
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA JOINS A TEMPERANCE SOCIETY.
+
+"Don't you think my Pa is showing his age a good deal more than usual?"
+asked the bad boy of the grocery man, as he took a smoked herring out of a
+box, and peeled off the skin with a broken bladed jack-knife, and split it
+open and ripped off the bone, threw the head at a cat, took some crackers
+and began to eat.
+
+"Well, I don't know but he does look as though he was getting old," said
+the grocery man, as he took a piece of yellow wrapping paper and charged
+the boy's poor old father with a dozen herrings and a pound of crackers;
+"But there is no wonder he is getting old. I wouldn't go through what your
+father has, the last year, for a million dollars. I tell you, boy, when
+your father is dead, and you get a step-father, and he makes you walk the
+chalk mark, you will realize what a bonanza you have fooled yourself out
+of by killing off your father. The way I figure it, your father will last
+about six months, and you ought to treat him right, the little time he has
+to live."
+
+"Well, I am going to," said the boy, as he picked the herring bones out of
+his teeth with a piece of a match that he sharpened with his knife. "But I
+don't believe in borrowing trouble about a step-father so long before
+hand. I don't think Ma could get a man to step into Pa's shoes, as long as
+I lived, not if she was inlaid with diamonds, and owned a brewery. There
+are brave men, I know, that are on the marry, but none of them would want
+to be brevet father to a cherubim like me, except he got pretty good
+wages. And then, since Pa was dissected he is going to lead a different
+life, and I guess I will make a man of him, if he holds out. We got him to
+join the Good Templars last night."
+
+"No, you don't tell me," said the grocery man, as he thought that
+his trade in cider for mince pies would be cut off. "So you got him into
+the Good Templars, eh?"
+
+"Well, he thinks he has joined the Good Templars, so it is all the same.
+You see my chum and me have been going to a private gymnasium, on the west
+side, kept by a Dutchman, and in the back room he has all the tools for
+getting up muscle. There, look at my arm," said the boy, as he rolled up
+his sleeve and showed a muscle about as big as an oyster. "That is the
+result of training at the gymnasium. Before I took lessons I hadn't any
+more muscle than you have got. Well, the Dutchman was going to a dance on
+the south side the other night, and he asked my chum to tend the
+gymnasium, and I told Pa if he would join the Good Templars that night
+there wouldn't be many at the lodge, and he wouldn't be so embarrassed,
+and as I was one of the officers of the lodge I would put it to him light,
+and he said he would go, so my chum got five other boys to help us put him
+through. So we steered him down to the gymnasium and made him rap on the
+storm door outside, and I said 'who comes there?' and he said it was a
+pilgrim who wanted to jine our sublime order. I asked him if he had made
+up his mind to turn from the ways of a hyena, and adopt the customs of the
+truly good, and he said if he knew his own heart he had, and then I told
+him to come in out of the snow and take off his pants. He kicked a little
+at taking off his pants, because it was cold out there in the storm door
+dog house, but I told him they all had to do it. The princes, potentates
+and paupers all had to come to it. He asked me how it was when we
+initiated women, and I told him women never took that degree. He pulled
+off his pants and wanted a check for them, but I told him the Grand Mogul
+would hold his clothes, and then I blind-folded him, and with a base ball
+club I pounded on the floor as I walked around the gymnasium, while the
+lodge, headed by my chum, sung, 'We won't go home till morning' I
+stopped in front of the ice water tank, and said, 'Grand Worthy Duke, I
+bring before you a pilgrim who has drank of the dregs until his stomach
+won't hold water, and who desires to swear off.' The Grand Mogul asked me
+if he was worthy and well qualified, and I told him that he had been drunk
+more or less since the reunion last summer, which ought to qualify him.
+Then the Grand Mogul made Pa repeat the most blood-curdling oath, in which
+Pa agreed, if he ever drank another drop, to allow anybody to pull his
+toe-nails out with tweezers, to have his liver dug out and fed to dogs,
+his head chopped off, and his eyes removed. Then the Mogul said he would
+brand the candidate on the bare back with the initial letters of our
+order, 'G.T.,' that all might read how a brand had been snatched from the
+burning. You'd a dide to see Pa flinch when I pulled up his shirt, and got
+ready to brand him.
+
+"My chum got a piece of ice out of the water cooler, and just as he
+clapped it on Pa's back I burned a piece of horses hoof in the candle, and
+held it to Pa's nose, and I guess Pa actually thought it was his burning
+skin that he smelled. He jumped about six feet and said, 'Great heavens,
+what you dewin,' and then he began to roll over a barrel which I had
+arranged for him. Pa thought he was going down cellar, and he hung to the
+barrel, but he was on top half the time. When Pa and the barrel got
+through fighting I was beside him, and I said, 'Calm yourself, and be
+prepared for the ordeal that is to follow.' Pa asked how much of this dum
+fooling there was, and said he was sorry he joined. He said he could let
+licker alone without having the skin all burned off his back. I told Pa to
+be brave and not weaken, and all would-be well. He wiped the prespiration
+off his face on the end of his shirt, and we put a belt around his body
+and hitched it to a tackle, and pulled him up so his feet just
+off the floor, and then we talked as though we were away off, and I told
+my chum to look out that Pa did not hit the gas fixtures, and Pa actually
+thought he was being hauled clear up to the roof. I could see he was
+scared by the complexion of his hands and feet, as they clawed the air. He
+actually sweat so the drops fell on the floor. Bime-by we let him down,
+and he was awfully relieved though his feet were not more than two inches
+from the floor any of the time. We were just going to slip Pa down a board
+with slivers in to give him a realizing sense of the rough road a reformed
+man has to travel, and got him straddle of the board, when the Dutchman
+came home from the dance fullern a goose, and he drove us boys out, and we
+left Pa, and the Dutchman said, 'Vot you vas doing here mit dose boys, you
+old duffer, and vere vas your pants?' and Pa pulled off the handkerchief
+from his eyes, and the Dutchman said if he didn't get out in a holy minute
+he would kick the stuffing out of him, and Pa got out. He took his pants
+and put them, on in the alley, and then we came up to Pa and told him that
+was the third time the drunken Dutchman had broke up our lodge, but we
+should keep on doing good until we had reformed every drunkard in
+Milwaukee, and Pa said that was right, and he would see us through, if it
+cost every dollar he had. Then we took him home, and when Ma asked if she
+couldn't join the lodge, too, Pa said, 'Now you take my advice, and don't
+you ever join no Good Templars. Your system could not stand the racket.
+Say, I want you to put some cold cream on my back.' I think Pa will be a
+different man now, don't you?"
+
+The grocery man said if he was that boy's pa for fifteen minutes he would
+be a different boy or there would be a funeral, and the boy took a handful
+of soft-shelled almonds and a few layer raisins and skipped out.
+
+
+THE WAY WOMEN BOSS A PILLOW.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: BOSSING THE PILLOW.]
+
+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 cannot 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
+it 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.
+
+
+HUNTING DOGS.
+
+They are making everything out of rubber now. A man has invented a hunting
+dog that can be carried in the pocket. When you get in the field, all you
+have to do is to blow the dog up, and start it to going. This will be a
+great saving, as hunters will not have to pay baggage men a dollar for
+tying their dogs to a trunk, when they go off hunting.
+
+
+ENTERPRISING CHICAGO!
+
+Chicago is to have a hotel built exclusively for men. Under no
+circumstances will a woman be admitted into it. There are so many men who
+go to Chicago, who are liable to wink at women at the table of the hotel,
+before they know their own heart, to lead a different life, that this new
+hotel, without temptation, has been decided upon. There will only be a few
+old bald headed roosters and persons with red noses and sore eyes stopping
+at the new hotel. A hotel without women would be almost as cheerful as a
+reform school.
+
+
+A MAD MINISTER.
+
+There is probably the maddest minister living at Black River Falls, that
+can be found in America to-day. He is a real nice man, and his name is
+Burt Wheeler. He preaches good sound sense, and everybody likes him. He
+has got friends at Neillsville, and all around there. At Black River Falls
+there is no license, and liquor is unknown, while at Neillsville there is
+license, and one can have benzine at every meal. The other day the express
+took a jug from Neillsville to the Falls, directed to the reverend
+gentleman, and on the card attached to the jug handle was the following
+notice:
+
+"Old Bourbon--We have license here, and knowing you have none in your town
+we thought it but kindness to remember your wants."
+
+When a jug, or a keg arrives at the Falls by express, every citizen
+notices it, and they investigate, and when the jug came into the express
+office the expressman winked, and in a few minutes half the population of
+the darling little village was there. They read the note on the card and
+winked at each other. One man as he took a piece of cut sugar out of a
+barrel, said he had long suspected that Burt liked his toddy. Another
+fellow, picking a mouthful off a codfish, remarked that you couldn't
+always tell about these confounded ministers. Frank Cooper, the editor of
+the _Banner_, though he looked pained when he saw the name "Old Bourbon"
+on the jug, and noticed the immense size of the jug remarked that it was
+the best way not to condemn a man till the returns were all in. The
+reverened gentleman was interrupted in his preparation of his sermon by a
+neighboring lady who just dropped in to tell the news, and when she sighed
+and told him that his jug of whisky which he had ordered from Neillsville,
+was in the express office, he could hardly believe his ears. He had
+always, to the best of his knowledge and belief, tried to lead a
+different life, and this was too much--too much bourbon. Scratching out
+the last line that he had written, which was something about something
+biting like an anaconda, and stinging like a ready reckoner, he put on his
+coat and started down town, resolved to face the multitude, conscious of
+his innocence. He approached the express office a little nervous. The
+crowd filled the street, and as he passed a raftsman with red breeches on,
+said he wouldn't have such a nose as that on him for a hundred dollars.
+"He is full now," said another, as the Reverend gentleman put his hand on
+an awning post to steady himself in the trying emergency. A man who was
+sitting on a salt barrel, whittling a shingle, and who had one trousers
+leg tucked in his boot, and a red sash around him, said if it could be
+proved that Wheeler was a drinking man it would be a hard blow at
+religion, but he didn't know as he cared a blank anyway. The elder went in
+the express office and the crowd fell back to give the chief mourner a
+chance to look at the late lamented. There was a different expression on
+every face. Some looked as though they were glad he had been caught in the
+act, while others wore a mournful expression, as though they had been
+suddenly bereaved. He was pale, yet determined, and as he read the
+inscription he said, so help him John Rogers, he had never ordered any
+whisky, and never drank any, and didn't know anything about this jug.
+Turning to those present he said: "This is some horrid nightmare." The
+expressman said it was no nightmare, it was whisky. Wheeler said if the
+charges were paid he would take it, and taking the jug out doors he raised
+it high in the air and dashed it upon the pavement, amid the applause of
+his friends. At this point Hon. Wm. T. Price come along, and was told what
+had happened. He looked at the amber liquid oozing down between the stones
+on the pavement, put his finger in some of it, smelled of it,
+touched it to his tongue, and turning to the yet pale and excited
+Reverend, he said:
+
+"Wheeler, you have maintained a noble principle, but you have destroyed
+four gallons of the d--dest finest maple syrup that was ever brewed in
+Clark county."
+
+It was true, Doc. French and Tom Reed, of Neillsville, two good friends of
+the Rev. Wheeler, had sent him the syrup, knowing that he could use it in
+his family, and being jokers they had put the Bourbon card on the jug,
+just for fun, with the alleged result above stated. Temperance men should
+always smell of the cork, at least, before smashing the jug. We have
+practiced that a good many years, and never lost a gallon of maple syrup.
+
+
+ANNA DICKINSON AS MAZEPPA!
+
+Anna Dickinson is to go upon the stage, and it is said that she will open
+in San Francisco, in the play of "Mazeppa." If there is any society for
+the prevention of cruelty to animals on the Pacific coast, we trust before
+Anna is tied on the wild horse of Tartary, that some one will see to it
+that a cushion is put on the back of the horse.
+
+
+GOOD TEMPLARS ON ICE.
+
+We like to see young Good Templars have a hankering after cold water,
+bright water; but when a Juvenile Lodge about to start on a picnic,
+deliberately loads a hunk of ice belonging to _The Sun_ into an omnibus,
+we feel like reaching for the basement of their roundabouts with a piece
+of clapboard.
+
+
+BOUNCED FROM CHURCH FOR DANCING.
+
+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 intermittant 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 Dr. 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 gripsacks and
+register and ask for a room and a bath, and a fire escape. He will be apt
+to look up to 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.
+
+
+FROZEN EARS.
+
+"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, 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.
+
+
+HARD ON FOND DU LAC.
+
+Forest street, Fond du Lac, is going to be a great place for sparking, one
+of these days. For three years all the children born on that street have
+been girls. Some lay it to the artesian well water.
+
+
+THOSE BOLD BAD DRUMMERS.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE SEXTON IN ALL HIS GLORY.]
+
+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 wore a
+smile. The sexton looked up to the minister, who was picking up 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
+"renigged," 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 from 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.
+
+
+ANNA DICKINSON.
+
+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 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 this test, which we trust
+will be made at the Boston Theatre next week.
+
+
+EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF A DOUGHNUT.
+
+"'Twas midnight's holy hour, and silence was brooding like a gentle spirit
+o'er the still and pulseless world." Not a sound was heard, except
+Robert's dog baying at a sorrel haired young man and a muchmussed girl,
+who were returning home from a suburban picnic. As they passed out of
+hearing, and the dog was peacefully cannibalizing on a link of sausage
+that had been condemned by the board of health, owing to a piece of brass
+padlock that showed through the silky nickel plating made of fiddling
+string material, a soft cry of a child was heard in an upper room of a
+mansion owned by a prosperous business man. The head of the house heard it
+and sat up in bed to still the small voice, but couldn't, when the mother
+of the child said that she had forgotten to bring up anything for the
+child to eat in the night, and she must go down cellar and get a doughnut.
+The man said he could never stay there and enjoy himself in bed and think
+of his wife, groping around in the dark below stairs after it. After
+telling him that he would probably come up with a pickle, ehe let him go.
+Carefully he got out of bed, in an angelic frame of mind and a night
+shirt, and barefooted he prepared to make the descent. As he stopped to
+hold one foot in his hand, the instep of which had struck the rocker of
+the baby crib, she told him the doughnuts were in the third crock in the
+pantry on the floor. He said it was one evidence of a clear headed man,
+that he could walk all over his own house in the dark. At the head of the
+first pair of stairs he tripped on a baby cart and the tongue flew up and
+struck him on the knee, but by hanging to the bannisters he saved himself.
+At the foot of the stairs he tumbled over a block house and broke off a
+toe nail. He said it was a mean man that wouldn't sacrifice a few toe
+nails for his little baby, and he laughed. He fell over a dining room
+chair, and sat down in another, and when he got up he felt that
+though he was not proud, he was stuck up, for on his night shirt was a
+sticky fly paper that had been placed in readiness to catch the unwary
+early fly. After peeling off the sticky paper, and subterraneously
+swearing a neat, delicate little female swear, he groped to the cellar
+door, and began to go down.
+
+[Illustration: THE STARTLED CAT.]
+
+Now, if there is anything a boy ought to be punished for, it is for
+surreptitiously eating a large slice of musk melon and leaving the rind on
+the top stair. It tends to make a boy disliked. The head of the family
+stepped with his bare feet on the piece of melon, and sat down so quick
+that it made his head swim. It made him swim all over, and under, and
+everywhere. But if he sat down soon, he got up sooner. If there is one
+thing that a house cat should be taught, it is to sleep elsewhere than on
+the top stair. When he fell and struck the sleeping cat there was a
+crisis. He took in the situation at once. An occasional disengaged feline
+toe nail, and a squall, told him in burning words that, while his title to
+the seat was contested, it would be impolitic to wait for a commission of
+unbiased judges to decide which was entitled to it. His opponent was
+armed, and had possession, and he felt that it would tend to prevent riot
+and bloodshed if he quietly gave up. But he felt that while in his present
+position the cat was comparatively harmless, if he attempted to rise she
+would bring the whole army and navy into action, and perhaps cripple his
+resources. So he decided to jump up in a hurry before the cat had time to
+think of her toe nails much. His position was not pleasant, to say the
+least, but he jumped up in a hurry, hoping the cat would remain and
+continue her nap. She was not a remaining cat and as soon as his weight
+was removed from her person, she gave a yell as though frightened, and
+began to walk up and down his legs, inside of his night shirt.
+The question as to how many toe nails a cat has got, has never been
+decided, but he says they have a million, and he can show the documents to
+prove it. She went up him as though he was a fence post, and a dog after
+her, and he flew around as though his linen was on fire, and yelled until
+his wife came down to see what was the matter. By unbuttoning the top
+button the cat was coaxed out, under protest however, and after a light
+was lit there was seen about the maddest man in the world. He took a
+candle and went down after the doughnuts, and after running his hand into
+a jar of preserved peaches, and another of pickled pig's feet, he struck
+the right one, and after hot grease from the candle had run down his
+fingers he came up with a doughnut, and then the baby wouldn't eat it,
+then he sat down side-ways in a cushioned chair, applied arnica and swore
+till daylight. A single shot was heard in the cellar that
+morning, and the young life of that cat went out. As he rode down on the
+street car the next morning, people marvelled that he should stand up on
+the back platform, when there were so many vacant seats, and when a
+neighbor asked him to be seated he said, with a yawn, "No thank you, I
+have been sitting down a good deal during the night," and he looked mad.
+It is such things that drive men to commit crimes.
+
+
+TAKE YOUR LATIN STRAIGHT.
+
+The school board, at its last session adopted the following rule: "The
+continental system of pronounciation shall be taught in the high schools
+of La Crosse, and no other allowed except by direction of board of
+education." We are glad the rule has been adopted, as there is no doubt
+that the continental system is the best. We have been pained beyond
+measure, as no doubt all of the school board have, at hearing the scholars
+pronounce Latin by 'tother system. No longer ago than last Saturday, when
+we were in Mons. Anderson's, a girl came in and asked for a pair of Latin
+corsets, by the Onalaska system of pronounciation. The clerk, not
+understanding, went and got a pair of those undershirts and drawers,
+complete in one number, with no tale to be continued. The girl blushed,
+the clerk did not understand, and we had to explain by the continental
+system, and the girl got her corsets, but suppose there had not been a
+Latin scholar standing around there waiting for his wife to buy a package
+of safty pins, what a predicament the girl would have been in. On behalf
+of the people, THE SUN thanks the board of education for adopting the
+continental system of pronounciation, only they ought to go further, and
+make it a crime punishable with suicide for anybody to pronounce it in any
+other way. There has been suffering enough by pronouncing it the old way.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HE IS TOO HEALTHY.
+
+"There, I knew you would get into trouble," said the grocery man to the
+bad boy, as a policeman came along leading him by the ear, the boy having
+an empty champagne bottle in one hand, and a black eye. "What has he been
+doing Mr. Policeman?" asked the grocery man, as the policeman halted with
+the boy in front of the store.
+
+"Well, I was going by a house up here when this kid opened the door with a
+quart bottle of champagne, and he cut the wire and fired the cork at
+another boy, and the champagne went all over the sidewalk, and some of it
+went on me, and I knew there was something wrong, cause champagne is too
+expensive to waste that way, and he said he was running the shebang and if
+I would bring him here you would say he was all right. If you say so I
+will let him go."
+
+The grocery man said he had better let the boy go, as his parents would
+not like to have their little pet locked up. So the policeman let go his
+ear, and he throwed the empty bottle at a coal wagon, and after the
+policeman had brushed the champagne off his coat, and smelled of his
+fingers, and started off, the grocery man turned to the boy, who was
+peeling a cucumber, and said:
+
+"Now, what kind of a circus have you been having, and what do you mean by
+destroying wine that way! and, where are your folks?"
+
+"Well, I'll tell you. Ma she has got the hay fever and has gone to Lake
+Superior to see if she can't stop sneezing, and Saturday Pa said he and me
+would go out to Oconomowoc and stay over Sunday, and try and recuperate
+our health. Pa said it would be a good joke for me not to call him Pa, but
+to act as though I was his younger brother, and we would have a
+real nice time. I knowed what he wanted. He is an old masher, that's
+what's the matter with him, and he was going to play himself for a
+batchelor. O, thunder, I got on to his racket in a minute. He was
+introduced to some of the girls and Saturday evening he danced till the
+cows came home. At home he is awful fraid of rheumatiz, and he never
+sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured off'n him, and he
+stood in the door and let a girl fan him till I was afraid he would
+freeze, and just as he was telling a girl from Tennessee, who was joking
+him about being 'a nold batch,' that he was not sure as he could always
+hold out a woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with the
+charming ladies of the Sunny South. I pulled his coat and said, 'Pa how do
+you spose Ma's hay fever is to-night, I'll bet she is just sneezing the
+top of her head off.' Wall, sir, you just oughten seen that girl and Pa.
+Pa looked at me as if I was a total stranger, and told the porter if that
+freckled faced boot-black belonged around the house he had better be fired
+out of the ball room, and the girl said 'the disgustin' thing!' and just
+before they fired me I told Pa he had better look out or he would sweat
+through his liver pad.
+
+"I went to bed and Pa staid up till the lights were put out. He was mad
+when he came to bed, but he didn't kick me, cause the people in the next
+room would hear him, but the next morning he talked to me. He said I might
+go back home Sunday night, and he would stay a day or two. He sat around
+on the veranda all the afternoon, talking with the girls, and when he
+would see me coming along he would look cross. He took a girl out boat
+riding, and when I asked him if I couldn't go along, he said he was afraid
+I would get drowned, and he said if I went home there was nothing there
+too good for me, and so my chum and me got to firing bottles of champagne,
+and he hit me in the eye with a cork, and I drove him out doors
+and was just going to shell his earth works, when the policeman collared
+me. Say, what's good for a black eye?"
+
+The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home. "What do
+you think your Pa's object was in passing himself off for a single man at
+Oconomowoc?" asked the grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the
+boy's father.
+
+"That's what beats me. Aside from Ma's hay fever she is one of the
+healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose he does it for his health, the
+way they all do when they go to a summer resort, but it leaves a boy an
+orphan, don't it, to have such kitteny parents?"
+
+
+SURE OF HEAVEN.
+
+The only persons that are real sure that their calling and election is
+sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots, are the men who are
+hung for murder. They always announce that they have got a dead thing on
+it, just before the drop falls. How encouraging it must be to children to
+listen to the prayers of our ministers in churches, who admit that they
+are miserable sinners, living on God's charity, and doubtful if they would
+be allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of their
+own unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then let the
+children read an account of a hanging bee, and see how happy the condemned
+man is, how he shouts glory hallelujah, and confesses that, though he
+killed his man, he is going to heaven. A child will naturally ask, why
+don't the ministers murder somebody, and make a dead sure thing of it?
+
+
+THE NAUGHTY BUT NICE CHURCH CHOIR.
+
+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 bookmark 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 the 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 that came in with the old lady, and while he was up
+the soprano put the shoemaker's 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
+shoemaker's wax melts at ninety eight degrees Fahrenheit.
+
+[Illustration: THE TENOR ARRAYED IN ALL HIS GLORY.]
+
+The minister finally got to the amen, and read a hymn, the choir then
+coughed and all rose up. The chair that the tenor sat 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, 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.
+
+
+SUPREME COURT JUDGES AND U.S. SENATORS.
+
+I would call your attention to a change that it seems to me should be made
+in the method of selecting U.S. Senators and Supreme Judges. Heretofore it
+has been noticeable that the men who carried the longest pole knocked down
+the senatorial persimmons. In the matter of the election of Judges of the
+Supreme Court, it has been the practice to secure men for those places at
+an enormous salary, when other men would be willing to do the work and
+board themselves. The suggestion I would make is that you pass a law
+letting the offices of United States Senator and Judges of the Supreme
+Court to the lowest bidder. This method will be economical and will secure
+to the state men who can legislate and judge things well enough for all
+practical purposes. The way times are now we must get things at panic
+prices or go without.
+
+
+OUR CHRISTIAN NEIGHBORS HAVE GONE.
+
+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 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
+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 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 centre
+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 toward
+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 crossed 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 backtalk, 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_.
+
+
+BUTTERMILK BIBBERS.
+
+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 assumes 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.
+
+
+FISHING FOR PIECES OF WOMEN.
+
+There are lots of ludicrous scenes to be observed on the railroads and
+conductors are loaded with stories that would cause a marble monument to
+keep its sides a laughing. Some day we are going to borrow a conductor,
+and take him out in the woods, and place a revolver to his head and make
+him deliver a lot of stories. The other day as conductor Fred Underwood's
+train from Chicago, arrived on the trestle work on the south side, the
+whistle blew, the air break was touched off, and the train came up
+standing so quick that a woman lost her false teeth in the sleeper, and
+everybody's hair stood up like a mule's ears. Every window had a head out,
+and when the conductor got out on the platform he saw the engineer and
+fireman on the ends of the ties looking down into the mud and water,
+shading their eyes as though looking for the eclipse.
+
+There, sticking out of the mud were two human legs, and as one leg had a
+piece of listing around it, just above the veal, the conductor knew,
+instinctively, that the surface indications showed that there was a woman
+in there. Then he thought that the engine had probably struck a female,
+and tore her all to pieces, and of course he knew that the company would
+expect him to bring home enough for a mess, or a funeral. Spitting on his
+hands he called a brakeman with a transom hook out of the sleeper, to fish
+with, they rolled up their trousers and waded in, after telling a porter
+to bring a blanket to put the pieces in. The brakeman got there first and
+took hold of one foot, when the conductor got hold of the brakeman's coat
+tail and pulled. The passengers turned away sick, expecting to see the
+mangled remains brought to the surface. They pulled, and directly the
+balance of the deceased came up. It was an Irish lady, with a tin pail,
+who had been on the way to take her husband's dinner to him, and
+she stood on one side to let the train pass, and had lost her balance and
+fallen into the mud. As her head came out of the mud, she squirted water
+out of her mouth, kicked the brakeman in the ear and said,
+
+"Lave go of me, I am a dacent woman!"
+
+The conductor asked her if she was hurt.
+
+"Hurted is it," said she, "Ivery bone in my body is kilt intirely, and I
+have lost me tay cup," and she looked in her tin pail in distress.
+
+After vainly trying to get the conductor to wade in and search for her
+"tay cup," she permitted them to assist her into the car, where an old
+doctor from Racine volunteered to examine her to see if she was mortally
+injured. He put his hand on her shoulder and asked her if she was in any
+pain.
+
+"Divil the pain, except the loss of me tay cup," said she, "and kape yer
+owld hands off me, for I am a dacent woman."
+
+She shook herself in the car and got mud all over everybody, and finally
+took her pail and jumped off at a crossing before arriving at the depot.
+As the train came into the depot ten minutes late, and the conductor
+jumped off, all mud from head to foot, as though he had been playing
+spaniel and retrieving a wounded duck, Supt. Atkins looked at his clothes
+and said, "Where in ---- have you been all the time?" The conductor took a
+wisp of straw to wipe himself off, and as he threw it under a car he said
+he had been in the artificial propagation of the human race. In fact he
+had been engaged in the noble work of raising woman to a higher sphere. He
+was allowed to go on probation and wash himself. The brakeman went down
+there the next day and was fishing in the same hole. He said he didn't
+know but there might be more woman in there, but they say he was after the
+"tay cup."
+
+
+NEARLY BROKE UP THE BALL.
+
+A party of well meaning young people from Ripon nearly broke up a dance at
+Hazen's cheese factory, out in the country a spell ago. The people around
+there are quiet, sober country people, who confine themselves in dancing,
+to plain quadrilles and country dances, with an occasional monnie musk, or
+a plain waltz. These young Ripon people are on the dance bigger than a
+wolf, and they have learned all the Boston dips, and Saratoga bends, and
+Newport colic dances, and everything new. There is one dance they have
+learned which is peculiar to say the least. It is a species of waltz, but
+the couple get together so odd that a person who sees it for the first
+time just leans against something and fans himself. When the music strikes
+up a waltz the young man opens his arms and doubles himself up like a boy
+with the cholera infantum, his hind leg cramps and his head lops over on
+one side, and he looks sick, his back humps up like a case of chronic
+inflammatory rheumatism, and he is ready. The girl who is with him, when
+he begins to have spasms, at once seems to go into a trance. Her back gets
+up like a cat, she bends over towards him, her forward leg gets out of
+joint at the knee, her neck takes a cramp, her mouth opens and she lolls,
+her eyes roll like a steer that has turned the yoke, and just before she
+dies she falls into the arms of the deceased and they are ready. For a
+moment they stand and squirm like angle-worms on a hook, and froth at the
+mouth, and look, as they stand there, like a pile driver that has been run
+into by an engine. They teeter up and down a little, and then fly off on a
+tangent, and they flop around in unexpected places among the other
+dancers, jump like a box car, bump against other couples, and at every
+bump they are driven closer together, until they are so near that it does
+seem as though they will have to be pried apart with a handspike;
+they look into each other's eyes as though they would bite, and they keep
+going around till their backs are broke. Well, a party of these kind of
+dancers went to the cheese factory where the country people were gathered,
+and after dancing a few quadrilles, the fiddlers struck up an old
+fashioned waltz. While the visiting dancers were going into spasms to get
+ready to wade in, the floor filled with the country couples, who were
+waltzing around old fashioned, when all of a sudden those Ripon people
+began to work. They flopped across the cheese factory, knocked down a
+couple from Pickett's Corners, caromed on a fellow and his girl from
+Brandon and sent them against a barrel of lemonade, glanced across the
+hall and struck an old lady amidships that had just started to call her
+girl off the floor because she was afraid the girl would catch those Ripon
+cramps, knocked her under a bench, where she lay and called for her
+husband Isaiah, to come and pick her up in a basket. In less than two
+minutes all the other dancers hauled off, and stood on benches and looked
+at them. Some of the country girls hid their heads and said they wanted to
+go home. The visitors slid around the hall, caught each other on the fly,
+run the bases, and come under the wire neck and neck, just as the man who
+played second fiddle fell over the base viol in a dead faint, and the man
+that played the piccalo rolled under the music stand, striken with
+apoplexy. The manager of the dance called a constable who was present, and
+told him to arrest the party, and handcuff them and take them to the
+Oshkosh insane asylum, where they had escaped. The young men explained
+that they were not crazy, and that it was only a new kind of dance, and
+they were reluctantly allowed to remain, on condition that they "wouldn't
+cut up any more of them city monkey shines, not afore folks."
+
+
+SUMMER RESORTING.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE RESORTER.]
+
+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 back 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 lunancy. 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 than 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 stairs 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.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA JOKES HIM.
+
+"What on earth is that you have got on your upper lip?" said the grocery
+man to the bad boy, as he came in and began to peel a rutabaga, and his
+upper lip hung down over his teeth, and was covered with something that
+looked like shoemaker's wax, "You look as though you had been digging
+potatoes with your nose."
+
+"O, that is some of Pa's darn smartness. I asked him if he knew anything
+that would make a boy's moustache grow, and he told me the best thing he
+ever tried was tar, and for me to rub it on thick when I went to bed, and
+wash it off in the morning. I put it on last night, and by gosh I can't
+wash it off. Pa told me all I had to do was to use a scouring brick, and
+it would come off, and I used the brick, and it took the skin off, and the
+tar is there yet, and say, does my lip look very bad?"
+
+The grocery man told him it was the worst looking lip he ever saw, but he
+could cure it by rubbing a little cayenne pepper in the tar. He said the
+tar would neutralize the pepper, and the pepper would loosen the tar, and
+act as a cooling lotion to the lacerated lip. The boy went to a can of
+pepper behind the counter, and stuck his finger in and rubbed a lot of it
+on his lip, and then his hair began to raise, and he began to cry, and
+rushed to the water-pail and ran his face into the water to wash off the
+pepper. The grocery man laughed, and when the boy had got the pepper
+washed off, and had resumed his rutabaga, he said:
+
+"That seals your fate. No man ever trifles with the feelings of the bold
+buccanner of the Spanish main, without living to rue it. I will lay for
+you, old man, and don't you forget it. Pa thought he was smart when he got
+me to put tar on my lip, to bring my moustache out, and to-day he
+lays on a bed of pain, and to-morrow your turn will come. You will regret
+that you did not get down on your knees and beg my pardon. You will be
+sorry that you did not prescribe cold cream for my bruised lip, instead of
+cayenne pepper. Beware, you base twelve ounces to the pound huckster, you
+gimlet-eyed seller of dog sausage, you sanded sugar idiot, you small
+potato three card monte sleight of hand rotten egg fiend, you villain that
+sells smoked sturgeon and dogfish for smoked halibut. The avenger is on
+your track."
+
+"Look here, young man, don't you threaten me, or I will take you by the
+ear and walk you through green fields, and beside still waters to the
+front door and kick your pistol pocket clear around so you can wear it for
+a watch pocket in your vest. No boy can frighten me by crimus. But tell
+me, how did you get even with your Pa?"
+
+"Well, give me a glass of cider and we will be friends and I will tell
+you. Thanks! Gosh, but that cider is made out of mouldy dried apples and
+sewer water," and he took a handful of layer raisins off the top of a box
+to take the taste out of his mouth, and while the grocer charged a peck of
+rutabagas, a gallon of cider and two pounds of raisins to the boy's Pa,
+the boy proceeded:
+
+"You see, Pa likes a joke the best of anybody you ever saw, if it is on
+somebody else, but he kicks like a steer when it is on him. I asked him
+this morning if it wouldn't be a good joke to put some soft soap on the
+front step, so the letter-carrier would slip up and spill hisself, and Pa
+said it would be elegant. Pa is a Democrat, and he thinks that anything
+that will make it unpleasant for Republican office holders, is legitimate,
+and he encouraged me to paralyze the letter-carrier. The letter-carrier is
+as old a man as Pa, and I didn't want to humiliate him, but I just wanted
+Pa to give his consent, so he couldn't kick if he got caught in his own
+trap. You see? Well, this morning the minister and two of the
+deacons called on Pa, to have a talk with him about his actions in church,
+on two or three occasions, when he pulled out the pack of cards with his
+handkerchief, and played the music box, and they had a pretty hot time in
+the back parlor, and finally they settled it, and were going to sing a
+hymn, when Pa handed them a little hymn book, and the minister opened it
+and turned pale and said, 'what's this?' and they looked at it, and it was
+a book of Hoyle's games instead of a hymn book. Gosh, wasn't the minister
+mad! He had started to read a hymn and he quit after he had read two lines
+where it said, 'In a game of four-handed euchre, never trump your
+partner's ace, but rely on the ace to take the trick on suit.' Pa was
+trying to explain how the book came to be there, when the minister and the
+deacons started out, and then I poured the two quart tin pail full of soft
+soap on the front step. It was this white soap, just the color of the
+step, and when I got it spread I went down in the basement. The visitors
+came out and Pa was trying to explain to them, about Hoyle, when one of
+the deacons stepped on the soap and his feet flew up and he struck on his
+pants and slid down the steps. The minister said 'great heavens, deacon,
+are you hurt? let me assist you,' and he took two quick steps, and you
+have seen these fellows in a nigger show that kick each other head over
+heels and fall on their ears, and stand on their heads and turn around
+like a top. The minister's feet slipped and the next I saw he was standing
+on his head in his hat, and his legs were sort of wilted and fell limp by
+his side, and he fell over on his stomach. You talk about spreading the
+gospel in heathen lands. It is nothing to the way you can spread it with
+two quarts of soft soap. The minister didn't look pious a bit, when he was
+trying to catch the railing he looked as though he wanted to
+murder every man on earth, but it may be he was tired.
+
+"Well, Pa he was paralyzed, and he and the other deacon rushed out to pick
+up the minister and the first old man, and when they struck the steps they
+went kiting. Pa's feet somehow slipped backwards, and he turned a
+summersault and struck full length on his back, and one heel was across
+the minister's neck, and he slid down the steps, and the other deacon fell
+all over the other three, and Pa swore at them, and it was the worst
+looking lot of pious people I ever saw. I think if the minister had been
+in the woods somewhere, where nobody could have heard him, he would have
+used language. They all seemed mad at each other. The hired girl told Ma
+there was three tramps out on the sidewalk fighting Pa, and Ma she took
+the broom and started to help Pa, and I tried to stop Ma, 'cause her
+constitution is not very strong and I didn't want her to do any flying
+trapeze business, but I couldn't stop her, and she went out with the broom
+and a towel tied around her head. Well, I don't know where Ma did strike,
+but when she came in she said she had palpitation of the heart, but that
+was not the place where she put the arnica. O, but she _did_ go through
+the air like a bullet through cheese, and when she went down the steps
+a-bumpity-bump, I felt sorry for Ma. The minister had got so he could set
+up on the sidewalk, with his back against the lower step, when Ma came
+sliding down, and one of the heels of her gaiters hit the minister in the
+hair, and the other foot went right through between his arm and his side,
+and the broom liked to pushed his teeth down his throat. But he was not
+mad at Ma. As soon as he see it was Ma he said, 'Why, sister, the wicked
+stand in slippery places, don't they?' and Ma she was mad and said for him
+to let go her stocking, and then Pa was mad and he said, 'look-a-here you
+sky-pilot, this thing has gone far enough,' and then a policeman
+came along and first he thought they were all drunk, but he found they
+were respectable, and he got a chip and scraped the soap off of them, and
+they went home, and Pa and Ma they got in the house some way, and just
+then the letter-carrier came along, but he didn't have any letters for us,
+and he didn't come onto the steps, and then I went up stairs and I said,
+'Pa, don't you think it is real mean, after you and I fixed the soap on
+the steps for the letter-carrier, he didn't come on the step at all,' and
+Pa was scraping the soap off his pants with a piece of shingle, and the
+hired girl was putting liniment on Ma, and heating it in for palpitation
+of the heart, and Pa said, 'You dam idjut, no more of this, or I'll maul
+the liver out of you,' and I asked him if he didn't think soft soap would
+help a moustache to grow, and he picked up Ma's work-basket and threw it
+at my head, as I went down stairs, and I came over here. Don't you think
+my Pa is unreasonable to get mad at a little joke that he planned
+himself?"
+
+The grocery man said he didn't know, and the boy went out with a pair of
+skates over his shoulder, and the grocery man is wondering what joke the
+boy will play on him to get even for the cayenne pepper.
+
+
+GATHERED WAISTS!
+
+Andrews' _Bazar_ says: "Gathered waists are very much worn." If the men
+would gather the waists carefully 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.
+
+
+CHURCH KENO.
+
+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
+nineteen 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!_"
+
+[Illustration: "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 taking advice from pious looking traveling men.
+They call her "Little Keno" now.
+
+
+THE OLD SWEET SONGS.
+
+A Boston girl sings: "What is home without a mother," while the old lady
+is mending her daughter's stockings. There is something sweet about those
+old songs.
+
+
+FAILURE OF A SOLID INSTITUTION.
+
+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 thing 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 knew how baked beans ought to be cooked from years of
+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.
+
+
+REGISTRY OF ELECTORS.
+
+The registry law has proved a conspicuous failure, inasmuch as it has
+taken ten years of persistent efforts by its use to make a change in the
+admistration. I would suggest that you amend the registry law by providing
+that all qualified voters have their ears punched, immediately after
+voting, by the inspectors of elections, the same as conductors punch
+tickets. This method will obviate the difficulties heretofore experienced,
+and check illegal voting and prevent repeating.
+
+
+ABOUT HELL.
+
+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 the 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.
+
+
+PREPARING FOR WAR.
+
+The _Sun_ is no alarmist, but it can see in recent events what it believes
+to be a preparation for war. All of the manufactories of fire arms and
+cartridges are working night and day, and the Oneida community have just
+received an order to immediately can 24,000 cans of baked beans. When the
+war will break out we do not know, but all this fixed amunition is not
+being fixed for no 4th of July. It is trouble.
+
+
+A TONY SLAUGHTER HOUSE.
+
+A Milwaukee paper copies what THE SUN said about killing hogs while under
+the influence of chloroform, at Keine & Wilson's packing house, and
+intimates that it is all a lie. Have we lived to this age to have our word
+doubted by a Milwaukee editor? This is too much. Why, bless the dear man,
+the half has not been told. The firm we speak of is desirous of building
+up a trade for gilt edged pork and hams, so every improvement known to the
+trade is inaugurated. We did not think it necessary to describe the whole
+process, but now that our word is doubted, it is necessary to do so. When
+the late lamented hog is transferred from the parlor where he was
+chloroformed, his body is gently, yet firmly placed in a gold lined tank,
+filled with boiling Florida water and cologne, where the body remains
+until the bristles become loose, when it is transferred to a table covered
+with purple velvet, and the bristles are removed by the gentlemanly
+ushers, dressed in the fashions of the time of George III, armed with gold
+candle sticks, studded with diamonds. Then the body is taken by easy
+stages, into the presence of the intestine transporter, who reclines upon
+a downy couch. He raises up, brushes a particle of dust from his sleeve,
+and with a silver knife cuts the hog from Dan to Beersheba, and the patent
+insides are received on a silver salver, and divided among attendant
+maidens. The inside of the hog is washed with bay rum, and sweet majorum
+is put in. Then the hog is removed and cut up. The portions salted are
+salted for keeps, and the hams and bacon are smoked in a room filled with
+incense, and when the smoked meat comes out it is good enough for a king,
+or a queen, or a Milwaukee editor. Lie, indeed! We should like to see
+ourselves lying for one hog.
+
+
+AN ARM THAT IS NOT RELIABLE.
+
+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
+bald-headed 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 but
+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 eight? You are
+silent, you cannot answer, enough?"
+
+[Illustration: "IT IS F-F-FOUR SIZES TOO B-B-BIG."]
+
+They instinctively found their way to the sofa; mutual explanation
+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 BOY AND THE GOAT.
+
+A man on King Street gave a boy a goat the other day, and he tied a rope
+around its neck to lead it home. The boy wanted to go through the gate,
+but as the goat concluded to jump over the fence and pull the boy through
+between the pickets, he let the goat have its own way. The boy got through
+the fence in instalments, leaving his shirt collar and one pants leg on
+the pickets, the goat dragged him out into the middle of the street, and
+then there occurred a sanguinary encounter to see whether the boy or the
+goat should boss the moving. At one time the spectators thought the goat
+would take the boy home. The animal used the boy for a cultivator, and
+they tore up the street like hands working on the road, till the goat
+slipped the rope over his head, and then the boy gathered himself up by
+the armful, and went and told his mother that he got his rope back anyway.
+She combed him with a piece of barrel.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GETS MAD!
+
+"I was down to the drug store this morning and saw your Ma buying a lot of
+court-plaster, enough to make a shirt I should think. What's she doing
+with so much court-plaster?" asked the grocery man of the bad boy, as he
+came in and pulled off his boots by the stove and emptied out a lot of
+snow that had collected as he walked through a drift, which melted and
+made a bad smell.
+
+"O, I guess she was going to patch Pa up so he will hold water. Pa's
+temper got him into the worst muss you ever see, last night. If that
+museum was here now they would hire Pa and exhibit him as the tattooed
+man. I tell you, I have got too old to be mauled as though I was a kid,
+and any man who attacks me from this out, wants to have his peace made
+with the insurance companies, and know that his calling and election is
+sure, because I am a bad man and don't you forget it." And the boy pulled
+on his boots and looked so cross and desperate that the grocer-man asked
+him if he wouldn't try a little new cider.
+
+"Good heavens!" said the grocery man, as the boy swallowed the cider, and
+his face resumed its natural look, and the piratical frown disappeared
+with the cider. "You have not stabbed your father have you? I have feared
+that one thing would bring on another, with you, and that you would yet be
+hung."
+
+"Naw, I haven't stabbed him. It was another cat that stabbed him. You see,
+Pa wants me to do all the work around the house. The other day he bought a
+load of kindling wood, and told me to carry it into the basement. I had
+not been educated up to kindling wood, and I didn't do it. When supper
+time came, and Pa found that I had not carried in the kindling wood, he
+had a hot box, and told me if that wood was not in when he came
+back from the lodge, that he would warm my jacket. Well, I tried to hire
+some one to carry it in, and got a man to promise to come in the morning
+and carry it in and take his pay in groceries, and I was going to buy the
+groceries here and have them charged to Pa. But that wouldn't help me out
+that night. I knew when Pa came home he would search for me. So I slept in
+the back hall on a cot. But I didn't want Pa to have all his trouble for
+nothing, so I borrowed an old torn cat that my chum's old maid aunt owns,
+and put the cat in my bed. I thought if Pa came into my room after me, and
+found that by his unkindness I had changed to a torn cat, he would be
+sorry. That is the biggest cat you ever see, and the worst fighter in our
+ward. It isn't afraid of anything, and can whip a New Foundland dog
+quicker than you could put sand in a barrel of sugar. Well, about eleven
+o'clock I heard Pa tumbing over the kindling wood, and I knew by the
+remark he made as the wood slid around under him, that there was going to
+be a cat fight real quick. He came up to Ma's room, and sounded Ma as to
+whether Hennery had retired to his virtuous couch. Pa is awful sarcastic
+when he tries to be. I could hear him take off his clothes, and hear him
+say, as he picked up a trunk strap, 'I guess I will go up to his room and
+watch the smile on his face, as he dreams of angels. I yearn to press him
+to my aching bosom.' I thought to myself, mebbe you won't yearn so much
+directly. He come up stairs, and I could hear him breathing hard. I looked
+around the corner and could see he just had on his shirt and pants, and
+his suspenders were hanging down, and his bald head shown like a calcium
+light just before it explodes. Pa went into my room, and up to the bed,
+and I could hear him say, 'Come out here and bring in that kindling wood
+or I will start a fire on your base burner with this strap.' And then
+there was a yowling such as I never heard before, and Pa said,
+'Helen Blazes,' and the furniture in my room began to fall around and
+break. O, _my_! I think Pa took the torn cat right by the neck, the way he
+does me, and that left the cat's feet free to get in their work. By the
+way the cat squawled as though it was being choked I know Pa had him by
+the neck. I suppose the cat thought Pa was a whole flock of New Foundland
+dogs, and the cat had a record on dogs, and it kicked awful. Pa's shirt
+was no protection at all in a cat fight, and the cat just walked all
+around Pa's stomach, and Pa yelled 'police,' and 'fire,' and 'turn on the
+hose,' and he called Ma, and the cat yowled. If Pa had had presence of
+mind enough to have dropped the cat, or rolled it up in the mattrass, it
+would have been all right, but a man always gets rattled in time of
+danger, and he held on to the cat and started down stairs yelling murder,
+and he met Ma coming up.
+
+"I guess Ma's night cap or something frightened the cat more, cause he
+stabbed Ma on the night-shirt with one hind foot, and Ma said 'mercy on
+us,' and she went back, and Pa stumbled on a hand-sled that was on the
+stairs, and they all fell down, and the cat got away and went down in the
+coal bin and yowled all night. Pa and Ma went into their room, and I guess
+they annointed themselves with vasaline, and Pond's extract, and I went
+and got into my bed, cause it was cold out in the hall, and the cat had
+warmed my bed as well as it had warmed Pa. It was all I could do to go to
+sleep, with Pa and Ma talking all night, and this morning I came down the
+back stairs, and haven't been to breakfast, cause I don't want to see Pa
+when he is vexed. You let the man that carries in the kindling wood have
+six shillings worth of groceries, and charge them to Pa. I have passed the
+kindling wood period in a boy's life, and have arrived at the coal period.
+I will carry in coal, but I draw the line at kindling wood."
+
+"Well, you are a cruel, bad boy," said the grocery man, as he
+went to the book and charged the six shillings.
+
+"O, I don't know. I think Pa is cruel. A man who will take a poor kitty by
+the neck, that hasn't done any harm, and tries to chastise the poor thing
+with a trunk strap, ought to be looked after by the humane society. And if
+it is cruel to take a cat by the neck, how much more cruel is it to take a
+boy by the neck, that had diphtheria only a few years ago, and whose
+throat is tender? Say, I guess I will accept your invitation to take
+breakfast with you," and the boy cut off a piece of bologna and helped
+himself to the crackers, and while the grocery man was out shoveling off
+the snow from the sidewalk, the boy filled his pockets with raisins and
+loaf sugar, and then went out to watch the man carry in his kindling wood.
+
+
+SPURIOUS TRIPE.
+
+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.
+
+
+"CASH."
+
+On circus day W.H.H. Cash, the great railroad monopolist of New Lisbon,
+was in the city. He had just made a few hundred thousand dollars on a
+railroad contract, and he decided to expend large sums of money in buying
+dry goods. He went into one of our stores and was passing along up the
+floor, when a black-eyed girl with a dimple in her chin, pearly teeth, red
+pouting lips, who was behind the counter, shouted, "_cash, here!_" Mr.
+Cash turned to her, a smile illuminating his face as big as a horse
+collar. He is one of the most modest men in the world, and as he extended
+his great big horny hand to the girl, a blush covered his face, and the
+perspiration stood in great beads on his forehead. "How do yeu dew?" said
+Cash, as she seemed to shrink back in a frightened manner. They gazed at
+each other a moment, in astonishment, when another girl, perhaps a little
+better looking, further on, said, "Here, Cash, quick!" He at once made up
+his mind that she was the one that had spoken to him the first time, so he
+said, "Beg your pardon, miss," to the black-eyed girl, and went on to
+where the other girl was wrapping up a corset in a base ball undershirt.
+As he approached her she smiled, supposing he wanted to buy something. He
+thought she knew him, and he sat down on a stool and put out his hand and
+said, "How have you been?" She didn't seem to shake very much, but asked
+him if there was anything she could show him. He thought may be it was
+against the rules for the clerks to speak to anybody, unless they were
+buying something, so he said, "Yes, of course. Show me corsets, stockings,
+anything, gaul dumbed if I care what." She was just beginning to look upon
+him as though she thought he had escaped, when a little blonde on the
+other side of the store, as sweet as honey, shouted, "Cash, Cash, I need
+thee every hour. Come a running." To say that Cash was astonished, is
+drawing it mild. He knew that they all wanted him, but he couldn't make
+out how they seemed to know his name. He looked at the little blonde a
+minute, trying to think where he had met her, when he decided to go over
+and ask her. On the way over he thought she resembled a girl that used to
+live in Portage. He went up to her, and with a smile that was childlike
+and bland, he said, "Why, how are you, Samantha?" The little blonde looked
+daggers at him. "Didn't you use to wait on tables there at the Fox House,
+at Portage?" The girl picked up a roll of paper cambric, and was about to
+brain him, when the floor walker came along, and asked what was the
+matter. Cash explained that since he came into the store, three or four
+girls had yelled to him, and he couldn't place them. "There," says he, as
+another girl yelled "Cash," "there's another of 'em wants me," and he was
+going to where she was, when the floor walker asked him if his name was
+Cash. "You bet your liver it is," said Cash. It was then explained to him
+that the girls were calling cash boys. He thought it over a minute and
+said, "Sold, by the great baldheaded Elijah. Won't you go down and take
+something? Invite all of them. The girls can take soda. I'll be gaul
+blasted if I ever had such a rig played on me." And he went out into the
+glare of the sunlight, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and just
+then the circus procession came along, and he followed off the elephants.
+There are lots of worse men than Cash.
+
+
+TO WHAT VILE USES MAY WE COME.
+
+A dispatch from Chicago, says that three men were shot on "a boat used for
+the vilest purposes." We never knew that the newspapers were printed on
+boats there in Chicago.
+
+
+THE ADVENT PREACHER AND THE BALLOON.
+
+There occasionally occurs an accident 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."
+
+[Illustration: "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 of 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 had not gone to heaven and opened a
+brewery.
+
+Of course we who are intelligent, and 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.
+
+
+MR. PECK'S SUNDAY LECTURE.
+
+The papers all around here are saying that I have a new Sunday Lecture,
+with a bad title. The way of it was this. A man in a neighboring city
+telegraphed me to know if I would deliver a "Sunday Lecture," and telling
+me to choose my subject, and answer by telegraph. I thought it was some
+joke of the boys. The idea of me delivering a Sunday lecture was
+ridiculous, so, in a moment of thoughtlessness I telegraphed back, "What
+in the d---- do you take me for?" I supposed that that would be enough to
+inform the man that I was not in the business. What do you suppose he did?
+He telegraphed back to me as follows: "All right. We have advertised you
+for Sunday. Subject, 'What the d---- do you take me for.'" You can judge
+something of my surprise and indignation.
+
+That is how it was.
+
+
+RELIGION AND FISH.
+
+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 the way they should go are
+broken into by a deacon with his nose peeled coining 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.
+
+
+THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK.
+
+When you see an article in the editorial columns of a paper headed, "The
+Political Outlook," look at the bottom line, and if it says "sold by all
+druggists," don't read it. There is such an article going the rounds,
+which is an advertisement of a patent medicine. It is a counterfeit well
+calculated to deceive. Don't read a political article unless the owner's
+name is blown in the bottle.
+
+
+ROPE LADDERS.
+
+The law to compel hotel keepers to provide rope ladders for every room
+above the second floor, is said not to be enforced, though it should be by
+all means. The law ought to be amended so as to compel guests to get up
+once or twice during the night and run up or down the rope ladder, outside
+the window, in their night clothes, so as to be in practice in case of
+fire. When every room is provided with rope ladders there will be lots of
+fun. Those men who invariably blow out the gas, will probably think they
+have got to come down stairs on the rope ladder in the morning, and it
+will take an extra clerk to stand in the alleys around a hotel, with a
+shot gun, to keep impecunious guests from going away from the tavern via
+rope ladder. And then imagine an Oshkosh man in a Milwaukee hotel, his
+head full of big schemes, and his skin full of beer. He has been on a
+"bum," and is nervous, and on being shown to his room he sees the rope
+ladder coiled up under the window, ready to spring upon him. He stares at
+it, and the cold sweat stands all over him. The rope ladder returns his
+gaze, and seems to move and to crawl towards his feet. For a moment he is
+powerless to move. His hair stands on end, his heart ceases to beat, cold
+and warm chills follow each other down his trousers legs and he clutches
+at the air, his eyes start from their sockets, and just as the rope ladder
+is about to wind around him, and crush his life out, he regains strength
+enough to rush down stairs head over appetite, and tell the clerk about
+the menagerie up stairs. O, there is going to be fun with these rope
+ladders, sure.
+
+
+A DOCTOR OF LAWS.
+
+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 plaster 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.
+
+
+COMFORTING COMPENSATIONS.
+
+If a farmer's wheat is killed by rain, he is consoled by the fact that
+rain is just what his corn needs. If his cattle die of disease, his
+consolation lies in the hope that pork will bring a good price. If boys
+steal his watermelons, he knows by experience that they will have the
+cholera morbus. So everything that is unpleasant has its compensation.
+
+
+LAY UP APPLES IN HEAVEN.
+
+[Illustration: NO MORE APPLES FOR THE MINISTER.]
+
+They tell a good story at Portage City, at the expense of Senator Barden,
+or a minister, we don't know which. Barden had a lot of apples sent him
+last fall, and he was anxious to sell them, before winter set in. One day
+he thought of a new minister that had settled in Portage, so he made up
+his mind to take him up a couple of barrels, supposing that when he went
+to heaven and saw the big ledger opened, there would be a credit about as
+follows:
+
+                  L.W. BARDEN,
+                      in acc't with Providence,
+
+        1876.
+    Oct. 21. By two bbls. apples, @ $3    $6.00
+     "    "  "  drayage                     .30
+                                          -----
+                              Total       $6.30
+
+Barden loaded them on a dray, and got on it, with his pants in
+his boots, and went up to deliver them himself. He stopped at the
+minister's gate, and hurried the apples off and rolled them inside the
+gate, and tried to get away before the minister had time to thank him.
+Just as he was about to drive away the door opened and the man of God came
+out, and says he:
+
+"Look here! You put them apples in the cellar!"
+
+Barden told him he was in something of a hurry, and really he could not
+spare the time. The minister raised his voice to a sort of "auction
+pitch," and said:
+
+"Here, now. You don't know your business, Mr. Drayman. You roll them
+apples into the cellar, or I won't accept them."
+
+The senator was by this time as mad as senators usually get. He jumped off
+the dray, threw the two barrels of apples on, and drove off, saying he
+didn't care a continental dam if the minister eat dried apples all winter.
+And he took them back to his store, and it is safe to say that he will not
+give many more apples to that minister.
+
+MORAL:--Never despise a man because he wears a ragged coat, for he may be
+a senatorial granger angel in the disguise of a drayman. And you may have
+to fill up on turnips instead of apples.
+
+
+ONE OF BEECHER'S CONVERTS.
+
+Since Beecher, the great revivalist, was here, and spoke so eloquently on
+the fall of man, and the need of making arrangements for the future, I
+have become a changed man. It hurts me to lie now, and when anything
+hurts, then I quit. It is wrong to lie, and a man who follows it up will
+come to some bad end.
+
+
+BUYING A STONE CRUSHER.
+
+The proceedings of the council of the city of Milwaukee shows that the
+aldermen are about to buy a stone crusher, to be run by steam, for the
+purpose of crushing stones to be used on the streets. If the city has
+never indulged in the luxury of a stone crusher, it should interview some
+city that has owned one, before it closes a contract with any party that
+wants to sell one. Every party that owns one does want to sell it.
+Statistics show that. The first city in Wisconsin that bought one was
+Madison. The city owned it for a year or two, and after that no man that
+was in the council when it was bought could ever get in it again. The
+mayor that winked at the purchase of the stone crusher was defeated, and
+there was trouble. No person would ever say what was the matter, but you
+say "stone crusher" to a citizen of Madison, and he would reach his right
+hand around to his pistol pocket, and the conversation would cease.
+
+La Crosse heard that Madison had a stone crusher, and so she wanted one.
+La Crosse is bound to have anything that any other town has, whether it is
+a railroad, an insane asylum, or a speckled hen. La Crosse could have
+bought Madison's stone crusher at a discount, but she wanted one new, with
+the paint all on, fresh. Second-hand stone crusher? Not any for La Crosse.
+So the city ordered a brand new one, right from the mint, at an expense of
+about $5,000.
+
+The idea was that it would be about as big as a straw cutter, or a job
+press, and people were anxious to see it work.
+
+Finally the city was notified that one train of cars loaded with the stone
+crusher had arrived, with red flags on, betokening extra trains running
+wild behind, and the city was told to come down to the depot and pay the
+first installment of freight, and take the stone crusher away--that part
+of it that had arrived. The aldermen went down and took an
+inventory of the hardware, and some of them went and jumped in the river.
+At a cent a pound one can buy a good deal of cast iron for five thousand
+dollars. The city bonded itself, and paid the freight, and during the
+spring all of the trains loaded with the stone crusher arrived. It was
+argued that the only way to get the stone crusher up to the city building
+would be to give the railroad the right of way up town, right through Main
+street.
+
+Some were in favor of letting the railroad company keep it for freight,
+but the company threatened to get out an injunction on the city. Finally a
+man who took contracts to move brick buildings agreed to move it up town
+on shares, and during the summer the most of it was got up there and
+corded up on some vacant lots. If all the cast iron in it came out of one
+mine it must have been an immense mine. People would look at it and weep.
+Every alderman swore he voted against buying it. Occasionally some one in
+the council would suggest that the stone crusher be taken out to the
+bluffs, a couple of miles, and set to work, when another one would move,
+to amend by inserting a clause that the bluffs be moved into the city to
+be crushed, as it would save expense. Then the matter would drop. For
+three years that stone crusher stood there, and it never crushed a pebble.
+New mayors and aldermen were elected, and every day they passed that
+crusher, but they never spoke to it. Finally a job was put up to get rid
+of it. There was a man there who owned a stone quarry, and it occurred to
+somebody to sell it to him. He was a truly good man, and did not believe
+there were any bad men in the world, who would kanoodle him with a stone
+crusher. A committee was appointed to sell it to him. The committee was
+composed of men who had traded horses, sold lightning rods, and been
+insurance agents, and when they told the poor man that the city had
+noticed that he was a deserving man, that they had decided to
+help him along, and would sell him that stone crusher, and he could pay
+for it in crushed stone, and the city would pay him in cash half a dollar
+more than the stone was worth, he said he would take it. They got it on to
+him by buying crushed stone of him and paying cash for it.
+
+We have never heard whether the man lived or not, and have never heard
+whether the city bought any stone of him, but the city got rid of it, and
+then had a celebration. Why, they figured it up, and the thing could crush
+enough stone in twenty-four hours to pave the streets a foot thick all
+over town and thirteen miles in the country. To run it a week would
+bankrupt the State of Wisconsin, It could go up to the stone quarry and
+tunnel a hole right through the hill. It was the biggest elephant that
+ever a city drew in a legalized lottery. Milwaukee will make money if she
+does not buy a stone crusher, not as long as it can buy stone in the
+rough, and have it crushed by tramps, at nothing a day.
+
+
+MERRIE CHRISTMAS.
+
+What proportion of the people who wish each other merry Christmas, do you
+suppose think of the reason that the day is a holiday? Not one in a
+thousand. Do the young fellows who put on a clean shirt and go down town
+and play pool all day, and drink yellow stuff out of a shaving cup, and
+get chalk on their fingers, and eat liver sausage, think that Christ died
+to save them? No! All they think of is the prospect of sticking some other
+fellow for the game. Do the hundreds of thousands of people who get up a
+big feed, and gormandize, think of Christ, or the poor all about them who
+have little to eat to-day, and little prospect of more to eat to-morrow?
+Many of them do not think of the poor, or of anything else except to
+prospect upon how much they will hold and not get sick.
+
+
+THE DIFFERENCE IN HORSES.
+
+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 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 someone 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 the
+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.
+
+
+BASE INGRATITUDE.
+
+I remember once of offering a lady from Eau Claire a slice of bread and a
+half of a red onion in a railroad car. She looked hungry, and yet she said
+she didn't care to eat. Thinking she had a delicacy about accepting food
+at the hands of one who was almost a stranger to her, I turned the bread
+and onion into her lap, and said she was entirely welcome to it. What did
+she do? Instead of eating it, and thanking me, she threw it out of the
+window, and went and sat by the stove. I was never so offended in my life.
+That woman may see the time she will want that onion, and I would see her
+almost perish of starvation before she could have any more of my onion.
+
+
+THE DIFFERENCE.
+
+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
+meningitis; 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 whiskey 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?
+
+
+THOSE STEP LADDERS!
+
+There has got to be a law passed to punish the hardware dealers for
+selling those step ladders that shut up like a jack-knife. A Ninth Street
+woman got onto one the other afternoon when it looked as though there was
+going to be a frost, to take her ivies down and carry them in the house.
+We don't care how handsome a woman is naturally, you put a towel around
+her head and put her up on a step ladder about seven feet high, with a
+tomahawk in her left hand, trying to draw a big nail out of a post on a
+veranda, and she looks like thunder. This woman did. Her husband tried to
+get her to let him do the work, but she said a man never knew how to do
+anything, anyway. So he sat down on the steps to see how it would turn
+out. She said afterwards that he kicked the ladder, but however that may
+be, there was an earthquake, and when he looked up the air was filled with
+calico, toweling, striped stockings, polonaise, trailing arbutus, red
+petticoats, store hair and step ladder. He said the step ladder struck the
+veranda last, but as he picked her off of it, it seemed as though it must
+have lit first. He said the step ladder must have kicked up. In coming
+down she run one leg through the baby wagon, and the other through some
+flower pots, and a boy who was passing along said he guess she had been to
+the turning school.
+
+
+WONDERS OF THE STAGE.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: BEHIND THE SCENES.]
+
+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.
+
+
+HOW FARMERS MAY GET RICH.
+
+The artificial propagation of fish has attracted much attention of late
+years, and the success of experiments has shown that every farmer that has
+a stream of water on his land can raise fish enough to get rich in five
+years, four months and twenty-one days.
+
+
+A CASE OF PARALYSIS.
+
+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 small pox. O, we suppose they have more fun in some of these
+country towns than you can shake a stick at.
+
+
+WE WILL CELEBRATE.
+
+With so many new holidays, and so many new people, it is hardly to be
+wondered at that the day of all days, the day that should be dearest to
+the heart of every American, is in danger of being passed over in silence,
+and were it not for the fire cracker, that begins to get in its work about
+the first of June, in many instances this Anniversary of American
+Independence would be passed without the customary mouth shootzen-fest
+from alleged orators, but when the small boy begins to stir around and
+clandestinely look down the muzzle of the always loaded fire cracker, the
+patriotism of the boys still begins to assert itself, the old man's eyes
+begin to snap, and he talks to his neighbor about how they used to
+celebrate when he was a boy, the stuff begins to work over the
+neighborhood, the village catches it, the country begins.
+
+
+DOGS AND HUMAN BEINGS!
+
+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
+girl's 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.
+
+
+AN ODOROUS BOHEMIAN.
+
+A Bohemian on the train last night had some cheese in his vest pocket that
+was too ripe, and the conductor had to disinfect the car, and order the
+Bohemian to be quarantined before the train would be allowed to enter the
+city. Cheese is all right in its place, but it don't want to be allowed to
+lay above ground too long after it has departed this life. If farmers will
+pay a little attention to cheese in its different stages, much trouble can
+be avoided. In union there is strength. So there is in a smoking car.
+
+
+TRAGEDY ON THE STAGE.
+
+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 drowned 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 unrequitted 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.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN MCCULLOUGH KILLING A TEXAS STEER.]
+
+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.
+
+
+GRANITE HEAD CHEESE.
+
+A few years ago there was some excitement at Grand Rapids over the
+discovery of a bed or quarry of granite. Some of it was taken out, from
+the top of the quarry, and polished, and proved to be as fine as any that
+is imported. Further working of the quarry, however, has developed a
+strange thing. The further they go down the softer it is, and it has been
+learned that the quarry is all head cheese, such as is sold by butchers.
+On top it is petrified, and polishes very nicely, but a little below it is
+nice and fresh, and can be cut out with a knife, all ready for the table.
+A friend in Milwaukee, who has an uncle living at Grand Rapids, has
+furnished us with a quantity of it, some of which we have eaten, and were
+it not for the fact that we know it came from the quarry, it would be hard
+to convince us that it was not concocted out of the remains of a butcher
+shop. The people up there talk of running Hon. J.N. Brundage for Congress,
+on the head cheese ticket, in order that he may use his influence to get
+head cheese adopted as an army ration, and also as currency with which to
+wipe out the national debt.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA AN INVENTOR.
+
+"Ha! Ha! Now I have got you," said the grocery man to the had boy, the
+other morning, as he came in and jumped upon the counter and tied the end
+of a ball of twine to the tail of a dog, and "sicked" the dog on another
+dog that was following a passing sleigh, causing the twine to pay out
+until the whole ball was scattered along the block. "Condemn you, I've a
+notion to choke the liver out of you. Who tied that twine to the dog's
+tail?"
+
+The boy choked up with emotion, and the tears came into his eyes, and he
+said he didn't know anything about the twine or the dog. He said he
+noticed the dog come in, and wag his tail around the twine, but he
+supposed the dog was a friend of the family, and did not disturb him.
+"Everybody lays everything that is done to me," said the boy, as he put
+his handkerchief to his nose, "and, they will be sorry for it when I die.
+I have a good notion to poison myself by eating some of your glucose
+sugar."
+
+"Yes, and you do about everything that is mean. The other day a lady came
+in and told me to send up to her house, some of my country sausage, done
+up in muslin bags, and while she was examining it she noticed something
+hard inside the bags, and asked me what it was, and I opened it, and I
+hope to die if there wasn't a little brass padlock and a piece of red
+morocco dog collar imbedded in the sausage. Now how do you suppose that
+got in there?" and the grocery man looked savage.
+
+The boy looked interested, and put on an expression as though in deep
+thought, and finally said, "I suppose the farmer that put up the sausage
+did not strain the dog meat. Sausage meat ought to be strained."
+
+The grocery man pulled in about half a block of twine, after the
+dog had run against a fence and broke it, and told the boy he knew
+perfectly well how the brass padlock came to be in the sausage, but
+thinking it was safer to have the good will of the boy than the ill will,
+he offered him a handful of prunes.
+
+"No," said the boy, "I have swore off on mouldy prunes. I am no
+kinder-garden any more. For years I have eaten rotten peaches around this
+store, and everything you couldn't sell, but I have turned over a new leaf
+now, and after this nothing is too good for me. Since Pa has got to be an
+inventor, we are going to live high."
+
+"What's your Pa invented? I saw a hearse and three hacks go up on your
+street the other day and I thought may be you had killed your Pa."
+
+"Not much. There will be more than three hacks when I kill Pa, and don't
+you forget it. Well, sir, Pa has struck a fortune, if he can make the
+thing work. He has got an idea about coal stoves that will bring him
+several million dollars, if he gets a royalty of five dollars on every
+cook stove in the world. His idea is to have a coal stove on castors with
+the pipe made to telescope out and in, and rubber hose for one joint, so
+you can pull the stove all around the room and warm any particular place.
+Well, sir, to hear Pa tell about it, you would think it would
+revolutionize the country, and maybe it will when he gets it perfected,
+but he came near burning the house up, and scared us half to death this
+morning, and burned his shirt off, and he is all covered with cotton with
+sweet oil on, and he smells like salad dressing.
+
+"You see Pa had a pipe made and some castors put on our coal stove, and he
+tied a rope to the hearth of the stove, and had me put in some kindling
+wood and coal last night, so he could draw the stove up to the bed and
+light the fire without getting up. Ma told him he would put his foot in
+it, and he told her to dry up, and let him run the stove
+business. He said it took a man with brain to run a patent right, and Ma
+she pulled the clothes over her head and let Pa do the fire act. She has
+been building the fires for twenty years, and thought she would let Pa see
+how good it was. Well, Pa pulled the stove to the bed, and touched off the
+kindling wood. I guess maybe I got a bundle of kindling wood that the
+hired girl had put kerosene on, cause it blazed up awful and smoked, and
+the blaze bursted out the doors and windows of the stove, and Pa yelled
+fire, and I jumped out of bed and rushed in and he was the scartest man
+you ever see, and you'd a dide to see how he kicked when I threw a pail of
+water on his legs and put his shirt out. Ma did not get burned, but she
+was pretty wet, and she told Pa she would pay five dollars royalty on that
+stove and take the castors off and let it remain stationary. Pa says he
+will make it work if he burns the house down. I think it was real mean in
+Pa to get mad at me because I threw cold water on him instead of warm
+water, to put his shirt out. If I had waited till I could heat water to
+the right temperature I would have been an orphan and Pa would have been a
+burnt offering. But some men always kick at everything. Pa has given up
+business entirely and says he shall devote the remainder of his life
+curing himself of the different troubles that I get him into. He has
+retained a doctor by the year, and he buys liniment by the gallon.
+
+"What was it about your folks getting up in the middle of the night to
+eat? The hired girl was over here after some soap the other morning, and
+she said she was going to leave your house."
+
+"Well, that was a picnic. Pa said he wanted breakfast earlier than we was
+in the habit of having it, and he said I might see to it that the house
+was awake early enough. The other night I awoke with the awfulest pain you
+ever heard of. It was that night that you give me and my chum the
+bottle of pickled oysters that had begun to work. Well, I could't sleep,
+and I thought I would call the hired girls, and they got up and got
+breakfast to going, and then I rapped on Pa's and Ma's door and told them
+the breakfast was getting cold, and they got up and came down. We ate
+breakfast by gas light, and Pa yawned and said it made a man feel good to
+get up and get ready for work before daylight, the way he used to on the
+farm, and Ma she yawned and agreed with Pa, 'cause she has to, or have a
+row. After breakfast we sat around for an hour, and Pa said it was a long
+time getting daylight, and bimeby Pa looked at his watch. When he began to
+pull out his watch I lit out and hid in the storeroom, and pretty soon I
+heard Pa and Ma come up stairs and go to bed, and then the hired girls,
+they went to bed, and when it was all still, and the pain had stopped
+inside of my clothes, I went to bed, and I looked to see what time it was
+and it was two o'clock in the morning. We got dinner at eight o'clock in
+the morning, and Pa said he guessed he would call up the house after this,
+so I have lost another job, and it was all on account of that bottle of
+pickled oysters you gave me. My chum says he had colic too, but he didn't
+call up his folks. It was all he could do to get up himself. Why don't you
+give away something that is not spiled?"
+
+The groceryman said he guessed he knew what to give away, and the boy went
+out and hung up a sign in front of the grocery, that he had made on
+wrapping paper with red chalk, which read, "Rotten eggs, good enough for
+custard pies, for 18 cents a dozen."
+
+
+A GOOD LAND ENOUGH.
+
+This land of the free is good enough, if we make it good, and if we make
+it bad, it is just as bad as any country under the sun. It all depends on
+how the people act.
+
+
+THE WOODCOCK.
+
+It is a rainy day, and nothing has occurred of a local nature, that is,
+nothing of a hair standing nature, so we will just spoil a few sheets of
+paper relating, in a Sunday School book style, the circumstances of an
+excursion after woodcock, the other day, indulged in by W.C. Root, the
+Wisconsin amateur Bogardus, Jennings McDonald, Captain of a breech-loading
+steamboat, and the subscriber. In the first place, it may be well to state
+that the woodcock, or "Timber Doodle," as Prof. Agassiz calls it, is a
+game bird. We know it is a game bird, because they charge a dollar apiece
+for them in New York. The meat is about as sweet as deceased cow's liver,
+but they are worth a dollar apiece. The "Timber Doodle" is a patriotic
+bird, because he gets ripe on the 4th of July. He is about the size of a
+doughnut, with a long bill, like a lawyer.
+
+We took passage per skiff at twelve o'clock. If there was one drawback, it
+was the fact that the oar-locks of the boat had been mislaid. After
+consuming an hour in not finding them, Frank Hatch became discouraged at
+seeing us lay around the levee, so he tied the oars on with tarred rope
+and we got off, three of us besides the other dogs. The water was so high
+that we crossed Barron's island, only having to get out and pull the boat
+over two or three sand-bars and a raft or two. Every time we got out to
+pull the boat, the dogs would get out to look for woodcock, around the
+stumps, and when they got in the boat would be full of water and mud, and
+of course we had our best clothes on. Did it ever occur to you how much
+water a dog could carry in his hair? A dog is worse than a sponge. An
+ordinary dog, with luck, can fill a skiff with water at two jumps. Not,
+however, with us in the boat to bail out the water. The woodcock's tail
+sticks up like a sore thumb. We are thus particular to describe
+the woodcock, so if you ever see one you can go right away from him.
+Woodcock and mosquitoes are in "cahoots." While the woodcock bores in the
+ground for snakes and other feed that makes him fat and worth a dollar in
+New York, the mosquito stands on the ramparts and talks to the boys.
+
+Well, speaking about woodcock, after riding five miles, through bushes,
+brambles and things, we got out of the boat and only had to walk a couple
+of miles to get where the birds were. Right here we wish to state that we
+shouldn't have gone after the woodcock at all, only everybody said it was
+such fun. Root showed us a picture of a woodcock in a book, and if that
+didn't convince us, the fact that a small boy came in town and sold three
+dozen, did. Then we wanted to go. There never has been a year when
+woodcock were so plenty at places we didn't visit. The most fun was at a
+ditch which was about a foot wider than any of us could jump. Root gave
+his gun to McDonald and plunged in. Then McDonald threw a gun to Root. It
+hit him on the thumb-nail and dropped in the ditch out of sight. Mc.
+thought it was Root's gun, and he apologized to Root for throwing it so
+carelessly. Root supposed it was Mc.'s gun, and he apologized for not
+catching it. We never saw men more polite in the world. Mc. started to
+jump across, when a dog got between his legs, and both went in up to their
+knees. You never can jump as well with a dog tangled up amongst your legs.
+The dog looked at Jennings as though he wanted to swear. We waded through
+the ditch and only got two feet wet. The rest of them had more than that
+wet.
+
+But about the woodcock. This is, kind reader, purely a woodcock story, and
+more or less must be said about the dollar bird. But this is neither here
+nor there. It was over in the Root river bottoms. Finally we got on the
+woodcock ground and went to work. Talk about mosquitoes! There was no end
+to them. We ought not to say that, either, because there are spots on our
+person that just fit the end of a mosquito. There was an end to them. If
+you never saw mosquitoes in convention, you want to go over there. And
+right here we will give a recipe for keeping mosquitoes from biting. You
+take some cedar oil and put on your coat collar, if you are a man, and if
+you are a woman put it on that gingerbread work around your neck, and a
+mosquito will come up and sing to you and get all ready to take toll, when
+she will smell that oil. She is the sickest mosquito you ever saw. She
+turns over on her back and sends her husband for the nearest doctor. We
+had a bottle of cedar oil, and if Jennings hadn't left it hanging up in
+Hogan's store in his coat, we should have made those mosquitoes sick. As
+it was they did it to us. There isn't a spot on us as big as a billiard
+table but what you can find artesian wells made by mosquitoes.
+
+Woodcock sell higher in the market than any other bird. Lots of people
+that never saw them eat snakes, eat them. When they get up to fly they
+talk Bohemian, and get behind a bush. You shoot right into the bush, and
+if you kill one you think you are a good shot. Talk about getting tired.
+You walk around in the woods several miles, with mosquitoes getting
+acquainted with you, and all the time your nerves strung up in
+anticipation of seeing a dollar bill fly up, and if you don't sleep
+without rocking, we are no prophet. The sport, however, is exhilerating,
+and we are glad we went. We are glad because it learned us one thing, and
+that is, if we ever want a woodcock real bad, it will be cheaper, easier,
+and better to buy it. It will be inferred that we did not see a woodcock.
+Such is the case.
+
+But we made the blackbirds sick.
+
+
+A BALD-HEADED MAN MOST CRAZY.
+
+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 rang 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.
+
+[Illustration: AT THE TELEPHONE.]
+
+If we have done wrong in talking with a total strangers 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.
+
+
+CONVENIENT CURRENCY.
+
+What we want is a currency that every farmer can issue for himself. A law
+should be passed making the products of the farm a legal tender for all
+debts, public and private, including duties on imports, interest on the
+public debt, and contributions for charitable purposes. Then we shall have
+a new money table about as follows:
+
+  Ten ears of corn make one cent.
+  Ten cucumbers make one dime.
+  Ten watermelons make one dollar.
+  Ten bushels of wheat make one eagle.
+
+
+THE GOSPEL CAR.
+
+    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 railroad 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 wheiher 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
+with 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 "square."
+
+That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can occasionally
+practice without having a gospel car.
+
+
+BANKS AND BANKING.
+
+The subject of banking has engrossed the attention of your excellent
+Governor for, lo! these many weeks, and he is constrained to say that some
+radical changes must be made in the method of receiving deposits by banks,
+where an equivalent is not rendered, of His Excellency will be compelled
+to emerge from his present aristocratic quarters and take up his abode in
+the poor-house. I would call your attention to the practice certain banks
+have of issuing checks in lieu of cash. If these checks were available at
+the groceries it would be better than it is. Banks have got in a habit of
+issuing a species of ivory button in receipt for the green coin of the
+realm which is only good at the counter of the bank. These checks are not
+issued by the National Banks, but by the State Banks, denominated "Keno"
+and "Faro." I would not charge that there is "skullduggery" or
+"shenanagen" going on in these institutions, as the president of one of
+them informed me, confidentially, that he dealt on the "square," but it is
+a noticeable fact that the dividends received by those who do business
+with the banks, are almost, as it were, imperceptible. I trust that you
+will cause this branch of industry to be thoroughly investigated, and
+report by bill or otherwise. Our finances should be beyond suspicion of
+dishonesty.
+
+
+LARGE MOUTHS ABE FASHIONABLE.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: "GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!"]
+
+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.
+
+
+INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.
+
+Under this heading I can think of nothing that appears more appropriate
+than the subject of the artificial propagation of fish. It is a subject
+that has arrested the attention of many of the ablest minds of the
+country, and the results of experiments have been thus far so satisfactory
+that it is almost safe to predict that within the next ten centuries every
+man, however poor, may pick bull-heads off of his crab apple vines and
+gather his winter supply of fresh shad from his sweet potato trees at less
+than fifty cents a pound. The experiments that have been made in our own
+state warrant us in going largely into the fish business. A year ago a
+quantity of fish seeds were sub soil plowed into the ice of Lake Mendota,
+and to-day I am informed that boarders at the hotels there have all the
+fish to eat that any reasonable man could desire. The expense is small and
+the returns are enormous. It is estimated that from the six quarts of fish
+seeds that were planted in the lake there are now ready for the market at
+least 11,000,000 car loads of brain-producing food, if you spit on your
+bait when you go fishing.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GETS BOXED.
+
+"You don't want to buy a good parrot, do you?" said the bad boy to the
+grocery man as he put his wet mittens on the top of the stove to dry, and
+kept his back to the stove so he could watch the grocery man, and be
+prepared for a kick, if the man should remember the rotten egg sign that
+the boy put up in front of the grocery last week.
+
+"Naw, I don't want no parrot. I had rather have a fool boy around than a
+parrot. But what's the matter with your Ma's parrot? I thought she
+wouldn't part with him for anything."
+
+"Well, she wouldn't until Wednesday night, but now she says she will not
+have him around, and I may have half I can get for him. She told me to go
+to some saloon or some disreputable place and sell him, and I thought
+maybe he would about suit you," and the boy broke into a bunch of celery,
+and took out a few tender stalks and rubbed them on a codfish to salt
+them, and began to bite the stalks, while he held the sole of one wet boot
+up against the stove to dry it, making a smell of burned leather that came
+near turning the stomach of the cigar sign.
+
+"Look-a-here boy, don't you call this a disreputable place. Some of the
+best people in this town come here," said the grocery man as he held up
+the cheese knife and grated his teeth as though he would like to jab it
+into the youth.
+
+"O, that's all right, they come here 'cause you trust; but you make up
+what you lose by charging it to other people. Pa will make it hot for you
+the last of the week. He has been looking over your bill, and comparing it
+with the hired girl, and she says we haven't ever had a prune, or
+a dried apple, or a raisin, or any cinnamon, or crackers and cheese out of
+your store, and he says you are worse than the James brothers, and that
+you used to be a three card monte man, and he will have you arrested for
+highway robbery, but you can settle that with Pa. I like you, because you
+are no ordinary sneak thief, you are a high-toned, gentlemanly sort of a
+bilk, and wouldn't take anything you couldn't lift. O, keep your seat, and
+don't get excited. It does a man good to hear the truth from one who has
+got the nerve to tell it.
+
+"But about the parrot. Ma has been away from home for a week, having a
+high old time in Chicago, going to theatres and things, and while she was
+gone, I guess the hired girl or somebody learned the parrot some new
+things to say. A parrot that can only say 'Polly wants a cracker,' don't
+amount to anything--what we need is new style parrots that can converse on
+the topics of the day, and say things original. Well, when Ma got back I
+guess her conscience hurt her for the way she had been carrying on in
+Chicago, and so when she heard the basement of the church was being
+frescoed, she invited the committee to hold the Wednesday evening prayer
+meeting at our house. First, there were four people came, and Ma asked Pa
+to stay to make up a quorum, and Pa said seeing he had two pair, he
+guessed he would stay in, and if Ma would deal him a queen he would have a
+full hand. I don't know what Pa meant, but he plays draw poker sometimes.
+Anyway there was eleven people came including the minister, and after they
+had talked about the neighbors a spell, and Ma had showed the women a new
+tidy she had worked for the heathen, with a motto on it which Pa had
+taught her: 'A contrite heart beats a bob-tailed flush,'--and Pa had
+talked to the men about a religious silver mine he was selling stock in,
+which he advised them as a friend to buy for the glory of the church, they
+all went in the back parlor and the minister lead in prayer. He
+got down on his knees right under the parrot's cage, and you'd a dide to
+see Polly hang on to the wires of the cage with one foot, and drop an
+apple core on the minister's head. Ma shook her handkerchief at Polly, and
+looked sassy, and Polly got up on the perch, and as the minister got
+warmed up and began to raise the roof, Polly said, 'O, dry up.' The
+minister had his eyes shut, but he opened one of them a little and looked
+at Pa. Pa was tickled at the parrot, but when the minister looked at Pa as
+though it was him that was making irreverent remarks, Pa was mad.
+
+"The minister got to the 'amen,' and Polly shook hisself and said 'What
+you giving us?' and the minister got up and brushed the bird seed off his
+knees, and he looked mad. I thought Ma would sink with mortification, and
+I was sitting on a piano stool looking as pious as a Sunday school
+superintendent the Sunday before he skips out with the bank's funds; and
+Ma looked at me as though she thought it was me that had been tampering
+with the parrot. Gosh, I never said a word to that parrot, and I can prove
+it by my chum.
+
+"Well, the minister asked one of the sisters if she wouldn't pray, and she
+wasn't engaged, so she said with pleasure, and she kneeled down, but she
+corked herself, cause she got one knee on a cast-iron dumb bell that I had
+been practising with. She said 'O my,' in a disgusted sort of a way, and
+then she began to pray for the reformation of the youth of the land, and
+asked for the spirit to descend on the household, and particularly on the
+boy that was such a care and anxiety to his parents, and just then Polly
+said 'O, pull down your vest.' Well, you'd a dide to see that woman look
+at me. The parrot cage was partly behind the window curtin, and they
+couldn't see it, and she thought it was me. She looked at Ma as though she
+was wondering why she didn't hit me with a poker, but she went on, and
+Polly said 'wipe off your chin,' and then the lady got through
+and got up, and told Ma it must be a great trial to have an idiotic child,
+and then Ma she was mad, and said it wasn't half so bad as it was to be a
+kleptomaniac, and then the woman got up and said she wouldn't stay no
+longer, and Pa said to me to take that parrot outdoors, and that seemed to
+make them all good natured again. Ma said to take the parrot and give it
+to the poor. I took the cage and pointed my finger at the parrot and it
+looked at the woman and said 'old catamaran,' and the woman tried to look
+pious and resigned, but she couldn't. As I was going out the door the
+parrot ruffed up his feathers and said 'Dammit, set 'em up,' and I hurried
+out with the cage for fear he would say something bad, and the folks all
+held up their hands and said it was scandalous. Say, I wonder if a parrot
+can go to hell with the rest of the community. Well, I put the parrot in
+the woodshed, and after they all had their innings, except Pa, who acted
+as umpire, the meeting broke up, and Ma says it is the last time she will
+have that gang at her house.
+
+"That must have been where your Pa got his black eye," said the grocery
+man, as he charged the bunch of celery to the boy's Pa. "Did the minister
+hit him, or was it one of the sisters?"
+
+"O, he didn't get his black eye at prayer meeting!" said the boy, as he
+took his mittens off the stove, and rubbed them to take the stiffening
+out. "It was from boxing. Pa told my chum and me that it was no harm to
+learn to box, cause we could defend ourselves, and he said he used to be a
+holy terror with the boxing gloves when he was a boy, and he has been
+giving us lessons. Well, he is no slouch, now I tell you, and handles
+himself pretty well for a church member. I read in the paper how Zack
+Chandler played it on Conkling by getting Jem Mace, the prize fighter, to
+knock him silly, and I asked Pa if he wouldn't let me bring a
+poor boy who had no father to teach him boxing, to our house to learn to
+box, and Pa said certainly, fetch him along. He said he would be glad to
+do anything for a poor orphan. So I went down in the Third ward and got an
+Irish boy by the name of Duffy, who can knock the socks off any boy in the
+ward. He fit a prize fight once. It would have made you laugh to see Pa
+telling him how to hold his hands and how to guard his face. He told Duffy
+not to be afraid, but strike right out and hit for keeps. Duffy said he
+was afraid Pa would get mad if he hit him, and Pa said, 'nonsense, boy,
+knock me down if you can, and I will laugh ha! ha!' Well, Duffy he hauled
+back and gave Pa one on the nose, and another in both eyes, and cuffed him
+on the ear and punched him in the stomach, and lammed him in the mouth and
+made his teeth bleed, and then he gave him a side winder in both eyes, and
+Pa pulled off his boxing gloves and grabbed a chair, and we adjourned and
+went down stairs as though there was a panic. I haven't seen Pa since. Was
+his eye very black?"
+
+"Black, I should say so," said the grocery man. "And his nose seemed to be
+trying to look into his left ear. He was at the market buying
+beefsteak to put on it."
+
+"O, beefsteak is no account. I must go and see him and tell him that an
+oyster is the best thing for a black eye. Well, I must go. A boy has a
+pretty hard time running a house the way it should be run," and the boy
+went out and hung up a sign in front of the grocery: "_Frowy Butter a
+Speshulty_."
+
+
+CHRISTMAS TREES.
+
+There is too much dress parade about Christmas. Too many Christmas trees
+where rich children get club skates, and gold napkin rings, and poor
+children get pop corn strung on a string, and cornucopias full of
+peppermint candy.
+
+
+THE BOB-TAILED BADGER.
+
+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 a
+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.
+
+
+TERROR IN CHURCH.
+
+A ridiculous scene occurred at 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.
+
+[Illustration: "AH, MY FRIENDS, LOOK DOWN INTO THAT BURNING LAKE!"]
+
+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.
+
+
+FISH HATCHING IN WISCONSIN.
+
+I would suggest that you permit the subject of the artificial hatching of
+fish to engage your attention, and that you appropriate several dollars to
+purchase whale's eggs, vegetable oysters and mock turtle seeds. The
+hatching of fish is easy, and any man can soon learn it; and it is a
+branch of industry that many who are now out of employment, owing to
+circumstances beyond their control, will be glad to avail themselves of.
+How, I ask you, could means better be adapted to the ends than for the
+retiring officers of our State to go to setting on fish eggs?
+
+
+TRAINS WITHOUT CONDUCTORS.
+
+Since the introduction of the patent air brake on passenger trains, by
+which brakemen have been dispensed with, a number of patent right men have
+been studying up some contrivance to do away with conductors. All have
+failed except one, and that fortunate inventor is Col. Johnson, of the
+Railroad Eating House, Milwaukee. He has been engaged for two years on
+this patent, and has got it so near completed that he has filed a caveat
+at the Patent Office, and as his rights are secured, it can do no harm to
+describe the invention, as it is destined to work quite a revolution in
+the railroad business. It has been Col. Johnson's idea that an arrangement
+could be made so that an engineer of a train could have the whole train
+under his charge, to stop it, start it, collect fares, and bounce
+impecunious passengers, from his position on the engine, and do it all by
+steam, wind and water. A series of pneumatic tubes run from the door of
+each car to the engine, with speaking tubes. A passenger gets on the
+platform, and through the speaking tube asks the engineer what the fare is
+to such a place. The answer is returned, the fare is put in the hopper of
+the pneumatic tube, it goes to the engineer, he pulls a string, the door
+flies open and the passenger enters. Not the least important part of the
+machinery is the patent "æolian bouncer," as it is called. A pair of ice
+tongs are placed so as to grasp the passenger by the seat of the pants or
+the polonaise, as the case may be, when he or she gets on the platform.
+These tongs are connected with the air brakes, in such a manner that by
+the engineer's touching a spring the whole force of the compressed air
+takes possession of the tongs, and the passenger is snatched bald-headed,
+metaphorically speaking. For instance, a passenger gets on the platform at
+Portage, and the ice tongs grasp him or her securely. If he or she pays
+the fare, the door is opened, the tongs release their hold, and
+the person is allowed to enter. But if the engineer should find that they
+had no money, or that their pass had run out, and they were trying to beat
+their way, he would pull the string and they would be lifted back on the
+depot steps and stood on their heads, raised in the air and made to see
+stars. Col. Johnson has been offered a fabulous sum for his patent, but he
+has not decided whether to sell or lease it. A trial trip was made at
+Milwaukee, the other day, and though the machine was not perfect, the
+experiment was not altogether a failure. A car was arranged with the
+apparatus, and went out to the Soldier's Home. Col. Johnson and a number
+of prominent railroad men were on board. They got a veteran soldier and a
+Polack waman to allow the machine to experiment on them. The machine took
+hold of the soldier and the engineer jerked. The man had one leg torn off,
+and the seat of his overcoat was ruined. He wouldn't try again, so they
+let the woman step on the platform. The engineer turned it the wrong way,
+and the car seemed full of compressed air, and a smell of limberger cheese
+pervaded the premises. When the smoke cleared off the woman was not to be
+found. After voting the machine a success the party started for Milwaukee.
+On nearing the city a pair of wooden shoes were seen in the air coming
+down, and they lit in the the canal by the tannery. A pair of corsets
+struck on Plankinton's packing house, and sections of spinal cord, and one
+leg of a pair of red drawers came down on the Soldier's home, and hair was
+found on the top of the car. It is thought the engineer loaded the air
+bouncer too heavy, and that it kicked. However, Col. Johnson was not
+discouraged, and will soon have his patent on all cars. The husband of the
+Polack woman wanted Johnson to pay him three dollars, but he said he
+didn't want to buy the woman. All he wanted was to hire her, anyway. Col.
+Johnson is a great inventor. It was he that invented the stomach
+pump, and the automatic candle enunciator, for awakening guests in the
+night to take early trains. The latter he sold to Mr. Williams, of Prairie
+du Chien, for a large amount and took his pay in trade.
+
+
+RAISING ELEPHANTS.
+
+Why not go to raising elephants? A good elephant will sell for eight
+thousand dollars. A pair of elephants can be bought by a community of
+farmers pooling their issues and getting a start, and in a few years every
+farm can be a menagerie of it own, and every year we can rake in from
+eight to twenty-four thousand dollars from the sale of surplus elephants.
+It may be said that elephants are hearty feeders, and that they would go
+through an ordinary farmer in a short time. Well, they can be turned out
+into the highway to browse, and earn their own living. This elephant
+theory is a good one, and any man that is good on figures can sit down and
+figure up a profit in a year sufficient to go into bankruptcy.
+
+
+THE POWER OF ELOQUENCE.
+
+A justice of the peace at Menasha, wanted to kill Pratt, the editor of the
+_Press_. The matter has been compromised, however. Pratt got the justice
+cornered up, and delivered one of the speeches to him that he delivered
+during the campaign last fall, and the justice got on his knees and said,
+"Pratt, this thing is all right, I surrender."
+
+
+A TRYING SITUATION.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE WANDERING OYSTER.]
+
+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 toward 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 slikery 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 GIDDY GIRLS QUARREL.
+
+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 enough 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.
+
+
+THE UNIVERSAL OBJECT.
+
+The object that every man has in view, whether he be farmer, mechanic,
+preacher, editor, or tramp, is to make money.
+
+
+THE MISTAKE ABOUT IT.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: MYSTERY OF A WOMAN'S CLOTHES!]
+
+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 expressman 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 greyhound 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.
+
+
+A NEW SPARKING SCHEME.
+
+A number of fathers who have daughters, have formed a society, the object
+of which is to charge young men who visit the girls, for meals, gas, wear
+and tear of furniture, etc. There has been so much sparking going on which
+did not mean business, that the organization has seemed necessary.
+
+
+EFFECTS OF MINERAL WATER.
+
+A woman from Milwaukee, stopping at Sparta for the summer, had a serious
+accident the other day. She had her dress pinned back so tight that the
+exclamation point where she was vaccinated on the left arm was plainly
+visible, and as she stooped over at the artesian well to dip up a cup full
+of physic, a little dog belonging to a lady from Pilot Knob took hold of
+her striped stocking and shook it, thinking it was a blue racer. The lady
+was overcome with heat and sank down on the damp ground, and the result
+was congestion of the dog, for when she got up she kicked that dog over
+the Court house and sprained her stocking. It is said that beautiful and
+healthful summer resort is fast filling up and everybody swears it is the
+most enjoyable place on the continent. It is certainly the cheapest for us
+La Crosse folks to go. We don't know of a place where, for the money
+invested, one can have so much fun and get so much health. You can leave
+La Crosse at 5:45, and arrive at Sparta at 6:20, after a delightful ride
+of thirty miles, and you will enjoy a race, your train beating the
+Northwestern train, and running like lightning. If you have a pass, or sit
+on the hind platform, it will cost you nothing. You can walk down town, at
+small expense. You want to take supper before leaving home, if economy is
+what you are seeking in addition to health. Go to Condit, at the Warner
+House, and talk as though you were looking for a place to send your
+family, and he will hitch up and drive you all over town. Tell Doc.
+Nichols you never tried a Turkish bath, but that you are troubled with
+hypochondria and often wish you were dead, and that if you were sure the
+baths would help you, you would come down and take them regular. He will
+put you through for nothing, and give you a cigar. Then you can get a
+tooth pick at Condit's and put your thumb under your vest and go to the
+springs and talk loud about railroad stocks and bonds and speculating in
+wheat. (It takes two to do it up right. Frank Hatch and the writer are
+going down some night to "do" the watering place). Then you can swell
+around till half past ten, and sneak off to the depot on foot and come
+home, and your pocket book will be just as empty as when you started,
+unless you get a subscriber, and you will have added bloom to your cheek,
+and had a high old time, and next winter you can talk about the delightful
+time you passed at Sparta last summer during the heated term.
+
+Let's get up a party and go down some night.
+
+
+WHAT THE COUNTRY NEEDS.
+
+What the country needs is a melon from which the incendiary ingredients
+have been removed. It seems to me that by proper care, when the melon is
+growing on the vines, the cholera morbus can be decreased, at least, the
+same as the cranberry has been improved, by cultivation. The experiment of
+planting homeopathic pills in the hill with the melon has been tried, but
+homeopathy, while perhaps good in certain cases, does not seem to reach
+the seat of disease in the watermelon. What I would advise, and the advice
+is free to all, is that a porous plaster be placed upon watermelons, just
+as they are begining to ripen, with a view to draw out the cholera morbus.
+A mustard plaster might have the same effect, but the porous plaster seems
+to me to be the article to fill a want long felt. If, by this means, a
+breed of watermelon can be raised that will not strike terror to the heart
+of the consumer, this agricultural address will not have been delivered in
+vain.
+
+
+THE MAN FROM DUBUQUE.
+
+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 forehead 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.
+
+[Illustration: AN INTRUSIVE NIGGER.]
+
+"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 brakemen 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 PLEA FOR THE BULL HEAD.
+
+The late meeting of the State Fish Commissioners at Milwaukee was an
+important event, and the discussions the wise men indulged in will be
+valuable additions to the literature of the country, and future readers of
+profane history will rise up and call them blessed. It seems that the
+action of the Milwaukee common council in withdrawing the use of the water
+works from the commissioners, will put a stop to the hatching of
+whitefish. This is as it should be. The white fish is an aristocratic
+bird, that will not bite a hook, and the propagation of this species of
+fish is wholly in the interest of wealthy owners of fishing tugs, who have
+nets. By strict attention to business they can catch all the whitefish out
+of the lake a little faster than the State machine can put them in. Poor
+people cannot get a smell of whitefish. The same may be said of brook
+trout. While they will bite a hook, it requires more machinery to catch
+them than ordinary people can possess without mortgaging a house. A man
+has got to have a morocco book of expensive flies, a fifteen dollar bamboo
+jointed rod, a three dollar trout basket with a hole mortised in the top,
+a corduroy suit made in the latest style, top boots of the Wellington
+pattern, with red tassels in the straps, and a flask of Otard brandy in a
+side pocket. Unless a man is got up in that style, a speckled trout will
+see him in Chicago, first, and then it won't bite. The brook trout is even
+more aristocratic than the whitefish, and should not be propagated at
+public expense.
+
+But there are fish that should be propagated in the interest of the
+people. There is a species of fish that never looks at the clothes of the
+man who throws in the bait, a fish that takes whatever is thrown to it,
+and when once hold of the hook never tries to shake a friend, but submits
+to the inevitable, crosses its legs and says "Now I lay me," and
+comes out on the bank and seems to enjoy being taken. It is a fish that is
+a friend of the poor, and one that will sacrifice itself in the interest
+of humanity. This is the fish that the State should adopt as its trade
+mark, and cultivate friendly relations with, and stand by. We allude to
+the bullhead.
+
+The bullhead never went back on a friend. To catch the bullhead it is not
+necessary to tempt his appetite with porter house steak, or to display an
+expensive lot of fishing tackle. A pin hook, a piece of liver, and a
+cistern pole, is all the capital required to catch a bullhead. He lays
+upon the bottom of a stream or pond in the mud, thinking. There is no fish
+that does more thinking or has a better head for grasping great questions,
+or chunks of liver than the bullhead. His brain is large, his heart beats
+for humanity, and if he can't get liver, a piece of a tin tomato can will
+make a meal for him. It is an interesting study to watch a boy catch a
+bullhead. The boy knows where the bullhead congregates, and when he throws
+in his hook it is dollars to buttons that "in the near future" he will get
+a bite. The bullhead is democratic in all its instincts. If the boy's
+shirt is sleeveless, his hat crownless, and his pants a bottomless pit,
+the bullhead will bite just as well as though the boy is dressed in purple
+and fine linen, with knee breeches and plaid stockings. The bull head
+seems to be dozing--bulldozing we might say--on the muddy bottom, and a
+stranger might say that he would not bite. But wait. There is a movement
+of his continuation, and his cow-catcher moves gently toward the piece of
+liver. He does not wait to smell of it, and canvas in his mind whether the
+liver is fresh. It makes no difference to him. He argues that here is a
+family out of meat. "My country calls and I must go," says the bullhead to
+himself, and he opens his mouth and the liver disappears.
+
+It is not certain that the boy will think of his bait for half an
+hour, but the bullhead is in no hurry. He lays in the mud and proceeds to
+digest the liver. He realizes that his days will not be long in the land,
+or water, more properly speaking, and he argues if he swallows the bait
+and digests it before the boy pulls him out, he will be just so much
+ahead. Finally the boy thinks of his bait, and pulls it out, and the
+bullhead is landed on the bank, and the boy cuts him open to get the hook
+out. Some fish only take the bait gingerly, and are only caught around the
+selvage of the mouth, and they are comparatively easy to dislodge. Not so
+with the bullhead. He says if liver is a good thing you can't have too
+much of it, and it tastes good all the way down. The boy gets down on his
+knees to dissect the bullhead, and get his hook, and it may be that the
+boy swears. It would not be astonishing, though he must feel, when he gets
+his hook out of the hidden recesses of the bullhead, like the minister
+that took up a collection and didn't get a cent, though he expressed his
+thanks at getting his hat back. There is one drawback to the bullhead, and
+that is his horns. We doubt if a boy ever descended into the patent
+insides of a bullhead, to mine for Limerick hooks, that did not, before
+his work was done, run a horn into his vital parts. But the boy seems to
+expect it, and the bullhead enjoys it. We have seen a bullhead lay on the
+bank and become dry, and to all appearances dead to all that was going on,
+and when the boy sat down on him and got a horn in his elbow, and yelled
+murder, the bullhead would grin from ear to ear, and wag his tail as
+though applauding for an _end core_.
+
+The bullhead never complains. We have seen a boy take a dull knife and
+proceed to follow a fish line down a bullhead from his head to the end of
+his subsequent anatomy, and all the time there would be an expression of
+sweet peace on the countenance of the bullhead, as though he
+enjoyed it. If we were preparing a picture representing "Resignation," for
+a chromo to give to subscribers, and wished to represent a scene of
+suffering in which the sufferer was light hearted, and seemed to recognize
+that all was for the best, we should take for the subject a bullhead, with
+a boy searching with a knife for a long lost fish hook.
+
+The bullhead is a fish that has no scales, but in lieu thereof is a fine
+India rubber skin, that is as far ahead of fiddle string material for
+strength and durability as possible. The meat of the bullhead is not as
+choice as that of the mackerel, but it fills up a stomach just as well,
+and the _Sun_ insists that the fish commissioners shall drop the hatching
+of aristocratic fish and give the bullhead a chance. There's millions in
+it.
+
+
+WHY NOT RAISE WOLVES?
+
+You devote a good deal of time and labor to the raising of sheep, and what
+do you get for it. The best sheep cannot lay more than eight pounds of
+wool in a season, and even if you get fifty cents a pound for it, you have
+not got any great bonanza. Now, the state encourages the raising of
+wolves, by offering a bounty of ten dollars for a piece of skin off the
+head of each wolf. It does not cost any more to raise a wolf than it does
+to raise a sheep, and while sheep rarely raise more than two lambs a year,
+a pair of good wolves are liable to raise twenty young ones in the course
+of a year, if it is a good year for wolves. In addition to the
+encouragement offered by the state, many counties give as much more, so
+that one wolf scalp will bring more money than five sheep. You will
+readily see that our wise legislators are offering inducements to you that
+you should be thankful for. You can establish a wolf orchard on any farm,
+and with a pair of good wolves to start on, there is millions in it.
+
+
+THE SUDDEN FIRE-WORKS AT RACINE.
+
+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 enterprizing 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 here 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.
+
+[Illustration: MARTINDALE CLIMBS A POLE.]
+
+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 the
+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 an 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 assembly man, 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.
+
+
+LA CROSSE NEBECUDNEZZER WATER.
+
+It is the great ambition of our life to bring to the notice of the people
+of the world the curative powers of the La Crosse water, that all who may
+be suffering from any disease, however complicated, may be cured, and all
+men may become healthy, and women too, and doctors will have to go out
+harvesting. The La Crosse artesian well, was begun last fall, and
+completed as soon as the contractor found he couldn't make any money at
+it. It was rumored that he struck granite, and in fact several little
+specks of granite were found in the stuff that come from the hole, but it
+is pretty generally believed now that the granite particles got in from
+the top, unknown to the contractor. The water came to within ten feet of
+the surface, and struck. It never would come any further, and the world
+would have remained in ignorance of its curative powers, only for Powers,
+who put in a hydraulic ram, and the blockade was broken, the water now
+flows to the surface, and all is well.
+
+Attention was first called to the curative powers of the water, by a
+singular incident. A teamster whose duty it was to haul stone, was in the
+habit of stopping at the well to water his mules. One of the mules was in
+a sad state. He was blind in one eye, had a spavin, a ringbone, the
+heaves, his liver was torpid, his lungs were badly affected, and his
+friends feared that he was not long for the stone quarry. He had no
+family. Soon after the mule began to drink the water, the driver noticed a
+great change come over him. Previously he had seemed resigned to his fate,
+but latterly he was ambitious. One day while playfully mashing the mule
+over the head with a sled stake, the driver noticed that a new eye had
+grown in the place of the former cavity, and as the mule kicked him with
+more than his accustomed vigor, he noticed that the spavin and ring bone
+were gone, and the former plaintive melody of his voice gave
+place to a bray that resembled the whistle of the Alex. Mitchell. When it
+was known that the mule had been cured, others tried the water, men who
+had never drank it before, until to-day there are thousands who will
+testify to the benefits arising from its use. We could give the names of
+many who have been snatched from the grave--the La Crosse water is a
+regular body snatcher--but we will first give an analysis of the water.
+
+Believing that the water was destined to play a prominent part in solving
+the great question of how to euchre death, we sent a quantity of it to the
+eminent Prof. Alonzo Brown, M.D.V.S. of Jefferson, Wis., with a letter of
+transmittal authorizing him to analyze it thoroughly, and give us the
+result, at our expense. The following is Prof. Brown's analysis:
+
+LABRATORY JEFFERSON LIVERY STABLE,
+August 3, 1877.
+
+Lieut. GEO. W. PECK,
+4th Wis. Cavalry,
+
+Dear Sir:
+
+Yours of July 25th, received. I should have attended to the water before,
+but have had several cases of blind staggers in my barn, which has kept me
+busy. I have examined the water by every process known to science, and
+pronounce it bully. I took it apart at my leisure, and find that it
+contains to one U.S. washtub full, of 741 cubic inches, the following
+stuff:
+
+  Chloride, of Sodium, (common salt).............2 sacks.
+  Chloride of Pilgarlic.....................40,021 grains.
+  Bicarbonate of erysipelas.................11,602   "
+  Bicarbonate of pie plant...................2,071   "
+  Blue pills................................21,011   "
+  Bicarbonate of soda water (vanilla.)......17,201   "
+  Sulphate of Potasalager beer..............61,399   "
+  Bicarbonate corrugated iron...............18,020 grains.
+  Mustang Liniment.............................240   "
+  Boneset and summer savory.................10,210   "
+  Dow's Liver Cure, (6 bottles for $1.).....16,297   "
+  Bromide of Alcock's Porous Plaster........22,222   "
+  Flouride of Pain Killer (for cucumbers,).....055   "
+  Paris green..................................001   "
+  Spruce gum and Vinegar Bitters...............075   "
+
+In submitting this analysis permit me to say that I find traces of mock
+turtle soup, and India Rubber. I consider the La Crosse Nebecudnezzer
+water the most comprehensive water that I have ever analyzed, and I would
+recommend it for any disease that human beings or animals may have.
+
+Very Respectfully,
+
+ALONZO BROWN,
+
+Prof. of Chemistry in Jefferson Livery stable, and late Veterinary Surgeon
+4th Wis. Cavalry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have known Mr. Brown long and well, and his statement in regard to the
+water can be relied upon. Citizens should retain a copy of this analysis
+for future reference.
+
+Mr. E.W. Keyes, of Madison, writing under date of August 1st, says: "The
+La Crosse water you sent me has caused an entire new crop of hair to grow
+upon my head. I had been bald for years, and offered five hundred dollars,
+for any medicine that would cause hair to grow. Enclosed find five hundred
+dollars, and send me more water. I want to try it on Murphey, of the
+Sentinel. I think it would be a good joke on Murphey."
+
+But wait till we get all the letters written from prominent men who have
+been cured.
+
+
+THE INFIDEL AND HIS SILVER MINE.
+
+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 the 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 than hear that some infidel who is around the country calling
+God a pirate and 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 Ingersoll 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 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 appoplectic, 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 knows 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 take 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 biown-up bladder. O,
+good God, don't hurt me so. My neck is all chafed."
+
+And then he will die, and God will continue business at the old stand.
+
+
+THE LEGEND OF THE LAKE.
+
+Every noted place of resort has an Indian legend, and the first thing I
+did after getting my dinner was to look up the legendist. I wanted to hear
+how it was that the Indian had ceased to frequent this spot. So in looking
+for the boss legendist I struck Judge Lamoreaux, of Dodge county, who had
+been herewith a party of friends, Mr. Hayes, and Mr. Van Brunt, with all
+their wives. They had been searching for ferns and legends and they had a
+car load. The Judge had heard of the legend, and he took me one side, and
+with tears in his eyes related to me the horrible story just as he had
+received it from an Indian named O'Flanegan, who sells relics in the shape
+of rye. If I can control my emotion long enough to write it, it will be a
+big thing for history.
+
+[Illustration: HIAWASAMANTHA, THE DUSKY DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST.]
+
+Years ago an Indian chief who lived in a dog tent and caught
+rattlesnakes for a side show, had a daughter, a beautiful maiden, about
+the color and odor of smoked bacon, and she wore a red blanket cut biased,
+and a tilter, under a polonaise made over from her last year's striped
+silk. She was the belliest squaw in the hills, and took the premium at all
+the county fairs, and she could shoot a deer equal to any buck Indian. Her
+name was Hiawasamantha, and she had two lovers, a Frenchman and a young
+Indian. In figuring up the returns there was some doubt as to who was
+elected, so the father of the girl decided to go behind the returns, and
+settle it by a commission. There was an eagle's nest half way up the
+rocks, with young eagles in it, and the old chief said that the one that
+got there first and brought him a young eagle, should have the squaw. The
+Frenchman climbed up the back stairs and got there ahead of the Indian,
+when the young Indian drew from his trousers leg a bar of railroad iron
+and drove it to the hilt in the breast of the Frenchman, not, however,
+till the Frenchman had drawn from his pistol pocket a 300 ton Krupp gun
+and sent a solid shot weighing 280 pounds crashing into the skull of the
+Indian, and both rolled to the bottom of the bluff, dead. Dr. Hall, of
+Baraboo, was called, and he probed for the ball, but could not find it,
+and neither could he get the bar of railroad iron out of the Frenchman,
+and so they were buried on the spot where now stands the Cliff House. The
+squaw looked around for another fellow, but they all had other
+engagements, the excursion train having arrived from La Crosse, and so she
+went up on a crag and said, "Big Injun me," and jumped off and was dashed
+into 1,347 pieces, and the wedding was broke up. Pieces of the squaw can
+now be found among the rocks, petrified, but retaining the odor of the
+ancient tribe. I got a piece of her, evidently a piece broken off her ear,
+which retains its shade perfectly, and will long be a reminder of
+my visit to Devil's Lake. (P.S.--Disreputable parties are selling pieces
+of stuff purporting to be genuine remains of this beauteous maiden, but
+they are base imitations. None genuine unless the trade mark is stamped on
+them.)
+
+
+GEOLOGICAL SURVEY.
+
+The Geological Survey is being prosecuted as well as could be expected
+with the limited means at the hands of the searchers in the bowels of the
+earth. They have already found, I am informed, that the earth on which we
+live, and move, and have a being, is composed largely of dirt. The
+discovery of this fact is alone worth the price of admission. This great
+discovery, which will be of such value to the future historian, has only
+cost the state the insignificant sum of $8,280. Rather than remain in
+ignorance of this astonishing fact, I would willingly pay the money
+myself--out of the public treasury. It is rumored that parties employed by
+the State to dive down into the ground and bring up sand in their claws,
+have discovered symptoms that the world was at one time sick to its
+stomach, and threw up divers and sundry kinds of rocks and things, and
+there is a probability that lead ore may be discovered. This will be
+valuable to make bullets in case of a war with Oshkosh. In peace it is
+always best to prepare for war, and I trust you will lend your countenance
+to the able men who are investigating the Lower Silurian age.
+
+
+FOOLING WITH THE BIBLE.
+
+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.
+
+
+A BLACK BEAR AT ONALASKA.
+
+A black bear was brought into town for sale on Friday, having been killed
+by Tom Rand, near Onalaska. He killed it with a little rifle that didn't
+look big enough to hurt a hen. If bears are so sociable as to come within
+sight of La Crosse to be killed, it will be a good excuse for husbands to
+stay at home nights.
+
+
+ANOTHER DEAD FAILURE.
+
+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 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.
+
+
+THE GLORIOUS FOURTH OF JULY.
+
+On this great day we are accustomed to leave our business to hired men,
+and burn with patriotism, and ginger pop, fill ourselves with patriotic
+ferver, and beer, shout the battle cry of freedom, and go home when the
+day is over with our eye-winkers burned off, and to sleep with a
+consciousness that a great duty has been performed, and that we have got
+bank notes to pay on the morrow. For three hundred and sixty-four days in
+the year our patriotism is corked up and wired down, and all we can do is
+to work, and acquire age and strength. On the 4th of July we cut the wire,
+the cork that holds our patriotism flies out, and we bubble and sparkle
+and steam, and make things howl. We hold in as long as we can, but when we
+get the harness off, and are turned into the pasture, we make a picnic of
+ourselves, with music all along the line.
+
+
+THE USES OF THE PAPER BAG.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: SLIPPERY OYSTERS.]
+
+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 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
+tobacce, 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.
+
+
+THE UNIVERSALIST BATH.
+
+Mr. E.H. Lane is canvassing the city for the Universalist Bath. We don't
+know why it should be called a "Universalist Bath," as it more nearly
+resembles a Baptist Bath, as we remember it. The bath is a queer thing,
+consisting of an India rubber hop sack, fastened to an immense ox bow. The
+ends are placed on to chairs, the water put in, and you get in and
+hippotamus and take a complete bath from Dan to Beersheba in a tea cup
+full of water.
+
+
+KILLING BIG GAME.
+
+The conductors on the St. Paul railroad are most all good sports with a
+shot gun. There is Howard and Clason, and Russell, who never tire of
+talking of the millions of chickens, ducks, wild turkeys and so forth that
+they have killed. They have tried to get Conductor Green interested in
+field sports, but he always said the game was not big enough for him. He
+said he had his opinion men that would surround a little chicken with
+spike tailed dogs, and then kill it and call it sport. What he wanted was
+big game. Nothing less than a bear would do him. Last week the owners of
+the cinnamon bear that was brought down from the Yellowstone, decided to
+have it killed, and some one told them to get Green to kill it, as he was
+an old bear hunter from the Rocky Mountains. Green said he was rusty on
+bears, not having had a tussel with a grizzly in several years, but if
+they couldn't get anybody else to chance the bear he would make hash of
+it. So they went down to the ice house where the bear was. Green said he
+didn't want anybody to go in with him, because they might get hurt. He put
+on Clason's hunting suit, took a carving knife in his teeth and a revolver
+in his hand, and went in and looked the bear in the eye. The bear knew
+Green meant business, and he began to feel around for his ticket. The
+conductor advanced to within eleven feet of the bear when all at once the
+animal sprang at him, growling and showing his teeth. Green's first
+impulse was to pull the bell rope, and order the cuss to get out of the
+ice house, but he saw the bear coming through the air towards him, and
+there was not four hours to lose, so he drew the revolver, took aim at the
+bear's left eye, and pulled. There was a puff of smoke, and the bear fell
+lifeless at his feet. Placing the animal in his game sack, he wiped the
+blood from his knife and said to some men who stood outside, their faces
+ashy pale: "Always shoot bears in the left eye." The men were
+pleased to see him come out alive and they shook him warmly by the hand.
+The other conductors, the shooters, are jealous of Green, and they are
+telling how he killed the bear by going up in the loft of the ice house
+and falling on him, and one conductor says Green shot the bear with a crow
+bar through a knot hole. Another said the bear had all four of his legs
+tied and that a dose of poison was administered through a syringe,
+attached to a pole, while another says that the bear died from fright. All
+these stories are the result of jealousy. The bear was killed just as we
+say, and there are few men that would tackle him--that is, few men aside
+from conductors.
+
+
+THE MULE NOT THE EAGLE.
+
+The bird that should have been selected as the emblem of our country, the
+bird of patience, forbearance, perseverance, and the bird of terror when
+aroused, is the mule. There is no bird that combines more virtues to the
+square foot than the mule. With the mule emblazoned on our banners, we
+should be a terror to every foe. We are a nation of uncomplaining hard
+workers. We mean to do the fair thing by everybody. We plod along, doing
+as we would be done by. So does the mule. As a nation we occasionally
+stick our ears forward, and fan flies off of our forehead. So does the
+mule. We allow parties to get on and ride as long as they behave
+themselves. So do does the mule. But when any nation sticks spurs in our
+flanks, and tickles our heels with a straw, we come down stiff-legged in
+front, our ears look to the beautiful beyond, our voice is cut loose, and
+is still for war, and our subsequent end plays the snare drum on anything
+that gets in reach of us, and strikes terror to the hearts of all tyrants.
+So does the mule.
+
+
+OUR BLUE-COATED DOG POISONERS.
+
+"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 Sheenan 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 door-keeper 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 go around assassinating dogs," we as
+people, would think more of them, and perhaps build them a decent station
+house to rest in.
+
+
+A HOT BOX AT A PICNIC.
+
+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 are 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, and 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, 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.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD BACK NUMBER GIRL.]
+
+
+CAMP MEETINGS IN THE DARK OF THE MOON.
+
+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.
+
+
+PALACE CATTLE CARS.
+
+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 Oleomargarine, 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 near 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, "Meet me in
+the slaughter house 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.
+
+
+GEORGE WASHINGTON.
+
+He could not tell a lie, George couldn't. Washington, it is probable,
+never knew what it was to stow away a schooner of beer, and history makes
+no mention that he ever, on any pretext, eat limberger cheese. At least no
+mention was made of it in his farewell address. He never was President of
+a savings bank. Washington never lectured. He never edited a newspaper. He
+could not tell a lie at the rates editors charge. No he was a good man,
+with none of the small vices that are so prevalent these days.
+
+
+BROKE UP A PRAYER MEETING.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE LADY OF THE SEVENTH WARD.]
+
+When we told her that a piece of beef-steak 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 tiptoe, to see if she was
+asleep. She found the girl with all her dolls on the floor having a dolls'
+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 the 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 no one 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 the 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.
+
+
+THE DOG LAW.
+
+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.
+
+
+LUNCH ON THE CARS.
+
+There is nothing that so gives a man away as to open a satchel and take
+out a lunch. I have been riding on the cars and have made the acquaintance
+of people who would listen to my stories, and take in every word as gospel
+truth. They would seem to hang on my words with pleasure, and be
+apparently glad they had become acquainted with one who combined so many
+graces of mind and person, and they would gather around so as not to miss
+a single lie that I might tell. And yet when I took a paper parcel out of
+my valise and opened up a lunch, consisting of bread and onions, and
+sausage and sweitzer cheese, they would draw coldly away from me and sit
+in the farther part of the car, and appear never to have known me.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14815 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14815 ***</div>
+<h1 class="pg">The Project Gutenberg eBook, Peck's Compendium of Fun, by George W. Peck</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>PECK&rsquo;S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.</h1>
+<h2>COMPRISING THE CHOICEST GEMS OF WIT, HUMOR, SARCASM AND
+PATHOS.</h2>
+<h3><em>Of America&rsquo;s Favorite Humorist</em>,</h3>
+<h2>GEORGE W. PECK,</h2>
+<h3>Editor of &ldquo;PECK&rsquo;S SUN&rdquo; Milwaukee.</h3>
+<h3><em>ILLUSTRATED BY EMINENT ARTISTS.</em></h3>
+<hr class="short" />
+<h4>CHICAGO:</h4>
+<h4>1886.</h4>
+<hr />
+<h3><a id="Contents" name="Contents">CONTENTS.</a></h3>
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#About_Hell">About Hell</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Another_Dead_Failure">Another Dead Failure</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Anna_Dickinson">Anna Dickinson</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Bald-headed_Man_Most_Crazy">A Bald-headed Man Most
+Crazy</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Case_of_Paralysis">A Case of Paralysis</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Doctor_of_Laws">A Doctor of Laws</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Hot_Box_at_a_Picnic">A Hot Box at a Picnic</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Lively_Train_Load">A Lively Train Load</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Mad_Minister">A Mad Minister</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Musical_Critique">A Musical Critique</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Peck_at_the_Cheese">A Peck at the Cheese</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Plea_for_the_Bull_Head">A Plea for the Bull
+Head</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Sewing_Machine_Given_to_the_Boss_Girl">A Sewing
+Machine Given to the Boss Girl</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Safe_Investment">A Safe Investment</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Tony_Slaughter-House">A Tony
+Slaughter-House</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Trying_Situation">A Trying Situation</a></li>
+<li><a href="#An_Arm_That_is_not_Reliable">An Arm That is not
+Reliable</a></li>
+<li><a href="#An_Editor_Burglarized">An Editor Burglarized</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Banks_and_Banking">Banks and Banking</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Bounced_from_Church_for_Dancing">Bounced from Church
+for Dancing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Boys_and_Circuses">Boys and Circuses</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Boys_will_be_Boys">Boys will be Boys</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Broke_up_a_Prayer_Meeting">Broke up a Prayer
+Meeting</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Buying_a_Stone_Crusher">Buying a Stone
+Crusher</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Cash">&ldquo;Cash!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Camp_Meetings_in_the_Dark_of_the_Moon">Camp Meetings
+in the Dark of the Moon</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Church_Keno">Church Keno</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Colored_Concert_Troupes">Colored Concert
+Troupes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Dogs_and_Human_Beings">Dogs and Human Beings</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Effects_of_Mineral_Water">Effects of Mineral
+Water</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Expedition_in_Search_of_a_Doughnut">Expedition in
+Search of a Doughnut</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Failure_of_a_Solid_Institution">Failure of a Solid
+Institution</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Fishing_for_Pieces_of_Women">Fishing for Pieces of
+Women</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Fooling_with_the_Bible">Fooling with the
+Bible</a></li>
+<li><a href="#George_Washington">George Washington</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Granite_Head_Cheese">Granite Head Cheese</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Internal_Improvements">Internal Improvements</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Joke_on_the_Hat">Joke on the Hat</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Killing_Big_Game">Killing Big Game</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Large_Mouths_are_Fashionable">Large Mouths are
+Fashionable</a></li>
+<li><a href="#La_Crosse_Nebecudnezzer_Water">La Crosse
+Nebecudnezzer Water</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Laying_up_Apples_in_Heaven">Laying up Apples in
+Heaven</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Mr_Pecks_Sunday_Lecture">Mr. Peck&rsquo;s Sunday
+Lecture</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Nearly_Broke_up_the_Ball">Nearly Broke up the
+Ball</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Our_Blue-Coated_Dog-Poisoners">Our Blue-Coated
+Dog-Poisoners</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Our_Christian_Neighbors_Have_Gone">Our Christian
+Neighbors Have Gone</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Palace_Cattle_Cars">Palace Cattle Cars</a></li>
+<li>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#He_Becomes_a_Druggist">He Becomes a Druggist</a></li>
+<li><a href="#He_is_too_Healthy">He is too Healthy</a></li>
+<li><a href="#He_Quits_the_Drug_Business">He Quits the Drug
+Business</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_an_Inventor">His Pa an Inventor</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Dissected">His Pa Dissected</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Goes_Calling">His Pa Goes Calling</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Goes_Skating">His Pa Goes Skating</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Gets_Boxed">His Pa Gets Boxed</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Gets_Mad">His Pa Gets Mad</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Joins_a_Temperance_Society">His Pa Joins a
+Temperance Society</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Jokes_Him">His Pa Jokes Him</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_is_Discouraged">His Pa is Discouraged</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Kills_Him">His Pa Kills Him</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Mortified">His Pa Mortified</a></li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li><a href="#Religion_and_Fish">Religion and Fish</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Rope_Ladders">Rope Ladders</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Sardineindianapolis">Sardineindianapolis</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Seven_Year_Old_Horses">Seven Year Old Horses</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Summer_Resorting">Summer Resorting</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Take_Your_Latin_Straight">Take Your Latin
+Straight</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Terror_in_Church">Terror in Church</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Bob-Tailed_Badger">The Bob-Tailed Badger</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Boy_and_the_Goat">The Boy and the Goat</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Difference">The Difference</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Difference_in_Horses">The Difference in
+Horses</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Fire_New_Years_Day">The Fire New Year&rsquo;s
+Day</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Giddy_Girls_Quarrel">The Giddy Girl&rsquo;s
+Quarrel</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Gospel_Car">The Gospel Car</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Infidel_and_His_Silver_Mine">The Infidel and His
+Silver Mine</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Knight_and_the_Bridal_Chamber">The Knight and the
+Bridal Chamber</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Legend_of_the_Lake">The Legend of the
+Lake</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Man_from_Dubuque">The Man from Dubuque</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Mistake_About_It">The Mistake About It</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Naughty_But_Nice_Church_Choir">The Naughty But
+Nice Church Choir</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_New_Coal_Stove">The New Coal Stove</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Sudden_Fire-Works_at_Racine">The Sudden
+Fire-Works at Racine</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Uses_of_the_Paper_Bag">The Uses of the Paper
+Bag</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Waters_of_La_Crosse">The Waters of La
+Crosse</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Way_to_Name_Children">The Way to Name
+Children</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Way_Women_Boss_a_Pillow">The Way Women Boss a
+Pillow</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Woodcock">The Woodcock</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Those_Bold_Bad_Drummers">Those Bold Bad
+Drummers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Those_Step_Ladders">Those Step Ladders!</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Tragedy_on_the_Stage">Tragedy on the Stage</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Trains_Without_Conductors">Trains Without
+Conductors</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Try_to_Save_Two_Shillings">Try to Save Two
+Shillings</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Unscrewing_the_Top_of_a_Fruit_Jar">Unscrewing the Top
+of a Fruit Jar</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Why_the_Fever_Didnt_Spread">Why the Fever
+Did&rsquo;nt Spread</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Woman-Dozing_a_Democrat">Woman-Dozing a
+Democrat</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Wonders_of_the_Stage">Wonders of the Stage</a></li>
+</ul>
+<h3>ELECTRIC FLASHES.</h3>
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#Anna_Dickinson_as_Mazeppa">Anna Dickinson as
+&ldquo;Mazeppa&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Black_Bear_at_Onalaska">A Black Bear at
+Onalaska</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Dead_Sure_Thing">A Dead Sure Thing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Fashion_Item">A Fashion Item</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Good_Land_Enough">A Good Land Enough</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Lecturer_Should_Know_What_He_Talks_About">A
+Lecturer Should Know What He Talks About</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Loan_Exhibition">A Loan Exhibition</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_New_Sparking_Scheme">A New Sparking Scheme</a></li>
+<li><a href="#An_Odorous_Bohemian">An Odorous Bohemian</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Base_Ingratitude">Base Ingratitude</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Buttermilk_Bibbers">Buttermilk Bibbers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Cats_on_the_Fence">Cats on the Fence</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Christmas_Trees">Christmas Trees</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Col_Ingersoll_Praying">Col. Ingersoll
+Praying</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Comforting_Compensations">Comforting
+Compensations</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Convenient_Currency">Convenient Currency</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Crushing_Nihilism">Crushing Nihilism</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Enterprising_Chicago">Enterprising Chicago!</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Fish_Hatching_in_Wisconsin">Fish Hatching in
+Wisconsin</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Frozen_Ears">Frozen Ears</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Gathered_Waists">Gathered Waists!</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Geological_Survey">Geological Survey</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Give_us_War">Give us War</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Good_Templars_on_Ice">Good Templars on Ice</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Hard_on_Fond_Du_Lac">Hard on Fond Du Lac</a></li>
+<li><a href="#He_Wouldnt_Have_His_Father_Called_Names">He
+Would&rsquo;nt Have His Father Called Names</a></li>
+<li><a href="#How_Farmers_May_Get_Rich">How Farmers May Get
+Rich</a></li>
+<li><a href="#How_Sharper_Than_a_Hounds_Tooth">&ldquo;How Sharper
+Than a Hound&rsquo;s Tooth!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#How_to_Invest_a_Thousand_Dollars">How to Invest a
+Thousand Dollars</a></li>
+<li><a href="#How_to_Reach_Young_Men">How to Reach Young
+Men</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Hunting_Dogs">Hunting Dogs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Insecure_Abodes">Insecure Abodes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Lunch_on_the_Cars">Lunch on the Cars</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Mattie_Mashes_Minnesota">Mattie Mashes
+Minnesota</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Merrie_Christmas">Merrie Christmas</a></li>
+<li><a href="#More_Dangerous_Than_Kerosene">More Dangerous Than
+Kerosene</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Mrs_Langtry">Mrs. Langtry</a></li>
+<li><a href="#One_of_Beechers_Converts">One of Beecher&rsquo;s
+Converts</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Preparing_for_War">Preparing for War</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Raising_Elephants">Raising Elephants</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Registry_of_Electors">Registry of Electors</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Selling_Clams">Selling Clams</a></li>
+<li><a href="#She_was_no_Gentleman">She was no Gentleman</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Southern_Honaw">Southern &ldquo;Honaw&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Spurious_Tripe">Spurious Tripe</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Sure_of_Heaven">Sure of Heaven</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Supreme_Court_Judges_and_US_Senators">Supreme Court
+Judges and U.S. Senators</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Ten_Days_in_Love">Ten Days in Love</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Advent_Preacher_and_the_Balloon">The Advent
+Preacher and the Balloon</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Day_We_Reached_Canada">The Day We Reached
+Canada</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Dog_Law">The Dog Law</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Glorious_Fourth_of_July">The Glorious Fourth of
+July</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Mule_not_the_Eagle">The Mule not the
+Eagle</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Old_Sweet_Songs">The Old Sweet Songs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Political_Outlook">The Political Outlook</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Power_of_Eloquence">The Power of
+Eloquence</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Thirsty_Gopher">The Thirsty Gopher</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Universalist_Bath">The Universalist Bath</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Universal_Object">The Universal Object</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Wicked_Mon_Kee">The Wicked Mon Kee</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Wrong_Corpse">The Wrong Corpse</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Three_Inches_of_Leg">Three Inches of Leg</a></li>
+<li><a href="#To_What_Vile_Uses_May_We_Come">To What Vile Uses May
+We Come</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Too_Particular_by_Half">Too Particular by
+Half</a></li>
+<li><a href="#What_the_Country_Needs">What the Country
+Needs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#What_the_Democrats_Will_Do">What the Democrats Will
+Do</a></li>
+<li><a href="#We_Will_Celebrate">We Will Celebrate</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Why_not_Raise_Wolves">Why not Raise Wolves?</a></li>
+</ul>
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS.</h3>
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#img050">A Scene in Paradise</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img217">&ldquo;Ah, my Friends, Look Down Into That
+Burning Lake!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img234">An Intrusive Nigger</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img202">At the Telephone</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img185">Behind the Scenes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img114">Bossing the Pillow</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img167">&ldquo;Do not Pass me by!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img090">Drummers Trying to Pray</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img209">&ldquo;Get Thee to a Nunnery!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img079">&ldquo;Happy New Year, Mum!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img248">Hiawasamantha, the Dusky Daughter of the
+Golden West</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img084">&ldquo;I Want to be an Angel&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img087">It Looked Like an old Dripping Pan</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img159">&ldquo;It is F-f-four Sizes too
+Big!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img192">John McCullough Killing a Texas
+Steer</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img045">&ldquo;Just as I am&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img151">&ldquo;Keno!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img240">Martindale Climbs a Pole</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img068">&ldquo;Me Long Lost Duke!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img228">Mystery of a Woman&rsquo;s Clothes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img021">New Way of Taking Seidlitz Powders</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img175">No More Apples for the Minister</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img061">&ldquo;Oh, That Will be all
+Right&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img057">&ldquo;Pa Grabbed Her by the
+Polonaise&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img105">&ldquo;Sard,&rdquo; and the Greek
+Slave</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img017">Sacred Memories</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img256">Slippery Oysters</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img033">Swallow-Tails on the Climb</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img268">The Lady of the Seventh Ward</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img263">The Old Back Number Girl</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img027">The Old Man Tries His Hand</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img142">The Resorter</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img041">The Rotund Urso</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img121">The Sexton in all His Glory</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img126">The Startled Cat</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img132">The Tenor Arrayed in all His Glory</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img222">The Wandering Oyster</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img071">&ldquo;Thereby Hangs a Tail.&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img108">&ldquo;This is too Allfired
+Much!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img037">&ldquo;Too Late, Pa, I Die at the Hand of an
+Assassin!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img010">Turning the Proper Dingus</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img064">&ldquo;Yell, or go Down!&rdquo;</a></li>
+</ul>
+<hr />
+<h2 style="padding-top:3em;">PECK&rsquo;S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.</h2>
+<h3><a id="The_New_Coal_Stove" name="The_New_Coal_Stove">THE NEW
+COAL STOVE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>We never had a coal stove around the house until last Saturday.
+Have always used pine slabs and pieces of our neighbor&rsquo;s
+fence. They burn well, too, but the fence got all burned up, and
+the neighbor said he wouldn&rsquo;t build a new one, so we went
+down to Jones&rsquo; and got a coal stove.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s house, and people all round
+the neighborhood put on linen clothes. And we couldn&rsquo;t stop
+the confounded thing.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;clock the
+whole family had to get up and sit on the fence.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/010.png"><img src=
+"images/010.png" alt=
+"A man wearing a blanket covered in flames reaches for a stove."
+id="img010" name="img010" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>TURNING THE PROPER DINGUS.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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 got to learn how to engineer it, or you may get
+roasted.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_is_Discouraged" name="His_Pa_is_Discouraged">HIS
+PA IS DISCOURAGED.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, you leave here mighty quick,&rdquo; said the grocery
+man to the bad boy, as he came in, with his arm in a sling, and
+backed up against the stove to get warm. &ldquo;Everything has gone
+wrong since you got to coming here, and I think you are a regular
+Jonah. I find sand in my sugar, kerosene in the butter, the codfish
+is all picked off, and there is something wrong every time you come
+here. Now you leave.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I aint no Joner,&rdquo; said the boy as he wiped his nose
+on his coat sleeve, and reached into a barrel for a snow apple.
+&ldquo;I never swallered no whale. Say, do you believe that story
+about Joner being in the whale&rsquo;s belly, all night? I
+don&rsquo;t. The minister was telling about it at Sunday school
+last Sunday, and asked me what I thought Joner was doing while he
+was in there, and I told him I interpreted the story this way, that
+the whale was fixed up inside with upper and lower berths, like a
+sleeping car, and Joner had a lower berth, and the porter made up
+the berth as soon as Joner came in with his satchel, and Joner
+pulled off his boots and gave them to the porter to black, and put
+his watch under the pillow and turned in. The boys in Sunday school
+all laffed, and the minister said I was a bigger fool than Pa was,
+and that was useless. If you go back on me, now, I won&rsquo;t have
+a friend, except my chum and a dog, and I swear, by my halidom,
+that I never put no sand in your sugar, or kerosene in your butter.
+I admit the picking off of the codfish, but you can charge it to
+Pa, the same as you did the eggs that I pushed my chum over into
+last summer, though I thought you did wrong in charging Christmas
+prices for dog days eggs. When my chum&rsquo;s Ma scraped his pants
+she said there was not an egg represented on there that was less
+than two years old. The Sunday school folks have all gone back on
+me, since I put kyan pepper on the stove, when they were singing
+&lsquo;Little Drops of Water,&rsquo; and they all had to go out
+doors and air themselves, but I didn&rsquo;t mean to let the pepper
+drop on the stove. I was just holding it over the stove to warm it,
+when my chum hit the funny bone of my elbow. Pa says I am a terror
+to cats. Every time Pa says anything, it gives me a new idea. I
+tell you Pa has got a great brain, but sometimes he don&rsquo;t
+have it with him. When he said I was a terror to cats I thought
+what fun there is in cats, and me and my chum went to stealing cats
+right off, and before night we had eleven cats caged. We had one in
+a canary bird cage, three in Pa&rsquo;s old hat boxes, three in
+Ma&rsquo;s band box, four in valises, two in a trunk, and the rest
+in a closet up stairs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That night Pa said he wanted me to stay home because the
+committee that is going to get up a noyster supper in the church
+was going to meet at our house, and they might want to send me on
+errands. I asked him if my chum couldn&rsquo;t stay too,
+&rsquo;cause he is the healthiest infant to run after errands that
+ever was, and Pa said he could stay, but we must remember that
+there musn&rsquo;t be no monkey business going on. I told him there
+shouldn&rsquo;t be no monkey business, but I didn&rsquo;t promise
+nothing about cats. Well, sir, you&rsquo;d a dide. The committee
+was in the library by the back stairs, and me and my chum got the
+cat boxes all together, at the top of the stairs, and we took them
+all out and put them in a clothes basket, and just as the minister
+was speaking, and telling what a great good was done by these
+oyster sociables, in bringing the young people together, and taking
+their minds from the wickedness of the world, and turning their
+thoughts into different channels, one of the old tom cats in the
+basket gave a &lsquo;purmeow&rsquo; that sounded like the wail of a
+lost soul, or a challenge to battle. I told my chum that we
+couldn&rsquo;t hold the bread-board over the clothes basket much
+longer, when two or three cats began to yowl, and the minister
+stopped talking and Pa told Ma to open the stair door and tell the
+hired girl to see what was the matter up there. She thought our cat
+had got shut up in the storm door, and she opened the stair door to
+yell to the girl, and then I pushed the clothes basket, cats and
+all down the back stairs. Well, sir, I suppose no committee for a
+noyster supper, was ever more astonished. I heard Ma fall over a
+willow rocking chair, and say, &lsquo;scat,&rsquo; and I heard Pa
+say, &lsquo;well. I&rsquo;m dam&rsquo;d,&rsquo; and a girl that
+sings in the choir say, &lsquo;Heavens, I am stabbed,&rsquo; then
+my chum and me ran to the front of the house and come down the
+front stairs looking as innocent as could be, and we went in the
+library, and I was just going to tell Pa if there was any errands
+he wanted run my chum and me was just aching to run them, when a
+yellow cat without any tail was walking over the minister, and Pa
+was throwing a hassock at two cats that were clawing each other
+under the piano, and Ma was trying to get her frizzes back on her
+head, and the choir girl was standing on the lounge with her dress
+pulled up, trying to scare cats with her striped stockings, and the
+minister was holding his hands up, and I guess he was asking a
+blessing on the cats, and my chum opened the front door and all the
+cats went out. Pa and Ma looked at me, and I said it wasn&rsquo;t
+me, and the minister wanted to know how so much cat hair got on my
+coat and vest, and I said a cat met me in the hall and kicked me,
+and Ma cried, and Pa said &lsquo;that boy beats hell,&rsquo; and
+the minister said, I would be all right if I had been properly
+brought up, and then Ma was mad, and the committee broke up. Well,
+to tell the honest truth Pa basted me, and yanked me around until I
+had to have my arm in a sling, but what&rsquo;s the use of making
+such a fuss about a few cats. Ma said she never wanted to have my
+company again, &rsquo;cause I spoiled everything. But I got even
+with Pa for basting me, this morning, and I dassent go home. You
+see Ma has got a great big bath sponge as big as a chair cushion,
+and this morning I took the sponge and filled it with warm water,
+and took the feather cushion out of the chair Pa sits in at the
+table, and put the sponge in its place, and covered it over with
+the cushion cover, and when we all got set down to the table Pa
+came in and sat down on it to ask a blessing. He started in by
+closing his eyes and placing his hands up in front of him like the
+letter V, and then he began to ask that the food we were about to
+partake off be blessed, and then he was going on to ask that all of
+us be made to see the error of our ways, when he began to hitch
+around, and he opened one eye and looked at me, and I looked as
+pious as a boy can look when he knows the pancakes are getting
+cold, and Pa he kind of sighed and said &lsquo;Amen&rsquo; sort of
+snappish, and he got up and told Ma he didn&rsquo;t feel well, and
+she would have to take his place and pass around the sassidge and
+potatoes, and he looked kind of scart and went out with his hand on
+his pistol pocket, as though he would like to shoot, and Ma she got
+up and went around and sat in Pa&rsquo;s chair. The sponge
+didn&rsquo;t hold more than half a pail full of water, and I
+didn&rsquo;t want to play no joke on Ma, cause the cats nearly
+broke her up, but she sat down and was just going to help me, when
+she rung the bell and called the hired girl, and said she felt as
+though her neuralgia was coming on, and she would go to her room,
+and told the girl to sit down and help Hennery. The girl sat down
+and poured me out some coffee, and then she said, &lsquo;Howly
+Saint Patrick, but I blave those pancakes are burning,&rsquo; and
+she went out in the kitchen. I drank my coffee, and then took the
+big sponge out of the chair and put the cushion in the place of it,
+and then I put the sponge in the bath room, and I went up to Pa and
+Ma&rsquo;s room, and asked them if I should go after the doctor,
+and Pa had changed his clothes and got on his Sunday pants, and he
+said, &lsquo;never mind the doctor, I guess we will pull
+through,&rsquo; and for me to get out and go to the devil, and I
+came over here. Say, there is no harm in a little warm water, is
+there? Well, I&rsquo;d like to know what Pa and Ma and the hired
+girl thought. I am the only real healthy one there is in our
+family.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Three_Inches_of_Leg" name="Three_Inches_of_Leg">THREE
+INCHES OF LEG.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Blanche Williams, of Philadelphia, who met with an accident at
+Fairmount Water-works, by which one leg was broken, and rendered
+three inches shorter than the rest of her legs, has recovered
+$10,000 damages. It would seem, to the student of nature, to be a
+pretty good price for three inches of ordinary leg, but then some
+people will make such a fuss.</p>
+<h3><a id="More_Dangerous_Than_Kerosene" name=
+"More_Dangerous_Than_Kerosene">MORE DANGEROUS THAN
+KEROSENE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The regular weekly murder is reported from Peshtigo. Two men
+named Glass and Penrue, got to quarreling about a girl, in a hay
+loft, over a barn. Glass stabbed Penrue quite a number of times and
+he died. There is nothing much more dangerous, unless it is
+kerosene, than two men and a girl, in a hay loft quarreling.</p>
+<h3><a id="Ten_Days_in_Love" name="Ten_Days_in_Love">TEN DAYS IN
+LOVE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There is a fearfully harrowing story going the rounds of the
+papers headed &ldquo;Ten Days in Love.&rdquo; It must have been
+dreadful, with no Sunday, no day of rest, no holiday, just nothing
+but love, for ten long days. By the way, did the person live?</p>
+<h3><a id="Boys_will_be_Boys" name="Boys_will_be_Boys">BOYS WILL BE
+BOYS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 <em>The Sun</em> man, who was present,
+disguised as a preacher, came to the conclusion that ministers were
+rather human than otherwise when they are young.</p>
+<p>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:
+&ldquo;Jim, do you remember the time we carried the cow and calf up
+into the recitation room?&rdquo; For a moment &ldquo;Jim&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;You bet your life I remember it. I have got a
+scar on my shin now where that d&mdash;blessed cow hooked
+me,&rdquo; and he began to roll up his trouser leg to show the
+scar. They told him they would take his word, and he pulled down
+his pants and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you see I was detailed to attend to the calf, and I
+carried the calf up stairs, assisted by Bill Smith&mdash;who is
+preaching in Chicago; got a soft thing&mdash;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 horseflesh or of
+Bill, and if he don&rsquo;t put on an old driving coat and go out
+on the road occasionally and catch on for a race with some
+wordly-minded man, then I am another. You hear me&mdash;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&rsquo;t get much of a
+breeze the next morning, did we, when we had to clean out the
+recitation room?&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/017.png"><img src=
+"images/017.png" alt="A group of men smoking." id="img017" name=
+"img017" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>SACRED MEMORIES</p>
+</div>
+<p>A solemn-looking minister, with red hair, who was present, and
+whose eyes twinkled some through the smoke, said to another:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Charlie, you remember you were completely gone on the
+professor&rsquo;s niece who was visiting there from Poughkeepsie?
+What become of her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Charlie put his feet on the table, struck a match on his
+trousers, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I wasn&rsquo;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&mdash;just the color of
+yours, Hank&mdash;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&rsquo;am, as she would if she had
+married me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Boys, do you remember the time we stole that three-seated
+wagon and went out across the marsh to Kingsley&rsquo;s farm, after
+watermelons?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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. &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Then the small brunette minister asked if he was not entitled to
+some credit for blacking the farmer&rsquo;s eyes. Says he:
+&ldquo;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 &lsquo;one, two, three&rsquo; about the nose, with my
+blessing, and he let go that horse and took his dog back to the
+house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; says the red haired minister, &ldquo;those
+melons were green, anyway, but it was the fun of stealing them that
+we were after.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At this point the door opened and the host entered, and, pushing
+the smoke away with his hands, he said: &ldquo;Well, gentlemen, you
+are enjoying yourselves?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="He_Becomes_a_Druggist" name="He_Becomes_a_Druggist">HE
+BECOMES A DRUGGIST.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whew! What is that smells so about this store? It seems
+as though everything had turned frowy,&rdquo; said the grocery man
+to his clerk in the presence of the bad boy, who was standing with
+his back to the stove, his coat-tails parted with his hands, and a
+cigarette in his mouth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;May be it is me that smells frowy,&rdquo; said the boy as
+he put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and spit at the
+keyhole in the door. &ldquo;I have gone into business.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By thunder, I believe it is you,&rdquo; said the grocery
+man, as he went up to the boy and snuffed a couple of times and
+then held his hand to his nose. &ldquo;The board of health will
+kerosene you if they ever smell that smell, and send you to the
+glue factory. What business have you gone into to make you smell so
+rank?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you see Pa began to think it was time I learned a
+trade, or a profession, and he saw a sign in a drug store window
+&lsquo;boy wanted,&rsquo; and as he had a boy he didn&rsquo;t want,
+he went to the druggist and got a job for me. This smell on me will
+go off in a few weeks. You know I wanted to try all the perfumery
+in the store, and after I had got about forty different extracts on
+my clothes, another boy that worked there he fixed up a bottle of
+benzine and assafety and brimstone, and a whole lot of other horrid
+stuff, and labeled it &lsquo;rose geranium,&rsquo; and I guess I
+just wallered in it. It <em>is</em> awful, aint it? It kerflummixed
+Ma when I went into the dining-room the first night that I got home
+from the store, and broke Pa all up. He said I reminded him of the
+time they had a litter of skunks under the barn. The air seemed
+fixed around where I am, and everybody seems to know who fixed it.
+A girl came into the store yesterday to buy a satchet, and there
+wasn&rsquo;t anybody there but me, and I didn&rsquo;t know what it
+was, and I took down everything in the store pretty near before I
+found it, and then I wouldn&rsquo;t have found it only the
+proprietor came in. The girl asked the proprietor if there
+wasn&rsquo;t a good deal of sewer gas in the store, and he told me
+to go out and shake myself. I think the girl was mad at me because
+I got a nursing bottle out of the show case with a rubber muzzle,
+and asked her if that was what she wanted. Well, she told me a
+sachet was something for the stummick, and I thought a nursing
+bottle was the nearest thing to it.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/021.png"><img src=
+"images/021.png" alt="A man spits something while a clerk watches."
+id="img021" name="img021" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>NEW WAY OF TAKING SEIDLITZ POWDERS</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;I should think you would drive all the customers away
+from the store,&rdquo; said the groceryman as he opened the door to
+let the fresh air in.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know but I will, but I am hired for a month
+on trial, and I shall stay. You see, I sha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t practice
+on anybody but Pa for a spell. I made up my mind to that when I
+gave a woman some salts instead of powdered borax, and she came
+back mad. Pa seems to want to encourage me, and is willing to take
+anything that I ask him to. He had a sore throat and wanted
+something for it, and the boss drugger told me to put some tannin
+and chlorate of potash in a mortar and grind it, and I let Pa pound
+it with the mortar, and while he was pounding I dropped in a couple
+of drops of sulphuric acid, and it exploded and blowed Pa&rsquo;s
+hat clear across the store, and Pa was whiter than a sheet. He said
+he guessed his throat was all right, and he wouldn&rsquo;t come
+near me again that day. The next day Pa came in, and I was laying
+for him. I took a white seidletz powder and a blue one, and
+dissolved them in separate glasses, and when Pa came in I asked him
+if he didn&rsquo;t want some lemonade, and he said he did, and I
+gave him the sour one and he drank it. He said it was too sour, and
+then I gave him the other glass that looked like water, to take the
+taste out of his mouth, and he drank it. Well, sir, when those two
+powders got together in Pa&rsquo;s stummick, and began to siz and
+steam and foam, Pa pretty near choked to death, and the suds came
+out of his nostrils, and his eyes stuck out, and as soon as he
+could get his breath he yelled &lsquo;fire,&rsquo; and said he was
+poisoned, and called for a doctor, but I thought as long as we had
+a doctor right in the family there was no use of hiring one, so I
+got a stomach pump and would have baled him out in no time, only
+the proprietor came in and told me to go and wash some bottles, and
+he gave Pa a drink of brandy, and Pa said he felt better. Pa has
+learned where we keep the liquor, and he comes in two or three
+times a day with a pain in his stomach. They play awful mean tricks
+on a boy in a drug store. The first day they put a chunk of
+something blue into a mortar, and told me to pulverize it and then
+make it up into two grain pills. Well, sir, I pounded that chunk
+all the forenoon, and it never pulverized at all, and the boss told
+me to hurry up as the woman was waiting for the pills, and I mauled
+it till I was nearly dead, and when it was time to go to supper the
+boss came and looked in the mortar, and took out the chunk and
+said, &lsquo;You dum fool, you have been pounding all day on a
+chunk of India rubber, instead of blue mass!&rsquo; Well, how did I
+know? But I will get even with them if I stay there long enough,
+and don&rsquo;t you forget it. If you have a prescription you want
+filled you can come down to the store and I will put it up for you
+myself, and then you will be sure to get what you pay
+for.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he cut off a piece
+of limberg cheese and put it on the stove to purify the air in the
+room, &ldquo;I should laugh to see myself taking any medicine you
+put up. You will kill some one yet, by giving them poison instead
+of quinine. But what has your Pa got his nose tied up for? He looks
+as though he had had a fight.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, that was from my treatment. He had a wart on his nose.
+You know that wart. You remember how the minister told him if other
+peoples&rsquo; business had a button hole in it, Pa could button
+the wart in the button-hole, as he always had his nose there. Well,
+I told Pa I could cure that wart with caustic, and he said he would
+give five dollars if I could cure it, so I took a stick of caustic
+and burned the wart off, but I guess I burned down into the nose a
+little, for it swelled up as big as a lobster. Pa says he would
+rather have a whole nest of warts than such a nose, but it will be
+all right in a year or two.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Loan_Exhibition" name="A_Loan_Exhibition">A LOAN
+EXHIBITION.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is a loan exhibition?&rdquo; asks a correspondent.
+Well, when a fellow borrows ten dollars of you, to be paid next
+Saturday, and he lets it run a year and a half, and don&rsquo;t pay
+it, and he meets you on the street and asks for five dollars more,
+and you turn him around and kick him right before the crowd, that
+is a loan exhibition.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Wicked_Mon_Kee" name="The_Wicked_Mon_Kee">THE WICKED
+MON KEE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Mon Kee, a Chinaman that was converted to regular United States
+religious doctrines, and opened a mission in New York for the
+purpose of converting more heathens and shethens, has been arrested
+for stealing. This is a terrible blow, and Mon Kee was a terrible
+plower. A few weeks since the religious papers made more blow over
+the coming into the fold of that Chinaman than they did over all
+the editors in the country, who went not astray. Now they have shut
+up their yawp about him, since he has proved to be no better than
+Talmage or Beecher.</p>
+<h3><a id="Unscrewing_the_Top_of_a_Fruit_Jar" name=
+"Unscrewing_the_Top_of_a_Fruit_Jar">UNSCREWING THE TOP OF A FRUIT
+JAR.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 away 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, pulls off his coat and takes the jar.</p>
+<p>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 when strategy, brain, and muscle are required, then they
+can&rsquo;t get along without a man. He tries to unscrew the cover,
+and his thumb slips off and knocks the skin off the knuckle. He
+breathes a silent prayer and calls for the kerosene can, and pours
+a little oil into the crevice, and lets it soak, and then he tries
+again, and swears audibly.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/027.png"><img src=
+"images/027.png" alt="A man tries to open a jar." id="img027" name=
+"img027" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>THE OLD MAN TRIES HIS HAND.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>All come to the table smiling, as though nothing had happened,
+and the house-wife don&rsquo;t allow any of the family to have any
+sauce for fear they will get broken glass into their stomachs, but
+the &ldquo;company&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;don&rsquo;t want
+no strawberries pickled in kerosene.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="He_Wouldnt_Have_His_Father_Called_Names" name=
+"He_Wouldnt_Have_His_Father_Called_Names">HE WOULDN&rsquo;T HAVE
+HIS FATHER CALLED NAMES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A man died in Oshkosh who was over eighty years of age. After
+the funeral the minister who conducted the services, said to the
+son of the deceased, &ldquo;your father was an octogenarian.&rdquo;
+The young man colored up, doubled up his fist, and said to the
+minister that he would like to have him repeat that remark. The
+minister said, &ldquo;I say your father was an old
+octogenarian.&rdquo; He had not more than got the word out of his
+mouth before the young man struck him on the nose, knocked him
+down, kicked him in the ear, and when pulled off by a policeman, he
+said no holyghoster could call his dead father names, not around
+him. The minister said he couldn&rsquo;t have been more surprised
+if some one had paid a year&rsquo;s pew rent, than he was when that
+young man&rsquo;s fist hit him.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="He_Quits_the_Drug_Business" name=
+"He_Quits_the_Drug_Business">HE QUITS THE DRUG BUSINESS.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you loafing around here for,&rdquo; says the
+grocery man to the bad boy one day this week. &ldquo;It is after
+nine o&rsquo;clock, and I should think you would want to be down to
+the drug store. How do you know but there may be somebody dying for
+a dose of pills?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, darn the drug store. I have got sick of that business,
+and I have dissolved with the drugger. I have resigned. The policy
+of the store did not meet with my approval, and I have stepped out
+and am waiting for them to come and tender me a better position at
+an increased salary,&rdquo; said the boy, as he threw a cigar stub
+into a barrel of prunes and lit a fresh one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Resigned, eh?&rdquo; said the grocery man as he fished
+out the cigar stub and charged the boy&rsquo;s father with two
+pounds of prunes, didn&rsquo;t you and the boss agree?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not exactly, I gave an old lady some gin when she asked
+for camphor and water, and she made a show of herself. I thought I
+would fool her, but she knew mighty well what it was, and she drank
+about half a pint of gin, and got to tipping over bottles and kegs
+of paint, and when the drug man came in with his wife, the old
+woman threw her arms around his neck and called him her darling,
+and when he pushed her away, and told her she was drunk, she picked
+up a bottle of citrate of magnesia and pointed it at him, and the
+cork came out like a pistol, and he thought he was shot, and his
+wife fainted away, and the police came and took the old gin
+refrigerator away, and then the drug man told me to face the door,
+and, when I wasn&rsquo;t looking he kicked me four times, and I
+landed in the street, and he said if I ever came in sight of the
+store again he would kill me dead. That is the way I resigned. I
+tell you, they will send for me again. They never can run that
+store without me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guess they will worry along without you,&rdquo; said
+the grocery man. &ldquo;How does your Pa take your being fired out?
+I should think it would brake him all up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, I think Pa rather likes it. At first he thought he had
+a soft snap with me in the drug store, cause he has got to drinking
+again, like a fish, and he has gone back on the church entirely;
+but after I had put a few things in his brandy he concluded it was
+cheaper to buy it, and he is now patronizing a barrel house down by
+the river.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One day I put some Castile soap in a drink of drandy, and
+Pa leaned over the back fence more than an hour, with his finger
+down his throat. The man that collects the ashes from the alley
+asked Pa if he had lost anything, and Pa said he was only
+&lsquo;sugaring off.&rsquo; I don&rsquo;t know what that is. When
+Pa felt better he came in and wanted a little whisky to take the
+taste out of his mouth, and I gave him some, with about a
+teaspoonful of pulverized alum in it. Well, sir, you&rsquo;d a
+dide. Pa&rsquo;s mouth and throat was so puckered up that he
+couldn&rsquo;t talk. I don&rsquo;t think that drugman will make
+anything by firing me out, because I shall turn all the trade that
+I control to another store. Why, sir, sometimes there were eight
+and nine girls in the store all at wonct, on account of my being
+there. They came to have me put extracts on their handkerchiefs,
+and to eat gum drops&mdash;he will lose all that trade now. My girl
+that went back on me for the telegraph messenger boy, she came with
+the rest of the girls, but she found that I could be as
+&lsquo;hawty as a dook.&rsquo; I got even with her, though. I
+pretended I wasn&rsquo;t mad, and when she wanted me to put some
+perfumery on her handkerchief I said &lsquo;all right,&rsquo; and I
+put on a little geranium and white rose, and then I got some
+tincture of assafety, and sprinkled it on her dress and cloak when
+she went out. That is about the worst smelling stuff that ever was,
+and I was glad when she went out and met the telegraph boy on the
+corner. They went off together; but he came back pretty soon, about
+the homesickest boy you ever saw, and he told my chum he would
+never go with that girl again because she smelled like spoiled
+oysters or sewer gas. Her folks noticed it, and made her go and
+wash her feet and soak herself, and her brother told my chum it
+didn&rsquo;t do any good, she smelled just like a glue factory, and
+my chum&mdash;the darn fool&mdash;told her brother that it was me
+who perfumed her, and he hit me in the eye with a frozen fish, down
+by the fish store, and that&rsquo;s what made my eye black; but I
+know how to cure a black eye. I have not been in a drug store eight
+days, and not know how to cure a black eye; and I guess I learned
+that girl not to go back on a boy &lsquo;cause he smelled like a
+goat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, what was it about your leaving the wrong medicine
+at houses? The policeman in this ward told me you come pretty near
+killing several people by leaving the wrong medicine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The way of it was this. There was about a dozen different
+kinds of medicine to leave at different places, and I was in a
+hurry to go to the roller skating rink, so I got my chum to help
+me, and we just took the numbers of the houses, and when we rung
+the bell we would hand out the first package we come to, and I
+understand there was a good deal of complaint. One old maid who
+ordered powder for her face, her ticket drew some worm lozengers,
+and she kicked awfully, and a widow who was going to be married,
+she ordered a celluloid comb and brush, and she got a nursing
+bottle with a rubber nozzle, and a toothing ring, and she made
+quite a fuss; but the woman who was weaning her baby and wanted the
+nursing bottle, she got the comb and brush and some blue pills, and
+she never made any fuss at all. It makes a good deal of difference,
+I notice, whether a person gets a better thing than they order or
+not. But the drug business is too lively for me. I have got to have
+a quiet place, and I guess I will be a cash boy in a store. Pa says
+he thinks I was cut out for a bunko steerer, and I may look for
+that kind of a job. Pa he is a terror since he got to drinking
+again. He came home the other day, when the minister was calling on
+Ma, and just cause the minister was sitting on the sofa with Ma,
+and had his hand on her shoulder, where she said the pain was when
+the rheumatiz came on, Pa was mad and told the minister he would
+kick his liver clear around on the other side if he caught him
+there again, and Ma felt awful about it. After the minister had
+gone away, Ma told Pa he had got no feeling at all, and Pa said he
+had got enough feeling for one family, and he didn&rsquo;t want no
+sky-sharp to help him. He said he could cure all the rheumatiz
+there was around the house, and then he went down town and
+didn&rsquo;t get home till most breakfast time. Ma says she thinks
+I am responsible for Pa&rsquo;s falling into bad ways again, and
+now I am going to cure him. You watch me, and see if I don&rsquo;t
+have Pa in the church in less than a week, praying and singing, and
+going home with the choir singers, just as pious as ever. I am
+going to get a boy that writes a woman&rsquo;s hand to write to Pa,
+and&mdash;but I must not give it away. But you just watch Pa,
+that&rsquo;s all. Well, I must go and saw some wood. It is coming
+down a good deal, from a drug clerk to sawing wood, but I will get
+on top yet, and don&rsquo;t you forget it.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Give_us_War" name="Give_us_War">GIVE US WAR!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>We are in receipt of a circular from the American peace society,
+requesting us to leave a sum of money, in our will, to the society
+to be applied to the interest of peace. We are opposed to peace, on
+such terms. Give us war, every time.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Fire_New_Years_Day" name=
+"The_Fire_New_Years_Day">THE FIRE NEW YEAR&rsquo;S DAY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>If there is anything the young men of Rescue Hose Company pride
+themselves upon, it is in getting themselves up, regardless of
+expense, on New Year&rsquo;s day, and calling upon their lady
+friends. On Monday last these young men arrayed themselves in their
+best clothes and sat around in stores and waited for the time to go
+calling. Solomon in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of
+these firemen.</p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/033.png"><img src=
+"images/033.png" alt="A fireman climbs a ladder." id="img033" name=
+"img033" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>SWALLOW-TAILS ON THE CLIMB.</p>
+</div>
+<p>Just as the young gentlemen were about throwing away their last
+cigar at noon, preparatory to calling at the first place on the
+list, the fire-bell rang, and there was a lively procession
+followed the steamer down Fourth street in a few minutes. It looked
+as though a wedding had been broken up and bridegrooms were running
+around loose. The party arrived at the scene of the fire, which was
+Matt. Larsen&rsquo;s hotel on the corner of Second and King
+streets, and such a shinning of swallow-tailed coats up blue
+ladders was never seen. The fellows that belonged in the house
+threw out bedsteads and crockery on to stove-pipe hats, and emptied
+beds on to broadcloth coats. The wedding party disappeared in the
+third story window with the hose, in the smoke, and after half an
+hour&rsquo;s work they came out looking as though they had been in
+the Ashtabula railroad accident. Young Mr. Smith had a stream of
+dirty water sent up his trousers leg, which went clear up to his
+collar, and wilted it beyond repair. Mr. Hatch entwined his doeskin
+pants around the burnt ridge-pole of the roof, hung on to a rafter
+with his teeth, and chopped shingles, and the pipemen kept him wet,
+and he looked like a bundle of damp stuff in a paper mill. Mr.
+Spence was on the top of the ladder, and Mr. Drummond was next
+below him. In falling, Mr. D. caught hold of one tail of Mr.
+Spence&rsquo;s swallow hammer coat, and stretched the tail about
+two feet longer than the other. Mr. Foote was as dry as a bone,
+until the pipeman saw him, and they nailed him up against the wall
+with a stream and Foote was damp as a wet nurse in a minute.</p>
+<p>Young Mr. Osborne, confidential adviser of Hyde, Cargill &amp;
+Co., got half way up the ladder, and a leak in the hose struck him
+and froze him to the ladder, and Mr. Watson had to strike a match
+and thaw him loose. He wet his pants from Genesis to Revelations,
+and had to go calling with an ulster overcoat on. The most of the
+young men, after returning from the fire, stood by the stove and
+dried themselves, and went calling all the same, but the girls said
+they smelt like burnt shingles. The boys were all dry enough at the
+dance in the evening.</p>
+<h3><a id="Southern_Honaw" name="Southern_Honaw">SOUTHERN
+&ldquo;HONAW.&rdquo;</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Bennett and May fought a duel in Maryland the other day, and as
+near as the truth can be arrived at neither party received a
+scratch. But their &ldquo;honaw&rdquo; was satisfied.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Kills_Him" name="His_Pa_Kills_Him">HIS PA KILLS
+HIM.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;For heaven&rsquo;s sake dry up that whistling,&rdquo;
+said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he sat on a bag of peanuts,
+whistling and filling his pockets. &ldquo;There is no sense in such
+whistling. What do you whistle for, anyway?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am practicing my profession,&rdquo; said the boy, as he
+got up and stretched himself, and cut off a slice of cheese, and
+took a few crackers. &ldquo;I have always been a good whistler, and
+I have decided to turn my talent to account. I am going to hire an
+office and put out a sign, &lsquo;Boy furnished to whistle for lost
+dogs.&rsquo; You see there are dogs lost every day, and any man
+would give half a dollar to a boy to find his dog. I can hire out
+to whistle for dogs, and can go around whistling and enjoy myself,
+and make money. Don&rsquo;t you think it is a good scheme?&rdquo;
+asked the boy of the grocery man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Naw,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he charged the
+cheese to the boy&rsquo;s father, and picked up his cigar stub,
+which he had left on the counter, and which the boy had rubbed on
+the kerosene barrel, &ldquo;No, sir, that whistle would scare any
+dog that heard it. Say, what was your Pa running after the doctor
+in his shirt sleeves for last Sunday morning? He looked scared. Was
+your Ma sick again?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, no; Ma is healthy enough, now she has got a new fur
+lined cloak. She played consumption on Pa, and coughed so she liked
+to raise her lights and liver, and made Pa believe she
+couldn&rsquo;t live, and got the doctor to prescribe a fur lined
+circular, and Pa went and got one, and Ma has improved awfully. Her
+cough is all gone, and she can walk ten miles. I was the one that
+was sick. You see, I wanted to get Pa into the church again, and
+get him to stop drinking, so I got a boy to write a letter to him,
+in a female hand, and sign the name of a choir singer Pa was mashed
+on, and tell him she was yearning for him to come back to the
+church, and that the church seemed a blank without his smiling
+face, and benevolent heart, and to please come back for her sake.
+Pa got the letters Saturday night and he seemed tickled, but I
+guess he dreamed about it all night, and Sunday morning he was mad,
+and he took me by the ear and said I couldn&rsquo;t come no
+&lsquo;Daisy&rsquo; business on him the second time. He said he
+knew I wrote the letter, and for me to go up to the store room and
+prepare for the almightiest licking a boy ever had, and he went
+down stairs and broke up an apple barrel and got a stave to whip me
+with. Well, I had to think mighty quick, but I was enough for him.
+I got a dried bladder in my room, one that me and my chum got to
+the slotter house, and I blowed it partly up, so it would be sort
+of flat like, and I put it down inside the back part of my pants,
+right about where Pa hits when he punishes me. I knowed when the
+barrel stave hit the bladder it would explode. Well, Pa came up and
+found me crying. I can cry just as easy as you can turn on the
+water at a faucet, and Pa took off his coat and looked sorry. I was
+afraid he would give up whipping me when he saw me cry, and I
+wanted the bladder experiment to go on, so I looked kind of hard,
+as if I was defying him to do his worst, and then he took me by the
+neck and laid me across a trunk. I didn&rsquo;t dare struggle much
+for fear the bladder would loose itself, and Pa said, &lsquo;Now,
+Hennery, I am going to break you of this damfoolishness, or I will
+break your back,&rsquo; and he spit on his hands and brought the
+barrel stave down on my best pants. Well, you&rsquo;d a dide if you
+had heard the explosion. It almost knocked me off the trunk. It
+sounded like firing a firecracker away down cellar in a barrel, and
+Pa looked scared. I rolled off the trunk, on the floor, and put
+some flour on my face, to make me look pale, and then I kind of
+kicked my legs like a fellow who is dying on the stage, after being
+stabbed with a piece of lath, and groaned, and said, &lsquo;Pa you
+have killed me, but I forgive you,&rsquo; and then rolled around,
+and frothed at the mouth, cause I had a piece of soap in my mouth
+to make foam. Well, Pa was all broke up. He said, &lsquo;Great God,
+what have I done? I have broke his spinal column. O, my poor boy,
+do not die!&rsquo; I kept chewing the soap and foaming at the
+mouth, and I drew my legs up and kicked them out, and clutched my
+hair, and rolled my eyes, and then kicked Pa in the stummick as he
+bent over me, and knocked his breath out of him, and then my limbs
+began to get rigid, and I said, &lsquo;Too late, Pa, I die at the
+hand of an assassin. Go for a doctor.&rsquo; Pa throwed his coat
+over me, and started down stairs on a run, &lsquo;I have murdered
+my brave boy,&rsquo; and he told Ma to go up stairs and stay with
+me, cause I had fallen off a trunk and ruptured a blood vessel, and
+he went after a doctor. When he went out the front door, I sat up
+and lit a cigarette, and Ma came up and I told her all about how I
+fooled Pa, and if she would take on and cry, when Pa got back, I
+would get him to go to church again, and swear off drinking, and
+she said she would.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/037.png"><img src=
+"images/037.png" alt=
+"A lays on the ground while another walks away carrying a stick."
+id="img037" name="img037" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;TOO LATE, PA, I DIE AT THE HAND OF AN
+ASSASSIN!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;So when Pa and the doc. came back, Ma was sitting on a
+velocipede I used to ride, which was in the store-room, and she had
+her apron over her face, and she just more than bellowed. Pa he was
+pale, and he told the doc. he was just playing with me with a
+little piece of board, and he heard something crack, and he guessed
+my spine got broke falling off the trunk. The doctor wanted to feel
+where my spine got broke, but I opened my eyes and had a vacant
+kind of stare, like a woman who leads a dog by a string, and looked
+as though my mind was wandering, and I told the doctor there was no
+use setting my spine, as it was broke in several places, and I
+wouldn&rsquo;t let him feel of the dried bladder. I told Pa I was
+going to die, and I wanted him to promise me two things on my dying
+bed. He cried and said he would, and I told him to promise me he
+would quit drinking, and attend church regular, and he said he
+would never drink another drop, and would go to church every
+Sunday. I made him get down on his knees beside me and swear it,
+and the doc. witnessed it, and Ma said she was so glad, and Ma
+called the doctor out in the hall and told him the joke, and the
+doc. came in and told Pa he was afraid Pa&rsquo;s presence would
+excite the patient, and for him to put on his coat and go out and
+walk around the block, or go to church, and Ma and he would remove
+me to another room, and do all that was possible to make my last
+hours pleasant. Pa he cried, and said he would put on his plug hat
+and go to church, and he kissed me, and got flour on his nose, and
+I came near laughing right out, to see the white flour on his red
+nose, when I thought how the people in church would laugh at Pa.
+But he went out feeling mighty bad, and then I got up and pulled
+the bladder out of my pants, and Ma and the doc. laughed awful.
+When Pa got back from church and asked for me, Ma said that I had
+gone down town. She said the doctor found my spine was only
+uncoupled and he coupled it together, and I was all right. Pa was
+nervous all the afternoon, and Ma thinks he suspects that we played
+it on him. Say, you don&rsquo;t think there is any harm in playing
+it on an old man a little for a good cause, do you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man said he supposed, in the interest of reform it
+was all right, but if it was his boy that played such tricks he
+would take an ax to him, and the boy went out, apparently
+encouraged, saying he hadn&rsquo;t seen the old man since the day
+before, and he was almost afraid to meet him.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Musical_Critique" name="A_Musical_Critique">A MUSICAL
+CRITIQUE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/041.png"><img src=
+"images/041.png" alt="A large woman plays the violin." id="img041"
+name="img041" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE ROTUND URSO.</p>
+</div>
+<p>The second lecture of the Library Association course was
+delivered on Tuesday evening by a female lecturer named Camilla
+Urso, on a fiddle. The lecturer was supported by a female singer,
+two male clamsellers, and a piano masher, all of them decidedly
+talented in their particular lines. The lecture on the fiddle gave
+the most unbounded satisfaction, and the Association in taking this
+new departure, has struck a popular chord. Scarcely a person in the
+vast audience but would prefer such an entertainment to a dry
+lecture by some dictionary sharp. Of the performance, it is
+unnecessary to go into details, as all our readers were there, with
+few exceptions. The fat female, Urso, more than carved the fiddle.
+She dug sweet morsels of music out of it, all the way from the
+wish-bone to the part that goes over the fence last. She made it
+talk Norwegian, and squeezed little notes out of it not bigger than
+a cambric needle, and as smooth as a book agent. The female singer
+was fair, though nothing to brag on, while the male grasshopper
+sufferers sang as well as was necessary. But the most agile
+flea-catcher that has been here since Anna Dickinson&rsquo;s time,
+was sixteen-fingered Jack, the sandhill crane that had the
+disturbance with the piano. We never knew what the row was about,
+but when he walked up to the piano smiling, and shied his castor
+into the ring, everybody could see there was going to be trouble.
+He spit on his hands, sparred a little, and suddenly landed a
+stunning blow right on the ivory, which staggered the piano, and
+caused an exclamation of agony. First knock down for Jack. He
+paused a moment and then began putting in blows right and left, in
+such a cruel manner that the spectators came near breaking into the
+ring. Whenever a key showed its head he mauled it. We never saw a
+piano stand so much punishment, and live, and Jack never got a
+scratch. The whole concert was a success, and the troupe can always
+get a good house here.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Dead_Sure_Thing" name="A_Dead_Sure_Thing">A DEAD SURE
+THING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The only persons that are real sure that their calling and
+election is sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots,
+are the men who are hung for murder. They always announce that they
+have got a dead thing on it, just before the drop falls. How
+encouraging it must be to children to listen to the prayers of our
+ministers in churches, who admit that they are miserable sinners
+living on God&rsquo;s charity, and doubtful if they would be
+allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of
+their unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then let
+the children read an account of a hanging bee, and see how happy
+the condemned man is, how he shouts glory hallelujah, and confesses
+that, though he killed his man, he is going to heaven. A child will
+naturally ask why don&rsquo;t the ministers murder somebody and
+make a dead sure thing of it?</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Mortified" name="His_Pa_Mortified">HIS PA
+MORTIFIED.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was the health officer doing over to your house this
+morning?&rdquo; said the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth
+was firing frozen potatoes at the man who collects garbage in the
+alley.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, they are searching for sewer gas and such things, and
+they have got plumbers and other society experts till you
+can&rsquo;t rest, and I came away for fear they would find the
+sewer gas and warm my jacket. Say, do you think it is right when
+anything smells awfully, to always lay it to a boy?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, in nine cases out of ten they would hit it right,
+but what do you think is the trouble over to your house,
+honest?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;S-h-h! Now don&rsquo;t breathe a word of it to a living
+soul, or I am a dead boy. You see I was over to the dairy fair at
+the Exposition building Saturday night, and when they were breaking
+up me and my chum helped to carry boxes of cheese and firkins of
+butter, and a cheese man gave each of us a piece of limberger
+cheese, wrapped up in tin foil. Sunday morning I opened my piece,
+and it made me tired. O, it was the offulest smell I ever heard of,
+except the smell when they found a tramp who hung himself in the
+woods on the Whitefish Bay road, and had been dead three weeks. It
+was just like an old back number funeral. Pa and Ma were just
+getting ready to go to church, and I cut off a piece of cheese and
+put it in the inside pocket of Pa&rsquo;s vest, and I put another
+in the lining of Ma&rsquo;s muff, and they went to church. I went
+down to church too, and sat on a back seat with my chum, looking
+just as pious as though I was taking up a collection. The church
+was pretty warm, and by the time they got up to sing the first hymn
+Pa&rsquo;s cheese began to smell a match against Ma&rsquo;s cheese.
+Pa held one side of the hymn book and Ma held the other, and Pa he
+always sings for all that is out, and when he braced himself and
+sang &lsquo;Just as I am,&rsquo; Ma thought Pa&rsquo;s voice was
+tinctured a little with biliousness, and she looked at him and
+hunched him, and told him to stop singing and breathe through his
+nose, cause his breath was enough to stop a clock. Pa stopped
+singing and turned around kind of cross towards Ma, and then he
+smelled Ma&rsquo;s cheese and he turned his head the other way and
+said, &lsquo;whew,&rsquo; and they didn&rsquo;t sing any more, but
+they looked at each other as though they smelled frowy. When they
+sat down they sat as far apart as they could get, and Pa sat next
+to a woman who used to be a nurse in a hospital, and when she
+smelled Pa&rsquo;s cheese she looked at him as though she thought
+he had the small pox, and she held her handkerchief to her nose.
+The man in the other end of the pew, that Ma sat near, he was a
+stranger from Racine, who belongs to our church, and he looked at
+Ma sort of queer, and after the minister prayed, and they got up to
+sing again, the man took his hat and went out, and when he came by
+me he said something in a whisper about a female glue factory.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/045.png"><img src=
+"images/045.png" alt="Two men look at a hymnal during church." id=
+"img045" name="img045" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;JUST AS I AM.&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, sir, before the sermon was over everybody in that
+part of the church had their handkerchiefs to their noses, and they
+looked at Pa and Ma scandalous, and the two ushers they came around
+in the pews looking for a dog, and when the minister got over his
+sermon, and wiped the prespiration off his face, he said he would
+like to have the trustees of the church stay after meeting, as
+there was some business of importance to transact. He said the
+question of proper ventilation and sewerage for the church would be
+brought up, and that he presumed the congregation had noticed this
+morning that the church was unusually full of sewer gas. He said he
+had spoken of the matter before, and expected it would be attended
+to before this. He said he was a meek and humble follower of the
+lamb, and was willing to cast his lot wherever the Master decided,
+but he would be blessed if he would preach any longer in a church
+that smelled like a bone boiling establishment. He said religion
+was a good thing, but no person could enjoy religion as well in a
+fat rendering establishment as he could in a flower garden, and as
+far as he was concerned he had got enough. Everybody looked at
+everybody else, and Pa looked at Ma as though he knew where the
+sewer gas came from, and Ma looked at Pa real mad, and me and my
+chum lit out, and I went home and distributed my cheese all around.
+I put a slice in Ma&rsquo;s bureau drawer, down under her
+underclothes, and a piece in the spare room, under the bed, and a
+piece in the bath-room in the soap dish, and a slice in the album
+on the parlor table, and a piece in the library in a book, and I
+went to the dining room and put some under the table, and dropped a
+piece under the range in the kitchen. I tell you the house was
+loaded for bear. Ma came home from church first, and when I asked
+where Pa was, she said she hoped he had gone to walk around the
+block to air hisself. Pa came home to dinner and when he got a
+smell of the house he opened all the doors, and Ma put a
+comfortable around her shoulders, and told Pa he was a disgrace to
+civilization. She tried to get Pa to drink some carbolic acid. Pa
+finally convinced Ma that it was not him, and then they decided it
+was the house that smelled so, as well as the church, and all
+Sunday afternoon they went visiting, and this morning Pa went down
+to the health office and got the inspector of nuisances to come up
+to the house, and when he smelled around a spell he said there was
+dead rats in the main sewer pipe, and they sent for plumbers, and
+Ma went out to a neighbors to borry some fresh air, and when the
+plumbers began to dig up the floor in the basement I came over
+here. If they find any of that limberger cheese it will go hard
+with me. The hired girls have both quit, and Ma says she is going
+to break up keeping house and board. That is just into my hand. I
+want to board at a hotel, where you can have a bill-of-fare, and
+tooth picks, and billiards, and everything. Well I guess I will go
+over to the house and stand in the back door and listen to the
+mocking bird. If you see me come flying out of the alley with my
+coat tail full of boots you can bet they have discovered the sewer
+gas.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Mrs_Langtry" name="Mrs_Langtry">MRS. LANGTRY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>America is to be visited by the most beautiful woman in all
+England, Mrs. Langtry. It is said that she is so sweet that when
+you look at her you feel caterpillars crawling up the small of your
+back, your heart begins to jump like a box car, and a streak of
+lightning goes down one trousers leg and up the other, and escapes
+up the back of your neck, causing the hair to raise and be filled
+with electricity enough to light a circus tent, and that when
+looking at her your hands clutch nervously as though you wanted to
+grasp something to hold you up, a sense of faintness comes over
+you, your eyes roll heavenward, your head falls helpless on your
+breast, your left side becomes numb, your liver quits working, your
+breath comes hot and heavy, your lips turn livid and tremble, your
+teeth chew on imaginary taffy, and you look around imploringly for
+somebody to take her away. If all this occurs to a person from
+looking at her, it would be sudden death or six months illness, to
+shake hands with her. If she comes to Milwaukee, there is one bald
+headed man going to the country where they are not so bad. You
+bet!</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Peck_at_the_Cheese" name="A_Peck_at_the_Cheese">A PECK
+AT THE CHEESE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Geo. W. Peck, of the <em>Sun</em>, recently delivered an address
+before the Wisconsin State Dairyman&rsquo;s Association. The
+following is an extract from the document:</p>
+<p><em>Fellow Cremationists:</em> 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&rsquo;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&mdash;<em>runnet</em>.</p>
+<p>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 will 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 &ldquo;Hold the fort for I am coming through the
+rye,&rdquo; while Eve sat on the verandah altering over her last
+year&rsquo;s polonaise, and winking at the devil who stood behind
+the milk house singing, &ldquo;I want to be an angel.&rdquo; After
+he got through milking he came up and saw Eve blushing, and he
+said, &ldquo;Madame, cheese it,&rdquo; and she chose it.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/050.png"><img src=
+"images/050.png" alt=
+"A smiling, smoking fellow in a top hat holds a pail and leans on a farm fence."
+id="img050" name="img050" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>A SCENE IN PARADISE.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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 from 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&frac12;
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 with 300 oxen. This is susceptible of
+demonstration. If any boy showed a desire to become a statesman, I
+would say to him, &ldquo;Young man, get married, buy a mooly cow,
+go to Sheboygan county, and start a cheese factory.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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-shaped chunk, all rind at one end, and as thin as a
+Congressman&rsquo;s excuse for voting back pay at the other? Make
+your cheese square and the consumer will rise up and call you
+another.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&mdash;I do not accuse you of
+cheating, but don&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s work to hew off cheese enough for a meal. Time has
+worked wonders in cheese.</p>
+<h3><a id="Selling_Clams" name="Selling_Clams">SELLING
+CLAMS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>At the concert Wednesday night, the last piece sung was a trio,
+by Marie Rose, Brignoli, and Carleton. The men stood on each side
+of the girl and began to jaw at her. It was in some other language,
+and we could only understand by the motion of their mouths and
+their actions. It seemed as though the men were trying to sell
+clams to her. First Brignoli began to whoop it up, and describe the
+clams he had to sell, and tried to get her to invest. He yelled at
+her, and seemed really put out, and she was as spunky as any girl
+we ever saw. When Brignoli got out of breath, Carleton began to
+tell her that Brig had been lying to her, that his clams were made
+of India rubber, and that she could never digest them in the wide
+world, and he wound up by telling her that she could have his clams
+at ten per cent discount for cash. By this time she was about as
+mad as she could be, and she pitched into both of them, looking
+cross, and sung like blazes, went away up the musical ladder to
+zero, and wound up by telling them both, to their face, that she
+would see them in Chicago before she would buy a condemned clam.
+And then they all went off the stage as though they had been having
+a regular fight, and Brignoli acted as though he would like to eat
+her raw. That&rsquo;s the way it seemed to us, but we are no
+musician.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Goes_Skating" name="His_Pa_Goes_Skating">HIS PA
+GOES SKATING.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is that stuff on your shirt bosom, that looks like
+soap grease?&rdquo; said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came
+into the grocery the morning after Christmas.</p>
+<p>The boy looked at his shirt front, put his finger on the stuff
+and smelled of his fingers, and then said, &ldquo;O, that is
+nothing but a little of the turkey dressing and gravy. You see
+after Pa and I got back from the roller skating rink yesterday, Pa
+was all broke up and he couldn&rsquo;t carve the turkey, and I had
+to do it, and Pa sat in a stuffed chair with his head tied up, and
+a pillow amongst his legs, and he kept complaining that I
+didn&rsquo;t do it right. Gol darn a turkey any way. I should think
+they would make a turkey flat on the back, so he would lay on a
+greasy platter without skating all around the table. It looks easy
+to see Pa carve a turkey, but when I speared into the bosom of that
+turkey, and began to saw on it, the turkey rolled around as though
+it was on castors, and it was all I could do to keep it out of
+Ma&rsquo;s lap. But I rasseled with it till I got off enough white
+meat for Pa and Ma and dark meat enough for me, and I dug out the
+dressing, but most of it flew into my shirt bosom, cause the string
+that tied up the place where the dressing was concealed about the
+person of the turkey, broke prematurely, and one oyster hit Pa in
+the eye, and he said I was as awkward as a cross-eyed girl trying
+to kiss a man with a hair lip. If I ever get to be the head of a
+family I shall carve turkeys with a corn sheller.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what broke your Pa up at the roller skating
+rink?&rdquo; asked the grocery man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, everything broke him up. He is split up so Ma buttons
+the top of his pants to his collar button, like a bicycle rider.
+Well, he had no business to have told me and my chum that he used
+to be the best skater in North America, when he was a boy. He said
+he skated once from Albany to New York in an hour and eighty
+minutes. Me and my chum thought if Pa was such a terror on skates
+we would get him to put on a pair of roller skates and enter him as
+the &lsquo;great unknown,&rsquo; and clean out the whole gang. We
+told Pa that he must remember that roller skates were different
+from ice skates, and that maybe he couldn&rsquo;t skate on them,
+but he said it didn&rsquo;t make any difference what they were as
+long as they were skates, and he would just paralyze the whole
+crowd. So we got a pair of big roller skates for him, and while we
+were strapping them on, Pa looked at the skaters glide around on
+the smooth wax floor just as though they were greased. Pa looked at
+the skates on his feet, after they were fastened, sort of forlorn
+like, the way a horse thief does when they put shackles on his
+legs, and I told him if he was afraid he couldn&rsquo;t skate with
+them we would take them off, but he said he would beat anybody
+there was there, or bust a suspender. Then we straightened Pa up,
+and pointed him towards the middle of the room, and he said,
+&lsquo;leggo,&rsquo; and we just give him a little push to start
+him, and he began to go. Well, by gosh, you&rsquo;d a dide to have
+seen Pa try to stop. You see, you can&rsquo;t stick in your heel
+and stop, like you can on ice skates, and Pa soon found that out,
+and he began to turn sideways, and then he threw his arms and
+walked on his heels, and he lost his hat, and his eyes began to
+stick out, cause he was going right towards an iron post. One arm
+caught the post and he circled around it a few times, and then he
+let go and began to fall, and, sir, he kept falling all across the
+room, and everybody got out of the way, except a girl, and Pa
+grabbed her by the polonaise, like a drowning man grabs at straws,
+though there wasn&rsquo;t any straws in her polonaise as I know of,
+but Pa just pulled her along as though she was done up in a
+shawl-strap, and his feet went out from under him and he struck on
+his shoulders and kept a going, with the girl dragging along like a
+bundle of clothes. If Pa had had another pair of roller skates on
+his shoulders, and castors on his ears, he couldn&rsquo;t have slid
+along any better. Pa is a short, big man, and as he was rolling
+along on his back, he looked like a sofa with castors on being
+pushed across a room by a girl. Finally Pa came to the wall and had
+to stop, and the girl fell right across him, with her roller skates
+in his neck, and she called him an old brute, and told him if he
+didn&rsquo;t let go of her polonaise she would murder him. Just
+then my chum and me got there and we amputated Pa from the girl,
+and lifted him up, and told him for heaven&rsquo;s sake to let us
+take off the skates, cause he couldn&rsquo;t skate any more than a
+cow, and Pa was mad and said for us to &lsquo;let him alone,&rsquo;
+and he could skate all right, and we let go and he struck out
+again. Well, sir, I was ashamed. An old man like Pa ought to knonv
+better than to try to be a boy. This last time Pa said he was going
+to spread himself, and if I am any judge of a big spread, he did
+spread himself. Some how the skates had got turned around side-ways
+on his feet, and his feet got to going in different directions, and
+Pa&rsquo;s feet were getting so far apart that I was afraid I would
+have two Pa&rsquo;s, half the size, with one leg apiece.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/057.png"><img src=
+"images/057.png" alt=
+"A man grabs a woman's clothing as he falls while ice skating." id=
+"img057" name="img057" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;PA GRABBED HER BY THE POLONAISE.&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;I tried to get him to take up a collection of his legs,
+and get them in the same ward but his arm flew around and hit me on
+the nose, and I thought if he wanted to strike the best friend he
+had, he could run his old legs his self. When he began to separate
+I could hear the bones crack, but maybe it was his pants, but
+anyway he came down on the floor like one of these fellows in a
+circus who spreads hisself, and he kept agoing and finally he
+surrounded an iron post with his legs, and stopped and looked pale,
+and the proprietor of the rink told Pa if he wanted to give a
+flying trapeze performance he would have to go to the gymnasium,
+and he couldn&rsquo;t skate on his shoulders any more, cause other
+skaters were afraid of him. Then Pa said he would kick the liver
+out of the proprietor of the rink, and he got up and steaded
+himself, and then he tried to kick the man, but both heels went up
+to wonct, and Pa turned a back summersault and struck right on his
+vest in front. I guess it knocked the breath out of him, for he
+didn&rsquo;t speak for a few minutes, and then he wanted to go
+home, and we put him in a street car, and he laid down on the hay
+and rode home. O, the work we had to get Pa&rsquo;s clothes off. He
+had cricks in his back, and everywhere, and Ma was away to one of
+the neighbors, to look at the presents, and I had to put liniment
+on Pa, and I made a mistake and got a bottle of furniture polish,
+and put it on Pa and rubbed it in, and when Ma came home, Pa
+smelled like a coffin at a charity funeral, and Ma said there was
+no way of getting that varnish off of Pa till it wore off: Pa says
+holidays are a condemned nuisance anyway. He will have to stay in
+the house all this week.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are pretty rough on the old man,&rdquo; said the
+grocery man, &ldquo;after he has been so kind to you and given you
+nice presents.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nice presents nothin. All I got was a &lsquo;Come to
+Jesus&rsquo; Christmas card, with brindle fringe, from Ma, and Pa
+gave me a pair of his old suspenders, and a calender with mottoes
+for every month, some quotations from scripture, such as
+&lsquo;honor thy father and mother,&rsquo; and &lsquo;evil
+communications corrupt two in the bush,&rsquo; and a bird in the
+hand beats two pair.&rsquo; Such things don&rsquo;t help a boy to
+be good. What a boy wants is club skates, and seven shot revolvers,
+and such things. Well, I must go and help Pa roll over in bed, and
+put on a new porous plaster. Good bye.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Try_to_Save_Two_Shillings" name=
+"Try_to_Save_Two_Shillings">TRYING TO SAVE TWO SHILLINGS.</a></h3>
+<!-- Transcriber's note: this is the way it is in the book (Try vs. Trying) -->
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>No person ever wants to tell us again how to save two shillings.
+When we started for Chippewa Falls, to attend the celebration, we
+only had a few hundred dollars along, and we felt like saving all
+that was possible. Just before arriving at Sparta, where we were to
+take supper, Dan McDonald got to telling about how to save
+twenty-five cents on meals at these eating houses, when traveling.
+He said that all you had to do when you come out from supper was to
+look like a bummer, or &ldquo;traveling man,&rdquo; hand the
+door-keeper fifty cents and wink twice with the left eye, and he
+would pass you right out, as though you had paid seventy-five
+cents. If you handed out a dollar bill, and he only gave you back
+twenty-five cents, you only had to hold out your hand and wink a
+couple of times, and the man would give you the other quarter. Dan
+said he always did that way, and he had saved hundreds of dollars.
+He said these bummers only paid fifty cents a meal, and there was
+no use of anybody else paying more, if they had cheek enough to
+play it on the landlord.</p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/061.png"><img src=
+"images/061.png" alt=
+"Two men gesture at each other by a sign marked 'Pay Here'" id=
+"img061" name="img061" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;OH, THAT WILL BE ALL RIGHT!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>We never had anything strike us any more reasonable than the
+statement of Mr. McDonald, and we determined to try it. To a man
+who was traveling a good deal lecturing, a saving of twenty-five
+cents a meal was worth looking into, and we made up our mind to
+begin to economize that very night. The train stopped and we walked
+across the platform as near like a bummer as possible. With our hat
+on one side, we threw a cigar stub into the parlor window, said
+&ldquo;Hello, old tapeworm,&rdquo; to the landlord in a familiar
+sort of way, chucked our hat into a chair; rushed into the
+dining-room, took a seat at the head of the table, and told a girl
+to cart out all she had got. The landlord looked at us as though he
+thought we were one of Field, Leiter &amp; Co.&rsquo;s bummers, his
+good wife looked frightened, as though she feared we would kick a
+leg off the table and spill things. However, there is no use of
+describing the meal, and how we went through brook trout and
+strawberry shortcake, and things. We couldn&rsquo;t help feeling
+sorry for the man that was destined to furnish all that for fifty
+cents. Finally we went out. We felt a sort of palpitation of the
+heart when we approached the hungry-looking man at the door, taking
+the money. He looked as though he was a sick orphan trying to save
+money enough to get to a water cure. Picking our teeth with our
+finger, like a Chicago bummer, and pulling our handkerchief out of
+our pistol pocket and blowing our nose like a thirty-two pounder,
+just as we had heard a Chicago fellow do, we handed the man fifty
+cents, winked a couple of times and started to go by. The tobacco
+sign standing there said, &ldquo;twenty-five cents more,
+please.&rdquo; We looked at him, winked, and said, &ldquo;O, that
+will be all right.&rdquo; &ldquo;Two shillings more, my
+friend,&rdquo; said the summer resort. We winked some more, and
+punched him in the ribs with our thumb, and said, &ldquo;O, now,
+old tapeworm, don&rsquo;t try to play it on us boys.&rdquo; And we
+laughed a sickly sort of laugh. The fact of it was, we began to
+have doubts about the thing working, and had a suspicion that the
+twinkle in Dan McDonald&rsquo;s eye meant that he had been playing
+it on us. The landlord said he should have to have two shillings
+more, and that we were blocking up the thoroughfare, and we fumbled
+around and found it and paid him, and went out, probably the most
+disgusted excursionist that ever was. Dan, who had watched the
+whole business, slapped us on the shoulder, and said, &ldquo;How
+did it work?&rdquo; Though not particularly hungry, we could have
+eaten him raw. When we go east now, we take a lunch along, and when
+the other passengers are in to supper, we sit on the woodpile at
+Sparta, eat our lunch and gaze at the fountains, talk with the
+brakemen, and wonder if the landlord would know us if we should go
+in and take a toothpick off the counter. Not any more bummer for
+us, and no man must ever tell us how to save two shillings on a
+meal.</p>
+<h3><a id="How_to_Reach_Young_Men" name=
+"How_to_Reach_Young_Men">HOW TO REACH YOUNG MEN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;How to reach young men,&rdquo; was the topic at the young
+men&rsquo;s prayer meeting on Thursday. An old gentleman on the
+East Side who broke a toe nail by kicking the gate post just as the
+young man went down the sidewalk, would also like to know. Bait
+your hook with a mighty good looking girl that wears a sealskin
+cloak, and you can reach the young men.</p>
+<h3><a id="Crushing_Nihilism" name="Crushing_Nihilism">CRUSHING
+NIHILISM.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The Russian government is making an average of four thousand
+arrests a day of persons charged with nihilism. At this rate it is
+only a question of time when the last of the conspirators will be
+in prison, and the emperor can walk out without fear of
+assassination from his wife and children, as these will probably be
+all the people that will be left.</p>
+<h3><a id="Woman-Dozing_a_Democrat" name=
+"Woman-Dozing_a_Democrat">WOMAN-DOZING A DEMOCRAT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A fearful tale conies 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.</p>
+<p>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</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hurrah for Garfield, or I will plunge you headlong into
+the yawning gulf below!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;Last call! Yell, or down you go!&rdquo; he
+opened his mouth and yelled so they heard it in Kilbourn City:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hurrah for Garfield! Now lemme go!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/064.png"><img src=
+"images/064.png" alt="A woman pushes a man from a cliff." id=
+"img064" name="img064" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;YELL, OR GO DOWN!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t fool him. After what had
+occurred, he didn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>They tried to interest him in conversation by drawing war maps
+with three-tined folks 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. Chapin&rsquo;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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Moak, that is played out. People will notice
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But he relapsed again into semi-unconsciousness, and never spoke
+again, not a great deal, till he got home.</p>
+<p>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 be 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.</p>
+<p>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-wood Democrat hurrahed for
+Garfield.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Wrong_Corpse" name="The_Wrong_Corpse">THE WRONG
+CORPSE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A corpse got a good joke on the people of Quebec the other day.
+It came there by express, and was only an ordinary, every-day man,
+but the Kanucks were looking for a military corpse, and supposing
+our ordinary corpse to be he, they got up a Fifth avenue funeral,
+and buried it with military honors. The corpse, who didn&rsquo;t
+know a thing about military matters, must have many a good laugh
+over the mistake. And how the military corpse must have felt, when
+HE came!</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Day_We_Reached_Canada" name=
+"The_Day_We_Reached_Canada">THE DAY WE REACHED CANADA.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>D.H. Pulcifer, of Shawano, announces that he is about to prepare
+a biography of all the members of the territorial legislature and
+subsequent legislatures, state officers, members of congress, etc.,
+and desires all men who may have been great or may be so now, to
+send in the particulars. Well, you can get our record at the
+adjutant general&rsquo;s office, though there is one mistake in
+that record. It was in June, 1862 that we arrived in Canada, the
+day before the draft.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Lively_Train_Load" name="A_Lively_Train_Load">A LIVELY
+TRAIN LOAD.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 into the car to
+sell pop corn.</p>
+<p>Stopping at the first seat, where a middle-aged lady was sitting
+alone, the pop corn man passed out his basket and said,
+&ldquo;fresh pop corn.&rdquo; The lady took her foot down off the
+stove, looked at the man a moment with eyes glaring and wild, and
+said, &ldquo;It is&mdash;no, it cannot be&mdash;and yet it
+<em>is</em> me long lost Duke of Oshkosh,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;Madame, you are
+mistaken. I never have been a duke in Oshkosh. I live here at the
+Junction.&rdquo; The woman looked at him as though she doubted his
+statement, but let him go.</p>
+<p>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 popcorn and putting it
+in his coat tail pocket, the serious man said, &ldquo;I was
+honestly elected President of the United States in 1876, but was
+counted out by the vilest conspiracy that ever was concocted on
+earth, and I believe you are one of the conspirators,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/068.png"><img src=
+"images/068.png" alt="A woman pulls a man towards her." id="img068"
+name="img068" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>ME LONG LOST DUKE.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;I will be ready when the carriage calls
+at 8.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;but,&rdquo; says he, as he picked some pieces
+of paper collar out of the back of his neck, &ldquo;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&rsquo;t know my business.&rdquo; Fitz told him they were
+patients going to the Insane Asylum.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Cats_on_the_Fence" name="Cats_on_the_Fence">CATS ON THE
+FENCE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Some idiot has invented a &ldquo;cat teaser&rdquo; to put on
+fences to keep cats from sitting there and singing. It consists of
+a three-cornered piece of tin, nailed on the top of the fence. We
+hope none of our friends will invest in the patent, for statistics
+show that while cats very often sit on fences to meditate, yet when
+they get it all mediated and get ready to sing a duet, they get
+down off the fence and get under a currant bush. We challenge any
+cat scientist to disprove the assertion.</p>
+<h3><a id="How_Sharper_Than_a_Hounds_Tooth" name=
+"How_Sharper_Than_a_Hounds_Tooth">HOW SHARPER THAN A HOUND&rsquo;S
+TOOTH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 <em>via</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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 till last week.
+One day we met Pierce, the Watertown Junction hotel man, and he
+told us that he had a greyhound pup that was the finest bread
+dog&mdash;we think he said bread dog, though it might have been
+sausage dog he said&mdash;anyway he told us it was blooded, and
+that when it grew up to be a man&mdash;that is, figuratively
+speaking&mdash;when it grew up to be a dog full size, it would be
+the handsomest canine in the Northwest.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Well&mdash;(excuse us while we go into a corner and mutter a
+silent remark)&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>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, the dog will reach from here to the
+Soldier&rsquo;s home.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/071.png"><img src=
+"images/071.png" alt="A dog with an extremely long tail." id=
+"img071" name="img071" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&lsquo;THEREBY HANGS A TAIL&rsquo;.</p>
+</div>
+<p>His head is about as big as a graham gem, and runs down to a
+point no 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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
+<em>him</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Pierce said he would be a nice dog to run with a horse, or under
+a carriage. Why, bless you, he won&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t be
+frightened at that dog nothing would scare him.</p>
+<p>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
+fall off a wagon track we tie a knot in his tail.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Safe_Investment" name="A_Safe_Investment">A SAFE
+INVESTMENT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Up to the present time the <em>Sun</em> has struggled along from
+infancy to middle age without a safe in its office. It has never
+needed one. It does not need one now, but custom has to do with
+these things. The associations that surround one, go far towards
+making these changes. When we look at the immense safes in the
+office of out neighbor, filled with bonds and mortgages, we feel
+that a safe will look well. So we purchased a sort of an iron
+range, with a nickle plated knob, and a lock with as many figures
+on it as a tax list or a lottery advertisement, and placed it where
+it will strike the visitor on his first entrance. Ah, what an
+imposing affair it is! As we lean back in a chair and 1ook at it,
+and close our eyes, we can see millions in it, in our mind. It is a
+cross between Alex. Mitchell&rsquo;s safe and a child&rsquo;s bank.
+It is not full, but it has evidently been taking something. It is a
+grand feeling to walk along the streets and feel that your head
+contains the secret which opens the safe. No one but yourself and
+your maker, and the maker of the safe knows the three numbers which
+will cause it to open. The numbers are safe with you, and the All
+Seeing Eye you have confidence will not give it away, so that the
+only show a burglar has is to get solid with the maker of the
+safe.</p>
+<p>What a piece of mechanism is the lock of a safe! The man we
+bought it of gave us the programme that opens it. You go to the
+dial turn the knob, put your finger by your nose and wink. If you
+leave out the wink, the safe will not open, but we never leave out
+the wink. The trouble is, if there is a lady customer in with a
+bill, and we go to open the safe, we wink too many times and have
+to go all over it again. Then we place the numbers in their order,
+4-11-44, and when the &ldquo;four&rdquo; is exactly opposite the
+dipthong, we turn the knob back three revolutions, light a cigar,
+and walk three times around the room. That is to give the mechanism
+in the Inside time to coalesce. Then we put the
+&ldquo;eleven&rdquo; in its place, turn the knob forward one
+revolution, and put on our hat and go out and take a drink. That is
+in the programme, and we sometimes think the inventor of the lock
+is interested in a brewery. Then we come back, wipe our mustache on
+the tail of a linen coat, place the figures &ldquo;44&rdquo;
+directly over the pointer, whistle &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a land that
+is fairer than this,&rdquo; place the right foot forward, then turn
+the knob, the door swings on its hinges, and the untold wealth of
+the Indies lies before us, in our alleged mind.</p>
+<p>O, safe, are you honest? Are you true to us? You look pure and
+chaste, and your new overskirt of varnish, and your puffed ruching
+of gold and blue sets you off to good advantage, but you may not be
+impregnable. You have always gone in good society, and no scandal
+has ever been attached to your name. Your purity and innocence has
+been remarked by all who have met you, and there are none who would
+dare to intimate but that you would maintain your reputation
+against any attack, but sometimes we think we should hesitate to
+leave you all alone, with the light turned down all night and over
+Sunday, in the company of an eloquent, persuasive, good-looking
+burglar armed with a jimmy, and we fear that his warm hearted can
+of powder would strike a responsive chord in your impulsive nature,
+and that you would yield up the jewels confined to you, and your
+honor, your reputation, your standing among safes would be forever
+ruined. And yet we may be wrong.</p>
+<p>But what would it profit a burglar to gain the whole contents
+and wear out his soles. If he got in that safe, he would find a
+package of bills that we tried for a year to collect, and we would
+give him the bills if he asked for them, and he could save his
+powder. He would find one bill of sixteen dollars, with an
+indorsement that one dollar is paid, after thirteen dollars worth
+of shoe leather had been worn out. And yet the burglar would have a
+soft thing on cigars with that bill, for every time he visited the
+doctor he would tell him when to come again, and give him a cigar.
+Another thing the burglar would find would be a protested draft
+from a great Philadelphia patent medicine advertiser. The burglar
+could take a tie pass that is in the safe, and walk to
+Philadelphia, and trade out the twenty-five dollar draft by taking
+buchu on account.</p>
+<p>But no burglar that has any respect for himself, we feel sure,
+will ever do us the injury to scrape the paint off of that
+safe.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Fashion_Item" name="A_Fashion_Item">A FASHION
+ITEM.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A fashion item says, &ldquo;The drawers this year are made very
+short, and some have lace ruffles.&rdquo; Some fashion reporter has
+evidently been looking over our back fence at the clothes line. But
+they got awfully fooled. The shortness of those drawers was caused
+by the flannel shrinking and the &ldquo;lace ruffles&rdquo; the
+reporter noticed is where a calf chewed them when they were hanging
+out to dry last fall on Black Hawk Island, when a gun kicked us out
+of a boat. Some of these fashion reporters think they are
+smart.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Lecturer_Should_Know_What_He_Talks_About" name=
+"A_Lecturer_Should_Know_What_He_Talks_About">A LECTURER SHOULD KNOW
+WHAT HE TALKS ABOUT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A man down east is lecturing on &ldquo;Hell, Ingersoll, and
+Whisky.&rdquo; If the lecturer is at all familiar with his
+subjects, we wouldn&rsquo;t believe him under oath.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Goes_Calling" name="His_Pa_Goes_Calling">HIS PA
+GOES CALLING.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, you are getting too alfired smart,&rdquo; said the
+grocery man to the bad boy as he pushed him into a corner by the
+molasses barrel, and took him by the neck and choked him so his
+eyes stuck out. &ldquo;You have driven away several of my best
+customers, and now, confound you, I am going to have your
+life,&rdquo; and he took up a cheese knife and began to sharpen it
+on his boot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the&mdash;gurgle&mdash;matter?&rdquo; asked
+the choking boy, as the grocery man&rsquo;s finger let up on his
+throat a little, so he could speak. &ldquo;I haint done
+nothing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you hang up that gray torn cat by the heels,
+in front of my store, with the rabbits I had for sale? I
+didn&rsquo;t notice it until the minister called me out in front of
+the store, and pointing to the rabbits, asked what good fat cats
+were selling for. By crimus, this thing has got to stop. You have
+got to move out of this ward or I will.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy got his breath and said it wasn&rsquo;t him that put the
+cat up there. He said it was the policeman, and he and his chum saw
+him do it, and he just come in to tell the grocery man about it,
+and before he could speak he had his neck nearly pulled off. The
+boy began to cry, and the grocery man said he was only joking, and
+gave him a box of sardines, and they made up. Then he asked the boy
+how his Pa put in his New Years, and the boy sighed and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We had a sad time at our house New Years. Pa insisted on
+making calls, and Ma and me tried to prevent it, but he said he was
+of age, and guessed he could make calls if he wanted to, so he
+looked at the morning paper and got the names of all the places
+where they were going to receive, and he turned his paper collar,
+and changed ends with his cuffs, and put some arnica on his
+handkerchief, and started out. Ma told him not to drink anything,
+and he said he wouldn&rsquo;t, but he did. He was full the third
+place he went to. O, so full. Some men can get full and not show
+it, but when Pa gets full, he gets so full his back teeth float,
+and the liquor crowds his eyes out, and his mouth gets loose and
+wiggles all over his face, and he laughs all the time, and the
+perspiration just oozes out of him, and his face gets red, and he
+walks so wide. O, he disgraced us all. At one place he wished the
+hired girl &lsquo;a happy new year&rsquo; more than twenty times,
+and hung his hat on her elbow, and tried to put on a rubber hall
+mat for his over shoes. At another place he walked up a
+lady&rsquo;s train, and carried away a card basket full of bananas
+and oranges. Ma wanted my chum and me to follow Pa and bring him
+home, and about dark we found him in the door yard of a house where
+they have statues in front of the house, and he grabbed me by the
+arm, and mistook me for another caller, and insisted on introducing
+me to a marble statue without any clothes on. He said it was a
+friend of his, and it was a winter picnic. He hung his hat on an
+evergreen, and put his overcoat on the iron fence, and I was so
+mortified I almost cried. My chum said if his Pa made such a circus
+of himself he would sand bag him. That gave me an idea, and when we
+got Pa most home I went and got a paper box covered with red paper,
+so it looked just like a brick, and a bottle of tomato ketchup, and
+when we got Pa up on the steps at home I hit him with the paper
+brick, and my chum squirted the ketchup on his head, and we
+demanded his money, and then he yelled murder, and we lit out, and
+Ma and the minister, who was making a call on her, all the
+afternoon, they came to the door and pulled Pa in. He said he had
+been attacked by a band of robbers, and they knocked his brains
+out, but he whipped them, and then Ma saw the ketchup brains oozing
+out of his head, and she screamed, and the minister said.
+&lsquo;Good heavens, he is murdered!&rsquo; and just then I came in
+the back door and they sent after the doctor, and they put Pa on
+the lounge, and tied up his head with a towel to keep the brains
+in, and Pa began to snore, and when the doctor came in it took them
+half an hour to wake him, and then he was awful sick to his
+stummick, and then Ma asked the doctor if he would live, and the
+doc. analyzed the ketchup and smelled of it and told Ma he would be
+all right if he had a little Worcester sauce to put on with the
+ketchup, and when he said Pa would pull through, Ma looked awful
+sad. Then Pa opened his eyes and saw the minister and said that was
+one of the robbers that jumped on him, and he wanted to whip the
+minister, but the doc. held Pa&rsquo;s arms and Ma sat on his legs,
+and the minister said he had got some other calls to make, and he
+wished Ma a happy new year in the hall, much as fifteen minutes.
+His happy new year to Ma is most as long as his prayers. Well, we
+got Pa to bed, and when we undressed him we found nine napkins in
+the bosom of his vest, that he had picked up at the places where he
+had called. He is all right this morning, but he says it is the
+last time he will drink coffee when he makes New Years calls.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, then you didn&rsquo;t have much fun yourself on New
+Years. That&rsquo;s too bad,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he
+looked at the sad eyed youth. &ldquo;But you look hard. If you were
+old enough I should say you had been drunk, your eyes are
+red.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/079.png"><img src=
+"images/079.png" alt="A man doffs his hat at a nude statue." id=
+"img079" name="img079" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>HAPPY NEW YEAR, MUM!</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t have any fun eh? Well, I wish I had as many
+dollars as I had fun. You see, after Pa got to sleep Ma wanted me
+and my chum to go to the houses that Pa had called at and return
+the napkins he had kleptomaniaced, so we dressed up and went. The
+first house we called at the girls were sort of demoralized. I
+don&rsquo;t know as I ever saw a girl drunk, but those girls acted
+queer. The callers had stopped coming, and the girls were drinking
+something out of shaving cups that looked like lather, and they
+said it was &lsquo;aignogg.&rsquo; They laffed and kicked up their
+heels wuss nor a circus, and their collars got unpinned, and their
+faces was red, and they put their arms around me and my chum and
+hugged us and asked us if we didn&rsquo;t want some of the custard.
+You&rsquo;d a dide to see me and my chum drink that lather. It
+looked just like soap suds with nutmaig in it, but by gosh it got
+in its work sudden. At first I was afraid when the girls hugged me,
+but after I had drank a couple of shaving cups full of the
+&lsquo;aignogg&rsquo; I wasn&rsquo;t afraid no more, and I hugged a
+girl so hard she catched her breath and panted and said, &lsquo;O,
+don&rsquo;t.&rsquo; Then I kissed her, and she is a great big girl,
+bigger&rsquo;n me, but she didn&rsquo;t care. Say, did you ever
+kiss a girl full of aignogg? If you did it would break up your
+grocery business. You would want to waller in bliss instead of
+selling mackerel. My chum ain&rsquo;t no slouch either. He was
+sitting in a stuffed chair holding another New Year&rsquo;s girl,
+and I could hear him kiss her so it sounded like a cutter scraping
+on bare ground. But the girl&rsquo;s Pa came in and said he guessed
+it was time to close the place, unless they had a license for an
+all night house, and me and my chum went out. But
+<em>wasn&rsquo;t</em> we sick when we got out doors. O, it seemed
+as though the pegs in my boots was the only thing that kept them
+down, and my chum he like to dide. He had been to dinner and supper
+and I had only been skating all day, so he had more to contend with
+than I did. O, my, but that lets me out on aignogg. I don&rsquo;t
+know how I got home, but I got in bed with Pa, cause Ma was called
+away to attend a baby matinee in the night. I don&rsquo;t know how
+it is, but there never is anybody in our part of town that has a
+baby but they have it in the night, and they send for Ma. I
+don&rsquo;t know what she has to be sent for every time for. Ma
+ain&rsquo;t to blame for all the young ones in this town, but she
+has got up a reputashun, and when we hear the bell ring in the
+night Ma gets up and begins to put on her clothes, and the next
+morning she comes in the dining room with a shawl over her head,
+and says, &lsquo;its a girl and weighs ten pounds,&rsquo; or
+&lsquo;a boy,&rsquo; if it&rsquo;s a boy baby. Ma was out on one of
+her professional engagements, and I got in bed with Pa. I had heard
+Pa blame Ma about her cold feet, so I got a piece of ice about as
+big as a raisin box, just zactly like one of Ma&rsquo;s feet, and
+laid it right against the small of Pa&rsquo;s back. I
+couldn&rsquo;t help laffing, but pretty soon Pa began to squirm and
+he said, &lsquo;Why&rsquo;n &rsquo;ell don&rsquo;t you warm them
+feet before you come to bed,&rsquo; and then he hauled back his leg
+and kicked me clear out in the middle of the floor, and said if he
+married again he would marry a woman who had lost both her feet in
+a railroad accident. Then I put the ice back in the bed with Pa and
+went to my room, and in the morning Pa said he sweat more&rsquo;n a
+pail full in the night. Well, you must excuse me. I have an
+engagement to shovel snow off the sidewalk. But before I go, let me
+advise you not to drink aignogg, and don&rsquo;t sell tom cats for
+rabbits,&rdquo; and he got out of the door just in time to miss the
+rutabaga that the grocery man threw at him.</p>
+<h3><a id="What_the_Democrats_Will_Do" name=
+"What_the_Democrats_Will_Do">WHAT THE DEMOCRATS WILL DO.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The <em>Wisconsin</em> asks, &ldquo;What will the Democrats
+do?&rdquo; We trust it is not betraying a confidence reposed in us
+by the manager of a party, but we can not allow our neighbor to
+remain in such dense ignorance, as long as we are possessed of the
+desired information. &ldquo;What will the Democrats do?&rdquo; The
+Democrats will prove an <em>alibi!</em></p>
+<h3><a id="A_Sewing_Machine_Given_to_the_Boss_Girl" name=
+"A_Sewing_Machine_Given_to_the_Boss_Girl">A SEWING MACHINE GIVEN TO
+THE BOSS GIRL.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;boss combination girl&rdquo; of
+Rock County. With the machine he sent the following letter, which
+explains his meaning of a &ldquo;combination girl,&rdquo; etc.:</p>
+<p class="rgt">MILWAUKEE, June 7, 1881.</p>
+<p>W.T. VANKIRK&mdash;<em>Dear Sir:</em> Your letter, in reference
+to 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 follow
+result:</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;combination girl&rdquo; in Rock
+County, with the compliments of the <em>Sun</em>.</p>
+<p>What I mean by a &ldquo;combination,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t want to give this machine to any female statue, or
+parlor ornament, who don&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Fair Girl,&rdquo;
+that takes this machine, must be &ldquo;the boss.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s roses
+will discount any preparation ever made by man, and so well-formed
+that nothing artificial is needed to&mdash;well, Van, you know what
+I mean.</p>
+<p>You want to pick out a thoroughbred, that is, all wool, a yard
+wide&mdash;that is, understand me, I don&rsquo;t want the girl to
+be a yard wide, but just right. Your Committee don&rsquo;t want to
+get &ldquo;mashed&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s work, if necessary, and one there is no danger
+of breaking in two if her intended should hug her.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/084.png"><img src=
+"images/084.png" alt=
+"A woman plays the piano and sings enthusiastically." id="img084"
+name="img084" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>I WANT TO BE AN ANGEL.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know Venus,
+but I have heard that she takes the cake&mdash;I say, if you find
+one that is perfect in everything, but shirks her duties at home,
+and plays, &ldquo;I Want to Be an Angel,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t give her the machine. You catch the idea?</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 open 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 for a prize.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p class="rgt">Your friend<br />
+GEO. W. PECK.</p>
+<h3><a id="She_was_no_Gentleman" name="She_was_no_Gentleman">SHE
+WAS NO GENTLEMAN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>From an article in the <em>Leader</em> we gather that Frank
+Drake, editor of the Rushford <em>Star</em>, was horsewhipped by a
+woman who was dissatisfied with some article of his that appeared
+against her, in the <em>Star</em>. A woman that cowhides an editor
+is no gentleman.</p>
+<h3><a id="Joke_on_the_Hat" name="Joke_on_the_Hat">JOKE ON THE
+HAT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Somehow, during the election excitement, Frank Hatch happened to
+bet right just once. He bet a hat, and on Monday he went to Putnam
+&amp; Philbrick and selected one of the finest silk ones. When he
+went out in the street every body noticed it, and a reception was
+held. They all congratulated Frank, except Ike Usher. Ike&rsquo;s
+hat was a year old, and the contrast was so remarkable that Ike
+would not walk on the street with Hatch. Frank said that
+Ike&rsquo;s hat used to be a very fine looking hat, but at present
+it was a disgrace to the force. Mr. Usher was offended, and he
+swore revenge. He went to a professional drunkard on Division
+street, and said that if he should happen to get drunk Monday night
+and Hatch should happen to arrest him, he would give the drunkard
+five dollars if the drunkard would mash Frank&rsquo;s new hat. The
+fellow said he would flatten it flatter than flatness itself. Just
+after dark Mr. Hatch was walking down Third street, &ldquo;Whoop,
+hurrah for Tilden, (hic) &rsquo;endrix.&rdquo; The remark seemed so
+out of place that Frank went down there. The man was lying on the
+sidewalk, and telling the barrel to roll over and not take up all
+the bed. Mr. Hatch accosted the man gently, telling him he would
+catch cold there, and that he had better go with him to the city
+hotel. The man said he would&mdash;be counted in if he did, and
+Hatch bent over him to take him by the lily white hand, when a
+drunken boot came down on the top of that hat, and drove it clean
+down to Frank&rsquo;s nose. Of course it could go no further. Then
+the man pulled Frank down, and the hat struck the end of a salt
+barrel, knocked it off, and the man raised up and sat down on it,
+and kicked it into the street. Frank got the man away, and a boy
+brought his hat to the police station, just as Usher and Littlejohn
+and Knutson, and all the policeman entered. It is said that all
+stood on the corner over by Kevin&rsquo;s watching the arrest. The
+hat was a sight to behold, as it laid in state on the safe, and all
+the boys making comments on it. It looked like a six-inch stove
+pipe elbow that a profane man had been attempting to fit to a
+five-inch stove pipe. It looked like some old dripping pan that had
+been thrown out in the street, and had been run over by wagons. It
+looked like the very dickens. And yet we have no doubt Hatch will
+say this is a lie, because he now wears a good hat, but we know the
+hat he now wears he got by trading a flannel shirt to a grasshopper
+sufferer, and it no more resembles the beautiful new hat he won on
+election than nothing. After Hatch went out of the office, Usher
+let the man &ldquo;escape,&rdquo; and he is five dollars ahead, and
+Ike has got even with Hatch.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/087.png"><img src=
+"images/087.png" alt="Three men stand around a beat-up hat." id=
+"img087" name="img087" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>IT LOOKED LIKE AN OLD DRIPPING PAN.</p>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="The_Thirsty_Gopher" name="The_Thirsty_Gopher">THE
+THIRSTY GOPHER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Minnesota town got a fire steamer on trial, and tested it by
+trying to drown out a gopher. After working it six hours, the
+gopher came out to get a drink. He would have died of thirst if
+they had kept the hole closed much longer.</p>
+<h3><a id="Colored_Concert_Troupes" name=
+"Colored_Concert_Troupes">COLORED CONCERT TROUPES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t know how
+to sing.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>They get too big, these colored people do, and can&rsquo;t
+strike their level. People who have heard Kellogg, and Marie Rose,
+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 her red trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage
+looking as though she would have to be carried on a dust pan, 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, &ldquo;Ise a Gwine
+to See Massa Jesus Early in de Mornin&rsquo;,&rdquo; they would
+have split the air wide open with cheers, and called her out five
+times.</p>
+<p>The fact is, they haven&rsquo;t got sense.</p>
+<p>There was a hungry-looking, round-shouldered, sick-looking
+colored man in the 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, &ldquo;Now we will have some fun.&rdquo; 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
+Wilhelmj or Ole Bull had played it, but the colored brother
+couldn&rsquo;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,&mdash;and the audience
+wished to heaven he had, and when he became exhausted and squeezed
+the last note out, 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 &ldquo;The
+Devil&rsquo;s Dream,&rdquo; or &ldquo;The Arkansaw Traveler,&rdquo;
+that crowd would have cheered him till he thought he was a bigger
+man than Grant.</p>
+<p>But he didn&rsquo;t have any sense.</p>
+<h3><a id="Mattie_Mashes_Minnesota" name=
+"Mattie_Mashes_Minnesota">MATTIE MASHES MINNESOTA.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Mrs. Mattie A. Bridge is meeting with great success in
+Minnesota. In some places she is retained until she lectures four
+times. She says the heart of Minnesota is warm towards her. We
+shall feel inclined to put a head on Minnesota, if it don&rsquo;t
+quit allowing its heart to get warm.</p>
+<h3><a id="Why_the_Fever_Didnt_Spread" name=
+"Why_the_Fever_Didnt_Spread">WHY THE FEVER DIDN&rsquo;T
+SPREAD.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Portage City has had a sensation which, though at one time it
+looked serious, turned out to be a farce. A girl was taken sick,
+and a physician was called who pronounced it a case of yellow
+fever, and he made out a prescription for that disease. Mr.
+Brannan, editor of the Portage Register, who lives near, got the
+news, and imparted it to all whom he met, and they in turn told it
+to others, and a stampede was looked for. Fox turned the Fox House
+over to Bunker, and had his trunks checked for the Hot Springs.
+Corning and Jack Turner hired a wagon to take them to Briggsville.
+H&aelig;rtel, the brewery man, offered to sell out his brewery and
+all his property for eight hundred dollars, and he bought a ticket
+for Germany. Bunker left the Fox House to run itself, and went to
+Devil&rsquo;s Lake. Sam. Branuan, telegraphed to George Clinton, at
+Denver, not to come home, as the yellow fever was raging, and
+people were dying off like rotton sheep. And Sam got vaccinated and
+went to Beaver Dam. The excitement was intense. Men became
+perfectly wild, and were going to rush off and leave the women and
+children to the mercies of the dead plague. Chicago and Milwaukee
+bummers could be seen at the hotels, kneeling beside their sample
+cases trying to pray, but they couldn&rsquo;t. Just before the
+train started that was to carry away the frightened populace, the
+doctor came up town and said that the girl with the yellow fever
+was better, and that she was the mother of a fine nine pound boy.
+The authorities took every precaution to prevent the spread of the
+yellow fever, by arresting the brakemen whom the girl said was the
+cause of all the trouble. All is quiet on the Wisconse now.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/090.png"><img src=
+"images/090.png" alt=
+"A man next to a case marked 'Samples' prays while kneeling." id=
+"img090" name="img090" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>DRUMMERS TRYING TO PRAY.</p>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="Too_Particular_by_Half" name=
+"Too_Particular_by_Half">TOO PARTICULAR BY HALF.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>It is one of the mottoes of THE SUN never to publish anything
+that would cause a blush to mantle the cheek of innocence, or
+anybody. And yet, occasionally, a person finds fault. Not long
+since a man said he liked THE SUN well enough, only it had too much
+to say about patched breeches, which was offensive to some. Well,
+some people are so confounded high toned that if they were going to
+have a patch put on they would have it way up on the small of their
+back. Some of the best women in the world have sat up nights to sew
+a patch on their husband&rsquo;s pants. Martha Washington used to
+do it. But, G. Lordy, a family newspaper must not speak of a patch.
+When you take patches away from the people you strike a blow at
+their liberties. Don&rsquo;t be too nice.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Way_to_Name_Children" name=
+"The_Way_to_Name_Children">THE WAY TO NAME CHILDREN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The names of Indians are sometimes so peculiar that people are
+made to wonder how the red men became possessed of them. That of
+&ldquo;Sitting Bull,&rdquo; &ldquo;Crazy Horse,&rdquo; &ldquo;Man
+Afraid of his Horses,&rdquo; &ldquo;Red Cloud,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Sitting Bull.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;George Washington&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;Hanner Jane,&rdquo; and such beautiful names, some of
+the worst jaw-breakers that ever was. Suppose the attending
+physician should go to the door after a child was born and name it
+after the first object he saw. We might have some future statesman
+named &ldquo;Red Headed Servant Girl with a Rubber Bag of Hot
+Water,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Bald Headed Husband Walking Up and Down the
+Alley with His Hands in His Pockets swearing this thing shall never
+Happen Again.&rdquo; If the doctor happened to go to the door when
+the grocery delivery wagon was there, he would name the child
+&ldquo;Boy from Dickson&rsquo;s Grocery with a Codfish by the Tail
+and a Bag of Oatmeal,&rdquo; or if the ice man was the first object
+the doctor saw, some beautiful girl might go down to history with
+the name, &ldquo;Pirate with a Lump of Ice About as Big as a
+Soltaire Diamond.&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;Candidate for Office so full of Bug
+Juice that His Back Teeth are afloat;&rdquo; or suppose he should
+look out and see a woman crossing a muddy street, he might name a
+child &ldquo;Woman with a Sealskin Cloak and a Hole in Her Stocking
+going Down Town to Buy a Red Hat.&rdquo; It wouldn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="An_Editor_Burglarized" name="An_Editor_Burglarized">AN
+EDITOR BURGLARIZED.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The residence of John Turner, of the Mauston <em>Star</em>, was
+entered by burglars a few nights since, and his clothes were
+stolen, containing all his money and his railroad pass. We can
+imagine an editor around bare as to legs, etcetery, and out of
+money, but to be without a railroad pass must indeed be a sad state
+of affairs. When burglars burgle an editor it is a sign that
+confidence is restored under Hayes&rsquo; administration. We trust
+that editors throughout the State who are blessed with this
+world&rsquo;s goods to the extent of more than one pair of pants,
+will send one pair at least to John Turner, Mauston, Wis., by
+express. We are probably as poor as any editor, but we have sent
+him those alligator pants that have created such a sensation in
+years gone by. It is true they are a little bit fringy about the
+bottoms, and the knees are worn through, and concealment, like a
+worm in the bud, has gnawed the foundation all out of them, but in
+a little town like Mauston, such things will not be noticed. John,
+take them, in welcome, and when the cold winds&mdash;but you better
+carry bricks in your coat tail pockets. That is the way we wore
+them the last three or four years.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Dissected" name="His_Pa_Dissected">HIS PA
+DISSECTED.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;I understand your Pa has got to drinking again like a
+fish,&rdquo; says the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth came
+in the grocery and took a handful of dried apples. The boy ate a
+dried apple and then made up a terrible face, and the grocery man
+asked him what he was trying to do with his face. The boy caught
+his breath and then said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, don&rsquo;t you know any better than to keep dried
+apples where a boy can get hold of them when he has got the mumps?
+You will kill some boy yet by such dum carelessness. I thought
+these were sweet dried apples, but they are sour as a boarding
+house keeper, and they make me tired. Didn&rsquo;t you ever have
+the mumps? Gosh, but don&rsquo;t it hurt though? You have got to be
+darn careful when you have the mumps, and not go out bob-sledding,
+or skating, or you will have your neck swell up biggern a milk
+pail. Pa says he had the mumps once when he was a boy and it broke
+him all up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, never mind the mumps, how about your Pa spreeing
+it. Try one of those pickles in the jar there, won&rsquo;t you. I
+always like to have a boy enjoy himself when he comes to see
+me,&rdquo; said the grocery man, winking to a man who was filling
+an old fashioned tin box with tobacco out of the pail, who winked
+back as much as to say, &ldquo;if that boy eats a pickle on top of
+them mumps we will have a circus, sure.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t play no pickle on me, not when I have the
+mumps. Ma passed the pickles to me this morning, and I took one
+mouthful, and like to had the lockjaw. But Ma didn&rsquo;t do it on
+purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps and didn&rsquo;t know how
+discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn&rsquo;t feel as though I
+had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But about Pa.
+He has been fuller&rsquo;n a goose ever since New Year&rsquo;s day.
+I think its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with
+liquor on New Year&rsquo;s. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink
+and then let it alone. We have got brain, and know when we have got
+enough, but Pa, when he gets to going don&rsquo;t ever stop until
+he gets so sick that he can&rsquo;t keep his stummick inside of
+hisself. It is getting so they look to me to brace Pa up every time
+he gets on a tear, and I guess I fixed him this time so he will
+never touch liquor again. I scared him so his bald head turned gray
+in a single night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What under the heavens have you done to him now?&rdquo;
+says the grocery man, in astonishment. &ldquo;I hope you
+haven&rsquo;t done anything you will regret in after
+years.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Regret nothing,&rdquo; said the boy, as he turned the lid
+of the cheese box back and took the knife and sliced off a piece of
+cheese, and took a few crackers out of a barrel, and sat down on a
+soap box by the stove, &ldquo;You see Ma was annoyed to death with
+Pa. He would come home full, when she had company, and lay down on
+the sofa and snore, and he would smell like a distillery. It hurt
+me to see Ma cry, and I told her I would break Pa of drinking if
+she would let me, and she said if I would promise not to hurt Pa to
+go ahead, and I promised not to. Then I got my chum and another
+boy, to help, and Pa is all right. We went down to the place where
+they sell arms and legs, to folks who have served in the army, or a
+saw mill, or a threshing machine, and lose their limbs, and we
+borrowed some arms and legs, and fixed up a dissecting room. We
+fixed a long table in the basement, big enough to lay Pa out on you
+know, and then we got false whiskers and moustaches, and when Pa
+came in the house drunk and lay down on the sofa, and got to sleep,
+we took him and laid him out on the table, and took some trunk
+straps, and a circingle and strapped him down to the table. He
+slept right along all through it, and we had another table with the
+false arms and legs on, and we rolled up our sleeves, and smoked
+pipes, just like I read that medical students do when they cut up a
+man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you&rsquo;d a dide to see Pa look at us when he
+woke up. I saw him open his eyes, and then we began to talk about
+cutting up dead men. We put hickery nuts in our mouths so our
+voices would sound different, so he wouldn&rsquo;t know us, and was
+telling the other boys about what a time we had cutting up the last
+man we bought. I said he was awful tough, and when we had got his
+legs off and had taken out his brain, his friends came to the
+dissecting room and claimed the body, and we had to give it up, but
+I saved the legs. I looked at Pa on the table and he began to turn
+pale, and he squirmed around to get up, but found he was fast. I
+had pulled his shirt up under his arms, while he was asleep, and as
+he began to move I took an icicle, and in the dim light of the
+candles, that were sitting on the table in beer botles, I drew the
+icicle across Pa&rsquo;s stummick and I said to my chum,
+&lsquo;Doc, I guess we had better cut open this old duffer and see
+if he died from inflamation of the stummick, from hard drinking, as
+the coroner said he did.&rsquo; Pa shuddered all over when he felt
+the icicle going over his bare stummick, and he said, &lsquo;For
+God&rsquo;s sake, gentlemen, what does this mean? I am not
+dead.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The other boys looked at Pa with astonishment, and I said
+&lsquo;Well, we bought you for dead, and the coroner&rsquo;s jury
+said you were dead, and by the eternal we ain&rsquo;t going to be
+fooled out of a corpse when we buy one, are we Doc?&rsquo; My chum
+said not if he knowed his self, and the other students said,
+&lsquo;Of course he is dead. He thinks he is alive, but he died day
+before yesterday, fell dead on the street, and his folks said he
+had been a nuisance and they wouldn&rsquo;t claim the corpse, and
+we bought it at the morgue.&rsquo; Then I drew the icicle across
+him again, and I said, &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t know about this,
+doctor. I find that blood follows the scalpel as I cut through the
+cuticle. Hand me the blood sponge please.&rsquo; Pa began to wiggle
+around, and we looked at him, and my chum raised his eye-lid, and
+looked solemn, and Pa said, &lsquo;Hold on gentlemen. Don&rsquo;t
+cut into me any more, and I can explain this matter. This is all a
+mistake. I was only drunk.&rsquo; We went in a corner and
+whispered, and Pa kept talking all the time. He said if we would
+postpone the hog killing he could send and get witnesses to prove
+that he was not dead, but that he was a respectable citizen, and
+had a family. After we held a consultation I went to Pa and told
+him that what he said about being alive might possibly be true,
+though we had our doubts. We had found such cases before in our
+practice east, where men seemed to be alive, but it was only
+temporary. Before we had got them cut up they were dead enough for
+all practical purposes. Then I laid the icicle across Pa&rsquo;s
+abdomen, and went on to tell him that even if he <em>was</em> alive
+it would be better for him to play that he <em>was</em> dead,
+because he was such a nuisance to his family that they did not want
+him, and I was telling him that I had heard that in his lifetime he
+was very cruel to his boy, a bright little fellow who was at the
+head of his class in Sunday school and a pet wherever he was known,
+when Pa interrupted me and said, &lsquo;Doctor, please take that
+carving knife off my stomach, for it makes me nervous. As for that
+boy of mine, he is the condemndest little whelp in town, and he
+isn&rsquo;t no pet anywhere. Now, you let up on this
+dissectin&rsquo; business, and I will make it all right with
+you.&rsquo; We held another consultation and then I told Pa that we
+did not feel that it was doing justice to society to give up the
+body of a notorious drunkard, after we had paid twenty dollars for
+the corpse. If there was any hopes that he would reform and try and
+lead a different life, it would be different, and I said to the
+boys, &lsquo;gentlemen, we must do our duty. Doc, you dismember
+that leg, and I will attend to the stomach and the upper part of
+body. He will be dead before we are done with him. We must remember
+that society has some claim on us, and not let our better natures
+be worked upon by the <em>post mortem</em> promises of a dead
+drunkard.&rsquo; Then I took my icicle and began fumbling around
+the abdomen portion of Pa&rsquo;s remains, and my chum took a rough
+piece of ice and began to saw his leg off, while the other boy took
+hold of the leg and said he would catch it when it dropped off.
+Well, Pa kicked like a steer. He said he wanted to make one more
+appeal to us, and we acted sort of impatent but we let up to hear
+what he had to say. He said if we would turn him loose he would
+give us ten dollars more than we paid for his body, and that he
+would never drink another drop as long as he lived. Then we
+whispered some more and then told him we thought favorably of his
+last proposition, but he must swear, with his hand on the leg of a
+corpse we were then dissecting that he would never drink again, and
+then he must be blindfolded and be conducted several blocks away
+from the dissecting room, before we could turn him loose. He said
+that was all right, and so we blindfolded him, and made him take a
+bloody oath, with his hand on a piece of ice that we told him was a
+piece of another corpse, and then we took him out of the house and
+walked him around the block four times, and left him on a corner,
+after he had promised to send the money to an address that I gave
+him. We told him to stand still five minutes after we left him,
+then remove the blindfold, and go home. We watched him, from behind
+a board fence, and he took off the handkerchief, looked at the name
+on a street lamp, and found he was not far from home. He started
+off saying &lsquo;That&rsquo;s a pretty narrow escape old man. No
+more whisky for you.&rsquo; I did not see him again until this
+morning, and when I asked him where he was last night he shuddered
+and said &lsquo;none of your darn business. But I never drink any
+more, you remember that.&rsquo; Ma was tickled and she told me I
+was worth my weight in gold. Well, good day. That cheese is
+musty.&rdquo; And the boy went and caught on a passing sleigh.</p>
+<h3><a id="Col_Ingersoll_Praying" name="Col_Ingersoll_Praying">COL.
+INGERSOLL PRAYING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Bob. Ingersoll is taking a rest from his persecutions of the
+Creator, and is traveling in the Yo Semite region of California.
+Bob does not believe there is a God, but if he was riding a kicking
+mule, down the precipice near the big trees, and the saddle should
+turn over with him, and his foot should be caught in the stirrup,
+after the mule had kicked him a few times in the judgement seat,
+which is the bowels, in his case, he would be very apt to bellow
+like a calf, and say &ldquo;O, Lord, please unbuckle that cussed
+strap.&rdquo; We should like to hear Bob had met with some such
+accident, just so he would recognize the foreign government of the
+Lord, which at present he totally ignores. Not that we have
+anything against Ingersoll.</p>
+<h3><a id="How_to_Invest_a_Thousand_Dollars" name=
+"How_to_Invest_a_Thousand_Dollars">HOW TO INVEST A THOUSAND
+DOLLARS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A young man advertises in a Milwaukee paper for a partnership.
+He wants to invest one thousand dollars in some established
+business. Go to La Crosse and go to betting on election. It pays,
+and is an established business. There&rsquo;s millions in it.</p>
+<h3><a id="Boys_and_Circuses" name="Boys_and_Circuses">BOYS AND
+CIRCUSES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+circusses, and we contend that it is the duty of teachers to place
+as few temptations to lie as possible in the way of boys.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t go. If
+he knows 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo; heaven.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>You may try to paralyze him by the story of Daniel in the den of
+lions, and how he was saved by faith in the power above, and the
+boy&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>At a certain age a circus can hold over heaven or anything else
+in a boy&rsquo;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 wont 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.</p>
+<p>Suppose, a day or two before the circus arrives, the teacher
+should say to the school: &ldquo;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 to the circus,
+and if any of you can&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Of course it is a male teacher we are supposing said this. Well,
+don&rsquo;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&rsquo;t any money to go and he had no school funds
+to be used for such a purpose.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>O, we are too smart. We are trying to fire education into boys
+with a shot gun, 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&rsquo;t lay up a cent.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Waters_of_La_Crosse" name=
+"The_Waters_of_La_Crosse">THE WATERS OF LA CROSSE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>We have heretofore entirely overlooked the magnetic qualities of
+the La Crosse water. It will be remembered that the Fond du Lac
+water is advertised as magnetic water, and it has been said that a
+knife blade, after being soaked in the water will take up a watch
+key or a steel pen. That is nothing compared to the La Crosse
+water. Last week a man who had been soaked in La Crosse water, took
+up a watch, key and all, and a policeman who had been using the
+water took up the man, with the watch. A pair of ice tongs, made of
+steel, on being soaked in water, took up a piece of ice weighing
+over a hundred pounds, and a farmer named Dawson, after drinking
+the water took up a stray colt. A young couple stopped the other
+evening and took a drink of water and up Fourth street, and before
+they got to Seymour&rsquo;s corner they were walking so close
+together that you couldn&rsquo;t tell which the bustle was on. We
+have never seen water that had so much magnetism in as this. A pot
+of it on a house is better than a lightning rod.</p>
+<h3><a id="Sardineindianapolis" name=
+"Sardineindianapolis">SARDINEINDIANAPOLIS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>In company with a couple of hundred others who were firm in the
+belief that the Sardinapalus troupe were under the auspices of the
+Young Men&rsquo;s Christian Association, we attended the
+performance on Monday evening. It was heralded as coming from
+Booth&rsquo;s theater, N.Y., where it had a run of four months.
+Most of them got away while on the trip here, and only a few
+appeared. The scenery, which was also extensively advertised, was
+no more than could have been fixed up with a whitewash brush in
+half a day, by home talent. The play, what there was of it was well
+rendered, though many doubted the propriety of the king calling
+around him a lot of La Crosse soldiers, to hear him tell the Greek
+slave how he loved her. There was much dissatisfaction about the
+Greek slave. All marble statues of the Greek slave represent her
+with nothing on but a trace chain around one arm and one leg. But
+the party who got up this play went behind the returns and invested
+her with a white night gown, which detracted very much from
+history. The &ldquo;soldiers&rdquo; were picked up among the La
+Crosse boys, and they got tangled up, and couldn&rsquo;t form a
+line to save themselves, and when they stood against the wall it
+was a melancholy fact that they tickled the ballet girls in the
+ribs as they passed by. This was highly wrong. It takes the romance
+out of the affair to gaze upon an Assyrian soldier, covered with
+armor, and carrying a cover to a wash boiler in his hand, and to
+think that he is covered with scars won in battle, and then look at
+him through a glass and have him wink at you, and you find that you
+have seen him thousands of times standing on the postoffice corner,
+spitting tobacco juice across the sidewalk at the hydrant. Mrs.
+Sardinapalus did not appear, having gone to visit her uncle, but
+&ldquo;Sard.&rdquo; stuck to the Greek slave like a sand burr to a
+boy&rsquo;s trousers. They laid down together on a bale of paper
+rags and looked at the dance. The dance was pretty good. First
+there came out about a dozen girls in tights, with skirts as short
+as pie crust. Their legs were all round and well got up, showing
+that the sawdust was evenly distributed, with no chance for
+dissatisfaction. They capered around, and smiled at the reflection
+of the red lights in the gallery upon the bald heads before them,
+and kicked up like all possessed, and then they backed up against
+the wings and fooled with the La Cross Assyrians, who came down
+like a wolf on the fold. Then there came out two first-class
+dancers, one short, fat, plump, but mighty small, so small that she
+didn&rsquo;t look as though she was big enough for a cork to a jug.
+But she could dance. Well, she ought to, as she had no clothes to
+bother her. Next came a brunette, evidently of French extraction,
+with a face that was a protection against assault with intent to
+kill, and legs of the Gothic style. Smith said she was spavined,
+but that&rsquo;s a lie. She danced better than all of them, and
+walked on her big toes till the audience yelled. Then the dancers
+all got tangled up together, the brunette fell over on the little
+blonde, stuck her hind foot right in the air as straight as a
+liberty pole struck by lightning, somebody said
+&ldquo;Tableau,&rdquo; and the curtain went down, and the audience
+looked at each other as much as to say, &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go
+home.&rdquo; The boys in the gallery cheered, and the curtain was
+rung up again, but her flag was still there. Then they had a
+fighting scene, where everybody gets mad and goes out into the
+dressing room and clashes old swords together, and come back
+wounded. The king, after killing up a lot ahead, got a furlough and
+came in and lallygaged with the Greek slave a spell, and then the
+battle was lost, and &ldquo;Sardine.&rdquo; said he might as well
+die for an old sheep as a lamb. So he ordered a funeral pile built
+of red fire, and he got on it to be burned up. The Greek slave said
+if that was the game she wanted a hand dealt to her, as wherever
+&ldquo;Sard.&rdquo; went she was going, as she had an insurance
+policy against fire in the Northwestern Mutual. So he invited her
+on to the kindling wood, and after hugging enough to last them
+through perdition&mdash;and mighty good hugging it was
+too&mdash;the pile of slabs was touched off, the flames rolled, and
+&ldquo;Sard.&rdquo; and the Greek slave went down to hell clasped
+in each other&rsquo;s embrace, and we went to the People&rsquo;s
+store and bought a mackerel and went home and told our wife we had
+been to a democratic caucus. We don&rsquo;t know what all the other
+fellows told their wives, but there has been a heap of lying, we
+know that much.</p>
+<div class="figure"><a href="images/105.png"><img src=
+"images/105.png" alt="A couple embraces." id="img105" name="img105"
+width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;SARD.&rdquo; AND THE GREEK SLAVE.</p>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="Insecure_Abodes" name="Insecure_Abodes">INSECURE
+ABODES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Four men fell out of the Oshkosh jail the other day. If Oshkosh
+would only imitate Fond du lac, and paper the county jail with wall
+paper, it might become safe.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Knight_and_the_Bridal_Chamber" name=
+"The_Knight_and_the_Bridal_Chamber">THE KNIGHT AND THE BRIDAL
+CHAMBER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t know whether you are on foot or a
+horseback. Of course some of the Knights in attendance were from
+the backwoods, and while they were well up in all the secret
+workings of the order, they were awful &ldquo;new&rdquo; in regard
+to city ways.</p>
+<p>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 <em>was</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;had tried to sleep
+on one of them cots down to camp, but it nearly broke his
+back,&rdquo; and he would be mighty glad to strike a lounge. The
+clerk called a bell boy and said, &ldquo;Show the gentleman to
+253.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy took the Knight&rsquo;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, then at the elevator boy, whom
+he supposed was the bridegroom, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;t nothing mean about me, only I swow it&rsquo;s
+pretty cramped quarters, ain&rsquo;t it, miss?&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sir!&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t take on. The book-keeper told me I could
+sleep on the lounge, but you can have it, and I will turn in on the
+floor. I ain&rsquo;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&rsquo;t you forget it,&rdquo; and he began tugging
+on the boot again.</p>
+<p>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
+&ldquo;didn&rsquo;t want to go to no floor,&rdquo; unless that
+woman wanted the lounge, but if she was huffy, and didn&rsquo;t
+want to stay there, he was going to sleep on the lounge, and he
+began to unbutton his vest.</p>
+<p>Just then a dozen ladies and gentlemen got in 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/108.png"><img src=
+"images/108.png" alt="An angry man is confronted by a policeman."
+id="img108" name="img108" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;THIS IS TOO ALLFIRED MUCH!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Seven_Year_Old_Horses" name=
+"Seven_Year_Old_Horses">SEVEN YEAR OLD HORSES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>An old farmer once said, &ldquo;What a year it must have been
+for colts seven years ago this spring.&rdquo; No person who has
+never attempted to buy a horse can appreciate the remark, but if he
+will let it be known that he wants to buy a good horse, he will be
+struck with the circumstance that all the horses that are of any
+particular account were born seven years ago. Occasionally there is
+one that is six years old, but they are not plenty, Now, those of
+us who lived around here seven years ago did not have our attention
+called to the fact that the country was flooded with colts. There
+were very few twin colts, and it was seldom that a mother had half
+a dozen colts following her. Farmers and stock raisers did not go
+round worrying about what they were going to do with so many colts.
+The papers, if we recollect right, were not filled with accounts of
+the extraordinary number of colts born. And yet it must have been a
+terrible year for colts, because there are only six horses in
+Milwaukee that are over seven years old, but one of them was found
+to have been pretty well along in years when he worked in
+Burnham&rsquo;s brick yard in 1848, and finally the owner owned up
+that he was mistaken twenty-six years. What a mortality there must
+have been among horses that would now be eight, nine or ten years
+old. There are none of them left. And a year from now, when our
+present stock of horses would naturally be eight years old they
+will all be dead, and a new lot of seven years old horses will take
+their places. It is singular, but it is true. That is, it is true
+unless horse dealers lie, and THE SUN would be slow to charge so
+grave a crime upon a useful and enterprising class of citizens. No,
+it cannot be, and yet, don&rsquo;t it seem peculiar that all the
+horses in this broad land are seven years old this spring? We leave
+the suject for the youth of the land to wonder over,</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Joins_a_Temperance_Society" name=
+"His_Pa_Joins_a_Temperance_Society">HIS PA JOINS A TEMPERANCE
+SOCIETY.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think my Pa is showing his age a good
+deal more than usual?&rdquo; asked the bad boy of the grocery man,
+as he took a smoked herring out of a box, and peeled off the skin
+with a broken bladed jack-knife, and split it open and ripped off
+the bone, threw the head at a cat, took some crackers and began to
+eat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t know but he does look as though he
+was getting old,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he took a piece of
+yellow wrapping paper and charged the boy&rsquo;s poor old father
+with a dozen herrings and a pound of crackers; &ldquo;But there is
+no wonder he is getting old. I wouldn&rsquo;t go through what your
+father has, the last year, for a million dollars. I tell you, boy,
+when your father is dead, and you get a step-father, and he makes
+you walk the chalk mark, you will realize what a bonanza you have
+fooled yourself out of by killing off your father. The way I figure
+it, your father will last about six months, and you ought to treat
+him right, the little time he has to live.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I am going to,&rdquo; said the boy, as he picked
+the herring bones out of his teeth with a piece of a match that he
+sharpened with his knife. &ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t believe in
+borrowing trouble about a step-father so long before hand. I
+don&rsquo;t think Ma could get a man to step into Pa&rsquo;s shoes,
+as long as I lived, not if she was inlaid with diamonds, and owned
+a brewery. There are brave men, I know, that are on the marry, but
+none of them would want to be brevet father to a cherubim like me,
+except he got pretty good wages. And then, since Pa was dissected
+he is going to lead a different life, and I guess I will make a man
+of him, if he holds out. We got him to join the Good Templars last
+night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, you don&rsquo;t tell me,&rdquo; said the grocery man,
+as he thought that his trade in cider for mince pies would be cut
+off. &ldquo;So you got him into the Good Templars, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, he thinks he has joined the Good Templars, so it is
+all the same. You see my chum and me have been going to a private
+gymnasium, on the west side, kept by a Dutchman, and in the back
+room he has all the tools for getting up muscle. There, look at my
+arm,&rdquo; said the boy, as he rolled up his sleeve and showed a
+muscle about as big as an oyster. &ldquo;That is the result of
+training at the gymnasium. Before I took lessons I hadn&rsquo;t any
+more muscle than you have got. Well, the Dutchman was going to a
+dance on the south side the other night, and he asked my chum to
+tend the gymnasium, and I told Pa if he would join the Good
+Templars that night there wouldn&rsquo;t be many at the lodge, and
+he wouldn&rsquo;t be so embarrassed, and as I was one of the
+officers of the lodge I would put it to him light, and he said he
+would go, so my chum got five other boys to help us put him
+through. So we steered him down to the gymnasium and made him rap
+on the storm door outside, and I said &lsquo;who comes
+there?&rsquo; and he said it was a pilgrim who wanted to jine our
+sublime order. I asked him if he had made up his mind to turn from
+the ways of a hyena, and adopt the customs of the truly good, and
+he said if he knew his own heart he had, and then I told him to
+come in out of the snow and take off his pants. He kicked a little
+at taking off his pants, because it was cold out there in the storm
+door dog house, but I told him they all had to do it. The princes,
+potentates and paupers all had to come to it. He asked me how it
+was when we initiated women, and I told him women never took that
+degree. He pulled off his pants and wanted a check for them, but I
+told him the Grand Mogul would hold his clothes, and then I
+blind-folded him, and with a base ball club I pounded on the floor
+as I walked around the gymnasium, while the lodge, headed by my
+chum, sung, &lsquo;We won&rsquo;t go home till morning&rsquo; I
+stopped in front of the ice water tank, and said, &lsquo;Grand
+Worthy Duke, I bring before you a pilgrim who has drank of the
+dregs until his stomach won&rsquo;t hold water, and who desires to
+swear off.&rsquo; The Grand Mogul asked me if he was worthy and
+well qualified, and I told him that he had been drunk more or less
+since the reunion last summer, which ought to qualify him. Then the
+Grand Mogul made Pa repeat the most blood-curdling oath, in which
+Pa agreed, if he ever drank another drop, to allow anybody to pull
+his toe-nails out with tweezers, to have his liver dug out and fed
+to dogs, his head chopped off, and his eyes removed. Then the Mogul
+said he would brand the candidate on the bare back with the initial
+letters of our order, &lsquo;G.T.,&rsquo; that all might read how a
+brand had been snatched from the burning. You&rsquo;d a dide to see
+Pa flinch when I pulled up his shirt, and got ready to brand
+him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My chum got a piece of ice out of the water cooler, and
+just as he clapped it on Pa&rsquo;s back I burned a piece of horses
+hoof in the candle, and held it to Pa&rsquo;s nose, and I guess Pa
+actually thought it was his burning skin that he smelled. He jumped
+about six feet and said, &lsquo;Great heavens, what you
+dewin,&rsquo; and then he began to roll over a barrel which I had
+arranged for him. Pa thought he was going down cellar, and he hung
+to the barrel, but he was on top half the time. When Pa and the
+barrel got through fighting I was beside him, and I said,
+&lsquo;Calm yourself, and be prepared for the ordeal that is to
+follow.&rsquo; Pa asked how much of this dum fooling there was, and
+said he was sorry he joined. He said he could let licker alone
+without having the skin all burned off his back. I told Pa to be
+brave and not weaken, and all would-be well. He wiped the
+prespiration off his face on the end of his shirt, and we put a
+belt around his body and hitched it to a tackle, and pulled him up
+so his feet just off the floor, and then we talked as though we
+were away off, and I told my chum to look out that Pa did not hit
+the gas fixtures, and Pa actually thought he was being hauled clear
+up to the roof. I could see he was scared by the complexion of his
+hands and feet, as they clawed the air. He actually sweat so the
+drops fell on the floor. Bime-by we let him down, and he was
+awfully relieved though his feet were not more than two inches from
+the floor any of the time. We were just going to slip Pa down a
+board with slivers in to give him a realizing sense of the rough
+road a reformed man has to travel, and got him straddle of the
+board, when the Dutchman came home from the dance fullern a goose,
+and he drove us boys out, and we left Pa, and the Dutchman said,
+&lsquo;Vot you vas doing here mit dose boys, you old duffer, and
+vere vas your pants?&rsquo; and Pa pulled off the handkerchief from
+his eyes, and the Dutchman said if he didn&rsquo;t get out in a
+holy minute he would kick the stuffing out of him, and Pa got out.
+He took his pants and put them, on in the alley, and then we came
+up to Pa and told him that was the third time the drunken Dutchman
+had broke up our lodge, but we should keep on doing good until we
+had reformed every drunkard in Milwaukee, and Pa said that was
+right, and he would see us through, if it cost every dollar he had.
+Then we took him home, and when Ma asked if she couldn&rsquo;t join
+the lodge, too, Pa said, &lsquo;Now you take my advice, and
+don&rsquo;t you ever join no Good Templars. Your system could not
+stand the racket. Say, I want you to put some cold cream on my
+back.&rsquo; I think Pa will be a different man now, don&rsquo;t
+you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man said if he was that boy&rsquo;s pa for fifteen
+minutes he would be a different boy or there would be a funeral,
+and the boy took a handful of soft-shelled almonds and a few layer
+raisins and skipped out.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Way_Women_Boss_a_Pillow" name=
+"The_Way_Women_Boss_a_Pillow">THE WAY WOMEN BOSS A PILLOW.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/114.png"><img src=
+"images/114.png" alt=
+"A woman holds a pillow in her teeth and puts a pillowcase on it."
+id="img114" name="img114" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>BOSSING THE PILLOW.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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 cannot be
+replaced by any invention.</p>
+<p>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 it 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s jaws about the only rest they
+get during the day.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Hunting_Dogs" name="Hunting_Dogs">HUNTING DOGS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>They are making everything out of rubber now. A man has invented
+a hunting dog that can be carried in the pocket. When you get in
+the field, all you have to do is to blow the dog up, and start it
+to going. This will be a great saving, as hunters will not have to
+pay baggage men a dollar for tying their dogs to a trunk, when they
+go off hunting.</p>
+<h3><a id="Enterprising_Chicago" name=
+"Enterprising_Chicago">ENTERPRISING CHICAGO!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Chicago is to have a hotel built exclusively for men. Under no
+circumstances will a woman be admitted into it. There are so many
+men who go to Chicago, who are liable to wink at women at the table
+of the hotel, before they know their own heart, to lead a different
+life, that this new hotel, without temptation, has been decided
+upon. There will only be a few old bald headed roosters and persons
+with red noses and sore eyes stopping at the new hotel. A hotel
+without women would be almost as cheerful as a reform school.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Mad_Minister" name="A_Mad_Minister">A MAD
+MINISTER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There is probably the maddest minister living at Black River
+Falls, that can be found in America to-day. He is a real nice man,
+and his name is Burt Wheeler. He preaches good sound sense, and
+everybody likes him. He has got friends at Neillsville, and all
+around there. At Black River Falls there is no license, and liquor
+is unknown, while at Neillsville there is license, and one can have
+benzine at every meal. The other day the express took a jug from
+Neillsville to the Falls, directed to the reverend gentleman, and
+on the card attached to the jug handle was the following
+notice:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Old Bourbon&mdash;We have license here, and knowing you
+have none in your town we thought it but kindness to remember your
+wants.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When a jug, or a keg arrives at the Falls by express, every
+citizen notices it, and they investigate, and when the jug came
+into the express office the expressman winked, and in a few minutes
+half the population of the darling little village was there. They
+read the note on the card and winked at each other. One man as he
+took a piece of cut sugar out of a barrel, said he had long
+suspected that Burt liked his toddy. Another fellow, picking a
+mouthful off a codfish, remarked that you couldn&rsquo;t always
+tell about these confounded ministers. Frank Cooper, the editor of
+the <em>Banner</em>, though he looked pained when he saw the name
+&ldquo;Old Bourbon&rdquo; on the jug, and noticed the immense size
+of the jug remarked that it was the best way not to condemn a man
+till the returns were all in. The reverened gentleman was
+interrupted in his preparation of his sermon by a neighboring lady
+who just dropped in to tell the news, and when she sighed and told
+him that his jug of whisky which he had ordered from Neillsville,
+was in the express office, he could hardly believe his ears. He had
+always, to the best of his knowledge and belief, tried to lead a
+different life, and this was too much&mdash;too much bourbon.
+Scratching out the last line that he had written, which was
+something about something biting like an anaconda, and stinging
+like a ready reckoner, he put on his coat and started down town,
+resolved to face the multitude, conscious of his innocence. He
+approached the express office a little nervous. The crowd filled
+the street, and as he passed a raftsman with red breeches on, said
+he wouldn&rsquo;t have such a nose as that on him for a hundred
+dollars. &ldquo;He is full now,&rdquo; said another, as the
+Reverend gentleman put his hand on an awning post to steady himself
+in the trying emergency. A man who was sitting on a salt barrel,
+whittling a shingle, and who had one trousers leg tucked in his
+boot, and a red sash around him, said if it could be proved that
+Wheeler was a drinking man it would be a hard blow at religion, but
+he didn&rsquo;t know as he cared a blank anyway. The elder went in
+the express office and the crowd fell back to give the chief
+mourner a chance to look at the late lamented. There was a
+different expression on every face. Some looked as though they were
+glad he had been caught in the act, while others wore a mournful
+expression, as though they had been suddenly bereaved. He was pale,
+yet determined, and as he read the inscription he said, so help him
+John Rogers, he had never ordered any whisky, and never drank any,
+and didn&rsquo;t know anything about this jug. Turning to those
+present he said: &ldquo;This is some horrid nightmare.&rdquo; The
+expressman said it was no nightmare, it was whisky. Wheeler said if
+the charges were paid he would take it, and taking the jug out
+doors he raised it high in the air and dashed it upon the pavement,
+amid the applause of his friends. At this point Hon. Wm. T. Price
+come along, and was told what had happened. He looked at the amber
+liquid oozing down between the stones on the pavement, put his
+finger in some of it, smelled of it, touched it to his tongue, and
+turning to the yet pale and excited Reverend, he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wheeler, you have maintained a noble principle, but you
+have destroyed four gallons of the d&mdash;dest finest maple syrup
+that was ever brewed in Clark county.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was true, Doc. French and Tom Reed, of Neillsville, two good
+friends of the Rev. Wheeler, had sent him the syrup, knowing that
+he could use it in his family, and being jokers they had put the
+Bourbon card on the jug, just for fun, with the alleged result
+above stated. Temperance men should always smell of the cork, at
+least, before smashing the jug. We have practiced that a good many
+years, and never lost a gallon of maple syrup.</p>
+<h3><a id="Anna_Dickinson_as_Mazeppa" name=
+"Anna_Dickinson_as_Mazeppa">ANNA DICKINSON AS MAZEPPA!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Anna Dickinson is to go upon the stage, and it is said that she
+will open in San Francisco, in the play of &ldquo;Mazeppa.&rdquo;
+If there is any society for the prevention of cruelty to animals on
+the Pacific coast, we trust before Anna is tied on the wild horse
+of Tartary, that some one will see to it that a cushion is put on
+the back of the horse.</p>
+<h3><a id="Good_Templars_on_Ice" name="Good_Templars_on_Ice">GOOD
+TEMPLARS ON ICE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>We like to see young Good Templars have a hankering after cold
+water, bright water; but when a Juvenile Lodge about to start on a
+picnic, deliberately loads a hunk of ice belonging to <em>The
+Sun</em> into an omnibus, we feel like reaching for the basement of
+their roundabouts with a piece of clapboard.</p>
+<h3><a id="Bounced_from_Church_for_Dancing" name=
+"Bounced_from_Church_for_Dancing">BOUNCED FROM CHURCH FOR
+DANCING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s religion
+enough to cause him to backslide.</p>
+<p>If it was this new &ldquo;waltz quadrille&rdquo; that Donaldson
+indulged in, where there is intermittant 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.</p>
+<p>We presume the wicked and perverse Dr. 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.</p>
+<p>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 gripsacks and register and ask for a room
+and a bath, and a fire escape. He will be apt to look up to 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Frozen_Ears" name="Frozen_Ears">FROZEN EARS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo; A girl that will go out sleigh-riding with a young
+man and allow his ears to freeze is no gentleman, 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 &ldquo;sis,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Hard_on_Fond_Du_Lac" name="Hard_on_Fond_Du_Lac">HARD ON
+FOND DU LAC.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Forest street, Fond du Lac, is going to be a great place for
+sparking, one of these days. For three years all the children born
+on that street have been girls. Some lay it to the artesian well
+water.</p>
+<h3><a id="Those_Bold_Bad_Drummers" name=
+"Those_Bold_Bad_Drummers">THOSE BOLD BAD DRUMMERS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/121.png"><img src=
+"images/121.png" alt="A man holds an overflowing collection plate."
+id="img121" name="img121" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE SEXTON IN ALL HIS GLORY.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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&rsquo;t go twice to the
+same drummer.</p>
+<p>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 wore a smile. The sexton looked up to the
+minister, who was picking up a hymn, as much as to say,
+&ldquo;Boss, we have struck it rich, and I am going back to work
+the lead some more.&rdquo; The minister looked at the boys, and
+then at the sexton as though saying, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;passed&rdquo; or &ldquo;renigged,&rdquo; and when the
+last drummer had been interviewed the sexton carried the biggest
+load of silver back to the table that he ever saw.</p>
+<p>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
+from his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief and winked, as much
+as to say, &ldquo;The first man that speaks disrespectfully of a
+traveling man in my presence will get thumped, and don&rsquo;t you
+forget it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The minister rose up in the pulpit, looked at the wealth on the
+table, and read the hymn, &ldquo;A charge to keep I have,&rdquo;
+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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;view the remains.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Anna_Dickinson" name="Anna_Dickinson">ANNA
+DICKINSON.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Anna Dickinson is going upon the stage again and is to play male
+characters, such as &ldquo;Hamlet,&rdquo; &ldquo;Macbeth,&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;Claude Melnotte.&rdquo; 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,
+&ldquo;Alas, poor Yorick, I was pretty solid with him,&rdquo; let
+the spider crawl out of one of the eye holes onto Hamlet&rsquo;s
+hand, and proceed to walk up Miss Dickinson&rsquo;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 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&rsquo;s back and spits,
+then Miss Dickinson is a woman. The country will watch eagerly for
+the result of this test, which we trust will be made at the Boston
+Theatre next week.</p>
+<h3><a id="Expedition_in_Search_of_a_Doughnut" name=
+"Expedition_in_Search_of_a_Doughnut">EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF A
+DOUGHNUT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Twas midnight&rsquo;s holy hour, and silence was
+brooding like a gentle spirit o&rsquo;er the still and pulseless
+world.&rdquo; Not a sound was heard, except Robert&rsquo;s dog
+baying at a sorrel haired young man and a muchmussed girl, who were
+returning home from a suburban picnic. As they passed out of
+hearing, and the dog was peacefully cannibalizing on a link of
+sausage that had been condemned by the board of health, owing to a
+piece of brass padlock that showed through the silky nickel plating
+made of fiddling string material, a soft cry of a child was heard
+in an upper room of a mansion owned by a prosperous business man.
+The head of the house heard it and sat up in bed to still the small
+voice, but couldn&rsquo;t, when the mother of the child said that
+she had forgotten to bring up anything for the child to eat in the
+night, and she must go down cellar and get a doughnut. The man said
+he could never stay there and enjoy himself in bed and think of his
+wife, groping around in the dark below stairs after it. After
+telling him that he would probably come up with a pickle, ehe let
+him go. Carefully he got out of bed, in an angelic frame of mind
+and a night shirt, and barefooted he prepared to make the descent.
+As he stopped to hold one foot in his hand, the instep of which had
+struck the rocker of the baby crib, she told him the doughnuts were
+in the third crock in the pantry on the floor. He said it was one
+evidence of a clear headed man, that he could walk all over his own
+house in the dark. At the head of the first pair of stairs he
+tripped on a baby cart and the tongue flew up and struck him on the
+knee, but by hanging to the bannisters he saved himself. At the
+foot of the stairs he tumbled over a block house and broke off a
+toe nail. He said it was a mean man that wouldn&rsquo;t sacrifice a
+few toe nails for his little baby, and he laughed. He fell over a
+dining room chair, and sat down in another, and when he got up he
+felt that though he was not proud, he was stuck up, for on his
+night shirt was a sticky fly paper that had been placed in
+readiness to catch the unwary early fly. After peeling off the
+sticky paper, and subterraneously swearing a neat, delicate little
+female swear, he groped to the cellar door, and began to go
+down.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/126.png"><img src=
+"images/126.png" alt="A man and a cat are both yelling." id=
+"img126" name="img126" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>THE STARTLED CAT.</p>
+</div>
+<p>Now, if there is anything a boy ought to be punished for, it is
+for surreptitiously eating a large slice of musk melon and leaving
+the rind on the top stair. It tends to make a boy disliked. The
+head of the family stepped with his bare feet on the piece of
+melon, and sat down so quick that it made his head swim. It made
+him swim all over, and under, and everywhere. But if he sat down
+soon, he got up sooner. If there is one thing that a house cat
+should be taught, it is to sleep elsewhere than on the top stair.
+When he fell and struck the sleeping cat there was a crisis. He
+took in the situation at once. An occasional disengaged feline toe
+nail, and a squall, told him in burning words that, while his title
+to the seat was contested, it would be impolitic to wait for a
+commission of unbiased judges to decide which was entitled to it.
+His opponent was armed, and had possession, and he felt that it
+would tend to prevent riot and bloodshed if he quietly gave up. But
+he felt that while in his present position the cat was
+comparatively harmless, if he attempted to rise she would bring the
+whole army and navy into action, and perhaps cripple his resources.
+So he decided to jump up in a hurry before the cat had time to
+think of her toe nails much. His position was not pleasant, to say
+the least, but he jumped up in a hurry, hoping the cat would remain
+and continue her nap. She was not a remaining cat and as soon as
+his weight was removed from her person, she gave a yell as though
+frightened, and began to walk up and down his legs, inside of his
+night shirt. The question as to how many toe nails a cat has got,
+has never been decided, but he says they have a million, and he can
+show the documents to prove it. She went up him as though he was a
+fence post, and a dog after her, and he flew around as though his
+linen was on fire, and yelled until his wife came down to see what
+was the matter. By unbuttoning the top button the cat was coaxed
+out, under protest however, and after a light was lit there was
+seen about the maddest man in the world. He took a candle and went
+down after the doughnuts, and after running his hand into a jar of
+preserved peaches, and another of pickled pig&rsquo;s feet, he
+struck the right one, and after hot grease from the candle had run
+down his fingers he came up with a doughnut, and then the baby
+wouldn&rsquo;t eat it, then he sat down side-ways in a cushioned
+chair, applied arnica and swore till daylight. A single shot was
+heard in the cellar that morning, and the young life of that cat
+went out. As he rode down on the street car the next morning,
+people marvelled that he should stand up on the back platform, when
+there were so many vacant seats, and when a neighbor asked him to
+be seated he said, with a yawn, &ldquo;No thank you, I have been
+sitting down a good deal during the night,&rdquo; and he looked
+mad. It is such things that drive men to commit crimes.</p>
+<h3><a id="Take_Your_Latin_Straight" name=
+"Take_Your_Latin_Straight">TAKE YOUR LATIN STRAIGHT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The school board, at its last session adopted the following
+rule: &ldquo;The continental system of pronounciation shall be
+taught in the high schools of La Crosse, and no other allowed
+except by direction of board of education.&rdquo; We are glad the
+rule has been adopted, as there is no doubt that the continental
+system is the best. We have been pained beyond measure, as no doubt
+all of the school board have, at hearing the scholars pronounce
+Latin by &rsquo;tother system. No longer ago than last Saturday,
+when we were in Mons. Anderson&rsquo;s, a girl came in and asked
+for a pair of Latin corsets, by the Onalaska system of
+pronounciation. The clerk, not understanding, went and got a pair
+of those undershirts and drawers, complete in one number, with no
+tale to be continued. The girl blushed, the clerk did not
+understand, and we had to explain by the continental system, and
+the girl got her corsets, but suppose there had not been a Latin
+scholar standing around there waiting for his wife to buy a package
+of safty pins, what a predicament the girl would have been in. On
+behalf of the people, THE SUN thanks the board of education for
+adopting the continental system of pronounciation, only they ought
+to go further, and make it a crime punishable with suicide for
+anybody to pronounce it in any other way. There has been suffering
+enough by pronouncing it the old way.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="He_is_too_Healthy" name="He_is_too_Healthy">HE IS TOO
+HEALTHY.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;There, I knew you would get into trouble,&rdquo; said the
+grocery man to the bad boy, as a policeman came along leading him
+by the ear, the boy having an empty champagne bottle in one hand,
+and a black eye. &ldquo;What has he been doing Mr.
+Policeman?&rdquo; asked the grocery man, as the policeman halted
+with the boy in front of the store.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I was going by a house up here when this kid opened
+the door with a quart bottle of champagne, and he cut the wire and
+fired the cork at another boy, and the champagne went all over the
+sidewalk, and some of it went on me, and I knew there was something
+wrong, cause champagne is too expensive to waste that way, and he
+said he was running the shebang and if I would bring him here you
+would say he was all right. If you say so I will let him
+go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man said he had better let the boy go, as his
+parents would not like to have their little pet locked up. So the
+policeman let go his ear, and he throwed the empty bottle at a coal
+wagon, and after the policeman had brushed the champagne off his
+coat, and smelled of his fingers, and started off, the grocery man
+turned to the boy, who was peeling a cucumber, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, what kind of a circus have you been having, and what
+do you mean by destroying wine that way! and, where are your
+folks?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll tell you. Ma she has got the hay fever
+and has gone to Lake Superior to see if she can&rsquo;t stop
+sneezing, and Saturday Pa said he and me would go out to Oconomowoc
+and stay over Sunday, and try and recuperate our health. Pa said it
+would be a good joke for me not to call him Pa, but to act as
+though I was his younger brother, and we would have a real nice
+time. I knowed what he wanted. He is an old masher, that&rsquo;s
+what&rsquo;s the matter with him, and he was going to play himself
+for a batchelor. O, thunder, I got on to his racket in a minute. He
+was introduced to some of the girls and Saturday evening he danced
+till the cows came home. At home he is awful fraid of rheumatiz,
+and he never sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured
+off&rsquo;n him, and he stood in the door and let a girl fan him
+till I was afraid he would freeze, and just as he was telling a
+girl from Tennessee, who was joking him about being &lsquo;a nold
+batch,&rsquo; that he was not sure as he could always hold out a
+woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with the charming
+ladies of the Sunny South. I pulled his coat and said, &lsquo;Pa
+how do you spose Ma&rsquo;s hay fever is to-night, I&rsquo;ll bet
+she is just sneezing the top of her head off.&rsquo; Wall, sir, you
+just oughten seen that girl and Pa. Pa looked at me as if I was a
+total stranger, and told the porter if that freckled faced
+boot-black belonged around the house he had better be fired out of
+the ball room, and the girl said &lsquo;the disgustin&rsquo;
+thing!&rsquo; and just before they fired me I told Pa he had better
+look out or he would sweat through his liver pad.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I went to bed and Pa staid up till the lights were put
+out. He was mad when he came to bed, but he didn&rsquo;t kick me,
+cause the people in the next room would hear him, but the next
+morning he talked to me. He said I might go back home Sunday night,
+and he would stay a day or two. He sat around on the veranda all
+the afternoon, talking with the girls, and when he would see me
+coming along he would look cross. He took a girl out boat riding,
+and when I asked him if I couldn&rsquo;t go along, he said he was
+afraid I would get drowned, and he said if I went home there was
+nothing there too good for me, and so my chum and me got to firing
+bottles of champagne, and he hit me in the eye with a cork, and I
+drove him out doors and was just going to shell his earth works,
+when the policeman collared me. Say, what&rsquo;s good for a black
+eye?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home.
+&ldquo;What do you think your Pa&rsquo;s object was in passing
+himself off for a single man at Oconomowoc?&rdquo; asked the
+grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the boy&rsquo;s
+father.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what beats me. Aside from Ma&rsquo;s hay
+fever she is one of the healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose
+he does it for his health, the way they all do when they go to a
+summer resort, but it leaves a boy an orphan, don&rsquo;t it, to
+have such kitteny parents?&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Sure_of_Heaven" name="Sure_of_Heaven">SURE OF
+HEAVEN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The only persons that are real sure that their calling and
+election is sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots,
+are the men who are hung for murder. They always announce that they
+have got a dead thing on it, just before the drop falls. How
+encouraging it must be to children to listen to the prayers of our
+ministers in churches, who admit that they are miserable sinners,
+living on God&rsquo;s charity, and doubtful if they would be
+allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of
+their own unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then
+let the children read an account of a hanging bee, and see how
+happy the condemned man is, how he shouts glory hallelujah, and
+confesses that, though he killed his man, he is going to heaven. A
+child will naturally ask, why don&rsquo;t the ministers murder
+somebody, and make a dead sure thing of it?</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Naughty_But_Nice_Church_Choir" name=
+"The_Naughty_But_Nice_Church_Choir">THE NAUGHTY BUT NICE CHURCH
+CHOIR.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 bookmark 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 the 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&rsquo;t know one card from another.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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 that came in with the old lady, and
+while he was up the soprano put the shoemaker&rsquo;s 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 shoemaker&rsquo;s
+wax melts at ninety eight degrees Fahrenheit.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/132.png"><img src=
+"images/132.png" alt="A man stands looking over a rail." id=
+"img132" name="img132" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE TENOR ARRAYED IN ALL HIS GLORY.</p>
+</div>
+<p>The minister finally got to the amen, and read a hymn, the choir
+then coughed and all rose up. The chair that the tenor sat in stuck
+to him like a brother, and came right along and nearly broke his
+suspenders.</p>
+<p>It was the tenor to bat, and as the great organ struck up he
+pushed the chair, 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Hold the Fort.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;laying&rdquo; for the soprano ever
+since to get even.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Candy had been passed around, and just before the hymn was given
+out in which the soprano was to sing a solo, &ldquo;Nearer My God
+to Thee,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>Well, if a democratic torch-light procession had marched
+unbidden down her throat she couldn&rsquo;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, &ldquo;A Charge to Keep I Have,&rdquo; and
+the congregation was almost melted to tears.</p>
+<p>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
+&ldquo;whoosh,&rdquo; to cool her mouth. The audience saw her wipe
+a tear away, but did not hear the sound of her voice as she
+&ldquo;whooshed.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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:
+&ldquo;Young man, I will get even with you for that peppermint
+candy if I have to live a thousand years, and don&rsquo;t you
+forget it,&rdquo; and then they all sat down and looked pious,
+while the minister preached a most beautiful sermon on
+&ldquo;Faith.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Supreme_Court_Judges_and_US_Senators" name=
+"Supreme_Court_Judges_and_US_Senators">SUPREME COURT JUDGES AND
+U.S. SENATORS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>I would call your attention to a change that it seems to me
+should be made in the method of selecting U.S. Senators and Supreme
+Judges. Heretofore it has been noticeable that the men who carried
+the longest pole knocked down the senatorial persimmons. In the
+matter of the election of Judges of the Supreme Court, it has been
+the practice to secure men for those places at an enormous salary,
+when other men would be willing to do the work and board
+themselves. The suggestion I would make is that you pass a law
+letting the offices of United States Senator and Judges of the
+Supreme Court to the lowest bidder. This method will be economical
+and will secure to the state men who can legislate and judge things
+well enough for all practical purposes. The way times are now we
+must get things at panic prices or go without.</p>
+<h3><a id="Our_Christian_Neighbors_Have_Gone" name=
+"Our_Christian_Neighbors_Have_Gone">OUR CHRISTIAN NEIGHBORS HAVE
+GONE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>It pains us to announce that the Young Men&rsquo;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 it was possible to do for their
+comfort, and to cheer them in their lonely life. That their
+proximity to the <em>Sun</em> office has been beneficial to them we
+are assured, and the closeness has not done us any hurt as we know
+of.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>No one has been more punctual at these free feeds than we have,
+though we 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <em>did</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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 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.</p>
+<p>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 centre 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 toward 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.</p>
+<p>They are all gone. They have crossed the beautiful river, and
+have camped near the <em>Christian Statesman</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s gate, if there is any backtalk, 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&rsquo;s
+Christian Association, and he is asked to pass them in and charge
+it up to the <em>Sun</em>.</p>
+<h3><a id="Buttermilk_Bibbers" name="Buttermilk_Bibbers">BUTTERMILK
+BIBBERS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Another thing, buttermilk does not cause the nose to become red,
+and the consumer&rsquo;s breath does not smell like the next day
+after a sangerfest. The complexion of the nose of a buttermilk
+drinker assumes 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Fishing_for_Pieces_of_Women" name=
+"Fishing_for_Pieces_of_Women">FISHING FOR PIECES OF WOMEN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There are lots of ludicrous scenes to be observed on the
+railroads and conductors are loaded with stories that would cause a
+marble monument to keep its sides a laughing. Some day we are going
+to borrow a conductor, and take him out in the woods, and place a
+revolver to his head and make him deliver a lot of stories. The
+other day as conductor Fred Underwood&rsquo;s train from Chicago,
+arrived on the trestle work on the south side, the whistle blew,
+the air break was touched off, and the train came up standing so
+quick that a woman lost her false teeth in the sleeper, and
+everybody&rsquo;s hair stood up like a mule&rsquo;s ears. Every
+window had a head out, and when the conductor got out on the
+platform he saw the engineer and fireman on the ends of the ties
+looking down into the mud and water, shading their eyes as though
+looking for the eclipse.</p>
+<p>There, sticking out of the mud were two human legs, and as one
+leg had a piece of listing around it, just above the veal, the
+conductor knew, instinctively, that the surface indications showed
+that there was a woman in there. Then he thought that the engine
+had probably struck a female, and tore her all to pieces, and of
+course he knew that the company would expect him to bring home
+enough for a mess, or a funeral. Spitting on his hands he called a
+brakeman with a transom hook out of the sleeper, to fish with, they
+rolled up their trousers and waded in, after telling a porter to
+bring a blanket to put the pieces in. The brakeman got there first
+and took hold of one foot, when the conductor got hold of the
+brakeman&rsquo;s coat tail and pulled. The passengers turned away
+sick, expecting to see the mangled remains brought to the surface.
+They pulled, and directly the balance of the deceased came up. It
+was an Irish lady, with a tin pail, who had been on the way to take
+her husband&rsquo;s dinner to him, and she stood on one side to let
+the train pass, and had lost her balance and fallen into the mud.
+As her head came out of the mud, she squirted water out of her
+mouth, kicked the brakeman in the ear and said,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lave go of me, I am a dacent woman!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The conductor asked her if she was hurt.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hurted is it,&rdquo; said she, &ldquo;Ivery bone in my
+body is kilt intirely, and I have lost me tay cup,&rdquo; and she
+looked in her tin pail in distress.</p>
+<p>After vainly trying to get the conductor to wade in and search
+for her &ldquo;tay cup,&rdquo; she permitted them to assist her
+into the car, where an old doctor from Racine volunteered to
+examine her to see if she was mortally injured. He put his hand on
+her shoulder and asked her if she was in any pain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Divil the pain, except the loss of me tay cup,&rdquo;
+said she, &ldquo;and kape yer owld hands off me, for I am a dacent
+woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook herself in the car and got mud all over everybody, and
+finally took her pail and jumped off at a crossing before arriving
+at the depot. As the train came into the depot ten minutes late,
+and the conductor jumped off, all mud from head to foot, as though
+he had been playing spaniel and retrieving a wounded duck, Supt.
+Atkins looked at his clothes and said, &ldquo;Where in
+&mdash;&mdash; have you been all the time?&rdquo; The conductor
+took a wisp of straw to wipe himself off, and as he threw it under
+a car he said he had been in the artificial propagation of the
+human race. In fact he had been engaged in the noble work of
+raising woman to a higher sphere. He was allowed to go on probation
+and wash himself. The brakeman went down there the next day and was
+fishing in the same hole. He said he didn&rsquo;t know but there
+might be more woman in there, but they say he was after the
+&ldquo;tay cup.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Nearly_Broke_up_the_Ball" name=
+"Nearly_Broke_up_the_Ball">NEARLY BROKE UP THE BALL.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A party of well meaning young people from Ripon nearly broke up
+a dance at Hazen&rsquo;s cheese factory, out in the country a spell
+ago. The people around there are quiet, sober country people, who
+confine themselves in dancing, to plain quadrilles and country
+dances, with an occasional monnie musk, or a plain waltz. These
+young Ripon people are on the dance bigger than a wolf, and they
+have learned all the Boston dips, and Saratoga bends, and Newport
+colic dances, and everything new. There is one dance they have
+learned which is peculiar to say the least. It is a species of
+waltz, but the couple get together so odd that a person who sees it
+for the first time just leans against something and fans himself.
+When the music strikes up a waltz the young man opens his arms and
+doubles himself up like a boy with the cholera infantum, his hind
+leg cramps and his head lops over on one side, and he looks sick,
+his back humps up like a case of chronic inflammatory rheumatism,
+and he is ready. The girl who is with him, when he begins to have
+spasms, at once seems to go into a trance. Her back gets up like a
+cat, she bends over towards him, her forward leg gets out of joint
+at the knee, her neck takes a cramp, her mouth opens and she lolls,
+her eyes roll like a steer that has turned the yoke, and just
+before she dies she falls into the arms of the deceased and they
+are ready. For a moment they stand and squirm like angle-worms on a
+hook, and froth at the mouth, and look, as they stand there, like a
+pile driver that has been run into by an engine. They teeter up and
+down a little, and then fly off on a tangent, and they flop around
+in unexpected places among the other dancers, jump like a box car,
+bump against other couples, and at every bump they are driven
+closer together, until they are so near that it does seem as though
+they will have to be pried apart with a handspike; they look into
+each other&rsquo;s eyes as though they would bite, and they keep
+going around till their backs are broke. Well, a party of these
+kind of dancers went to the cheese factory where the country people
+were gathered, and after dancing a few quadrilles, the fiddlers
+struck up an old fashioned waltz. While the visiting dancers were
+going into spasms to get ready to wade in, the floor filled with
+the country couples, who were waltzing around old fashioned, when
+all of a sudden those Ripon people began to work. They flopped
+across the cheese factory, knocked down a couple from
+Pickett&rsquo;s Corners, caromed on a fellow and his girl from
+Brandon and sent them against a barrel of lemonade, glanced across
+the hall and struck an old lady amidships that had just started to
+call her girl off the floor because she was afraid the girl would
+catch those Ripon cramps, knocked her under a bench, where she lay
+and called for her husband Isaiah, to come and pick her up in a
+basket. In less than two minutes all the other dancers hauled off,
+and stood on benches and looked at them. Some of the country girls
+hid their heads and said they wanted to go home. The visitors slid
+around the hall, caught each other on the fly, run the bases, and
+come under the wire neck and neck, just as the man who played
+second fiddle fell over the base viol in a dead faint, and the man
+that played the piccalo rolled under the music stand, striken with
+apoplexy. The manager of the dance called a constable who was
+present, and told him to arrest the party, and handcuff them and
+take them to the Oshkosh insane asylum, where they had escaped. The
+young men explained that they were not crazy, and that it was only
+a new kind of dance, and they were reluctantly allowed to remain,
+on condition that they &ldquo;wouldn&rsquo;t cut up any more of
+them city monkey shines, not afore folks.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Summer_Resorting" name="Summer_Resorting">SUMMER
+RESORTING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/142.png"><img src=
+"images/142.png" alt="A man on a bench." id="img142" name="img142"
+width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE RESORTER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>A friend who was on the car, on the way up town, after a
+day&rsquo;s work, with a clean shirt on, a white vest and a general
+look of coolness, accosted the traveler as follows:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Been summer resorting, I hear?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The dirty-looking man crossed his legs with a painful effort, as
+though his drawers stuck to his legs and almost peeled the back
+off, and answered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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,&rdquo; and he wiped a cinder out of his eye with what was
+once a clean handkerchief.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Had a good, cool time, I suppose, and enjoyed
+yourself,&rdquo; said the man who had not been out of town.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cool time, hell,&rdquo; said the man, who has a pew in
+two churches, as he kicked his limp satchel of dirty clothes under
+the car seat. &ldquo;I had rather been sentenced to the House of
+Correction for a month.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, what&rsquo;s the trouble?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 lunancy. 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 than I have
+never raised six children.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The only night&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 stairs 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
+&lsquo;Allegezan and Kalamazoo.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, at one place I was woke up at 3 o&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, I don&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And the sticky, cross man got off swearing at summer hotels and
+pirates. We don&rsquo;t see where he could have been traveling.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Jokes_Him" name="His_Pa_Jokes_Him">HIS PA JOKES
+HIM.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What on earth is that you have got on your upper
+lip?&rdquo; said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came in and
+began to peel a rutabaga, and his upper lip hung down over his
+teeth, and was covered with something that looked like
+shoemaker&rsquo;s wax, &ldquo;You look as though you had been
+digging potatoes with your nose.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, that is some of Pa&rsquo;s darn smartness. I asked him
+if he knew anything that would make a boy&rsquo;s moustache grow,
+and he told me the best thing he ever tried was tar, and for me to
+rub it on thick when I went to bed, and wash it off in the morning.
+I put it on last night, and by gosh I can&rsquo;t wash it off. Pa
+told me all I had to do was to use a scouring brick, and it would
+come off, and I used the brick, and it took the skin off, and the
+tar is there yet, and say, does my lip look very bad?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man told him it was the worst looking lip he ever
+saw, but he could cure it by rubbing a little cayenne pepper in the
+tar. He said the tar would neutralize the pepper, and the pepper
+would loosen the tar, and act as a cooling lotion to the lacerated
+lip. The boy went to a can of pepper behind the counter, and stuck
+his finger in and rubbed a lot of it on his lip, and then his hair
+began to raise, and he began to cry, and rushed to the water-pail
+and ran his face into the water to wash off the pepper. The grocery
+man laughed, and when the boy had got the pepper washed off, and
+had resumed his rutabaga, he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That seals your fate. No man ever trifles with the
+feelings of the bold buccanner of the Spanish main, without living
+to rue it. I will lay for you, old man, and don&rsquo;t you forget
+it. Pa thought he was smart when he got me to put tar on my lip, to
+bring my moustache out, and to-day he lays on a bed of pain, and
+to-morrow your turn will come. You will regret that you did not get
+down on your knees and beg my pardon. You will be sorry that you
+did not prescribe cold cream for my bruised lip, instead of cayenne
+pepper. Beware, you base twelve ounces to the pound huckster, you
+gimlet-eyed seller of dog sausage, you sanded sugar idiot, you
+small potato three card monte sleight of hand rotten egg fiend, you
+villain that sells smoked sturgeon and dogfish for smoked halibut.
+The avenger is on your track.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look here, young man, don&rsquo;t you threaten me, or I
+will take you by the ear and walk you through green fields, and
+beside still waters to the front door and kick your pistol pocket
+clear around so you can wear it for a watch pocket in your vest. No
+boy can frighten me by crimus. But tell me, how did you get even
+with your Pa?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, give me a glass of cider and we will be friends and
+I will tell you. Thanks! Gosh, but that cider is made out of mouldy
+dried apples and sewer water,&rdquo; and he took a handful of layer
+raisins off the top of a box to take the taste out of his mouth,
+and while the grocer charged a peck of rutabagas, a gallon of cider
+and two pounds of raisins to the boy&rsquo;s Pa, the boy
+proceeded:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see, Pa likes a joke the best of anybody you ever
+saw, if it is on somebody else, but he kicks like a steer when it
+is on him. I asked him this morning if it wouldn&rsquo;t be a good
+joke to put some soft soap on the front step, so the letter-carrier
+would slip up and spill hisself, and Pa said it would be elegant.
+Pa is a Democrat, and he thinks that anything that will make it
+unpleasant for Republican office holders, is legitimate, and he
+encouraged me to paralyze the letter-carrier. The letter-carrier is
+as old a man as Pa, and I didn&rsquo;t want to humiliate him, but I
+just wanted Pa to give his consent, so he couldn&rsquo;t kick if he
+got caught in his own trap. You see? Well, this morning the
+minister and two of the deacons called on Pa, to have a talk with
+him about his actions in church, on two or three occasions, when he
+pulled out the pack of cards with his handkerchief, and played the
+music box, and they had a pretty hot time in the back parlor, and
+finally they settled it, and were going to sing a hymn, when Pa
+handed them a little hymn book, and the minister opened it and
+turned pale and said, &lsquo;what&rsquo;s this?&rsquo; and they
+looked at it, and it was a book of Hoyle&rsquo;s games instead of a
+hymn book. Gosh, wasn&rsquo;t the minister mad! He had started to
+read a hymn and he quit after he had read two lines where it said,
+&lsquo;In a game of four-handed euchre, never trump your
+partner&rsquo;s ace, but rely on the ace to take the trick on
+suit.&rsquo; Pa was trying to explain how the book came to be
+there, when the minister and the deacons started out, and then I
+poured the two quart tin pail full of soft soap on the front step.
+It was this white soap, just the color of the step, and when I got
+it spread I went down in the basement. The visitors came out and Pa
+was trying to explain to them, about Hoyle, when one of the deacons
+stepped on the soap and his feet flew up and he struck on his pants
+and slid down the steps. The minister said &lsquo;great heavens,
+deacon, are you hurt? let me assist you,&rsquo; and he took two
+quick steps, and you have seen these fellows in a nigger show that
+kick each other head over heels and fall on their ears, and stand
+on their heads and turn around like a top. The minister&rsquo;s
+feet slipped and the next I saw he was standing on his head in his
+hat, and his legs were sort of wilted and fell limp by his side,
+and he fell over on his stomach. You talk about spreading the
+gospel in heathen lands. It is nothing to the way you can spread it
+with two quarts of soft soap. The minister didn&rsquo;t look pious
+a bit, when he was trying to catch the railing he looked as though
+he wanted to murder every man on earth, but it may be he was
+tired.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, Pa he was paralyzed, and he and the other deacon
+rushed out to pick up the minister and the first old man, and when
+they struck the steps they went kiting. Pa&rsquo;s feet somehow
+slipped backwards, and he turned a summersault and struck full
+length on his back, and one heel was across the minister&rsquo;s
+neck, and he slid down the steps, and the other deacon fell all
+over the other three, and Pa swore at them, and it was the worst
+looking lot of pious people I ever saw. I think if the minister had
+been in the woods somewhere, where nobody could have heard him, he
+would have used language. They all seemed mad at each other. The
+hired girl told Ma there was three tramps out on the sidewalk
+fighting Pa, and Ma she took the broom and started to help Pa, and
+I tried to stop Ma, &rsquo;cause her constitution is not very
+strong and I didn&rsquo;t want her to do any flying trapeze
+business, but I couldn&rsquo;t stop her, and she went out with the
+broom and a towel tied around her head. Well, I don&rsquo;t know
+where Ma did strike, but when she came in she said she had
+palpitation of the heart, but that was not the place where she put
+the arnica. O, but she <em>did</em> go through the air like a
+bullet through cheese, and when she went down the steps
+a-bumpity-bump, I felt sorry for Ma. The minister had got so he
+could set up on the sidewalk, with his back against the lower step,
+when Ma came sliding down, and one of the heels of her gaiters hit
+the minister in the hair, and the other foot went right through
+between his arm and his side, and the broom liked to pushed his
+teeth down his throat. But he was not mad at Ma. As soon as he see
+it was Ma he said, &lsquo;Why, sister, the wicked stand in slippery
+places, don&rsquo;t they?&rsquo; and Ma she was mad and said for
+him to let go her stocking, and then Pa was mad and he said,
+&lsquo;look-a-here you sky-pilot, this thing has gone far
+enough,&rsquo; and then a policeman came along and first he thought
+they were all drunk, but he found they were respectable, and he got
+a chip and scraped the soap off of them, and they went home, and Pa
+and Ma they got in the house some way, and just then the
+letter-carrier came along, but he didn&rsquo;t have any letters for
+us, and he didn&rsquo;t come onto the steps, and then I went up
+stairs and I said, &lsquo;Pa, don&rsquo;t you think it is real
+mean, after you and I fixed the soap on the steps for the
+letter-carrier, he didn&rsquo;t come on the step at all,&rsquo; and
+Pa was scraping the soap off his pants with a piece of shingle, and
+the hired girl was putting liniment on Ma, and heating it in for
+palpitation of the heart, and Pa said, &lsquo;You dam idjut, no
+more of this, or I&rsquo;ll maul the liver out of you,&rsquo; and I
+asked him if he didn&rsquo;t think soft soap would help a moustache
+to grow, and he picked up Ma&rsquo;s work-basket and threw it at my
+head, as I went down stairs, and I came over here. Don&rsquo;t you
+think my Pa is unreasonable to get mad at a little joke that he
+planned himself?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man said he didn&rsquo;t know, and the boy went out
+with a pair of skates over his shoulder, and the grocery man is
+wondering what joke the boy will play on him to get even for the
+cayenne pepper.</p>
+<h3><a id="Gathered_Waists" name="Gathered_Waists">GATHERED
+WAISTS!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Andrews&rsquo; <em>Bazar</em> says: &ldquo;Gathered waists are
+very much worn.&rdquo; If the men would gather the waists carefully
+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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Church_Keno" name="Church_Keno">CHURCH KENO.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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
+nineteen drew the quilt and the little sister turned to the
+traveling man and said, &ldquo;My! that is my number. I have drawn
+it. What shall I do?&rdquo; &ldquo;Hold up your ticket and shout
+keno,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+<p>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,
+&ldquo;<em>Keno!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/151.png"><img src=
+"images/151.png" alt=
+"A woman holds a ticket towards an astonished man." id="img151"
+name="img151" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;KENO!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>If a bank had burst in the building there couldn&rsquo;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 &ldquo;keno&rdquo; meant. He said he didn&rsquo;t know
+exactly, but he had always seen people, when they won anything at
+that game, yell &ldquo;keno.&rdquo; She isn&rsquo;t exactly clear
+yet what &ldquo;keno&rdquo; is, but she says she has sworn off
+taking advice from pious looking traveling men. They call her
+&ldquo;Little Keno&rdquo; now.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Old_Sweet_Songs" name="The_Old_Sweet_Songs">THE OLD
+SWEET SONGS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Boston girl sings: &ldquo;What is home without a
+mother,&rdquo; while the old lady is mending her daughter&rsquo;s
+stockings. There is something sweet about those old songs.</p>
+<h3><a id="Failure_of_a_Solid_Institution" name=
+"Failure_of_a_Solid_Institution">FAILURE OF A SOLID
+INSTITUTION.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 thing
+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.</p>
+<p>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 knew how baked beans ought to be
+cooked from years of 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Registry_of_Electors" name=
+"Registry_of_Electors">REGISTRY OF ELECTORS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The registry law has proved a conspicuous failure, inasmuch as
+it has taken ten years of persistent efforts by its use to make a
+change in the admistration. I would suggest that you amend the
+registry law by providing that all qualified voters have their ears
+punched, immediately after voting, by the inspectors of elections,
+the same as conductors punch tickets. This method will obviate the
+difficulties heretofore experienced, and check illegal voting and
+prevent repeating.</p>
+<h3><a id="About_Hell" name="About_Hell">ABOUT HELL.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 the hundredth part of a second, and that it
+would not cause as much &ldquo;sissing&rdquo; as a drop of water on
+a hot griddle.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;Now I lay me,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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 <em>too</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Preparing_for_War" name="Preparing_for_War">PREPARING
+FOR WAR.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The <em>Sun</em> is no alarmist, but it can see in recent events
+what it believes to be a preparation for war. All of the
+manufactories of fire arms and cartridges are working night and
+day, and the Oneida community have just received an order to
+immediately can 24,000 cans of baked beans. When the war will break
+out we do not know, but all this fixed amunition is not being fixed
+for no 4th of July. It is trouble.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Tony_Slaughter-House" name="A_Tony_Slaughter-House">A
+TONY SLAUGHTER HOUSE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Milwaukee paper copies what THE SUN said about killing hogs
+while under the influence of chloroform, at Keine &amp;
+Wilson&rsquo;s packing house, and intimates that it is all a lie.
+Have we lived to this age to have our word doubted by a Milwaukee
+editor? This is too much. Why, bless the dear man, the half has not
+been told. The firm we speak of is desirous of building up a trade
+for gilt edged pork and hams, so every improvement known to the
+trade is inaugurated. We did not think it necessary to describe the
+whole process, but now that our word is doubted, it is necessary to
+do so. When the late lamented hog is transferred from the parlor
+where he was chloroformed, his body is gently, yet firmly placed in
+a gold lined tank, filled with boiling Florida water and cologne,
+where the body remains until the bristles become loose, when it is
+transferred to a table covered with purple velvet, and the bristles
+are removed by the gentlemanly ushers, dressed in the fashions of
+the time of George III, armed with gold candle sticks, studded with
+diamonds. Then the body is taken by easy stages, into the presence
+of the intestine transporter, who reclines upon a downy couch. He
+raises up, brushes a particle of dust from his sleeve, and with a
+silver knife cuts the hog from Dan to Beersheba, and the patent
+insides are received on a silver salver, and divided among
+attendant maidens. The inside of the hog is washed with bay rum,
+and sweet majorum is put in. Then the hog is removed and cut up.
+The portions salted are salted for keeps, and the hams and bacon
+are smoked in a room filled with incense, and when the smoked meat
+comes out it is good enough for a king, or a queen, or a Milwaukee
+editor. Lie, indeed! We should like to see ourselves lying for one
+hog.</p>
+<h3><a id="An_Arm_That_is_not_Reliable" name=
+"An_Arm_That_is_not_Reliable">AN ARM THAT IS NOT RELIABLE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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,&mdash;which is seldom, on account of the old folks.&mdash;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&rsquo;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 bald-headed and mean. &ldquo;You
+want to give her something that will be a constant reminder of
+you?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that was what was
+the matter.&rdquo; &ldquo;Does she have any corns?&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t do. The old man hesitated a moment,
+scratched his head, and finally said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The young man blushed, and said that was about the size of
+it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I presume she enjoys that part of the discourse,
+eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy said that, as near as he could tell, by the way she
+acted, she was not opposed to being held up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is there any attachment to it that will make her dream of
+me all night?&rdquo; asked the boy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir! Don&rsquo;t be a hog,&rdquo; said the bad
+man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then what is it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The old man said one word, &ldquo;Corset!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The young man was delighted, and he went to a store to buy a
+nice corset.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What size do you want?&rdquo; asked the girl who waited
+on him.</p>
+<p>That was a puzzler. He didn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take a tape measure and measure my arm; that will just
+fit.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/159.png"><img src=
+"images/159.png" alt="A woman cries while a man looks on." id=
+"img159" name="img159" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;IT IS F-F-FOUR SIZES TOO B-B-BIG.&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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&rsquo;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 but a corset,
+but if she felt insulted he would take his leave, give the corset
+to some poor family, and go drown himself.</p>
+<p>He was about to go away, when she burst out crying, and sobbed
+out the following words, wet with salt brine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was v-v-v-very thoughtful of y-y-you, but I
+<em>couldn&rsquo;t feel it</em>! It is f-f-four sizes too b-b-big!
+Why didn&rsquo;t you get number eight? You are silent, you cannot
+answer, enough?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They instinctively found their way to the sofa; mutual
+explanation 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Boy_and_the_Goat" name="The_Boy_and_the_Goat">THE
+BOY AND THE GOAT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A man on King Street gave a boy a goat the other day, and he
+tied a rope around its neck to lead it home. The boy wanted to go
+through the gate, but as the goat concluded to jump over the fence
+and pull the boy through between the pickets, he let the goat have
+its own way. The boy got through the fence in instalments, leaving
+his shirt collar and one pants leg on the pickets, the goat dragged
+him out into the middle of the street, and then there occurred a
+sanguinary encounter to see whether the boy or the goat should boss
+the moving. At one time the spectators thought the goat would take
+the boy home. The animal used the boy for a cultivator, and they
+tore up the street like hands working on the road, till the goat
+slipped the rope over his head, and then the boy gathered himself
+up by the armful, and went and told his mother that he got his rope
+back anyway. She combed him with a piece of barrel.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Gets_Mad" name="His_Pa_Gets_Mad">HIS PA GETS
+MAD!</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was down to the drug store this morning and saw your Ma
+buying a lot of court-plaster, enough to make a shirt I should
+think. What&rsquo;s she doing with so much court-plaster?&rdquo;
+asked the grocery man of the bad boy, as he came in and pulled off
+his boots by the stove and emptied out a lot of snow that had
+collected as he walked through a drift, which melted and made a bad
+smell.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, I guess she was going to patch Pa up so he will hold
+water. Pa&rsquo;s temper got him into the worst muss you ever see,
+last night. If that museum was here now they would hire Pa and
+exhibit him as the tattooed man. I tell you, I have got too old to
+be mauled as though I was a kid, and any man who attacks me from
+this out, wants to have his peace made with the insurance
+companies, and know that his calling and election is sure, because
+I am a bad man and don&rsquo;t you forget it.&rdquo; And the boy
+pulled on his boots and looked so cross and desperate that the
+grocer-man asked him if he wouldn&rsquo;t try a little new
+cider.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good heavens!&rdquo; said the grocery man, as the boy
+swallowed the cider, and his face resumed its natural look, and the
+piratical frown disappeared with the cider. &ldquo;You have not
+stabbed your father have you? I have feared that one thing would
+bring on another, with you, and that you would yet be
+hung.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Naw, I haven&rsquo;t stabbed him. It was another cat that
+stabbed him. You see, Pa wants me to do all the work around the
+house. The other day he bought a load of kindling wood, and told me
+to carry it into the basement. I had not been educated up to
+kindling wood, and I didn&rsquo;t do it. When supper time came, and
+Pa found that I had not carried in the kindling wood, he had a hot
+box, and told me if that wood was not in when he came back from the
+lodge, that he would warm my jacket. Well, I tried to hire some one
+to carry it in, and got a man to promise to come in the morning and
+carry it in and take his pay in groceries, and I was going to buy
+the groceries here and have them charged to Pa. But that
+wouldn&rsquo;t help me out that night. I knew when Pa came home he
+would search for me. So I slept in the back hall on a cot. But I
+didn&rsquo;t want Pa to have all his trouble for nothing, so I
+borrowed an old torn cat that my chum&rsquo;s old maid aunt owns,
+and put the cat in my bed. I thought if Pa came into my room after
+me, and found that by his unkindness I had changed to a torn cat,
+he would be sorry. That is the biggest cat you ever see, and the
+worst fighter in our ward. It isn&rsquo;t afraid of anything, and
+can whip a New Foundland dog quicker than you could put sand in a
+barrel of sugar. Well, about eleven o&rsquo;clock I heard Pa
+tumbing over the kindling wood, and I knew by the remark he made as
+the wood slid around under him, that there was going to be a cat
+fight real quick. He came up to Ma&rsquo;s room, and sounded Ma as
+to whether Hennery had retired to his virtuous couch. Pa is awful
+sarcastic when he tries to be. I could hear him take off his
+clothes, and hear him say, as he picked up a trunk strap, &lsquo;I
+guess I will go up to his room and watch the smile on his face, as
+he dreams of angels. I yearn to press him to my aching
+bosom.&rsquo; I thought to myself, mebbe you won&rsquo;t yearn so
+much directly. He come up stairs, and I could hear him breathing
+hard. I looked around the corner and could see he just had on his
+shirt and pants, and his suspenders were hanging down, and his bald
+head shown like a calcium light just before it explodes. Pa went
+into my room, and up to the bed, and I could hear him say,
+&lsquo;Come out here and bring in that kindling wood or I will
+start a fire on your base burner with this strap.&rsquo; And then
+there was a yowling such as I never heard before, and Pa said,
+&lsquo;Helen Blazes,&rsquo; and the furniture in my room began to
+fall around and break. O, <em>my</em>! I think Pa took the torn cat
+right by the neck, the way he does me, and that left the
+cat&rsquo;s feet free to get in their work. By the way the cat
+squawled as though it was being choked I know Pa had him by the
+neck. I suppose the cat thought Pa was a whole flock of New
+Foundland dogs, and the cat had a record on dogs, and it kicked
+awful. Pa&rsquo;s shirt was no protection at all in a cat fight,
+and the cat just walked all around Pa&rsquo;s stomach, and Pa
+yelled &lsquo;police,&rsquo; and &lsquo;fire,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;turn on the hose,&rsquo; and he called Ma, and the cat
+yowled. If Pa had had presence of mind enough to have dropped the
+cat, or rolled it up in the mattrass, it would have been all right,
+but a man always gets rattled in time of danger, and he held on to
+the cat and started down stairs yelling murder, and he met Ma
+coming up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guess Ma&rsquo;s night cap or something frightened the
+cat more, cause he stabbed Ma on the night-shirt with one hind
+foot, and Ma said &lsquo;mercy on us,&rsquo; and she went back, and
+Pa stumbled on a hand-sled that was on the stairs, and they all
+fell down, and the cat got away and went down in the coal bin and
+yowled all night. Pa and Ma went into their room, and I guess they
+annointed themselves with vasaline, and Pond&rsquo;s extract, and I
+went and got into my bed, cause it was cold out in the hall, and
+the cat had warmed my bed as well as it had warmed Pa. It was all I
+could do to go to sleep, with Pa and Ma talking all night, and this
+morning I came down the back stairs, and haven&rsquo;t been to
+breakfast, cause I don&rsquo;t want to see Pa when he is vexed. You
+let the man that carries in the kindling wood have six shillings
+worth of groceries, and charge them to Pa. I have passed the
+kindling wood period in a boy&rsquo;s life, and have arrived at the
+coal period. I will carry in coal, but I draw the line at kindling
+wood.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you are a cruel, bad boy,&rdquo; said the grocery
+man, as he went to the book and charged the six shillings.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, I don&rsquo;t know. I think Pa is cruel. A man who
+will take a poor kitty by the neck, that hasn&rsquo;t done any
+harm, and tries to chastise the poor thing with a trunk strap,
+ought to be looked after by the humane society. And if it is cruel
+to take a cat by the neck, how much more cruel is it to take a boy
+by the neck, that had diphtheria only a few years ago, and whose
+throat is tender? Say, I guess I will accept your invitation to
+take breakfast with you,&rdquo; and the boy cut off a piece of
+bologna and helped himself to the crackers, and while the grocery
+man was out shoveling off the snow from the sidewalk, the boy
+filled his pockets with raisins and loaf sugar, and then went out
+to watch the man carry in his kindling wood.</p>
+<h3><a id="Spurious_Tripe" name="Spurious_Tripe">SPURIOUS
+TRIPE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Cash" name="Cash">&ldquo;CASH.&rdquo;</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>On circus day W.H.H. Cash, the great railroad monopolist of New
+Lisbon, was in the city. He had just made a few hundred thousand
+dollars on a railroad contract, and he decided to expend large sums
+of money in buying dry goods. He went into one of our stores and
+was passing along up the floor, when a black-eyed girl with a
+dimple in her chin, pearly teeth, red pouting lips, who was behind
+the counter, shouted, &ldquo;<em>cash, here!</em>&rdquo; Mr. Cash
+turned to her, a smile illuminating his face as big as a horse
+collar. He is one of the most modest men in the world, and as he
+extended his great big horny hand to the girl, a blush covered his
+face, and the perspiration stood in great beads on his forehead.
+&ldquo;How do yeu dew?&rdquo; said Cash, as she seemed to shrink
+back in a frightened manner. They gazed at each other a moment, in
+astonishment, when another girl, perhaps a little better looking,
+further on, said, &ldquo;Here, Cash, quick!&rdquo; He at once made
+up his mind that she was the one that had spoken to him the first
+time, so he said, &ldquo;Beg your pardon, miss,&rdquo; to the
+black-eyed girl, and went on to where the other girl was wrapping
+up a corset in a base ball undershirt. As he approached her she
+smiled, supposing he wanted to buy something. He thought she knew
+him, and he sat down on a stool and put out his hand and said,
+&ldquo;How have you been?&rdquo; She didn&rsquo;t seem to shake
+very much, but asked him if there was anything she could show him.
+He thought may be it was against the rules for the clerks to speak
+to anybody, unless they were buying something, so he said,
+&ldquo;Yes, of course. Show me corsets, stockings, anything, gaul
+dumbed if I care what.&rdquo; She was just beginning to look upon
+him as though she thought he had escaped, when a little blonde on
+the other side of the store, as sweet as honey, shouted,
+&ldquo;Cash, Cash, I need thee every hour. Come a running.&rdquo;
+To say that Cash was astonished, is drawing it mild. He knew that
+they all wanted him, but he couldn&rsquo;t make out how they seemed
+to know his name. He looked at the little blonde a minute, trying
+to think where he had met her, when he decided to go over and ask
+her. On the way over he thought she resembled a girl that used to
+live in Portage. He went up to her, and with a smile that was
+childlike and bland, he said, &ldquo;Why, how are you,
+Samantha?&rdquo; The little blonde looked daggers at him.
+&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you use to wait on tables there at the Fox
+House, at Portage?&rdquo; The girl picked up a roll of paper
+cambric, and was about to brain him, when the floor walker came
+along, and asked what was the matter. Cash explained that since he
+came into the store, three or four girls had yelled to him, and he
+couldn&rsquo;t place them. &ldquo;There,&rdquo; says he, as another
+girl yelled &ldquo;Cash,&rdquo; &ldquo;there&rsquo;s another of
+&lsquo;em wants me,&rdquo; and he was going to where she was, when
+the floor walker asked him if his name was Cash. &ldquo;You bet
+your liver it is,&rdquo; said Cash. It was then explained to him
+that the girls were calling cash boys. He thought it over a minute
+and said, &ldquo;Sold, by the great baldheaded Elijah. Won&rsquo;t
+you go down and take something? Invite all of them. The girls can
+take soda. I&rsquo;ll be gaul blasted if I ever had such a rig
+played on me.&rdquo; And he went out into the glare of the
+sunlight, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and just then the
+circus procession came along, and he followed off the elephants.
+There are lots of worse men than Cash.</p>
+<h3><a id="To_What_Vile_Uses_May_We_Come" name=
+"To_What_Vile_Uses_May_We_Come">TO WHAT VILE USES MAY WE
+COME.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A dispatch from Chicago, says that three men were shot on
+&ldquo;a boat used for the vilest purposes.&rdquo; We never knew
+that the newspapers were printed on boats there in Chicago.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Advent_Preacher_and_the_Balloon" name=
+"The_Advent_Preacher_and_the_Balloon">THE ADVENT PREACHER AND THE
+BALLOON.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There occasionally occurs an accident 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, &ldquo;O,
+Jesus, do not pass me by.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/167.png"><img src=
+"images/167.png" alt="A man calls to a hot air balloon." id=
+"img167" name="img167" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;DO NOT PASS ME BY!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>We should pity the poor man for his ignorance, we who believe
+that when Christ <em>does</em> 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&rsquo;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,
+&ldquo;Where in &mdash;&mdash; are we?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>He must have come to the conclusion that the Son of 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 had not gone to heaven and opened a brewery.</p>
+<p>Of course we who are intelligent, and 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>He had been waiting for the wagon, full of hope, and when it
+came, and he saw the helmet on King&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>The Adventist would have been justified in renouncing his
+religion and joining the Democratic party. It is sad, indeed.</p>
+<h3><a id="Mr_Pecks_Sunday_Lecture" name=
+"Mr_Pecks_Sunday_Lecture">MR. PECK&rsquo;S SUNDAY LECTURE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The papers all around here are saying that I have a new Sunday
+Lecture, with a bad title. The way of it was this. A man in a
+neighboring city telegraphed me to know if I would deliver a
+&ldquo;Sunday Lecture,&rdquo; and telling me to choose my subject,
+and answer by telegraph. I thought it was some joke of the boys.
+The idea of me delivering a Sunday lecture was ridiculous, so, in a
+moment of thoughtlessness I telegraphed back, &ldquo;What in the
+d&mdash;&mdash; do you take me for?&rdquo; I supposed that that
+would be enough to inform the man that I was not in the business.
+What do you suppose he did? He telegraphed back to me as follows:
+&ldquo;All right. We have advertised you for Sunday. Subject,
+&lsquo;What the d&mdash;&mdash; do you take me for.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+You can judge something of my surprise and indignation.</p>
+<p>That is how it was.</p>
+<h3><a id="Religion_and_Fish" name="Religion_and_Fish">RELIGION AND
+FISH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;Amen&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>Discussions on how to bring up children in the the way they
+should go are broken into by a deacon with his nose peeled coining
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;mashed&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s only hook, it was setting a bad
+example.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Political_Outlook" name="The_Political_Outlook">THE
+POLITICAL OUTLOOK.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>When you see an article in the editorial columns of a paper
+headed, &ldquo;The Political Outlook,&rdquo; look at the bottom
+line, and if it says &ldquo;sold by all druggists,&rdquo;
+don&rsquo;t read it. There is such an article going the rounds,
+which is an advertisement of a patent medicine. It is a counterfeit
+well calculated to deceive. Don&rsquo;t read a political article
+unless the owner&rsquo;s name is blown in the bottle.</p>
+<h3><a id="Rope_Ladders" name="Rope_Ladders">ROPE LADDERS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The law to compel hotel keepers to provide rope ladders for
+every room above the second floor, is said not to be enforced,
+though it should be by all means. The law ought to be amended so as
+to compel guests to get up once or twice during the night and run
+up or down the rope ladder, outside the window, in their night
+clothes, so as to be in practice in case of fire. When every room
+is provided with rope ladders there will be lots of fun. Those men
+who invariably blow out the gas, will probably think they have got
+to come down stairs on the rope ladder in the morning, and it will
+take an extra clerk to stand in the alleys around a hotel, with a
+shot gun, to keep impecunious guests from going away from the
+tavern via rope ladder. And then imagine an Oshkosh man in a
+Milwaukee hotel, his head full of big schemes, and his skin full of
+beer. He has been on a &ldquo;bum,&rdquo; and is nervous, and on
+being shown to his room he sees the rope ladder coiled up under the
+window, ready to spring upon him. He stares at it, and the cold
+sweat stands all over him. The rope ladder returns his gaze, and
+seems to move and to crawl towards his feet. For a moment he is
+powerless to move. His hair stands on end, his heart ceases to
+beat, cold and warm chills follow each other down his trousers legs
+and he clutches at the air, his eyes start from their sockets, and
+just as the rope ladder is about to wind around him, and crush his
+life out, he regains strength enough to rush down stairs head over
+appetite, and tell the clerk about the menagerie up stairs. O,
+there is going to be fun with these rope ladders, sure.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Doctor_of_Laws" name="A_Doctor_of_Laws">A DOCTOR OF
+LAWS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A doctor at Ashland is also a Justice of the Peace, and when he
+is called to visit a house he don&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 plaster on her chest, and some onions around her
+neck.</p>
+<p>She was mad, and flared right up, and said she wasn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>The doctor got mad, and asked her if she thought he didn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>But the doc. had cheek. Just as he was leaving he asked the
+bridegroom if he didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t
+care much about going to Ashland anyway.</p>
+<h3><a id="Comforting_Compensations" name=
+"Comforting_Compensations">COMFORTING COMPENSATIONS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>If a farmer&rsquo;s wheat is killed by rain, he is consoled by
+the fact that rain is just what his corn needs. If his cattle die
+of disease, his consolation lies in the hope that pork will bring a
+good price. If boys steal his watermelons, he knows by experience
+that they will have the cholera morbus. So everything that is
+unpleasant has its compensation.</p>
+<h3><a id="Laying_up_Apples_in_Heaven" name=
+"Laying_up_Apples_in_Heaven">LAY UP APPLES IN HEAVEN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>They tell a good story at Portage City, at the expense of
+Senator Barden, or a minister, we don&rsquo;t know which. Barden
+had a lot of apples sent him last fall, and he was anxious to sell
+them, before winter set in. One day he thought of a new minister
+that had settled in Portage, so he made up his mind to take him up
+a couple of barrels, supposing that when he went to heaven and saw
+the big ledger opened, there would be a credit about as
+follows:</p>
+<table summary="Barden's account" style="width:70%;margin:auto;">
+<tr>
+<td colspan="5">
+<p class="cen">L.W. BARDEN,<br />
+in acc't with Providence,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" style="text-align:right;">1876.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Oct.</td>
+<td>21.</td>
+<td>By</td>
+<td>two bbls. apples, @ $3</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">$6.00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td style="text-align:center;">"</td>
+<td style="text-align:center;">"</td>
+<td style="text-align:center;">"</td>
+<td>drayage</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">.30</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td></td>
+<td></td>
+<td style="text-align:center;">Total</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;border-top:solid 1px;">$6.30</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<div class="figright" style="clear:left;"><a href=
+"images/175.png"><img src="images/175.png" alt=
+"A man yells at a drayman from a house." id="img175" name="img175"
+width="100%" /></a>
+<p>NO MORE APPLES FOR THE MINISTER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>Barden loaded them on a dray, and got on it, with his pants in
+his boots, and went up to deliver them himself. He stopped at the
+minister&rsquo;s gate, and hurried the apples off and rolled them
+inside the gate, and tried to get away before the minister had time
+to thank him. Just as he was about to drive away the door opened
+and the man of God came out, and says he:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look here! You put them apples in the cellar!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Barden told him he was in something of a hurry, and really he
+could not spare the time. The minister raised his voice to a sort
+of &ldquo;auction pitch,&rdquo; and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here, now. You don&rsquo;t know your business, Mr.
+Drayman. You roll them apples into the cellar, or I won&rsquo;t
+accept them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The senator was by this time as mad as senators usually get. He
+jumped off the dray, threw the two barrels of apples on, and drove
+off, saying he didn&rsquo;t care a continental dam if the minister
+eat dried apples all winter. And he took them back to his store,
+and it is safe to say that he will not give many more apples to
+that minister.</p>
+<p>MORAL:&mdash;Never despise a man because he wears a ragged coat,
+for he may be a senatorial granger angel in the disguise of a
+drayman. And you may have to fill up on turnips instead of
+apples.</p>
+<h3><a id="One_of_Beechers_Converts" name=
+"One_of_Beechers_Converts">ONE OF BEECHER&rsquo;S
+CONVERTS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Since Beecher, the great revivalist, was here, and spoke so
+eloquently on the fall of man, and the need of making arrangements
+for the future, I have become a changed man. It hurts me to lie
+now, and when anything hurts, then I quit. It is wrong to lie, and
+a man who follows it up will come to some bad end.</p>
+<h3><a id="Buying_a_Stone_Crusher" name=
+"Buying_a_Stone_Crusher">BUYING A STONE CRUSHER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The proceedings of the council of the city of Milwaukee shows
+that the aldermen are about to buy a stone crusher, to be run by
+steam, for the purpose of crushing stones to be used on the
+streets. If the city has never indulged in the luxury of a stone
+crusher, it should interview some city that has owned one, before
+it closes a contract with any party that wants to sell one. Every
+party that owns one does want to sell it. Statistics show that. The
+first city in Wisconsin that bought one was Madison. The city owned
+it for a year or two, and after that no man that was in the council
+when it was bought could ever get in it again. The mayor that
+winked at the purchase of the stone crusher was defeated, and there
+was trouble. No person would ever say what was the matter, but you
+say &ldquo;stone crusher&rdquo; to a citizen of Madison, and he
+would reach his right hand around to his pistol pocket, and the
+conversation would cease.</p>
+<p>La Crosse heard that Madison had a stone crusher, and so she
+wanted one. La Crosse is bound to have anything that any other town
+has, whether it is a railroad, an insane asylum, or a speckled hen.
+La Crosse could have bought Madison&rsquo;s stone crusher at a
+discount, but she wanted one new, with the paint all on, fresh.
+Second-hand stone crusher? Not any for La Crosse. So the city
+ordered a brand new one, right from the mint, at an expense of
+about $5,000.</p>
+<p>The idea was that it would be about as big as a straw cutter, or
+a job press, and people were anxious to see it work.</p>
+<p>Finally the city was notified that one train of cars loaded with
+the stone crusher had arrived, with red flags on, betokening extra
+trains running wild behind, and the city was told to come down to
+the depot and pay the first installment of freight, and take the
+stone crusher away&mdash;that part of it that had arrived. The
+aldermen went down and took an inventory of the hardware, and some
+of them went and jumped in the river. At a cent a pound one can buy
+a good deal of cast iron for five thousand dollars. The city bonded
+itself, and paid the freight, and during the spring all of the
+trains loaded with the stone crusher arrived. It was argued that
+the only way to get the stone crusher up to the city building would
+be to give the railroad the right of way up town, right through
+Main street.</p>
+<p>Some were in favor of letting the railroad company keep it for
+freight, but the company threatened to get out an injunction on the
+city. Finally a man who took contracts to move brick buildings
+agreed to move it up town on shares, and during the summer the most
+of it was got up there and corded up on some vacant lots. If all
+the cast iron in it came out of one mine it must have been an
+immense mine. People would look at it and weep. Every alderman
+swore he voted against buying it. Occasionally some one in the
+council would suggest that the stone crusher be taken out to the
+bluffs, a couple of miles, and set to work, when another one would
+move, to amend by inserting a clause that the bluffs be moved into
+the city to be crushed, as it would save expense. Then the matter
+would drop. For three years that stone crusher stood there, and it
+never crushed a pebble. New mayors and aldermen were elected, and
+every day they passed that crusher, but they never spoke to it.
+Finally a job was put up to get rid of it. There was a man there
+who owned a stone quarry, and it occurred to somebody to sell it to
+him. He was a truly good man, and did not believe there were any
+bad men in the world, who would kanoodle him with a stone crusher.
+A committee was appointed to sell it to him. The committee was
+composed of men who had traded horses, sold lightning rods, and
+been insurance agents, and when they told the poor man that the
+city had noticed that he was a deserving man, that they had decided
+to help him along, and would sell him that stone crusher, and he
+could pay for it in crushed stone, and the city would pay him in
+cash half a dollar more than the stone was worth, he said he would
+take it. They got it on to him by buying crushed stone of him and
+paying cash for it.</p>
+<p>We have never heard whether the man lived or not, and have never
+heard whether the city bought any stone of him, but the city got
+rid of it, and then had a celebration. Why, they figured it up, and
+the thing could crush enough stone in twenty-four hours to pave the
+streets a foot thick all over town and thirteen miles in the
+country. To run it a week would bankrupt the State of Wisconsin, It
+could go up to the stone quarry and tunnel a hole right through the
+hill. It was the biggest elephant that ever a city drew in a
+legalized lottery. Milwaukee will make money if she does not buy a
+stone crusher, not as long as it can buy stone in the rough, and
+have it crushed by tramps, at nothing a day.</p>
+<h3><a id="Merrie_Christmas" name="Merrie_Christmas">MERRIE
+CHRISTMAS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>What proportion of the people who wish each other merry
+Christmas, do you suppose think of the reason that the day is a
+holiday? Not one in a thousand. Do the young fellows who put on a
+clean shirt and go down town and play pool all day, and drink
+yellow stuff out of a shaving cup, and get chalk on their fingers,
+and eat liver sausage, think that Christ died to save them? No! All
+they think of is the prospect of sticking some other fellow for the
+game. Do the hundreds of thousands of people who get up a big feed,
+and gormandize, think of Christ, or the poor all about them who
+have little to eat to-day, and little prospect of more to eat
+to-morrow? Many of them do not think of the poor, or of anything
+else except to prospect upon how much they will hold and not get
+sick.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Difference_in_Horses" name=
+"The_Difference_in_Horses">THE DIFFERENCE IN HORSES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s father kicked the young man all over the orchard, and
+broke the mainspring of his watch.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s arm would steal around her waist, and she would snug
+up to him, and&mdash;Oh, pshaw, you have heard it before.</p>
+<p>Well, late years the livery men have &ldquo;got onto the
+racket,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;Them children will get all smashed up
+one of these days.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl&rsquo;s mother and father see the team start, and their
+minds experience a relief as they reflect that &ldquo;as long as
+John drives that frisky team there can&rsquo;t be no hugging a
+going on.&rdquo; The girl&rsquo;s older sister sighs and says,
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s so,&rdquo; and goes to her room and laughs
+right out loud.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>But a change comes over them. A carriage appears in front,
+coming towards them. It may be someone 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.</p>
+<p>If you meet the party on the Whitefish Bay road at 10
+o&rsquo;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 the 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Base_Ingratitude" name="Base_Ingratitude">BASE
+INGRATITUDE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>I remember once of offering a lady from Eau Claire a slice of
+bread and a half of a red onion in a railroad car. She looked
+hungry, and yet she said she didn&rsquo;t care to eat. Thinking she
+had a delicacy about accepting food at the hands of one who was
+almost a stranger to her, I turned the bread and onion into her
+lap, and said she was entirely welcome to it. What did she do?
+Instead of eating it, and thanking me, she threw it out of the
+window, and went and sat by the stove. I was never so offended in
+my life. That woman may see the time she will want that onion, and
+I would see her almost perish of starvation before she could have
+any more of my onion.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Difference" name="The_Difference">THE
+DIFFERENCE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>One of the great female writers on dress reform, in trying to
+illustrate how terrible the female dress is, says:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;s
+dress is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now you think you have done it, don&rsquo;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&rsquo;s four
+shilling drawers on her that are so tight that when they get damp,
+from perspiration, sis, they stick so you can&rsquo;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
+meningitis; 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 whiskey cocktails, and walk around in
+the sun with tight boots on, sis, and then you will know what a
+man&rsquo;s dress is.</p>
+<p>Come to figure it up, it is about an even thing,
+sis,&mdash;isn&rsquo;t it?</p>
+<h3><a id="Those_Step_Ladders" name="Those_Step_Ladders">THOSE STEP
+LADDERS!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There has got to be a law passed to punish the hardware dealers
+for selling those step ladders that shut up like a jack-knife. A
+Ninth Street woman got onto one the other afternoon when it looked
+as though there was going to be a frost, to take her ivies down and
+carry them in the house. We don&rsquo;t care how handsome a woman
+is naturally, you put a towel around her head and put her up on a
+step ladder about seven feet high, with a tomahawk in her left
+hand, trying to draw a big nail out of a post on a veranda, and she
+looks like thunder. This woman did. Her husband tried to get her to
+let him do the work, but she said a man never knew how to do
+anything, anyway. So he sat down on the steps to see how it would
+turn out. She said afterwards that he kicked the ladder, but
+however that may be, there was an earthquake, and when he looked up
+the air was filled with calico, toweling, striped stockings,
+polonaise, trailing arbutus, red petticoats, store hair and step
+ladder. He said the step ladder struck the veranda last, but as he
+picked her off of it, it seemed as though it must have lit first.
+He said the step ladder must have kicked up. In coming down she run
+one leg through the baby wagon, and the other through some flower
+pots, and a boy who was passing along said he guess she had been to
+the turning school.</p>
+<h3><a id="Wonders_of_the_Stage" name=
+"Wonders_of_the_Stage">WONDERS OF THE STAGE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/185.png"><img src=
+"images/185.png" alt=
+"A woman sits on a backwards chair and drinks from a bottle." id=
+"img185" name="img185" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>BEHIND THE SCENES.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;twelve years is supposed to elapse,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="How_Farmers_May_Get_Rich" name=
+"How_Farmers_May_Get_Rich">HOW FARMERS MAY GET RICH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The artificial propagation of fish has attracted much attention
+of late years, and the success of experiments has shown that every
+farmer that has a stream of water on his land can raise fish enough
+to get rich in five years, four months and twenty-one days.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Case_of_Paralysis" name="A_Case_of_Paralysis">A CASE
+OF PARALYSIS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;uncle,&rdquo; John Comstock,
+who keeps a pawnbrokery there, he broke ground for the shoes.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t change his shoes.</p>
+<p>The judge looked down at the vast expanse of leather, both
+sections pointing inwardly, and said, &ldquo;Well, dam a
+fool,&rdquo; and &ldquo;changed cars&rdquo; 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 small pox. O, we suppose they have more fun in some of these
+country towns than you can shake a stick at.</p>
+<h3><a id="We_Will_Celebrate" name="We_Will_Celebrate">WE WILL
+CELEBRATE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>With so many new holidays, and so many new people, it is hardly
+to be wondered at that the day of all days, the day that should be
+dearest to the heart of every American, is in danger of being
+passed over in silence, and were it not for the fire cracker, that
+begins to get in its work about the first of June, in many
+instances this Anniversary of American Independence would be passed
+without the customary mouth shootzen-fest from alleged orators, but
+when the small boy begins to stir around and clandestinely look
+down the muzzle of the always loaded fire cracker, the patriotism
+of the boys still begins to assert itself, the old man&rsquo;s eyes
+begin to snap, and he talks to his neighbor about how they used to
+celebrate when he was a boy, the stuff begins to work over the
+neighborhood, the village catches it, the country begins.</p>
+<h3><a id="Dogs_and_Human_Beings" name="Dogs_and_Human_Beings">DOGS
+AND HUMAN BEINGS!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.]</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 girl&rsquo;s
+master&rsquo;s dog, no one need come around here lecturing at a
+dollar a head and telling us there is no hell.</p>
+<p>When a poor girl, who has gone creeping to her work at daylight,
+looks out of the window at noon to see her master&rsquo;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&rsquo;t want to fool away any time trying to get us
+to go to a heaven where such heartless employers are expected.</p>
+<p>It is seldom the <em>Sun</em> gets on its ear, but it can say
+with great fervency, &ldquo;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!&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>It seems now&mdash;though we may change our mind the first day
+at the fire&mdash;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="An_Odorous_Bohemian" name="An_Odorous_Bohemian">AN
+ODOROUS BOHEMIAN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Bohemian on the train last night had some cheese in his vest
+pocket that was too ripe, and the conductor had to disinfect the
+car, and order the Bohemian to be quarantined before the train
+would be allowed to enter the city. Cheese is all right in its
+place, but it don&rsquo;t want to be allowed to lay above ground
+too long after it has departed this life. If farmers will pay a
+little attention to cheese in its different stages, much trouble
+can be avoided. In union there is strength. So there is in a
+smoking car.</p>
+<h3><a id="Tragedy_on_the_Stage" name=
+"Tragedy_on_the_Stage">TRAGEDY ON THE STAGE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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
+drowned 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The star butcher could sit on a barrel of pigs&rsquo; feet, or a
+pile of heads and horns, and soliloquize over his unrequitted 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.</p>
+<p>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, <em>en train</em>, with
+a white reception hat with ostrich feathers, and, wading through
+the blood of the steer on the carpet, shout, &ldquo;Stay your hand,
+Reginald!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;What wiltest
+thou, Mary Anderson de Montmorence?&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/192.png"><img src=
+"images/192.png" alt="A man in on stage stabs at a bull." id=
+"img192" name="img192" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>JOHN MCCULLOUGH KILLING A TEXAS STEER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Imagine John McCullough, or Barrett, instead of killing Roman
+supes with night gowns on, and bare legs, killing a Texas steer.
+There&rsquo;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Granite_Head_Cheese" name="Granite_Head_Cheese">GRANITE
+HEAD CHEESE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A few years ago there was some excitement at Grand Rapids over
+the discovery of a bed or quarry of granite. Some of it was taken
+out, from the top of the quarry, and polished, and proved to be as
+fine as any that is imported. Further working of the quarry,
+however, has developed a strange thing. The further they go down
+the softer it is, and it has been learned that the quarry is all
+head cheese, such as is sold by butchers. On top it is petrified,
+and polishes very nicely, but a little below it is nice and fresh,
+and can be cut out with a knife, all ready for the table. A friend
+in Milwaukee, who has an uncle living at Grand Rapids, has
+furnished us with a quantity of it, some of which we have eaten,
+and were it not for the fact that we know it came from the quarry,
+it would be hard to convince us that it was not concocted out of
+the remains of a butcher shop. The people up there talk of running
+Hon. J.N. Brundage for Congress, on the head cheese ticket, in
+order that he may use his influence to get head cheese adopted as
+an army ration, and also as currency with which to wipe out the
+national debt.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_an_Inventor" name="His_Pa_an_Inventor">HIS PA AN
+INVENTOR.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ha! Ha! Now I have got you,&rdquo; said the grocery man
+to the had boy, the other morning, as he came in and jumped upon
+the counter and tied the end of a ball of twine to the tail of a
+dog, and &ldquo;sicked&rdquo; the dog on another dog that was
+following a passing sleigh, causing the twine to pay out until the
+whole ball was scattered along the block. &ldquo;Condemn you,
+I&rsquo;ve a notion to choke the liver out of you. Who tied that
+twine to the dog&rsquo;s tail?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy choked up with emotion, and the tears came into his
+eyes, and he said he didn&rsquo;t know anything about the twine or
+the dog. He said he noticed the dog come in, and wag his tail
+around the twine, but he supposed the dog was a friend of the
+family, and did not disturb him. &ldquo;Everybody lays everything
+that is done to me,&rdquo; said the boy, as he put his handkerchief
+to his nose, &ldquo;and, they will be sorry for it when I die. I
+have a good notion to poison myself by eating some of your glucose
+sugar.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, and you do about everything that is mean. The other
+day a lady came in and told me to send up to her house, some of my
+country sausage, done up in muslin bags, and while she was
+examining it she noticed something hard inside the bags, and asked
+me what it was, and I opened it, and I hope to die if there
+wasn&rsquo;t a little brass padlock and a piece of red morocco dog
+collar imbedded in the sausage. Now how do you suppose that got in
+there?&rdquo; and the grocery man looked savage.</p>
+<p>The boy looked interested, and put on an expression as though in
+deep thought, and finally said, &ldquo;I suppose the farmer that
+put up the sausage did not strain the dog meat. Sausage meat ought
+to be strained.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man pulled in about half a block of twine, after the
+dog had run against a fence and broke it, and told the boy he knew
+perfectly well how the brass padlock came to be in the sausage, but
+thinking it was safer to have the good will of the boy than the ill
+will, he offered him a handful of prunes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the boy, &ldquo;I have swore off on
+mouldy prunes. I am no kinder-garden any more. For years I have
+eaten rotten peaches around this store, and everything you
+couldn&rsquo;t sell, but I have turned over a new leaf now, and
+after this nothing is too good for me. Since Pa has got to be an
+inventor, we are going to live high.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s your Pa invented? I saw a hearse and three
+hacks go up on your street the other day and I thought may be you
+had killed your Pa.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not much. There will be more than three hacks when I kill
+Pa, and don&rsquo;t you forget it. Well, sir, Pa has struck a
+fortune, if he can make the thing work. He has got an idea about
+coal stoves that will bring him several million dollars, if he gets
+a royalty of five dollars on every cook stove in the world. His
+idea is to have a coal stove on castors with the pipe made to
+telescope out and in, and rubber hose for one joint, so you can
+pull the stove all around the room and warm any particular place.
+Well, sir, to hear Pa tell about it, you would think it would
+revolutionize the country, and maybe it will when he gets it
+perfected, but he came near burning the house up, and scared us
+half to death this morning, and burned his shirt off, and he is all
+covered with cotton with sweet oil on, and he smells like salad
+dressing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see Pa had a pipe made and some castors put on our
+coal stove, and he tied a rope to the hearth of the stove, and had
+me put in some kindling wood and coal last night, so he could draw
+the stove up to the bed and light the fire without getting up. Ma
+told him he would put his foot in it, and he told her to dry up,
+and let him run the stove business. He said it took a man with
+brain to run a patent right, and Ma she pulled the clothes over her
+head and let Pa do the fire act. She has been building the fires
+for twenty years, and thought she would let Pa see how good it was.
+Well, Pa pulled the stove to the bed, and touched off the kindling
+wood. I guess maybe I got a bundle of kindling wood that the hired
+girl had put kerosene on, cause it blazed up awful and smoked, and
+the blaze bursted out the doors and windows of the stove, and Pa
+yelled fire, and I jumped out of bed and rushed in and he was the
+scartest man you ever see, and you&rsquo;d a dide to see how he
+kicked when I threw a pail of water on his legs and put his shirt
+out. Ma did not get burned, but she was pretty wet, and she told Pa
+she would pay five dollars royalty on that stove and take the
+castors off and let it remain stationary. Pa says he will make it
+work if he burns the house down. I think it was real mean in Pa to
+get mad at me because I threw cold water on him instead of warm
+water, to put his shirt out. If I had waited till I could heat
+water to the right temperature I would have been an orphan and Pa
+would have been a burnt offering. But some men always kick at
+everything. Pa has given up business entirely and says he shall
+devote the remainder of his life curing himself of the different
+troubles that I get him into. He has retained a doctor by the year,
+and he buys liniment by the gallon.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was it about your folks getting up in the middle of
+the night to eat? The hired girl was over here after some soap the
+other morning, and she said she was going to leave your
+house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, that was a picnic. Pa said he wanted breakfast
+earlier than we was in the habit of having it, and he said I might
+see to it that the house was awake early enough. The other night I
+awoke with the awfulest pain you ever heard of. It was that night
+that you give me and my chum the bottle of pickled oysters that had
+begun to work. Well, I could&rsquo;t sleep, and I thought I would
+call the hired girls, and they got up and got breakfast to going,
+and then I rapped on Pa&rsquo;s and Ma&rsquo;s door and told them
+the breakfast was getting cold, and they got up and came down. We
+ate breakfast by gas light, and Pa yawned and said it made a man
+feel good to get up and get ready for work before daylight, the way
+he used to on the farm, and Ma she yawned and agreed with Pa,
+&rsquo;cause she has to, or have a row. After breakfast we sat
+around for an hour, and Pa said it was a long time getting
+daylight, and bimeby Pa looked at his watch. When he began to pull
+out his watch I lit out and hid in the storeroom, and pretty soon I
+heard Pa and Ma come up stairs and go to bed, and then the hired
+girls, they went to bed, and when it was all still, and the pain
+had stopped inside of my clothes, I went to bed, and I looked to
+see what time it was and it was two o&rsquo;clock in the morning.
+We got dinner at eight o&rsquo;clock in the morning, and Pa said he
+guessed he would call up the house after this, so I have lost
+another job, and it was all on account of that bottle of pickled
+oysters you gave me. My chum says he had colic too, but he
+didn&rsquo;t call up his folks. It was all he could do to get up
+himself. Why don&rsquo;t you give away something that is not
+spiled?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The groceryman said he guessed he knew what to give away, and
+the boy went out and hung up a sign in front of the grocery, that
+he had made on wrapping paper with red chalk, which read,
+&ldquo;Rotten eggs, good enough for custard pies, for 18 cents a
+dozen.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Good_Land_Enough" name="A_Good_Land_Enough">A GOOD
+LAND ENOUGH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>This land of the free is good enough, if we make it good, and if
+we make it bad, it is just as bad as any country under the sun. It
+all depends on how the people act.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Woodcock" name="The_Woodcock">THE WOODCOCK.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>It is a rainy day, and nothing has occurred of a local nature,
+that is, nothing of a hair standing nature, so we will just spoil a
+few sheets of paper relating, in a Sunday School book style, the
+circumstances of an excursion after woodcock, the other day,
+indulged in by W.C. Root, the Wisconsin amateur Bogardus, Jennings
+McDonald, Captain of a breech-loading steamboat, and the
+subscriber. In the first place, it may be well to state that the
+woodcock, or &ldquo;Timber Doodle,&rdquo; as Prof. Agassiz calls
+it, is a game bird. We know it is a game bird, because they charge
+a dollar apiece for them in New York. The meat is about as sweet as
+deceased cow&rsquo;s liver, but they are worth a dollar apiece. The
+&ldquo;Timber Doodle&rdquo; is a patriotic bird, because he gets
+ripe on the 4th of July. He is about the size of a doughnut, with a
+long bill, like a lawyer.</p>
+<p>We took passage per skiff at twelve o&rsquo;clock. If there was
+one drawback, it was the fact that the oar-locks of the boat had
+been mislaid. After consuming an hour in not finding them, Frank
+Hatch became discouraged at seeing us lay around the levee, so he
+tied the oars on with tarred rope and we got off, three of us
+besides the other dogs. The water was so high that we crossed
+Barron&rsquo;s island, only having to get out and pull the boat
+over two or three sand-bars and a raft or two. Every time we got
+out to pull the boat, the dogs would get out to look for woodcock,
+around the stumps, and when they got in the boat would be full of
+water and mud, and of course we had our best clothes on. Did it
+ever occur to you how much water a dog could carry in his hair? A
+dog is worse than a sponge. An ordinary dog, with luck, can fill a
+skiff with water at two jumps. Not, however, with us in the boat to
+bail out the water. The woodcock&rsquo;s tail sticks up like a sore
+thumb. We are thus particular to describe the woodcock, so if you
+ever see one you can go right away from him. Woodcock and
+mosquitoes are in &ldquo;cahoots.&rdquo; While the woodcock bores
+in the ground for snakes and other feed that makes him fat and
+worth a dollar in New York, the mosquito stands on the ramparts and
+talks to the boys.</p>
+<p>Well, speaking about woodcock, after riding five miles, through
+bushes, brambles and things, we got out of the boat and only had to
+walk a couple of miles to get where the birds were. Right here we
+wish to state that we shouldn&rsquo;t have gone after the woodcock
+at all, only everybody said it was such fun. Root showed us a
+picture of a woodcock in a book, and if that didn&rsquo;t convince
+us, the fact that a small boy came in town and sold three dozen,
+did. Then we wanted to go. There never has been a year when
+woodcock were so plenty at places we didn&rsquo;t visit. The most
+fun was at a ditch which was about a foot wider than any of us
+could jump. Root gave his gun to McDonald and plunged in. Then
+McDonald threw a gun to Root. It hit him on the thumb-nail and
+dropped in the ditch out of sight. Mc. thought it was Root&rsquo;s
+gun, and he apologized to Root for throwing it so carelessly. Root
+supposed it was Mc.&rsquo;s gun, and he apologized for not catching
+it. We never saw men more polite in the world. Mc. started to jump
+across, when a dog got between his legs, and both went in up to
+their knees. You never can jump as well with a dog tangled up
+amongst your legs. The dog looked at Jennings as though he wanted
+to swear. We waded through the ditch and only got two feet wet. The
+rest of them had more than that wet.</p>
+<p>But about the woodcock. This is, kind reader, purely a woodcock
+story, and more or less must be said about the dollar bird. But
+this is neither here nor there. It was over in the Root river
+bottoms. Finally we got on the woodcock ground and went to work.
+Talk about mosquitoes! There was no end to them. We ought not to
+say that, either, because there are spots on our person that just
+fit the end of a mosquito. There was an end to them. If you never
+saw mosquitoes in convention, you want to go over there. And right
+here we will give a recipe for keeping mosquitoes from biting. You
+take some cedar oil and put on your coat collar, if you are a man,
+and if you are a woman put it on that gingerbread work around your
+neck, and a mosquito will come up and sing to you and get all ready
+to take toll, when she will smell that oil. She is the sickest
+mosquito you ever saw. She turns over on her back and sends her
+husband for the nearest doctor. We had a bottle of cedar oil, and
+if Jennings hadn&rsquo;t left it hanging up in Hogan&rsquo;s store
+in his coat, we should have made those mosquitoes sick. As it was
+they did it to us. There isn&rsquo;t a spot on us as big as a
+billiard table but what you can find artesian wells made by
+mosquitoes.</p>
+<p>Woodcock sell higher in the market than any other bird. Lots of
+people that never saw them eat snakes, eat them. When they get up
+to fly they talk Bohemian, and get behind a bush. You shoot right
+into the bush, and if you kill one you think you are a good shot.
+Talk about getting tired. You walk around in the woods several
+miles, with mosquitoes getting acquainted with you, and all the
+time your nerves strung up in anticipation of seeing a dollar bill
+fly up, and if you don&rsquo;t sleep without rocking, we are no
+prophet. The sport, however, is exhilerating, and we are glad we
+went. We are glad because it learned us one thing, and that is, if
+we ever want a woodcock real bad, it will be cheaper, easier, and
+better to buy it. It will be inferred that we did not see a
+woodcock. Such is the case.</p>
+<p>But we made the blackbirds sick.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Bald-headed_Man_Most_Crazy" name=
+"A_Bald-headed_Man_Most_Crazy">A BALD-HEADED MAN MOST
+CRAZY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Last Wednesday the bell to our telephone rung violently at 8
+o&rsquo;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,
+&ldquo;Julia has got worms, doctor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;O, go to the devil, will
+you?&rdquo; We couldn&rsquo;t tell whose voice it was, but it
+sounded like the clerk at the Plankinton House, and we sat
+down.</p>
+<p>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 rang
+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&rsquo;s ear all day is no fun.</p>
+<p>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,
+&ldquo;Are you going to receive to-morrow?&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/202.png"><img src=
+"images/202.png" alt=
+"A man falls backward away from a wall-mounted telephone" id=
+"img202" name="img202" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>AT THE TELEPHONE.</p>
+</div>
+<p>If we have done wrong in talking with a total strangers who took
+us for a lady friend, we are willing to die. We couldn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>And still the bell did flut. We went to the cornucopia, put our
+ear to the toddy stick and said, &ldquo;What ailest thou darling,
+why dost thy hand tremble? Whisper all thou feelest to thine old
+baldy.&rdquo; Then there came over the wire and into our mansard by
+a side window the following touching remarks: &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Then there was a stuttering, and then another voice
+said, &ldquo;Go over to Loomis&rsquo; pawn shop. A man shot
+in&rdquo;&mdash;and another voice broke in singing, &ldquo;The
+sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful&rdquo;&mdash;and
+another voice said&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Convenient_Currency" name=
+"Convenient_Currency">CONVENIENT CURRENCY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>What we want is a currency that every farmer can issue for
+himself. A law should be passed making the products of the farm a
+legal tender for all debts, public and private, including duties on
+imports, interest on the public debt, and contributions for
+charitable purposes. Then we shall have a new money table about as
+follows:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Ten ears of corn make one cent.</p>
+<p>Ten cucumbers make one dime.</p>
+<p>Ten watermelons make one dollar.</p>
+<p>Ten bushels of wheat make one eagle.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="The_Gospel_Car" name="The_Gospel_Car">THE GOSPEL
+CAR.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>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 railroad companies to fit up
+&ldquo;Gospel cars.&rdquo; 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.&mdash;<em>Chicago
+News</em>.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&mdash;and they do not travel for
+anything else&mdash;that they are going into a &ldquo;Gospel
+car&rdquo; to listen to some sky pirate who has been picked up for
+the purpose, talk about the prospects of landing the cargo in
+heaven?</p>
+<p>Not much!</p>
+<p>The women are too much engaged looking after their baggage, and
+keeping the cinders out of their eyes, and keeping the
+children&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;A charge to keep I have,&rdquo;
+some pious sinner who was trying to take a nap in the corner of the
+gospel car would say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, go and hire a hall!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t get two persons on an average
+train full that would put up a nickel.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>A man&mdash;as we understand religion from those who have had
+it&mdash;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&mdash;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 wheiher the
+children of Israel went through the Red Sea with life-preservers,
+or wore rubber hunting boots.</p>
+<p>Take your gospel-car half dollar and buy a vegetable ivory
+rattle of the train boy, and give it to the sick emigrant
+mother&rsquo;s pale baby, and you make four persons happy&mdash;the
+baby, the mother, the train boy and yourself.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t-care-a-damative appearance. The citizen asked
+the prisoner how he was fixed for money to buy tobacco with in
+prison. He said he hadn&rsquo;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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, every time you take a chew of tobacco in prison,
+just make up your mind to be square when you get out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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&mdash;the other
+eye had been gouged out while &ldquo;having some fun with the
+boys&rdquo; at Oshkosh&mdash;and his lips trembled as he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So help me God, I will!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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
+&ldquo;square.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can
+occasionally practice without having a gospel car.</p>
+<h3><a id="Banks_and_Banking" name="Banks_and_Banking">BANKS AND
+BANKING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The subject of banking has engrossed the attention of your
+excellent Governor for, lo! these many weeks, and he is constrained
+to say that some radical changes must be made in the method of
+receiving deposits by banks, where an equivalent is not rendered,
+of His Excellency will be compelled to emerge from his present
+aristocratic quarters and take up his abode in the poor-house. I
+would call your attention to the practice certain banks have of
+issuing checks in lieu of cash. If these checks were available at
+the groceries it would be better than it is. Banks have got in a
+habit of issuing a species of ivory button in receipt for the green
+coin of the realm which is only good at the counter of the bank.
+These checks are not issued by the National Banks, but by the State
+Banks, denominated &ldquo;Keno&rdquo; and &ldquo;Faro.&rdquo; I
+would not charge that there is &ldquo;skullduggery&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;shenanagen&rdquo; going on in these institutions, as the
+president of one of them informed me, confidentially, that he dealt
+on the &ldquo;square,&rdquo; but it is a noticeable fact that the
+dividends received by those who do business with the banks, are
+almost, as it were, imperceptible. I trust that you will cause this
+branch of industry to be thoroughly investigated, and report by
+bill or otherwise. Our finances should be beyond suspicion of
+dishonesty.</p>
+<h3><a id="Large_Mouths_are_Fashionable" name=
+"Large_Mouths_are_Fashionable">LARGE MOUTHS ABE
+FASHIONABLE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t certainly, be any
+better for kissing.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/209.png"><img src=
+"images/209.png" alt="A woman yells at a man." id="img209" name=
+"img209" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&rsquo; worth out of what was left unemployed.</p>
+<p>This was too much, and she gave him a terrible look, and
+returned him his ten cents, saying, &ldquo;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,&rdquo; and he went and bought a lemonade with the
+money.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Internal_Improvements" name=
+"Internal_Improvements">INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Under this heading I can think of nothing that appears more
+appropriate than the subject of the artificial propagation of fish.
+It is a subject that has arrested the attention of many of the
+ablest minds of the country, and the results of experiments have
+been thus far so satisfactory that it is almost safe to predict
+that within the next ten centuries every man, however poor, may
+pick bull-heads off of his crab apple vines and gather his winter
+supply of fresh shad from his sweet potato trees at less than fifty
+cents a pound. The experiments that have been made in our own state
+warrant us in going largely into the fish business. A year ago a
+quantity of fish seeds were sub soil plowed into the ice of Lake
+Mendota, and to-day I am informed that boarders at the hotels there
+have all the fish to eat that any reasonable man could desire. The
+expense is small and the returns are enormous. It is estimated that
+from the six quarts of fish seeds that were planted in the lake
+there are now ready for the market at least 11,000,000 car loads of
+brain-producing food, if you spit on your bait when you go
+fishing.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Gets_Boxed" name="His_Pa_Gets_Boxed">HIS PA GETS
+BOXED.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want to buy a good parrot, do you?&rdquo;
+said the bad boy to the grocery man as he put his wet mittens on
+the top of the stove to dry, and kept his back to the stove so he
+could watch the grocery man, and be prepared for a kick, if the man
+should remember the rotten egg sign that the boy put up in front of
+the grocery last week.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Naw, I don&rsquo;t want no parrot. I had rather have a
+fool boy around than a parrot. But what&rsquo;s the matter with
+your Ma&rsquo;s parrot? I thought she wouldn&rsquo;t part with him
+for anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, she wouldn&rsquo;t until Wednesday night, but now
+she says she will not have him around, and I may have half I can
+get for him. She told me to go to some saloon or some disreputable
+place and sell him, and I thought maybe he would about suit
+you,&rdquo; and the boy broke into a bunch of celery, and took out
+a few tender stalks and rubbed them on a codfish to salt them, and
+began to bite the stalks, while he held the sole of one wet boot up
+against the stove to dry it, making a smell of burned leather that
+came near turning the stomach of the cigar sign.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look-a-here boy, don&rsquo;t you call this a disreputable
+place. Some of the best people in this town come here,&rdquo; said
+the grocery man as he held up the cheese knife and grated his teeth
+as though he would like to jab it into the youth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, that&rsquo;s all right, they come here &rsquo;cause
+you trust; but you make up what you lose by charging it to other
+people. Pa will make it hot for you the last of the week. He has
+been looking over your bill, and comparing it with the hired girl,
+and she says we haven&rsquo;t ever had a prune, or a dried apple,
+or a raisin, or any cinnamon, or crackers and cheese out of your
+store, and he says you are worse than the James brothers, and that
+you used to be a three card monte man, and he will have you
+arrested for highway robbery, but you can settle that with Pa. I
+like you, because you are no ordinary sneak thief, you are a
+high-toned, gentlemanly sort of a bilk, and wouldn&rsquo;t take
+anything you couldn&rsquo;t lift. O, keep your seat, and
+don&rsquo;t get excited. It does a man good to hear the truth from
+one who has got the nerve to tell it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But about the parrot. Ma has been away from home for a
+week, having a high old time in Chicago, going to theatres and
+things, and while she was gone, I guess the hired girl or somebody
+learned the parrot some new things to say. A parrot that can only
+say &lsquo;Polly wants a cracker,&rsquo; don&rsquo;t amount to
+anything&mdash;what we need is new style parrots that can converse
+on the topics of the day, and say things original. Well, when Ma
+got back I guess her conscience hurt her for the way she had been
+carrying on in Chicago, and so when she heard the basement of the
+church was being frescoed, she invited the committee to hold the
+Wednesday evening prayer meeting at our house. First, there were
+four people came, and Ma asked Pa to stay to make up a quorum, and
+Pa said seeing he had two pair, he guessed he would stay in, and if
+Ma would deal him a queen he would have a full hand. I don&rsquo;t
+know what Pa meant, but he plays draw poker sometimes. Anyway there
+was eleven people came including the minister, and after they had
+talked about the neighbors a spell, and Ma had showed the women a
+new tidy she had worked for the heathen, with a motto on it which
+Pa had taught her: &lsquo;A contrite heart beats a bob-tailed
+flush,&rsquo;&mdash;and Pa had talked to the men about a religious
+silver mine he was selling stock in, which he advised them as a
+friend to buy for the glory of the church, they all went in the
+back parlor and the minister lead in prayer. He got down on his
+knees right under the parrot&rsquo;s cage, and you&rsquo;d a dide
+to see Polly hang on to the wires of the cage with one foot, and
+drop an apple core on the minister&rsquo;s head. Ma shook her
+handkerchief at Polly, and looked sassy, and Polly got up on the
+perch, and as the minister got warmed up and began to raise the
+roof, Polly said, &lsquo;O, dry up.&rsquo; The minister had his
+eyes shut, but he opened one of them a little and looked at Pa. Pa
+was tickled at the parrot, but when the minister looked at Pa as
+though it was him that was making irreverent remarks, Pa was
+mad.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The minister got to the &lsquo;amen,&rsquo; and Polly
+shook hisself and said &lsquo;What you giving us?&rsquo; and the
+minister got up and brushed the bird seed off his knees, and he
+looked mad. I thought Ma would sink with mortification, and I was
+sitting on a piano stool looking as pious as a Sunday school
+superintendent the Sunday before he skips out with the bank&rsquo;s
+funds; and Ma looked at me as though she thought it was me that had
+been tampering with the parrot. Gosh, I never said a word to that
+parrot, and I can prove it by my chum.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, the minister asked one of the sisters if she
+wouldn&rsquo;t pray, and she wasn&rsquo;t engaged, so she said with
+pleasure, and she kneeled down, but she corked herself, cause she
+got one knee on a cast-iron dumb bell that I had been practising
+with. She said &lsquo;O my,&rsquo; in a disgusted sort of a way,
+and then she began to pray for the reformation of the youth of the
+land, and asked for the spirit to descend on the household, and
+particularly on the boy that was such a care and anxiety to his
+parents, and just then Polly said &lsquo;O, pull down your
+vest.&rsquo; Well, you&rsquo;d a dide to see that woman look at me.
+The parrot cage was partly behind the window curtin, and they
+couldn&rsquo;t see it, and she thought it was me. She looked at Ma
+as though she was wondering why she didn&rsquo;t hit me with a
+poker, but she went on, and Polly said &lsquo;wipe off your
+chin,&rsquo; and then the lady got through and got up, and told Ma
+it must be a great trial to have an idiotic child, and then Ma she
+was mad, and said it wasn&rsquo;t half so bad as it was to be a
+kleptomaniac, and then the woman got up and said she wouldn&rsquo;t
+stay no longer, and Pa said to me to take that parrot outdoors, and
+that seemed to make them all good natured again. Ma said to take
+the parrot and give it to the poor. I took the cage and pointed my
+finger at the parrot and it looked at the woman and said &lsquo;old
+catamaran,&rsquo; and the woman tried to look pious and resigned,
+but she couldn&rsquo;t. As I was going out the door the parrot
+ruffed up his feathers and said &lsquo;Dammit, set &rsquo;em
+up,&rsquo; and I hurried out with the cage for fear he would say
+something bad, and the folks all held up their hands and said it
+was scandalous. Say, I wonder if a parrot can go to hell with the
+rest of the community. Well, I put the parrot in the woodshed, and
+after they all had their innings, except Pa, who acted as umpire,
+the meeting broke up, and Ma says it is the last time she will have
+that gang at her house.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That must have been where your Pa got his black
+eye,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he charged the bunch of celery
+to the boy&rsquo;s Pa. &ldquo;Did the minister hit him, or was it
+one of the sisters?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, he didn&rsquo;t get his black eye at prayer
+meeting!&rdquo; said the boy, as he took his mittens off the stove,
+and rubbed them to take the stiffening out. &ldquo;It was from
+boxing. Pa told my chum and me that it was no harm to learn to box,
+cause we could defend ourselves, and he said he used to be a holy
+terror with the boxing gloves when he was a boy, and he has been
+giving us lessons. Well, he is no slouch, now I tell you, and
+handles himself pretty well for a church member. I read in the
+paper how Zack Chandler played it on Conkling by getting Jem Mace,
+the prize fighter, to knock him silly, and I asked Pa if he
+wouldn&rsquo;t let me bring a poor boy who had no father to teach
+him boxing, to our house to learn to box, and Pa said certainly,
+fetch him along. He said he would be glad to do anything for a poor
+orphan. So I went down in the Third ward and got an Irish boy by
+the name of Duffy, who can knock the socks off any boy in the ward.
+He fit a prize fight once. It would have made you laugh to see Pa
+telling him how to hold his hands and how to guard his face. He
+told Duffy not to be afraid, but strike right out and hit for
+keeps. Duffy said he was afraid Pa would get mad if he hit him, and
+Pa said, &lsquo;nonsense, boy, knock me down if you can, and I will
+laugh ha! ha!&rsquo; Well, Duffy he hauled back and gave Pa one on
+the nose, and another in both eyes, and cuffed him on the ear and
+punched him in the stomach, and lammed him in the mouth and made
+his teeth bleed, and then he gave him a side winder in both eyes,
+and Pa pulled off his boxing gloves and grabbed a chair, and we
+adjourned and went down stairs as though there was a panic. I
+haven&rsquo;t seen Pa since. Was his eye very black?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Black, I should say so,&rdquo; said the grocery man.
+&ldquo;And his nose seemed to be trying to look into his left ear.
+He was at the market buying beefsteak to put on it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, beefsteak is no account. I must go and see him and
+tell him that an oyster is the best thing for a black eye. Well, I
+must go. A boy has a pretty hard time running a house the way it
+should be run,&rdquo; and the boy went out and hung up a sign in
+front of the grocery: &ldquo;<em>Frowy Butter a
+Speshulty</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Christmas_Trees" name="Christmas_Trees">CHRISTMAS
+TREES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There is too much dress parade about Christmas. Too many
+Christmas trees where rich children get club skates, and gold
+napkin rings, and poor children get pop corn strung on a string,
+and cornucopias full of peppermint candy.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Bob-Tailed_Badger" name="The_Bob-Tailed_Badger">THE
+BOB-TAILED BADGER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 <em>sic semper Americanus
+scunch</em>. We do not complain that the sailor with a 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Terror_in_Church" name="Terror_in_Church">TERROR IN
+CHURCH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A ridiculous scene occurred at 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.</p>
+<p>Wiping the perspiration from his face, he said, pointing, to the
+floor, &ldquo;Ah, my friends, look down into that seething, burning
+lake, and&mdash;&rdquo; Just at this point the trap door raised a
+little, and the sexton&rsquo;s face, with coal smut all over it,
+appeared. He wanted to come up and hear the sermon.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/217.png"><img src=
+"images/217.png" alt="A man peers up from a hole in the floor." id=
+"img217" name="img217" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;AH, MY FRIENDS, LOOK DOWN INTO THAT BURNING
+LAKE!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right, brother; he has only <em>been
+down below to see about the fire</em>.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t see how he could help
+it.</p>
+<h3><a id="Fish_Hatching_in_Wisconsin" name=
+"Fish_Hatching_in_Wisconsin">FISH HATCHING IN WISCONSIN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>I would suggest that you permit the subject of the artificial
+hatching of fish to engage your attention, and that you appropriate
+several dollars to purchase whale&rsquo;s eggs, vegetable oysters
+and mock turtle seeds. The hatching of fish is easy, and any man
+can soon learn it; and it is a branch of industry that many who are
+now out of employment, owing to circumstances beyond their control,
+will be glad to avail themselves of. How, I ask you, could means
+better be adapted to the ends than for the retiring officers of our
+State to go to setting on fish eggs?</p>
+<h3><a id="Trains_Without_Conductors" name=
+"Trains_Without_Conductors">TRAINS WITHOUT CONDUCTORS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Since the introduction of the patent air brake on passenger
+trains, by which brakemen have been dispensed with, a number of
+patent right men have been studying up some contrivance to do away
+with conductors. All have failed except one, and that fortunate
+inventor is Col. Johnson, of the Railroad Eating House, Milwaukee.
+He has been engaged for two years on this patent, and has got it so
+near completed that he has filed a caveat at the Patent Office, and
+as his rights are secured, it can do no harm to describe the
+invention, as it is destined to work quite a revolution in the
+railroad business. It has been Col. Johnson&rsquo;s idea that an
+arrangement could be made so that an engineer of a train could have
+the whole train under his charge, to stop it, start it, collect
+fares, and bounce impecunious passengers, from his position on the
+engine, and do it all by steam, wind and water. A series of
+pneumatic tubes run from the door of each car to the engine, with
+speaking tubes. A passenger gets on the platform, and through the
+speaking tube asks the engineer what the fare is to such a place.
+The answer is returned, the fare is put in the hopper of the
+pneumatic tube, it goes to the engineer, he pulls a string, the
+door flies open and the passenger enters. Not the least important
+part of the machinery is the patent &ldquo;&aelig;olian
+bouncer,&rdquo; as it is called. A pair of ice tongs are placed so
+as to grasp the passenger by the seat of the pants or the
+polonaise, as the case may be, when he or she gets on the platform.
+These tongs are connected with the air brakes, in such a manner
+that by the engineer&rsquo;s touching a spring the whole force of
+the compressed air takes possession of the tongs, and the passenger
+is snatched bald-headed, metaphorically speaking. For instance, a
+passenger gets on the platform at Portage, and the ice tongs grasp
+him or her securely. If he or she pays the fare, the door is
+opened, the tongs release their hold, and the person is allowed to
+enter. But if the engineer should find that they had no money, or
+that their pass had run out, and they were trying to beat their
+way, he would pull the string and they would be lifted back on the
+depot steps and stood on their heads, raised in the air and made to
+see stars. Col. Johnson has been offered a fabulous sum for his
+patent, but he has not decided whether to sell or lease it. A trial
+trip was made at Milwaukee, the other day, and though the machine
+was not perfect, the experiment was not altogether a failure. A car
+was arranged with the apparatus, and went out to the
+Soldier&rsquo;s Home. Col. Johnson and a number of prominent
+railroad men were on board. They got a veteran soldier and a Polack
+waman to allow the machine to experiment on them. The machine took
+hold of the soldier and the engineer jerked. The man had one leg
+torn off, and the seat of his overcoat was ruined. He
+wouldn&rsquo;t try again, so they let the woman step on the
+platform. The engineer turned it the wrong way, and the car seemed
+full of compressed air, and a smell of limberger cheese pervaded
+the premises. When the smoke cleared off the woman was not to be
+found. After voting the machine a success the party started for
+Milwaukee. On nearing the city a pair of wooden shoes were seen in
+the air coming down, and they lit in the the canal by the tannery.
+A pair of corsets struck on Plankinton&rsquo;s packing house, and
+sections of spinal cord, and one leg of a pair of red drawers came
+down on the Soldier&rsquo;s home, and hair was found on the top of
+the car. It is thought the engineer loaded the air bouncer too
+heavy, and that it kicked. However, Col. Johnson was not
+discouraged, and will soon have his patent on all cars. The husband
+of the Polack woman wanted Johnson to pay him three dollars, but he
+said he didn&rsquo;t want to buy the woman. All he wanted was to
+hire her, anyway. Col. Johnson is a great inventor. It was he that
+invented the stomach pump, and the automatic candle enunciator, for
+awakening guests in the night to take early trains. The latter he
+sold to Mr. Williams, of Prairie du Chien, for a large amount and
+took his pay in trade.</p>
+<h3><a id="Raising_Elephants" name="Raising_Elephants">RAISING
+ELEPHANTS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Why not go to raising elephants? A good elephant will sell for
+eight thousand dollars. A pair of elephants can be bought by a
+community of farmers pooling their issues and getting a start, and
+in a few years every farm can be a menagerie of it own, and every
+year we can rake in from eight to twenty-four thousand dollars from
+the sale of surplus elephants. It may be said that elephants are
+hearty feeders, and that they would go through an ordinary farmer
+in a short time. Well, they can be turned out into the highway to
+browse, and earn their own living. This elephant theory is a good
+one, and any man that is good on figures can sit down and figure up
+a profit in a year sufficient to go into bankruptcy.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Power_of_Eloquence" name=
+"The_Power_of_Eloquence">THE POWER OF ELOQUENCE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A justice of the peace at Menasha, wanted to kill Pratt, the
+editor of the <em>Press</em>. The matter has been compromised,
+however. Pratt got the justice cornered up, and delivered one of
+the speeches to him that he delivered during the campaign last
+fall, and the justice got on his knees and said, &ldquo;Pratt, this
+thing is all right, I surrender.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Trying_Situation" name="A_Trying_Situation">A TRYING
+SITUATION.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t think raw oysters would go further at a sociable, than
+stewed oysters.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/222.png"><img src=
+"images/222.png" alt="A man bows." id="img222" name="img222" width=
+"80%" /></a>
+<p>THE WANDERING OYSTER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>He said he thought raw oysters would go further, but they
+wouldn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>They had some shell oysters, and he took up one on a
+fork&mdash;a large, fat one&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+toward his shoes, that they winked at each other, though they might
+have been winking at something else.</p>
+<p>The oyster seemed to be real spry until it got out of reach, and
+then it got to going slow as the slikery 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Giddy_Girls_Quarrel" name=
+"The_Giddy_Girls_Quarrel">THE GIDDY GIRLS QUARREL.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A dispatch from Brooklyn states that at the conclusion of a
+performance at the theatre, Fanny Davenport&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Now, the question is, what is Anna Dickinson going to do with
+Fanny&rsquo;s wardrobe? She may think Fanny&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Fanny&rsquo;s dress, accustomed to so much talent, would have to
+be stuffed full of stuff. There would be room enough in
+Fanny&rsquo;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&rsquo;t go in the dress in any one given locality. If Anna
+should put on Fanny&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Why, if Dickinson should put on a pair of Davenport&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Universal_Object" name="The_Universal_Object">THE
+UNIVERSAL OBJECT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The object that every man has in view, whether he be farmer,
+mechanic, preacher, editor, or tramp, is to make money.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Mistake_About_It" name="The_Mistake_About_It">THE
+MISTAKE ABOUT IT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Excuse me, madame, but I think your wearing apparel is
+becoming disarranged. You might step right into Clark&rsquo;s,
+here, and fix it,&rdquo; and he pointed to the bottom of her
+dress.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Madame, you better drop into a millinery store and fasten
+up your&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/228.png"><img src=
+"images/228.png" alt="A woman points a pistol at a man." id=
+"img228" name="img228" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>MYSTERY OF A WOMAN&rsquo;S CLOTHES!</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Pierce, the hotel man, is one of the most noticin&rsquo; persons
+anywhere, and she hadn&rsquo;t been seated a York minute before his
+eye caught the discrepancy in her apparel.</p>
+<p>He tried to get the telegraph operator and the expressman to go
+and tell her about it, but they wouldn&rsquo;t, so he went and took
+a seat near her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is a warm day, madame,&rdquo; said Pierce, looking at
+the red strip at the bottom of her dress.</p>
+<p>She drew her pistol, cocked it, and pointed it at Pierce, who
+was trembling in every leg, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;s clothes it
+is too much, and the shooting is going to commence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Pierce made one bound and reached the door, and then got
+behind a white greyhound 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your apparel, madame, seems to be demoralized,&rdquo; but
+she rushed into the car, and was seen no more.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_New_Sparking_Scheme" name="A_New_Sparking_Scheme">A
+NEW SPARKING SCHEME.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A number of fathers who have daughters, have formed a society,
+the object of which is to charge young men who visit the girls, for
+meals, gas, wear and tear of furniture, etc. There has been so much
+sparking going on which did not mean business, that the
+organization has seemed necessary.</p>
+<h3><a id="Effects_of_Mineral_Water" name=
+"Effects_of_Mineral_Water">EFFECTS OF MINERAL WATER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A woman from Milwaukee, stopping at Sparta for the summer, had a
+serious accident the other day. She had her dress pinned back so
+tight that the exclamation point where she was vaccinated on the
+left arm was plainly visible, and as she stooped over at the
+artesian well to dip up a cup full of physic, a little dog
+belonging to a lady from Pilot Knob took hold of her striped
+stocking and shook it, thinking it was a blue racer. The lady was
+overcome with heat and sank down on the damp ground, and the result
+was congestion of the dog, for when she got up she kicked that dog
+over the Court house and sprained her stocking. It is said that
+beautiful and healthful summer resort is fast filling up and
+everybody swears it is the most enjoyable place on the continent.
+It is certainly the cheapest for us La Crosse folks to go. We
+don&rsquo;t know of a place where, for the money invested, one can
+have so much fun and get so much health. You can leave La Crosse at
+5:45, and arrive at Sparta at 6:20, after a delightful ride of
+thirty miles, and you will enjoy a race, your train beating the
+Northwestern train, and running like lightning. If you have a pass,
+or sit on the hind platform, it will cost you nothing. You can walk
+down town, at small expense. You want to take supper before leaving
+home, if economy is what you are seeking in addition to health. Go
+to Condit, at the Warner House, and talk as though you were looking
+for a place to send your family, and he will hitch up and drive you
+all over town. Tell Doc. Nichols you never tried a Turkish bath,
+but that you are troubled with hypochondria and often wish you were
+dead, and that if you were sure the baths would help you, you would
+come down and take them regular. He will put you through for
+nothing, and give you a cigar. Then you can get a tooth pick at
+Condit&rsquo;s and put your thumb under your vest and go to the
+springs and talk loud about railroad stocks and bonds and
+speculating in wheat. (It takes two to do it up right. Frank Hatch
+and the writer are going down some night to &ldquo;do&rdquo; the
+watering place). Then you can swell around till half past ten, and
+sneak off to the depot on foot and come home, and your pocket book
+will be just as empty as when you started, unless you get a
+subscriber, and you will have added bloom to your cheek, and had a
+high old time, and next winter you can talk about the delightful
+time you passed at Sparta last summer during the heated term.</p>
+<p>Let&rsquo;s get up a party and go down some night.</p>
+<h3><a id="What_the_Country_Needs" name=
+"What_the_Country_Needs">WHAT THE COUNTRY NEEDS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>What the country needs is a melon from which the incendiary
+ingredients have been removed. It seems to me that by proper care,
+when the melon is growing on the vines, the cholera morbus can be
+decreased, at least, the same as the cranberry has been improved,
+by cultivation. The experiment of planting homeopathic pills in the
+hill with the melon has been tried, but homeopathy, while perhaps
+good in certain cases, does not seem to reach the seat of disease
+in the watermelon. What I would advise, and the advice is free to
+all, is that a porous plaster be placed upon watermelons, just as
+they are begining to ripen, with a view to draw out the cholera
+morbus. A mustard plaster might have the same effect, but the
+porous plaster seems to me to be the article to fill a want long
+felt. If, by this means, a breed of watermelon can be raised that
+will not strike terror to the heart of the consumer, this
+agricultural address will not have been delivered in vain.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Man_from_Dubuque" name="The_Man_from_Dubuque">THE
+MAN FROM DUBUQUE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;Show the gentleman to No 65
+and the lady to 67,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;Hold on, &rsquo;squire!
+One room will do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, can a man enjoy religion in this house?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why,&rdquo; says the manager of the house, &ldquo;has
+anybody interfered with your devotions here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, not here,&rdquo; said the man, wiping his forehead
+with a red handkerchief. &ldquo;But they have at Dubuque.
+I&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, we went to our room in the afternoon, and she began
+to cry, and said if she wasn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This seal ring on my finger caught in her frizzes and
+I&rsquo;ll be cussed if the whole top of her head didn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;t let my temper get away with me, but as it was three
+hours before dark I didn&rsquo;t see what was the use of a lamp,
+and I told him to get out of there. Before 6 o&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figure"><a href="images/234.png"><img src=
+"images/234.png" alt=
+"A black man looks on as a woman falls against a dresser and a man looks angry."
+id="img234" name="img234" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>AN INTRUSIVE NIGGER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;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 brakemen 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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Plea_for_the_Bull_Head" name=
+"A_Plea_for_the_Bull_Head">A PLEA FOR THE BULL HEAD.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The late meeting of the State Fish Commissioners at Milwaukee
+was an important event, and the discussions the wise men indulged
+in will be valuable additions to the literature of the country, and
+future readers of profane history will rise up and call them
+blessed. It seems that the action of the Milwaukee common council
+in withdrawing the use of the water works from the commissioners,
+will put a stop to the hatching of whitefish. This is as it should
+be. The white fish is an aristocratic bird, that will not bite a
+hook, and the propagation of this species of fish is wholly in the
+interest of wealthy owners of fishing tugs, who have nets. By
+strict attention to business they can catch all the whitefish out
+of the lake a little faster than the State machine can put them in.
+Poor people cannot get a smell of whitefish. The same may be said
+of brook trout. While they will bite a hook, it requires more
+machinery to catch them than ordinary people can possess without
+mortgaging a house. A man has got to have a morocco book of
+expensive flies, a fifteen dollar bamboo jointed rod, a three
+dollar trout basket with a hole mortised in the top, a corduroy
+suit made in the latest style, top boots of the Wellington pattern,
+with red tassels in the straps, and a flask of Otard brandy in a
+side pocket. Unless a man is got up in that style, a speckled trout
+will see him in Chicago, first, and then it won&rsquo;t bite. The
+brook trout is even more aristocratic than the whitefish, and
+should not be propagated at public expense.</p>
+<p>But there are fish that should be propagated in the interest of
+the people. There is a species of fish that never looks at the
+clothes of the man who throws in the bait, a fish that takes
+whatever is thrown to it, and when once hold of the hook never
+tries to shake a friend, but submits to the inevitable, crosses its
+legs and says &ldquo;Now I lay me,&rdquo; and comes out on the bank
+and seems to enjoy being taken. It is a fish that is a friend of
+the poor, and one that will sacrifice itself in the interest of
+humanity. This is the fish that the State should adopt as its trade
+mark, and cultivate friendly relations with, and stand by. We
+allude to the bullhead.</p>
+<p>The bullhead never went back on a friend. To catch the bullhead
+it is not necessary to tempt his appetite with porter house steak,
+or to display an expensive lot of fishing tackle. A pin hook, a
+piece of liver, and a cistern pole, is all the capital required to
+catch a bullhead. He lays upon the bottom of a stream or pond in
+the mud, thinking. There is no fish that does more thinking or has
+a better head for grasping great questions, or chunks of liver than
+the bullhead. His brain is large, his heart beats for humanity, and
+if he can&rsquo;t get liver, a piece of a tin tomato can will make
+a meal for him. It is an interesting study to watch a boy catch a
+bullhead. The boy knows where the bullhead congregates, and when he
+throws in his hook it is dollars to buttons that &ldquo;in the near
+future&rdquo; he will get a bite. The bullhead is democratic in all
+its instincts. If the boy&rsquo;s shirt is sleeveless, his hat
+crownless, and his pants a bottomless pit, the bullhead will bite
+just as well as though the boy is dressed in purple and fine linen,
+with knee breeches and plaid stockings. The bull head seems to be
+dozing&mdash;bulldozing we might say&mdash;on the muddy bottom, and
+a stranger might say that he would not bite. But wait. There is a
+movement of his continuation, and his cow-catcher moves gently
+toward the piece of liver. He does not wait to smell of it, and
+canvas in his mind whether the liver is fresh. It makes no
+difference to him. He argues that here is a family out of meat.
+&ldquo;My country calls and I must go,&rdquo; says the bullhead to
+himself, and he opens his mouth and the liver disappears.</p>
+<p>It is not certain that the boy will think of his bait for half
+an hour, but the bullhead is in no hurry. He lays in the mud and
+proceeds to digest the liver. He realizes that his days will not be
+long in the land, or water, more properly speaking, and he argues
+if he swallows the bait and digests it before the boy pulls him
+out, he will be just so much ahead. Finally the boy thinks of his
+bait, and pulls it out, and the bullhead is landed on the bank, and
+the boy cuts him open to get the hook out. Some fish only take the
+bait gingerly, and are only caught around the selvage of the mouth,
+and they are comparatively easy to dislodge. Not so with the
+bullhead. He says if liver is a good thing you can&rsquo;t have too
+much of it, and it tastes good all the way down. The boy gets down
+on his knees to dissect the bullhead, and get his hook, and it may
+be that the boy swears. It would not be astonishing, though he must
+feel, when he gets his hook out of the hidden recesses of the
+bullhead, like the minister that took up a collection and
+didn&rsquo;t get a cent, though he expressed his thanks at getting
+his hat back. There is one drawback to the bullhead, and that is
+his horns. We doubt if a boy ever descended into the patent insides
+of a bullhead, to mine for Limerick hooks, that did not, before his
+work was done, run a horn into his vital parts. But the boy seems
+to expect it, and the bullhead enjoys it. We have seen a bullhead
+lay on the bank and become dry, and to all appearances dead to all
+that was going on, and when the boy sat down on him and got a horn
+in his elbow, and yelled murder, the bullhead would grin from ear
+to ear, and wag his tail as though applauding for an <em>end
+core</em>.</p>
+<p>The bullhead never complains. We have seen a boy take a dull
+knife and proceed to follow a fish line down a bullhead from his
+head to the end of his subsequent anatomy, and all the time there
+would be an expression of sweet peace on the countenance of the
+bullhead, as though he enjoyed it. If we were preparing a picture
+representing &ldquo;Resignation,&rdquo; for a chromo to give to
+subscribers, and wished to represent a scene of suffering in which
+the sufferer was light hearted, and seemed to recognize that all
+was for the best, we should take for the subject a bullhead, with a
+boy searching with a knife for a long lost fish hook.</p>
+<p>The bullhead is a fish that has no scales, but in lieu thereof
+is a fine India rubber skin, that is as far ahead of fiddle string
+material for strength and durability as possible. The meat of the
+bullhead is not as choice as that of the mackerel, but it fills up
+a stomach just as well, and the <em>Sun</em> insists that the fish
+commissioners shall drop the hatching of aristocratic fish and give
+the bullhead a chance. There&rsquo;s millions in it.</p>
+<h3><a id="Why_not_Raise_Wolves" name="Why_not_Raise_Wolves">WHY
+NOT RAISE WOLVES?</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>You devote a good deal of time and labor to the raising of
+sheep, and what do you get for it. The best sheep cannot lay more
+than eight pounds of wool in a season, and even if you get fifty
+cents a pound for it, you have not got any great bonanza. Now, the
+state encourages the raising of wolves, by offering a bounty of ten
+dollars for a piece of skin off the head of each wolf. It does not
+cost any more to raise a wolf than it does to raise a sheep, and
+while sheep rarely raise more than two lambs a year, a pair of good
+wolves are liable to raise twenty young ones in the course of a
+year, if it is a good year for wolves. In addition to the
+encouragement offered by the state, many counties give as much
+more, so that one wolf scalp will bring more money than five sheep.
+You will readily see that our wise legislators are offering
+inducements to you that you should be thankful for. You can
+establish a wolf orchard on any farm, and with a pair of good
+wolves to start on, there is millions in it.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Sudden_Fire-Works_at_Racine" name=
+"The_Sudden_Fire-Works_at_Racine">THE SUDDEN FIRE-WORKS AT
+RACINE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 enterprizing 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.</p>
+<p>Thousands of citizens had gathered there, from city and country,
+and bright Roman candles shone o&rsquo;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 here to
+see a specialist to have a splinter from a rocket stick removed
+from his ear.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s
+feelings.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t want to take off his clothes up there and come down,
+even if it <em>was</em> dark, because it would be just his luck to
+have some one fire off a Roman candle when he got down.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/240.png"><img src=
+"images/240.png" alt=
+"A man hangs from a telephone pole by the seat of his pants." id=
+"img240" name="img240" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>MARTINDALE CLIMBS A POLE.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The girl felt some one feeling, as she supposed, for her
+pocket-book, and she started to run, yelling,
+&ldquo;pickpocket,&rdquo; and left the burning polonaise in Mr.
+Field&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>The steward of the Gideon&rsquo;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 the 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.</p>
+<p>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
+<em>News</em> office he had to jump over an 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t got time, as he was going down to the river to take a
+sitz bath for his health.</p>
+<p>The man that keeps the hotel next door to the <em>News</em>
+office came out with a pail of water, yelled &ldquo;fire,&rdquo;
+and threw the water on Mr. Curt Treat&rsquo;s head. Mr. Treat was
+very much vexed, and told the hotel man if he couldn&rsquo;t tell
+the difference between an auburn haired young man and a pin-wheel,
+he&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 assembly man, had
+crawled into the pipe.</p>
+<p>By the way, Mr. Oberman finally got down from his terrible
+position by the aid of the editor of the <em>Journal</em>, 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="La_Crosse_Nebecudnezzer_Water" name=
+"La_Crosse_Nebecudnezzer_Water">LA CROSSE NEBECUDNEZZER
+WATER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>It is the great ambition of our life to bring to the notice of
+the people of the world the curative powers of the La Crosse water,
+that all who may be suffering from any disease, however
+complicated, may be cured, and all men may become healthy, and
+women too, and doctors will have to go out harvesting. The La
+Crosse artesian well, was begun last fall, and completed as soon as
+the contractor found he couldn&rsquo;t make any money at it. It was
+rumored that he struck granite, and in fact several little specks
+of granite were found in the stuff that come from the hole, but it
+is pretty generally believed now that the granite particles got in
+from the top, unknown to the contractor. The water came to within
+ten feet of the surface, and struck. It never would come any
+further, and the world would have remained in ignorance of its
+curative powers, only for Powers, who put in a hydraulic ram, and
+the blockade was broken, the water now flows to the surface, and
+all is well.</p>
+<p>Attention was first called to the curative powers of the water,
+by a singular incident. A teamster whose duty it was to haul stone,
+was in the habit of stopping at the well to water his mules. One of
+the mules was in a sad state. He was blind in one eye, had a
+spavin, a ringbone, the heaves, his liver was torpid, his lungs
+were badly affected, and his friends feared that he was not long
+for the stone quarry. He had no family. Soon after the mule began
+to drink the water, the driver noticed a great change come over
+him. Previously he had seemed resigned to his fate, but latterly he
+was ambitious. One day while playfully mashing the mule over the
+head with a sled stake, the driver noticed that a new eye had grown
+in the place of the former cavity, and as the mule kicked him with
+more than his accustomed vigor, he noticed that the spavin and ring
+bone were gone, and the former plaintive melody of his voice gave
+place to a bray that resembled the whistle of the Alex. Mitchell.
+When it was known that the mule had been cured, others tried the
+water, men who had never drank it before, until to-day there are
+thousands who will testify to the benefits arising from its use. We
+could give the names of many who have been snatched from the
+grave&mdash;the La Crosse water is a regular body
+snatcher&mdash;but we will first give an analysis of the water.</p>
+<p>Believing that the water was destined to play a prominent part
+in solving the great question of how to euchre death, we sent a
+quantity of it to the eminent Prof. Alonzo Brown, M.D.V.S. of
+Jefferson, Wis., with a letter of transmittal authorizing him to
+analyze it thoroughly, and give us the result, at our expense. The
+following is Prof. Brown&rsquo;s analysis:</p>
+<p class="cen">LABRATORY JEFFERSON LIVERY STABLE,</p>
+<p class="rgt">August 3, 1877.</p>
+<p>Lieut. GEO. W. PECK,<br />
+4th Wis. Cavalry,</p>
+<p>Dear Sir:</p>
+<p>Yours of July 25th, received. I should have attended to the
+water before, but have had several cases of blind staggers in my
+barn, which has kept me busy. I have examined the water by every
+process known to science, and pronounce it bully. I took it apart
+at my leisure, and find that it contains to one U.S. washtub full,
+of 741 cubic inches, the following stuff:</p>
+<table summary="chemical analysis" style="width:80%;margin:auto;">
+<tr>
+<td>Chloride, of Sodium, (common salt)</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">2</td>
+<td>sacks.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Chloride of Pilgarlic</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">40,021</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bicarbonate of erysipelas</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">11,602</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bicarbonate of pie plant</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">2,071</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Blue pills</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">21,011</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bicarbonate of soda water (vanilla.)</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">17,201</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Sulphate of Potasalager beer</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">61,399</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bicarbonate corrugated iron</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">18,020</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Mustang Liniment</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">240</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Boneset and summer savory</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">10,210</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Dow's Liver Cure, (6 bottles for $1.)</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">16,297</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bromide of Alcock's Porous Plaster</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">22,222</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Flouride of Pain Killer (for cucumbers,)</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">055</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Paris green</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">001</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Spruce gum and Vinegar Bitters</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">075</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>In submitting this analysis permit me to say that I find traces
+of mock turtle soup, and India Rubber. I consider the La Crosse
+Nebecudnezzer water the most comprehensive water that I have ever
+analyzed, and I would recommend it for any disease that human
+beings or animals may have.</p>
+<p class="rgt">Very Respectfully,<br />
+ALONZO BROWN,<br />
+Prof. of Chemistry in Jefferson Livery stable, and late Veterinary
+Surgeon 4th Wis. Cavalry.</p>
+<hr class="short" />
+<p>We have known Mr. Brown long and well, and his statement in
+regard to the water can be relied upon. Citizens should retain a
+copy of this analysis for future reference.</p>
+<p>Mr. E.W. Keyes, of Madison, writing under date of August 1st,
+says: &ldquo;The La Crosse water you sent me has caused an entire
+new crop of hair to grow upon my head. I had been bald for years,
+and offered five hundred dollars, for any medicine that would cause
+hair to grow. Enclosed find five hundred dollars, and send me more
+water. I want to try it on Murphey, of the Sentinel. I think it
+would be a good joke on Murphey.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But wait till we get all the letters written from prominent men
+who have been cured.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Infidel_and_His_Silver_Mine" name=
+"The_Infidel_and_His_Silver_Mine">THE INFIDEL AND HIS SILVER
+MINE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>This may be all right, and we hope it is, and we don&rsquo;t
+want to give any advice on anybody else&rsquo;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 the 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.</p>
+<p>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 than hear that some infidel
+who is around the country calling God a pirate and horse thief, at
+a dollar a head, to full houses, has miraculously struck a million
+dollar silver mine.</p>
+<p>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 Ingersoll 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&rsquo;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 that is being
+played on him.</p>
+<p>Everything turns out right some time, and from what we have
+heard of God, off and on, we don&rsquo;t believe he is going to let
+no ordinary man, bald-headed and appoplectic, 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.</p>
+<p>Bob Ingersoll has got the bulge on all the Christians now, and
+draws more water than anybody, but He who knows the sparrow&rsquo;s
+fall has no doubt got an eye on the fat rascal, and some day will
+close two or three fingers around Bob&rsquo;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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please, Mr. God, don&rsquo;t choke so, and I will take 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 biown-up bladder. O, good God, don&rsquo;t hurt me so.
+My neck is all chafed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then he will die, and God will continue business at the old
+stand.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Legend_of_the_Lake" name=
+"The_Legend_of_the_Lake">THE LEGEND OF THE LAKE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Every noted place of resort has an Indian legend, and the first
+thing I did after getting my dinner was to look up the legendist. I
+wanted to hear how it was that the Indian had ceased to frequent
+this spot. So in looking for the boss legendist I struck Judge
+Lamoreaux, of Dodge county, who had been herewith a party of
+friends, Mr. Hayes, and Mr. Van Brunt, with all their wives. They
+had been searching for ferns and legends and they had a car load.
+The Judge had heard of the legend, and he took me one side, and
+with tears in his eyes related to me the horrible story just as he
+had received it from an Indian named O&rsquo;Flanegan, who sells
+relics in the shape of rye. If I can control my emotion long enough
+to write it, it will be a big thing for history.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/248.png"><img src=
+"images/248.png" alt="A woman in Indian garb." id="img248" name=
+"img248" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>HIAWASAMANTHA, THE DUSKY DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST.</p>
+</div>
+<p>Years ago an Indian chief who lived in a dog tent and caught
+rattlesnakes for a side show, had a daughter, a beautiful maiden,
+about the color and odor of smoked bacon, and she wore a red
+blanket cut biased, and a tilter, under a polonaise made over from
+her last year&rsquo;s striped silk. She was the belliest squaw in
+the hills, and took the premium at all the county fairs, and she
+could shoot a deer equal to any buck Indian. Her name was
+Hiawasamantha, and she had two lovers, a Frenchman and a young
+Indian. In figuring up the returns there was some doubt as to who
+was elected, so the father of the girl decided to go behind the
+returns, and settle it by a commission. There was an eagle&rsquo;s
+nest half way up the rocks, with young eagles in it, and the old
+chief said that the one that got there first and brought him a
+young eagle, should have the squaw. The Frenchman climbed up the
+back stairs and got there ahead of the Indian, when the young
+Indian drew from his trousers leg a bar of railroad iron and drove
+it to the hilt in the breast of the Frenchman, not, however, till
+the Frenchman had drawn from his pistol pocket a 300 ton Krupp gun
+and sent a solid shot weighing 280 pounds crashing into the skull
+of the Indian, and both rolled to the bottom of the bluff, dead.
+Dr. Hall, of Baraboo, was called, and he probed for the ball, but
+could not find it, and neither could he get the bar of railroad
+iron out of the Frenchman, and so they were buried on the spot
+where now stands the Cliff House. The squaw looked around for
+another fellow, but they all had other engagements, the excursion
+train having arrived from La Crosse, and so she went up on a crag
+and said, &ldquo;Big Injun me,&rdquo; and jumped off and was dashed
+into 1,347 pieces, and the wedding was broke up. Pieces of the
+squaw can now be found among the rocks, petrified, but retaining
+the odor of the ancient tribe. I got a piece of her, evidently a
+piece broken off her ear, which retains its shade perfectly, and
+will long be a reminder of my visit to Devil&rsquo;s Lake.
+(P.S.&mdash;Disreputable parties are selling pieces of stuff
+purporting to be genuine remains of this beauteous maiden, but they
+are base imitations. None genuine unless the trade mark is stamped
+on them.)</p>
+<h3><a id="Geological_Survey" name="Geological_Survey">GEOLOGICAL
+SURVEY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The Geological Survey is being prosecuted as well as could be
+expected with the limited means at the hands of the searchers in
+the bowels of the earth. They have already found, I am informed,
+that the earth on which we live, and move, and have a being, is
+composed largely of dirt. The discovery of this fact is alone worth
+the price of admission. This great discovery, which will be of such
+value to the future historian, has only cost the state the
+insignificant sum of $8,280. Rather than remain in ignorance of
+this astonishing fact, I would willingly pay the money
+myself&mdash;out of the public treasury. It is rumored that parties
+employed by the State to dive down into the ground and bring up
+sand in their claws, have discovered symptoms that the world was at
+one time sick to its stomach, and threw up divers and sundry kinds
+of rocks and things, and there is a probability that lead ore may
+be discovered. This will be valuable to make bullets in case of a
+war with Oshkosh. In peace it is always best to prepare for war,
+and I trust you will lend your countenance to the able men who are
+investigating the Lower Silurian age.</p>
+<h3><a id="Fooling_with_the_Bible" name=
+"Fooling_with_the_Bible">FOOLING WITH THE BIBLE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Why, the cheeky ghouls have actually altered over the
+Lord&rsquo;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&rsquo;s sermon on the Mount
+until He couldn&rsquo;t tell it if He was to meet it in the Chicago
+<em>Times</em>.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;hades&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t know a hades if we should see it dead in the road,
+but they couldn&rsquo;t fool us any on hell.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Millions of Bibles were shipped to this country by the firm that
+was &ldquo;long&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>The edition was advertised like a circus, and doors were to be
+opened at six o&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>O, the revision is a three-card monte speculation; that is all
+it is.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Black_Bear_at_Onalaska" name=
+"A_Black_Bear_at_Onalaska">A BLACK BEAR AT ONALASKA.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A black bear was brought into town for sale on Friday, having
+been killed by Tom Rand, near Onalaska. He killed it with a little
+rifle that didn&rsquo;t look big enough to hurt a hen. If bears are
+so sociable as to come within sight of La Crosse to be killed, it
+will be a good excuse for husbands to stay at home nights.</p>
+<h3><a id="Another_Dead_Failure" name=
+"Another_Dead_Failure">ANOTHER DEAD FAILURE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; worth more because we thought if that was the last
+paper we were going to get out we might as 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Glorious_Fourth_of_July" name=
+"The_Glorious_Fourth_of_July">THE GLORIOUS FOURTH OF JULY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>On this great day we are accustomed to leave our business to
+hired men, and burn with patriotism, and ginger pop, fill ourselves
+with patriotic ferver, and beer, shout the battle cry of freedom,
+and go home when the day is over with our eye-winkers burned off,
+and to sleep with a consciousness that a great duty has been
+performed, and that we have got bank notes to pay on the morrow.
+For three hundred and sixty-four days in the year our patriotism is
+corked up and wired down, and all we can do is to work, and acquire
+age and strength. On the 4th of July we cut the wire, the cork that
+holds our patriotism flies out, and we bubble and sparkle and
+steam, and make things howl. We hold in as long as we can, but when
+we get the harness off, and are turned into the pasture, we make a
+picnic of ourselves, with music all along the line.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Uses_of_the_Paper_Bag" name=
+"The_Uses_of_the_Paper_Bag">THE USES OF THE PAPER BAG.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A First Ward man was told by his wife to bring home a quart of
+oysters on New Year&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/256.png"><img src=
+"images/256.png" alt=
+"A woman looks at a man who is searching his pockets." id="img256"
+name="img256" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>SLIPPERY OYSTERS.</p>
+</div>
+<p>We will leave the man there, gazing upon the wreck, and take the
+reader to the residence where he is expected.</p>
+<p>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 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Forgot noth(hic)ing,&rdquo; says he.</p>
+<p>He walks up to the table and asks for a plate, which is given
+him by the unsuspicious wife.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Damsaccident you ever(hic)see,&rdquo; said the truly good
+man, as he brought his hand out of his overcoat pocket, with four
+oysters, a little smoking tobacce, and a piece of cigar-stub.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Slipperysoystersev(hic)er was,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Got all my pock(hic)ets full,&rdquo; 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Six big oys(hic)ters gone down my trousers leg.
+S&rsquo;posi&rsquo;ll find them in my boot,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Universalist_Bath" name="The_Universalist_Bath">THE
+UNIVERSALIST BATH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Mr. E.H. Lane is canvassing the city for the Universalist Bath.
+We don&rsquo;t know why it should be called a &ldquo;Universalist
+Bath,&rdquo; as it more nearly resembles a Baptist Bath, as we
+remember it. The bath is a queer thing, consisting of an India
+rubber hop sack, fastened to an immense ox bow. The ends are placed
+on to chairs, the water put in, and you get in and hippotamus and
+take a complete bath from Dan to Beersheba in a tea cup full of
+water.</p>
+<h3><a id="Killing_Big_Game" name="Killing_Big_Game">KILLING BIG
+GAME.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The conductors on the St. Paul railroad are most all good sports
+with a shot gun. There is Howard and Clason, and Russell, who never
+tire of talking of the millions of chickens, ducks, wild turkeys
+and so forth that they have killed. They have tried to get
+Conductor Green interested in field sports, but he always said the
+game was not big enough for him. He said he had his opinion men
+that would surround a little chicken with spike tailed dogs, and
+then kill it and call it sport. What he wanted was big game.
+Nothing less than a bear would do him. Last week the owners of the
+cinnamon bear that was brought down from the Yellowstone, decided
+to have it killed, and some one told them to get Green to kill it,
+as he was an old bear hunter from the Rocky Mountains. Green said
+he was rusty on bears, not having had a tussel with a grizzly in
+several years, but if they couldn&rsquo;t get anybody else to
+chance the bear he would make hash of it. So they went down to the
+ice house where the bear was. Green said he didn&rsquo;t want
+anybody to go in with him, because they might get hurt. He put on
+Clason&rsquo;s hunting suit, took a carving knife in his teeth and
+a revolver in his hand, and went in and looked the bear in the eye.
+The bear knew Green meant business, and he began to feel around for
+his ticket. The conductor advanced to within eleven feet of the
+bear when all at once the animal sprang at him, growling and
+showing his teeth. Green&rsquo;s first impulse was to pull the bell
+rope, and order the cuss to get out of the ice house, but he saw
+the bear coming through the air towards him, and there was not four
+hours to lose, so he drew the revolver, took aim at the
+bear&rsquo;s left eye, and pulled. There was a puff of smoke, and
+the bear fell lifeless at his feet. Placing the animal in his game
+sack, he wiped the blood from his knife and said to some men who
+stood outside, their faces ashy pale: &ldquo;Always shoot bears in
+the left eye.&rdquo; The men were pleased to see him come out alive
+and they shook him warmly by the hand. The other conductors, the
+shooters, are jealous of Green, and they are telling how he killed
+the bear by going up in the loft of the ice house and falling on
+him, and one conductor says Green shot the bear with a crow bar
+through a knot hole. Another said the bear had all four of his legs
+tied and that a dose of poison was administered through a syringe,
+attached to a pole, while another says that the bear died from
+fright. All these stories are the result of jealousy. The bear was
+killed just as we say, and there are few men that would tackle
+him&mdash;that is, few men aside from conductors.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Mule_not_the_Eagle" name=
+"The_Mule_not_the_Eagle">THE MULE NOT THE EAGLE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The bird that should have been selected as the emblem of our
+country, the bird of patience, forbearance, perseverance, and the
+bird of terror when aroused, is the mule. There is no bird that
+combines more virtues to the square foot than the mule. With the
+mule emblazoned on our banners, we should be a terror to every foe.
+We are a nation of uncomplaining hard workers. We mean to do the
+fair thing by everybody. We plod along, doing as we would be done
+by. So does the mule. As a nation we occasionally stick our ears
+forward, and fan flies off of our forehead. So does the mule. We
+allow parties to get on and ride as long as they behave themselves.
+So do does the mule. But when any nation sticks spurs in our
+flanks, and tickles our heels with a straw, we come down
+stiff-legged in front, our ears look to the beautiful beyond, our
+voice is cut loose, and is still for war, and our subsequent end
+plays the snare drum on anything that gets in reach of us, and
+strikes terror to the hearts of all tyrants. So does the mule.</p>
+<h3><a id="Our_Blue-Coated_Dog-Poisoners" name=
+"Our_Blue-Coated_Dog-Poisoners">OUR BLUE-COATED DOG
+POISONERS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 Sheenan was the policeman any more he
+wouldn&rsquo;t poison my dog, would he, pa?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The above was the greeting the bald-headed <em>Sun</em> 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&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>If the boy slept too long after dinner, the dog went and rooted
+around him as much as to say, &ldquo;Look a here, Mr. Roy, you
+can&rsquo;t play this on your partner any longer. You get up here
+and we will have a high old time, and don&rsquo;t you forget
+it.&rdquo; And pretty soon the sound of baby feet and dog&rsquo;s
+toe nails would be heard on the stairs, and the circus would
+commence.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;Gip, too much
+sleep is what is ruining the dogs in this country. Now, brace up
+and play horse with me.&rdquo; And then there was fun.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo; spaniel
+dogs, and a door-keeper stands with a club to keep out policemen.
+And still we cannot blame policemen&mdash;it is the law that is to
+blame&mdash;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 &ldquo;dog days,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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, &ldquo;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 go around assassinating
+dogs,&rdquo; we as people, would think more of them, and perhaps
+build them a decent station house to rest in.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Hot_Box_at_a_Picnic" name="A_Hot_Box_at_a_Picnic">A
+HOT BOX AT A PICNIC.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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 are 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, and 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, 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/263.png"><img src=
+"images/263.png" alt=
+"A smiling woman and a man ride out in a carriage." id="img263"
+name="img263" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>THE OLD BACK NUMBER GIRL.</p>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="Camp_Meetings_in_the_Dark_of_the_Moon" name=
+"Camp_Meetings_in_the_Dark_of_the_Moon">CAMP MEETINGS IN THE DARK
+OF THE MOON.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Dartford man, who has been attending a camp meeting at that
+place, inquires of the Brandon <em>Times</em> why it is that camp
+meetings are always held when the moon does not shine. The
+<em>Times</em> man gives it up and refers the question to the
+<em>Sun</em>. We give it up.</p>
+<p>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
+&ldquo;catch on&rdquo; better at that time.</p>
+<p>There may be something in the atmosphere, in the dark of the
+moon, that makes a camp meeting more enjoyable. Certainly brethren
+and sisterin&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Palace_Cattle_Cars" name="Palace_Cattle_Cars">PALACE
+CATTLE CARS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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,
+&ldquo;the galoot wants to interview me, probably, and I wish he
+would keep away,&rdquo; the particular one sought for comes to the
+reception room and puts out its front foot for a shake, smiles and
+says, &ldquo;Glad you came. Was afraid you would let us go away and
+not call.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This,&rdquo; says the steer who is doing the honors,
+&ldquo;is the stateroom occupied by old Brindle, who is being
+shipped from St. Joseph, Mo. Brindle weighs 1,600 on
+foot&mdash;Brindle, get up and show yourself to the
+gentleman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;O, go on now and
+give us a rest.&rdquo; 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,
+&ldquo;Gentlemen, you will have to excuse me,&rdquo; lays down with
+her head on a pillow, pulls the coverlid over her and begins to
+snore.</p>
+<p>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 <em>Times</em> article on Oleomargarine, or Bull Butter, at
+intervals stopping the reading to curse the writer, who claims that
+oleomargarine is an unlawful preparation, containing deleterious
+substances.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;and make it hot,&rdquo; says
+the ox, as he counts up high, low, jack and the game.</p>
+<p>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 near 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&rsquo;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, &ldquo;Meet me in
+the slaughter house when the due bill falls,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="George_Washington" name="George_Washington">GEORGE
+WASHINGTON.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>He could not tell a lie, George couldn&rsquo;t. Washington, it
+is probable, never knew what it was to stow away a schooner of
+beer, and history makes no mention that he ever, on any pretext,
+eat limberger cheese. At least no mention was made of it in his
+farewell address. He never was President of a savings bank.
+Washington never lectured. He never edited a newspaper. He could
+not tell a lie at the rates editors charge. No he was a good man,
+with none of the small vices that are so prevalent these days.</p>
+<h3><a id="Broke_up_a_Prayer_Meeting" name=
+"Broke_up_a_Prayer_Meeting">BROKE UP A PRAYER MEETING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/268.png"><img src=
+"images/268.png" alt="A woman holds her hand over her eye." id=
+"img268" name="img268" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE LADY OF THE SEVENTH WARD.</p>
+</div>
+<p>When we told her that a piece of beef-steak was worth two
+oysters she uncovered the eye. It looked as though painted by one
+of the old masters.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s room on
+tiptoe, to see if she was asleep. She found the girl with all her
+dolls on the floor having a dolls&rsquo; 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 the 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There, Miss, you sit down and let some of the other
+sisters get in a word edgeways. Sister Perkins, won&rsquo;t you
+relate your experience?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>After listening to this for a few moments the mother heard the
+girl say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, Polly, you pass the collection plate, and no one
+must put in lozengers, and then we will all go to the dancing
+school.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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
+the prayer meeting, when she stubbed herself on a stair rod,
+and&mdash;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Dog_Law" name="The_Dog_Law">THE DOG LAW.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Lunch_on_the_Cars" name="Lunch_on_the_Cars">LUNCH ON THE
+CARS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There is nothing that so gives a man away as to open a satchel
+and take out a lunch. I have been riding on the cars and have made
+the acquaintance of people who would listen to my stories, and take
+in every word as gospel truth. They would seem to hang on my words
+with pleasure, and be apparently glad they had become acquainted
+with one who combined so many graces of mind and person, and they
+would gather around so as not to miss a single lie that I might
+tell. And yet when I took a paper parcel out of my valise and
+opened up a lunch, consisting of bread and onions, and sausage and
+sweitzer cheese, they would draw coldly away from me and sit in the
+farther part of the car, and appear never to have known me.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14815 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14815 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14815)
diff --git a/old/14815-8.txt b/old/14815-8.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Peck's Compendium of Fun, by George W. Peck
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Peck's Compendium of Fun
+
+Author: George W. Peck
+
+Release Date: January 27, 2005  [eBook #14815]
+
+Language: english
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 14815-h.htm or 14815-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/8/1/14815/14815-h/14815-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/8/1/14815/14815-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN
+
+Comprising the Choicest Gems of Wit, Humor, Sarcasm and Pathos
+of America's Favorite Humorist,
+
+GEORGE W. PECK,
+
+Editor of "Peck's Sun" Milwaukee
+
+Illustrated by Eminent Artists
+
+Chicago
+
+1886
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+    About Hell
+    Another Dead Failure
+    Anna Dickinson
+    A Bald-headed Man Most Crazy
+    A Case of Paralysis
+    A Doctor of Laws
+    A Hot Box at a Picnic
+    A Lively Train Load
+    A Mad Minister
+    A Musical Critique
+    A Peck at the Cheese
+    A Plea for the Bull Head
+    A Sewing Machine Given to the Boss Girl
+    A Safe Investment
+    A Tony Slaughter-House
+    A Trying Situation
+    An Arm That is not Reliable
+    An Editor Burglarized
+    Banks and Banking
+    Bounced from Church for Dancing
+    Boys and Circuses
+    Boys will be Boys
+    Broke up a Prayer Meeting
+    Buying a Stone Crusher
+    "Cash!"
+    Camp Meetings in the Dark of the Moon
+    Church Keno
+    Colored Concert Troupes
+    Dogs and Human Beings
+    Effects of Mineral Water
+    Expedition in Search of a Doughnut
+    Failure of a Solid Institution
+    Fishing for Pieces of Women
+    Fooling with the Bible
+    George Washington
+    Granite Head Cheese
+    Internal Improvements
+    Joke on the Hat
+    Killing Big Game
+    Large Mouths are Fashionable
+    La Crosse Nebecudnezzer Water
+    Laying up Apples in Heaven
+    Mr. Peck's Sunday Lecture
+    Nearly Broke up the Ball
+    Our Blue-Coated Dog-Poisoners
+    Our Christian Neighbors Have Gone
+    Palace Cattle Cars
+
+    PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+      He Becomes a Druggist
+      He is too Healthy
+      He Quits the Drug Business
+      His Pa an Inventor
+      His Pa Dissected
+      His Pa Goes Calling
+      His Pa Goes Skating
+      His Pa Gets Boxed
+      His Pa Gets Mad
+      His Pa Joins a Temperance Society
+      His Pa Jokes Him
+      His Pa is Discouraged
+      His Pa Kills Him
+      His Pa Mortified
+
+    Religion and Fish
+    Rope Ladders
+    Sardineindianapolis
+    Seven Year Old Horses
+    Summer Resorting
+    Take Your Latin Straight
+    Terror in Church
+    The Bob-Tailed Badger
+    The Boy and the Goat
+    The Difference
+    The Difference in Horses
+    The Fire New Year's Day
+    The Giddy Girl's Quarrel
+    The Gospel Car
+    The Infidel and His Silver Mine
+    The Knight and the Bridal Chamber
+    The Legend of the Lake
+    The Man from Dubuque
+    The Mistake About It
+    The Naughty But Nice Church Choir
+    The New Coal Stove
+    The Sudden Fire-Works at Racine
+    The Uses of the Paper Bag
+    The Waters of La Crosse
+    The Way to Name Children
+    The Way Women Boss a Pillow
+    The Woodcock
+    Those Bold Bad Drummers
+    Those Step Ladders!
+    Tragedy on the Stage
+    Trains Without Conductors
+    Try to Save Two Shillings
+    Unscrewing the Top of a Fruit Jar
+    Why the Fever Did'nt Spread
+    Woman-Dozing a Democrat
+    Wonders of the Stage
+
+
+    ELECTRIC FLASHES.
+
+    Anna Dickinson as "Mazeppa"
+    A Black Bear at Onalaska
+    A Dead Sure Thing
+    A Fashion Item
+    A Good Land Enough
+    A Lecturer Should Know What He Talks About
+    A Loan Exhibition
+    A New Sparking Scheme
+    An Odorous Bohemian
+    Base Ingratitude
+    Buttermilk Bibbers
+    Cats on the Fence
+    Christmas Trees
+    Col. Ingersoll Praying
+    Comforting Compensations
+    Convenient Currency
+    Crushing Nihilism
+    Enterprising Chicago!
+    Fish Hatching in Wisconsin
+    Frozen Ears
+    Gathered Waists!
+    Geological Survey
+    Give us War
+    Good Templars on Ice
+    Hard on Fond Du Lac
+    He Would'nt Have His Father Called Names
+    How Farmers May Get Rich
+    "How Sharper Than a Hound's Tooth!"
+    How to Invest a Thousand Dollars
+    How to Reach Young Men
+    Hunting Dogs
+    Insecure Abodes
+    Lunch on the Cars
+    Mattie Mashes Minnesota
+    Merrie Christmas
+    More Dangerous Than Kerosene
+    Mrs. Langtry
+    One of Beecher's Converts
+    Preparing for War
+    Raising Elephants
+    Registry of Electors
+    Selling Clams
+    She was no Gentleman
+    Southern "Honaw"
+    Spurious Tripe
+    Sure of Heaven
+    Supreme Court Judges and U.S. Senators
+    Ten Days in Love
+    The Advent Preacher and the Balloon
+    The Day We Reached Canada
+    The Dog Law
+    The Glorious Fourth of July
+    The Mule not the Eagle
+    The Old Sweet Songs
+    The Political Outlook
+    The Power of Eloquence
+    The Thirsty Gopher
+    The Universalist Bath
+    The Universal Object
+    The Wicked Mon Kee
+    The Wrong Corpse
+    Three Inches of Leg
+    To What Vile Uses May We Come
+    Too Particular by Half
+    What the Country Needs
+    What the Democrats Will Do
+    We Will Celebrate
+    Why not Raise Wolves?
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+    A Scene in Paradise
+    "Ah, my Friends, Look Down Into That Burning Lake!"
+    An Intrusive Nigger
+    At the Telephone
+    Behind the Scenes
+    Bossing the Pillow
+    "Do not Pass me by!"
+    Drummers Trying to Pray
+    "Get Thee to a Nunnery!"
+    "Happy New Year, Mum!"
+    Hiawasamantha, the Dusky Daughter of the Golden West
+    "I Want to be an Angel"
+    It Looked Like an old Dripping Pan
+    "It is F-f-four Sizes too Big!"
+    John McCullough Killing a Texas Steer
+    "Just as I am"
+    "Keno!"
+    Martindale Climbs a Pole
+    "Me Long Lost Duke!"
+    Mystery of a Woman's Clothes
+    New Way of Taking Seidlitz Powders
+    No More Apples for the Minister
+    "Oh, That Will be all Right"
+    "Pa Grabbed Her by the Polonaise"
+    "Sard," and the Greek Slave
+    Sacred Memories
+    Slippery Oysters
+    Swallow-Tails on the Climb
+    The Lady of the Seventh Ward
+    The Old Back Number Girl
+    The Old Man Tries His Hand
+    The Resorter
+    The Rotund Urso
+    The Sexton in all His Glory
+    The Startled Cat
+    The Tenor Arrayed in all His Glory
+    The Wandering Oyster
+    "Thereby Hangs a Tail."
+    "This is too Allfired Much!"
+    "Too Late, Pa, I Die at the Hand of an Assassin!"
+    Turning the Proper Dingus
+    "Yell, or go Down!"
+
+
+
+
+PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.
+
+
+THE NEW COAL STOVE.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: TURNING THE PROPER DINGUS.]
+
+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 got to learn how to
+engineer it, or you may get roasted.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA IS DISCOURAGED.
+
+"Say, you leave here mighty quick," said the grocery man to the bad boy,
+as he came in, with his arm in a sling, and backed up against the stove to
+get warm. "Everything has gone wrong since you got to coming here, and I
+think you are a regular Jonah. I find sand in my sugar, kerosene in the
+butter, the codfish is all picked off, and there is something wrong every
+time you come here. Now you leave."
+
+"I aint no Joner," said the boy as he wiped his nose on his coat sleeve,
+and reached into a barrel for a snow apple. "I never swallered no whale.
+Say, do you believe that story about Joner being in the whale's belly, all
+night? I don't. The minister was telling about it at Sunday school last
+Sunday, and asked me what I thought Joner was doing while he was in there,
+and I told him I interpreted the story this way, that the whale was fixed
+up inside with upper and lower berths, like a sleeping car, and Joner had
+a lower berth, and the porter made up the berth as soon as Joner came in
+with his satchel, and Joner pulled off his boots and gave them to the
+porter to black, and put his watch under the pillow and turned in. The
+boys in Sunday school all laffed, and the minister said I was a bigger
+fool than Pa was, and that was useless. If you go back on me, now, I won't
+have a friend, except my chum and a dog, and I swear, by my halidom, that
+I never put no sand in your sugar, or kerosene in your butter. I admit the
+picking off of the codfish, but you can charge it to Pa, the same as you
+did the eggs that I pushed my chum over into last summer, though I thought
+you did wrong in charging Christmas prices for dog days eggs. When my
+chum's Ma scraped his pants she said there was not an egg represented on
+there that was less than two years old. The Sunday school folks
+have all gone back on me, since I put kyan pepper on the stove, when they
+were singing 'Little Drops of Water,' and they all had to go out doors and
+air themselves, but I didn't mean to let the pepper drop on the stove. I
+was just holding it over the stove to warm it, when my chum hit the funny
+bone of my elbow. Pa says I am a terror to cats. Every time Pa says
+anything, it gives me a new idea. I tell you Pa has got a great brain, but
+sometimes he don't have it with him. When he said I was a terror to cats I
+thought what fun there is in cats, and me and my chum went to stealing
+cats right off, and before night we had eleven cats caged. We had one in a
+canary bird cage, three in Pa's old hat boxes, three in Ma's band box,
+four in valises, two in a trunk, and the rest in a closet up stairs.
+
+"That night Pa said he wanted me to stay home because the committee that
+is going to get up a noyster supper in the church was going to meet at our
+house, and they might want to send me on errands. I asked him if my chum
+couldn't stay too, 'cause he is the healthiest infant to run after errands
+that ever was, and Pa said he could stay, but we must remember that there
+musn't be no monkey business going on. I told him there shouldn't be no
+monkey business, but I didn't promise nothing about cats. Well, sir, you'd
+a dide. The committee was in the library by the back stairs, and me and my
+chum got the cat boxes all together, at the top of the stairs, and we took
+them all out and put them in a clothes basket, and just as the minister
+was speaking, and telling what a great good was done by these oyster
+sociables, in bringing the young people together, and taking their minds
+from the wickedness of the world, and turning their thoughts into
+different channels, one of the old tom cats in the basket gave a 'purmeow'
+that sounded like the wail of a lost soul, or a challenge to battle. I
+told my chum that we couldn't hold the bread-board over the clothes basket
+much longer, when two or three cats began to yowl, and the minister
+stopped talking and Pa told Ma to open the stair door and tell the hired
+girl to see what was the matter up there. She thought our cat had got shut
+up in the storm door, and she opened the stair door to yell to the girl,
+and then I pushed the clothes basket, cats and all down the back stairs.
+Well, sir, I suppose no committee for a noyster supper, was ever more
+astonished. I heard Ma fall over a willow rocking chair, and say, 'scat,'
+and I heard Pa say, 'well. I'm dam'd,' and a girl that sings in the choir
+say, 'Heavens, I am stabbed,' then my chum and me ran to the front of the
+house and come down the front stairs looking as innocent as could be, and
+we went in the library, and I was just going to tell Pa if there was any
+errands he wanted run my chum and me was just aching to run them, when a
+yellow cat without any tail was walking over the minister, and Pa was
+throwing a hassock at two cats that were clawing each other under the
+piano, and Ma was trying to get her frizzes back on her head, and the
+choir girl was standing on the lounge with her dress pulled up, trying to
+scare cats with her striped stockings, and the minister was holding his
+hands up, and I guess he was asking a blessing on the cats, and my chum
+opened the front door and all the cats went out. Pa and Ma looked at me,
+and I said it wasn't me, and the minister wanted to know how so much cat
+hair got on my coat and vest, and I said a cat met me in the hall and
+kicked me, and Ma cried, and Pa said 'that boy beats hell,' and the
+minister said, I would be all right if I had been properly brought up, and
+then Ma was mad, and the committee broke up. Well, to tell the honest
+truth Pa basted me, and yanked me around until I had to have my arm in a
+sling, but what's the use of making such a fuss about a few cats. Ma said
+she never wanted to have my company again, 'cause I spoiled everything.
+But I got even with Pa for basting me, this morning, and I dassent go
+home. You see Ma has got a great big bath sponge as big as a chair
+cushion, and this morning I took the sponge and filled it with warm water,
+and took the feather cushion out of the chair Pa sits in at the table, and
+put the sponge in its place, and covered it over with the cushion cover,
+and when we all got set down to the table Pa came in and sat down on it to
+ask a blessing. He started in by closing his eyes and placing his hands up
+in front of him like the letter V, and then he began to ask that the food
+we were about to partake off be blessed, and then he was going on to ask
+that all of us be made to see the error of our ways, when he began to
+hitch around, and he opened one eye and looked at me, and I looked as
+pious as a boy can look when he knows the pancakes are getting cold, and
+Pa he kind of sighed and said 'Amen' sort of snappish, and he got up and
+told Ma he didn't feel well, and she would have to take his place and pass
+around the sassidge and potatoes, and he looked kind of scart and went out
+with his hand on his pistol pocket, as though he would like to shoot, and
+Ma she got up and went around and sat in Pa's chair. The sponge didn't
+hold more than half a pail full of water, and I didn't want to play no
+joke on Ma, cause the cats nearly broke her up, but she sat down and was
+just going to help me, when she rung the bell and called the hired girl,
+and said she felt as though her neuralgia was coming on, and she would go
+to her room, and told the girl to sit down and help Hennery. The girl sat
+down and poured me out some coffee, and then she said, 'Howly Saint
+Patrick, but I blave those pancakes are burning,' and she went out in the
+kitchen. I drank my coffee, and then took the big sponge out of the chair
+and put the cushion in the place of it, and then I put the sponge in the
+bath room, and I went up to Pa and Ma's room, and asked them if I should
+go after the doctor, and Pa had changed his clothes and got on his Sunday
+pants, and he said, 'never mind the doctor, I guess we will pull through,'
+and for me to get out and go to the devil, and I came over here. Say,
+there is no harm in a little warm water, is there? Well, I'd like to know
+what Pa and Ma and the hired girl thought. I am the only real healthy one
+there is in our family."
+
+
+THREE INCHES OF LEG.
+
+Blanche Williams, of Philadelphia, who met with an accident at Fairmount
+Water-works, by which one leg was broken, and rendered three inches
+shorter than the rest of her legs, has recovered $10,000 damages. It would
+seem, to the student of nature, to be a pretty good price for three inches
+of ordinary leg, but then some people will make such a fuss.
+
+
+MORE DANGEROUS THAN KEROSENE.
+
+The regular weekly murder is reported from Peshtigo. Two men named Glass
+and Penrue, got to quarreling about a girl, in a hay loft, over a barn.
+Glass stabbed Penrue quite a number of times and he died. There is nothing
+much more dangerous, unless it is kerosene, than two men and a girl, in a
+hay loft quarreling.
+
+
+TEN DAYS IN LOVE.
+
+There is a fearfully harrowing story going the rounds of the papers headed
+"Ten Days in Love." It must have been dreadful, with no Sunday, no day of
+rest, no holiday, just nothing but love, for ten long days. By the way,
+did the person live?
+
+
+BOYS WILL BE BOYS.
+
+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 trouser 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 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
+horseflesh 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
+wordly-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?"
+
+[Illustration: SACRED MEMORIES]
+
+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, you are 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."
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HE BECOMES A DRUGGIST.
+
+"Whew! What is that smells so about this store? It seems as though
+everything had turned frowy," said the grocery man to his clerk in the
+presence of the bad boy, who was standing with his back to the stove, his
+coat-tails parted with his hands, and a cigarette in his mouth.
+
+"May be it is me that smells frowy," said the boy as he put his thumbs in
+the armholes of his vest, and spit at the keyhole in the door. "I have
+gone into business."
+
+"By thunder, I believe it is you," said the grocery man, as he went up to
+the boy and snuffed a couple of times and then held his hand to his nose.
+"The board of health will kerosene you if they ever smell that smell, and
+send you to the glue factory. What business have you gone into to make you
+smell so rank?"
+
+"Well, you see Pa began to think it was time I learned a trade, or a
+profession, and he saw a sign in a drug store window 'boy wanted,' and as
+he had a boy he didn't want, he went to the druggist and got a job for me.
+This smell on me will go off in a few weeks. You know I wanted to try all
+the perfumery in the store, and after I had got about forty different
+extracts on my clothes, another boy that worked there he fixed up a bottle
+of benzine and assafety and brimstone, and a whole lot of other horrid
+stuff, and labeled it 'rose geranium,' and I guess I just wallered in it.
+It _is_ awful, aint it? It kerflummixed Ma when I went into the
+dining-room the first night that I got home from the store, and broke Pa
+all up. He said I reminded him of the time they had a litter of skunks
+under the barn. The air seemed fixed around where I am, and everybody
+seems to know who fixed it. A girl came into the store yesterday to buy a
+satchet, and there wasn't anybody there but me, and I didn't know what it
+was, and I took down everything in the store pretty near before I found
+it, and then I wouldn't have found it only the proprietor came in. The
+girl asked the proprietor if there wasn't a good deal of sewer gas in the
+store, and he told me to go out and shake myself. I think the girl was mad
+at me because I got a nursing bottle out of the show case with a rubber
+muzzle, and asked her if that was what she wanted. Well, she told me a
+sachet was something for the stummick, and I thought a nursing bottle was
+the nearest thing to it."
+
+[Illustration: NEW WAY OF TAKING SEIDLITZ POWDERS]
+
+"I should think you would drive all the customers away from the store,"
+said the groceryman as he opened the door to let the fresh air in.
+
+"I don't know but I will, but I am hired for a month on trial, and I shall
+stay. You see, I sha'n't practice on anybody but Pa for a spell. I made up
+my mind to that when I gave a woman some salts instead of powdered borax,
+and she came back mad. Pa seems to want to encourage me, and is willing to
+take anything that I ask him to. He had a sore throat and wanted something
+for it, and the boss drugger told me to put some tannin and chlorate of
+potash in a mortar and grind it, and I let Pa pound it with the mortar,
+and while he was pounding I dropped in a couple of drops of sulphuric
+acid, and it exploded and blowed Pa's hat clear across the store, and Pa
+was whiter than a sheet. He said he guessed his throat was all right, and
+he wouldn't come near me again that day. The next day Pa came in, and I
+was laying for him. I took a white seidletz powder and a blue one, and
+dissolved them in separate glasses, and when Pa came in I asked him if he
+didn't want some lemonade, and he said he did, and I gave him the sour one
+and he drank it. He said it was too sour, and then I gave him the other
+glass that looked like water, to take the taste out of his mouth, and he
+drank it. Well, sir, when those two powders got together in Pa's
+stummick, and began to siz and steam and foam, Pa pretty near choked to
+death, and the suds came out of his nostrils, and his eyes stuck out, and
+as soon as he could get his breath he yelled 'fire,' and said he was
+poisoned, and called for a doctor, but I thought as long as we had a
+doctor right in the family there was no use of hiring one, so I got a
+stomach pump and would have baled him out in no time, only the proprietor
+came in and told me to go and wash some bottles, and he gave Pa a drink of
+brandy, and Pa said he felt better. Pa has learned where we keep the
+liquor, and he comes in two or three times a day with a pain in his
+stomach. They play awful mean tricks on a boy in a drug store. The first
+day they put a chunk of something blue into a mortar, and told me to
+pulverize it and then make it up into two grain pills. Well, sir, I
+pounded that chunk all the forenoon, and it never pulverized at all, and
+the boss told me to hurry up as the woman was waiting for the pills, and I
+mauled it till I was nearly dead, and when it was time to go to supper the
+boss came and looked in the mortar, and took out the chunk and said, 'You
+dum fool, you have been pounding all day on a chunk of India rubber,
+instead of blue mass!' Well, how did I know? But I will get even with them
+if I stay there long enough, and don't you forget it. If you have a
+prescription you want filled you can come down to the store and I will put
+it up for you myself, and then you will be sure to get what you pay for."
+
+"Yes," said the grocery man, as he cut off a piece of limberg cheese and
+put it on the stove to purify the air in the room, "I should laugh to see
+myself taking any medicine you put up. You will kill some one yet, by
+giving them poison instead of quinine. But what has your Pa got his nose
+tied up for? He looks as though he had had a fight."
+
+"O, that was from my treatment. He had a wart on his nose. You
+know that wart. You remember how the minister told him if other peoples'
+business had a button hole in it, Pa could button the wart in the
+button-hole, as he always had his nose there. Well, I told Pa I could cure
+that wart with caustic, and he said he would give five dollars if I could
+cure it, so I took a stick of caustic and burned the wart off, but I guess
+I burned down into the nose a little, for it swelled up as big as a
+lobster. Pa says he would rather have a whole nest of warts than such a
+nose, but it will be all right in a year or two."
+
+
+A LOAN EXHIBITION.
+
+"What is a loan exhibition?" asks a correspondent. Well, when a fellow
+borrows ten dollars of you, to be paid next Saturday, and he lets it run a
+year and a half, and don't pay it, and he meets you on the street and asks
+for five dollars more, and you turn him around and kick him right before
+the crowd, that is a loan exhibition.
+
+
+THE WICKED MON KEE.
+
+Mon Kee, a Chinaman that was converted to regular United States religious
+doctrines, and opened a mission in New York for the purpose of converting
+more heathens and shethens, has been arrested for stealing. This is a
+terrible blow, and Mon Kee was a terrible plower. A few weeks since the
+religious papers made more blow over the coming into the fold of that
+Chinaman than they did over all the editors in the country, who went not
+astray. Now they have shut up their yawp about him, since he has proved to
+be no better than Talmage or Beecher.
+
+
+UNSCREWING THE TOP OF A FRUIT JAR.
+
+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 away 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,
+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
+when 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 the skin off the knuckle. He breathes a silent prayer and calls for
+the kerosene can, and pours a little oil into the crevice, and lets it
+soak, and then he tries again, and swears audibly.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD MAN TRIES HIS HAND.]
+
+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.
+
+
+HE WOULDN'T HAVE HIS FATHER CALLED NAMES.
+
+A man died in Oshkosh who was over eighty years of age. After the funeral
+the minister who conducted the services, said to the son of the deceased,
+"your father was an octogenarian." The young man colored up, doubled up
+his fist, and said to the minister that he would like to have him repeat
+that remark. The minister said, "I say your father was an old
+octogenarian." He had not more than got the word out of his mouth before
+the young man struck him on the nose, knocked him down, kicked him in the
+ear, and when pulled off by a policeman, he said no holyghoster could call
+his dead father names, not around him. The minister said he couldn't have
+been more surprised if some one had paid a year's pew rent, than he was
+when that young man's fist hit him.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HE QUITS THE DRUG BUSINESS.
+
+"What are you loafing around here for," says the grocery man to the bad
+boy one day this week. "It is after nine o'clock, and I should think you
+would want to be down to the drug store. How do you know but there may be
+somebody dying for a dose of pills?"
+
+"O, darn the drug store. I have got sick of that business, and I have
+dissolved with the drugger. I have resigned. The policy of the store did
+not meet with my approval, and I have stepped out and am waiting for them
+to come and tender me a better position at an increased salary," said the
+boy, as he threw a cigar stub into a barrel of prunes and lit a fresh one.
+
+"Resigned, eh?" said the grocery man as he fished out the cigar stub and
+charged the boy's father with two pounds of prunes, didn't you and the
+boss agree?"
+
+"Not exactly, I gave an old lady some gin when she asked for camphor and
+water, and she made a show of herself. I thought I would fool her, but she
+knew mighty well what it was, and she drank about half a pint of gin, and
+got to tipping over bottles and kegs of paint, and when the drug man came
+in with his wife, the old woman threw her arms around his neck and called
+him her darling, and when he pushed her away, and told her she was drunk,
+she picked up a bottle of citrate of magnesia and pointed it at him, and
+the cork came out like a pistol, and he thought he was shot, and his wife
+fainted away, and the police came and took the old gin refrigerator away,
+and then the drug man told me to face the door, and, when I wasn't looking
+he kicked me four times, and I landed in the street, and he said if I ever
+came in sight of the store again he would kill me dead. That is the way I
+resigned. I tell you, they will send for me again. They never can run that
+store without me.
+
+"I guess they will worry along without you," said the grocery
+man. "How does your Pa take your being fired out? I should think it would
+brake him all up."
+
+"O, I think Pa rather likes it. At first he thought he had a soft snap
+with me in the drug store, cause he has got to drinking again, like a
+fish, and he has gone back on the church entirely; but after I had put a
+few things in his brandy he concluded it was cheaper to buy it, and he is
+now patronizing a barrel house down by the river.
+
+"One day I put some Castile soap in a drink of drandy, and Pa leaned over
+the back fence more than an hour, with his finger down his throat. The man
+that collects the ashes from the alley asked Pa if he had lost anything,
+and Pa said he was only 'sugaring off.' I don't know what that is. When Pa
+felt better he came in and wanted a little whisky to take the taste out of
+his mouth, and I gave him some, with about a teaspoonful of pulverized
+alum in it. Well, sir, you'd a dide. Pa's mouth and throat was so puckered
+up that he couldn't talk. I don't think that drugman will make anything by
+firing me out, because I shall turn all the trade that I control to
+another store. Why, sir, sometimes there were eight and nine girls in the
+store all at wonct, on account of my being there. They came to have me put
+extracts on their handkerchiefs, and to eat gum drops--he will lose all
+that trade now. My girl that went back on me for the telegraph messenger
+boy, she came with the rest of the girls, but she found that I could be as
+'hawty as a dook.' I got even with her, though. I pretended I wasn't mad,
+and when she wanted me to put some perfumery on her handkerchief I said
+'all right,' and I put on a little geranium and white rose, and then I got
+some tincture of assafety, and sprinkled it on her dress and cloak when
+she went out. That is about the worst smelling stuff that ever was, and I
+was glad when she went out and met the telegraph boy on the corner. They
+went off together; but he came back pretty soon, about the
+homesickest boy you ever saw, and he told my chum he would never go with
+that girl again because she smelled like spoiled oysters or sewer gas. Her
+folks noticed it, and made her go and wash her feet and soak herself, and
+her brother told my chum it didn't do any good, she smelled just like a
+glue factory, and my chum--the darn fool--told her brother that it was me
+who perfumed her, and he hit me in the eye with a frozen fish, down by the
+fish store, and that's what made my eye black; but I know how to cure a
+black eye. I have not been in a drug store eight days, and not know how to
+cure a black eye; and I guess I learned that girl not to go back on a boy
+'cause he smelled like a goat.
+
+"Well, what was it about your leaving the wrong medicine at houses? The
+policeman in this ward told me you come pretty near killing several people
+by leaving the wrong medicine."
+
+"The way of it was this. There was about a dozen different kinds of
+medicine to leave at different places, and I was in a hurry to go to the
+roller skating rink, so I got my chum to help me, and we just took the
+numbers of the houses, and when we rung the bell we would hand out the
+first package we come to, and I understand there was a good deal of
+complaint. One old maid who ordered powder for her face, her ticket drew
+some worm lozengers, and she kicked awfully, and a widow who was going to
+be married, she ordered a celluloid comb and brush, and she got a nursing
+bottle with a rubber nozzle, and a toothing ring, and she made quite a
+fuss; but the woman who was weaning her baby and wanted the nursing
+bottle, she got the comb and brush and some blue pills, and she never made
+any fuss at all. It makes a good deal of difference, I notice, whether a
+person gets a better thing than they order or not. But the drug business
+is too lively for me. I have got to have a quiet place, and I guess I will
+be a cash boy in a store. Pa says he thinks I was cut out for a bunko
+steerer, and I may look for that kind of a job. Pa he is a terror since he
+got to drinking again. He came home the other day, when the minister was
+calling on Ma, and just cause the minister was sitting on the sofa with
+Ma, and had his hand on her shoulder, where she said the pain was when the
+rheumatiz came on, Pa was mad and told the minister he would kick his
+liver clear around on the other side if he caught him there again, and Ma
+felt awful about it. After the minister had gone away, Ma told Pa he had
+got no feeling at all, and Pa said he had got enough feeling for one
+family, and he didn't want no sky-sharp to help him. He said he could cure
+all the rheumatiz there was around the house, and then he went down town
+and didn't get home till most breakfast time. Ma says she thinks I am
+responsible for Pa's falling into bad ways again, and now I am going to
+cure him. You watch me, and see if I don't have Pa in the church in less
+than a week, praying and singing, and going home with the choir singers,
+just as pious as ever. I am going to get a boy that writes a woman's hand
+to write to Pa, and--but I must not give it away. But you just watch Pa,
+that's all. Well, I must go and saw some wood. It is coming down a good
+deal, from a drug clerk to sawing wood, but I will get on top yet, and
+don't you forget it."
+
+
+GIVE US WAR!
+
+We are in receipt of a circular from the American peace society,
+requesting us to leave a sum of money, in our will, to the society to be
+applied to the interest of peace. We are opposed to peace, on such terms.
+Give us war, every time.
+
+
+THE FIRE NEW YEAR'S DAY.
+
+If there is anything the young men of Rescue Hose Company pride themselves
+upon, it is in getting themselves up, regardless of expense, on New Year's
+day, and calling upon their lady friends. On Monday last these young men
+arrayed themselves in their best clothes and sat around in stores and
+waited for the time to go calling. Solomon in all his glory, was not
+arrayed like one of these firemen.
+
+[Illustration: SWALLOW-TAILS ON THE CLIMB.]
+
+Just as the young gentlemen were about throwing away their last cigar at
+noon, preparatory to calling at the first place on the list, the fire-bell
+rang, and there was a lively procession followed the steamer down Fourth
+street in a few minutes. It looked as though a wedding had been broken up
+and bridegrooms were running around loose. The party arrived at the scene
+of the fire, which was Matt. Larsen's hotel on the corner of Second and
+King streets, and such a shinning of swallow-tailed coats up blue ladders
+was never seen. The fellows that belonged in the house threw out bedsteads
+and crockery on to stove-pipe hats, and emptied beds on to
+broadcloth coats. The wedding party disappeared in the third story window
+with the hose, in the smoke, and after half an hour's work they came out
+looking as though they had been in the Ashtabula railroad accident. Young
+Mr. Smith had a stream of dirty water sent up his trousers leg, which went
+clear up to his collar, and wilted it beyond repair. Mr. Hatch entwined
+his doeskin pants around the burnt ridge-pole of the roof, hung on to a
+rafter with his teeth, and chopped shingles, and the pipemen kept him wet,
+and he looked like a bundle of damp stuff in a paper mill. Mr. Spence was
+on the top of the ladder, and Mr. Drummond was next below him. In falling,
+Mr. D. caught hold of one tail of Mr. Spence's swallow hammer coat, and
+stretched the tail about two feet longer than the other. Mr. Foote was as
+dry as a bone, until the pipeman saw him, and they nailed him up against
+the wall with a stream and Foote was damp as a wet nurse in a minute.
+
+Young Mr. Osborne, confidential adviser of Hyde, Cargill & Co., got half
+way up the ladder, and a leak in the hose struck him and froze him to the
+ladder, and Mr. Watson had to strike a match and thaw him loose. He wet
+his pants from Genesis to Revelations, and had to go calling with an
+ulster overcoat on. The most of the young men, after returning from the
+fire, stood by the stove and dried themselves, and went calling all the
+same, but the girls said they smelt like burnt shingles. The boys were all
+dry enough at the dance in the evening.
+
+
+SOUTHERN "HONAW."
+
+Bennett and May fought a duel in Maryland the other day, and as near as
+the truth can be arrived at neither party received a scratch. But their
+"honaw" was satisfied.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA KILLS HIM.
+
+"For heaven's sake dry up that whistling," said the grocery man to the bad
+boy, as he sat on a bag of peanuts, whistling and filling his pockets.
+"There is no sense in such whistling. What do you whistle for, anyway?"
+
+"I am practicing my profession," said the boy, as he got up and stretched
+himself, and cut off a slice of cheese, and took a few crackers. "I have
+always been a good whistler, and I have decided to turn my talent to
+account. I am going to hire an office and put out a sign, 'Boy furnished
+to whistle for lost dogs.' You see there are dogs lost every day, and any
+man would give half a dollar to a boy to find his dog. I can hire out to
+whistle for dogs, and can go around whistling and enjoy myself, and make
+money. Don't you think it is a good scheme?" asked the boy of the grocery
+man.
+
+"Naw," said the grocery man, as he charged the cheese to the boy's father,
+and picked up his cigar stub, which he had left on the counter, and which
+the boy had rubbed on the kerosene barrel, "No, sir, that whistle would
+scare any dog that heard it. Say, what was your Pa running after the
+doctor in his shirt sleeves for last Sunday morning? He looked scared. Was
+your Ma sick again?"
+
+"O, no; Ma is healthy enough, now she has got a new fur lined cloak. She
+played consumption on Pa, and coughed so she liked to raise her lights and
+liver, and made Pa believe she couldn't live, and got the doctor to
+prescribe a fur lined circular, and Pa went and got one, and Ma has
+improved awfully. Her cough is all gone, and she can walk ten miles. I was
+the one that was sick. You see, I wanted to get Pa into the church again,
+and get him to stop drinking, so I got a boy to write a letter to
+him, in a female hand, and sign the name of a choir singer Pa was mashed
+on, and tell him she was yearning for him to come back to the church, and
+that the church seemed a blank without his smiling face, and benevolent
+heart, and to please come back for her sake. Pa got the letters Saturday
+night and he seemed tickled, but I guess he dreamed about it all night,
+and Sunday morning he was mad, and he took me by the ear and said I
+couldn't come no 'Daisy' business on him the second time. He said he knew
+I wrote the letter, and for me to go up to the store room and prepare for
+the almightiest licking a boy ever had, and he went down stairs and broke
+up an apple barrel and got a stave to whip me with. Well, I had to think
+mighty quick, but I was enough for him. I got a dried bladder in my room,
+one that me and my chum got to the slotter house, and I blowed it partly
+up, so it would be sort of flat like, and I put it down inside the back
+part of my pants, right about where Pa hits when he punishes me. I knowed
+when the barrel stave hit the bladder it would explode. Well, Pa came up
+and found me crying. I can cry just as easy as you can turn on the water
+at a faucet, and Pa took off his coat and looked sorry. I was afraid he
+would give up whipping me when he saw me cry, and I wanted the bladder
+experiment to go on, so I looked kind of hard, as if I was defying him to
+do his worst, and then he took me by the neck and laid me across a trunk.
+I didn't dare struggle much for fear the bladder would loose itself, and
+Pa said, 'Now, Hennery, I am going to break you of this damfoolishness, or
+I will break your back,' and he spit on his hands and brought the barrel
+stave down on my best pants. Well, you'd a dide if you had heard the
+explosion. It almost knocked me off the trunk. It sounded like firing a
+firecracker away down cellar in a barrel, and Pa looked scared. I rolled
+off the trunk, on the floor, and put some flour on my face, to make me
+look pale, and then I kind of kicked my legs like a fellow who is dying on
+the stage, after being stabbed with a piece of lath, and groaned, and
+said, 'Pa you have killed me, but I forgive you,' and then rolled around,
+and frothed at the mouth, cause I had a piece of soap in my mouth to make
+foam. Well, Pa was all broke up. He said, 'Great God, what have I done? I
+have broke his spinal column. O, my poor boy, do not die!' I kept chewing
+the soap and foaming at the mouth, and I drew my legs up and kicked them
+out, and clutched my hair, and rolled my eyes, and then kicked Pa in the
+stummick as he bent over me, and knocked his breath out of him, and then
+my limbs began to get rigid, and I said, 'Too late, Pa, I die at the hand
+of an assassin. Go for a doctor.' Pa throwed his coat over me, and started
+down stairs on a run, 'I have murdered my brave boy,' and he told Ma to go
+up stairs and stay with me, cause I had fallen off a trunk and ruptured a
+blood vessel, and he went after a doctor. When he went out the front door,
+I sat up and lit a cigarette, and Ma came up and I told her all about how
+I fooled Pa, and if she would take on and cry, when Pa got back, I would
+get him to go to church again, and swear off drinking, and she said she
+would.
+
+[Illustration: "TOO LATE, PA, I DIE AT THE HAND OF AN ASSASSIN!"]
+
+"So when Pa and the doc. came back, Ma was sitting on a velocipede I used
+to ride, which was in the store-room, and she had her apron over her face,
+and she just more than bellowed. Pa he was pale, and he told the doc. he
+was just playing with me with a little piece of board, and he heard
+something crack, and he guessed my spine got broke falling off the trunk.
+The doctor wanted to feel where my spine got broke, but I opened my eyes
+and had a vacant kind of stare, like a woman who leads a dog by a string,
+and looked as though my mind was wandering, and I told the doctor there
+was no use setting my spine, as it was broke in several places,
+and I wouldn't let him feel of the dried bladder. I told Pa I was going to
+die, and I wanted him to promise me two things on my dying bed. He cried
+and said he would, and I told him to promise me he would quit drinking,
+and attend church regular, and he said he would never drink another drop,
+and would go to church every Sunday. I made him get down on his knees
+beside me and swear it, and the doc. witnessed it, and Ma said she was so
+glad, and Ma called the doctor out in the hall and told him the joke, and
+the doc. came in and told Pa he was afraid Pa's presence would excite the
+patient, and for him to put on his coat and go out and walk around the
+block, or go to church, and Ma and he would remove me to another room, and
+do all that was possible to make my last hours pleasant. Pa he cried, and
+said he would put on his plug hat and go to church, and he kissed me, and
+got flour on his nose, and I came near laughing right out, to see the
+white flour on his red nose, when I thought how the people in church would
+laugh at Pa. But he went out feeling mighty bad, and then I got up and
+pulled the bladder out of my pants, and Ma and the doc. laughed awful.
+When Pa got back from church and asked for me, Ma said that I had gone
+down town. She said the doctor found my spine was only uncoupled and he
+coupled it together, and I was all right. Pa was nervous all the
+afternoon, and Ma thinks he suspects that we played it on him. Say, you
+don't think there is any harm in playing it on an old man a little for a
+good cause, do you?"
+
+The grocery man said he supposed, in the interest of reform it was all
+right, but if it was his boy that played such tricks he would take an ax
+to him, and the boy went out, apparently encouraged, saying he hadn't seen
+the old man since the day before, and he was almost afraid to meet him.
+
+
+A MUSICAL CRITIQUE.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROTUND URSO.]
+
+The second lecture of the Library Association course was delivered on
+Tuesday evening by a female lecturer named Camilla Urso, on a fiddle. The
+lecturer was supported by a female singer, two male clamsellers, and a
+piano masher, all of them decidedly talented in their particular lines.
+The lecture on the fiddle gave the most unbounded satisfaction, and the
+Association in taking this new departure, has struck a popular chord.
+Scarcely a person in the vast audience but would prefer such an
+entertainment to a dry lecture by some dictionary sharp. Of the
+performance, it is unnecessary to go into details, as all our readers were
+there, with few exceptions. The fat female, Urso, more than carved the
+fiddle. She dug sweet morsels of music out of it, all the way from the
+wish-bone to the part that goes over the fence last. She made it talk
+Norwegian, and squeezed little notes out of it not bigger than a cambric
+needle, and as smooth as a book agent. The female singer was fair, though
+nothing to brag on, while the male grasshopper sufferers sang as well as
+was necessary. But the most agile flea-catcher that has been here since
+Anna Dickinson's time, was sixteen-fingered Jack, the sandhill
+crane that had the disturbance with the piano. We never knew what the row
+was about, but when he walked up to the piano smiling, and shied his
+castor into the ring, everybody could see there was going to be trouble.
+He spit on his hands, sparred a little, and suddenly landed a stunning
+blow right on the ivory, which staggered the piano, and caused an
+exclamation of agony. First knock down for Jack. He paused a moment and
+then began putting in blows right and left, in such a cruel manner that
+the spectators came near breaking into the ring. Whenever a key showed its
+head he mauled it. We never saw a piano stand so much punishment, and
+live, and Jack never got a scratch. The whole concert was a success, and
+the troupe can always get a good house here.
+
+
+A DEAD SURE THING.
+
+The only persons that are real sure that their calling and election is
+sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots, are the men who are
+hung for murder. They always announce that they have got a dead thing on
+it, just before the drop falls. How encouraging it must be to children to
+listen to the prayers of our ministers in churches, who admit that they
+are miserable sinners living on God's charity, and doubtful if they would
+be allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of their
+unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then let the children
+read an account of a hanging bee, and see how happy the condemned man is,
+how he shouts glory hallelujah, and confesses that, though he killed his
+man, he is going to heaven. A child will naturally ask why don't the
+ministers murder somebody and make a dead sure thing of it?
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA MORTIFIED.
+
+"What was the health officer doing over to your house this morning?" said
+the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth was firing frozen potatoes at
+the man who collects garbage in the alley.
+
+"O, they are searching for sewer gas and such things, and they have got
+plumbers and other society experts till you can't rest, and I came away
+for fear they would find the sewer gas and warm my jacket. Say, do you
+think it is right when anything smells awfully, to always lay it to a
+boy?"
+
+"Well, in nine cases out of ten they would hit it right, but what do you
+think is the trouble over to your house, honest?"
+
+"S-h-h! Now don't breathe a word of it to a living soul, or I am a dead
+boy. You see I was over to the dairy fair at the Exposition building
+Saturday night, and when they were breaking up me and my chum helped to
+carry boxes of cheese and firkins of butter, and a cheese man gave each of
+us a piece of limberger cheese, wrapped up in tin foil. Sunday morning I
+opened my piece, and it made me tired. O, it was the offulest smell I ever
+heard of, except the smell when they found a tramp who hung himself in the
+woods on the Whitefish Bay road, and had been dead three weeks. It was
+just like an old back number funeral. Pa and Ma were just getting ready to
+go to church, and I cut off a piece of cheese and put it in the inside
+pocket of Pa's vest, and I put another in the lining of Ma's muff, and
+they went to church. I went down to church too, and sat on a back seat
+with my chum, looking just as pious as though I was taking up a
+collection. The church was pretty warm, and by the time they got up to
+sing the first hymn Pa's cheese began to smell a match against
+Ma's cheese. Pa held one side of the hymn book and Ma held the other, and
+Pa he always sings for all that is out, and when he braced himself and
+sang 'Just as I am,' Ma thought Pa's voice was tinctured a little with
+biliousness, and she looked at him and hunched him, and told him to stop
+singing and breathe through his nose, cause his breath was enough to stop
+a clock. Pa stopped singing and turned around kind of cross towards Ma,
+and then he smelled Ma's cheese and he turned his head the other way and
+said, 'whew,' and they didn't sing any more, but they looked at each other
+as though they smelled frowy. When they sat down they sat as far apart as
+they could get, and Pa sat next to a woman who used to be a nurse in a
+hospital, and when she smelled Pa's cheese she looked at him as though she
+thought he had the small pox, and she held her handkerchief to her nose.
+The man in the other end of the pew, that Ma sat near, he was a stranger
+from Racine, who belongs to our church, and he looked at Ma sort of queer,
+and after the minister prayed, and they got up to sing again, the man took
+his hat and went out, and when he came by me he said something in a
+whisper about a female glue factory.
+
+[Illustration: "JUST AS I AM."]
+
+"Well, sir, before the sermon was over everybody in that part of the
+church had their handkerchiefs to their noses, and they looked at Pa and
+Ma scandalous, and the two ushers they came around in the pews looking for
+a dog, and when the minister got over his sermon, and wiped the
+prespiration off his face, he said he would like to have the trustees of
+the church stay after meeting, as there was some business of importance to
+transact. He said the question of proper ventilation and sewerage for the
+church would be brought up, and that he presumed the congregation had
+noticed this morning that the church was unusually full of sewer gas. He
+said he had spoken of the matter before, and expected it would be attended
+to before this. He said he was a meek and humble follower of the lamb, and
+was willing to cast his lot wherever the Master decided, but he would be
+blessed if he would preach any longer in a church that smelled like a bone
+boiling establishment. He said religion was a good thing, but no person
+could enjoy religion as well in a fat rendering establishment as he could
+in a flower garden, and as far as he was concerned he had got enough.
+Everybody looked at everybody else, and Pa looked at Ma as though he knew
+where the sewer gas came from, and Ma looked at Pa real mad, and me and my
+chum lit out, and I went home and distributed my cheese all around. I put
+a slice in Ma's bureau drawer, down under her underclothes, and a piece in
+the spare room, under the bed, and a piece in the bath-room in the soap
+dish, and a slice in the album on the parlor table, and a piece in the
+library in a book, and I went to the dining room and put some under the
+table, and dropped a piece under the range in the kitchen. I tell you the
+house was loaded for bear. Ma came home from church first, and when I
+asked where Pa was, she said she hoped he had gone to walk around the
+block to air hisself. Pa came home to dinner and when he got a smell of
+the house he opened all the doors, and Ma put a comfortable around her
+shoulders, and told Pa he was a disgrace to civilization. She tried to get
+Pa to drink some carbolic acid. Pa finally convinced Ma that it was not
+him, and then they decided it was the house that smelled so, as well as
+the church, and all Sunday afternoon they went visiting, and this morning
+Pa went down to the health office and got the inspector of nuisances to
+come up to the house, and when he smelled around a spell he said there was
+dead rats in the main sewer pipe, and they sent for plumbers, and Ma went
+out to a neighbors to borry some fresh air, and when the plumbers began to
+dig up the floor in the basement I came over here. If they find any of
+that limberger cheese it will go hard with me. The hired girls have both
+quit, and Ma says she is going to break up keeping house and board. That
+is just into my hand. I want to board at a hotel, where you can have a
+bill-of-fare, and tooth picks, and billiards, and everything. Well I guess
+I will go over to the house and stand in the back door and listen to the
+mocking bird. If you see me come flying out of the alley with my coat tail
+full of boots you can bet they have discovered the sewer gas."
+
+
+MRS. LANGTRY.
+
+America is to be visited by the most beautiful woman in all England, Mrs.
+Langtry. It is said that she is so sweet that when you look at her you
+feel caterpillars crawling up the small of your back, your heart begins to
+jump like a box car, and a streak of lightning goes down one trousers leg
+and up the other, and escapes up the back of your neck, causing the hair
+to raise and be filled with electricity enough to light a circus tent, and
+that when looking at her your hands clutch nervously as though you wanted
+to grasp something to hold you up, a sense of faintness comes over you,
+your eyes roll heavenward, your head falls helpless on your breast, your
+left side becomes numb, your liver quits working, your breath comes hot
+and heavy, your lips turn livid and tremble, your teeth chew on imaginary
+taffy, and you look around imploringly for somebody to take her away. If
+all this occurs to a person from looking at her, it would be sudden death
+or six months illness, to shake hands with her. If she comes to Milwaukee,
+there is one bald headed man going to the country where they are not so
+bad. You bet!
+
+
+A PECK AT THE CHEESE.
+
+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 Cremationists:_ 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 will 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.
+
+[Illustration: A SCENE IN PARADISE.]
+
+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 from 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 with 300
+oxen. This is susceptible of demonstration. If any boy showed a desire to
+become a statesman, I would say to him, "Young man, get married, buy a
+mooly 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-shaped 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.
+
+
+SELLING CLAMS.
+
+At the concert Wednesday night, the last piece sung was a trio, by Marie
+Rose, Brignoli, and Carleton. The men stood on each side of the girl and
+began to jaw at her. It was in some other language, and we could only
+understand by the motion of their mouths and their actions. It seemed as
+though the men were trying to sell clams to her. First Brignoli began to
+whoop it up, and describe the clams he had to sell, and tried to get her
+to invest. He yelled at her, and seemed really put out, and she was as
+spunky as any girl we ever saw. When Brignoli got out of breath, Carleton
+began to tell her that Brig had been lying to her, that his clams were
+made of India rubber, and that she could never digest them in the wide
+world, and he wound up by telling her that she could have his clams at ten
+per cent discount for cash. By this time she was about as mad as she could
+be, and she pitched into both of them, looking cross, and sung like
+blazes, went away up the musical ladder to zero, and wound up by telling
+them both, to their face, that she would see them in Chicago before she
+would buy a condemned clam. And then they all went off the stage as though
+they had been having a regular fight, and Brignoli acted as though he
+would like to eat her raw. That's the way it seemed to us, but we are no
+musician.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GOES SKATING.
+
+"What is that stuff on your shirt bosom, that looks like soap grease?"
+said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came into the grocery the
+morning after Christmas.
+
+The boy looked at his shirt front, put his finger on the stuff and smelled
+of his fingers, and then said, "O, that is nothing but a little of the
+turkey dressing and gravy. You see after Pa and I got back from the roller
+skating rink yesterday, Pa was all broke up and he couldn't carve the
+turkey, and I had to do it, and Pa sat in a stuffed chair with his head
+tied up, and a pillow amongst his legs, and he kept complaining that I
+didn't do it right. Gol darn a turkey any way. I should think they would
+make a turkey flat on the back, so he would lay on a greasy platter
+without skating all around the table. It looks easy to see Pa carve a
+turkey, but when I speared into the bosom of that turkey, and began to saw
+on it, the turkey rolled around as though it was on castors, and it was
+all I could do to keep it out of Ma's lap. But I rasseled with it till I
+got off enough white meat for Pa and Ma and dark meat enough for me, and I
+dug out the dressing, but most of it flew into my shirt bosom, cause the
+string that tied up the place where the dressing was concealed about the
+person of the turkey, broke prematurely, and one oyster hit Pa in the eye,
+and he said I was as awkward as a cross-eyed girl trying to kiss a man
+with a hair lip. If I ever get to be the head of a family I shall carve
+turkeys with a corn sheller.
+
+"But what broke your Pa up at the roller skating rink?" asked the grocery
+man.
+
+"O, everything broke him up. He is split up so Ma buttons the top of his
+pants to his collar button, like a bicycle rider. Well, he had no business
+to have told me and my chum that he used to be the best skater in
+North America, when he was a boy. He said he skated once from Albany to
+New York in an hour and eighty minutes. Me and my chum thought if Pa was
+such a terror on skates we would get him to put on a pair of roller skates
+and enter him as the 'great unknown,' and clean out the whole gang. We
+told Pa that he must remember that roller skates were different from ice
+skates, and that maybe he couldn't skate on them, but he said it didn't
+make any difference what they were as long as they were skates, and he
+would just paralyze the whole crowd. So we got a pair of big roller skates
+for him, and while we were strapping them on, Pa looked at the skaters
+glide around on the smooth wax floor just as though they were greased. Pa
+looked at the skates on his feet, after they were fastened, sort of
+forlorn like, the way a horse thief does when they put shackles on his
+legs, and I told him if he was afraid he couldn't skate with them we would
+take them off, but he said he would beat anybody there was there, or bust
+a suspender. Then we straightened Pa up, and pointed him towards the
+middle of the room, and he said, 'leggo,' and we just give him a little
+push to start him, and he began to go. Well, by gosh, you'd a dide to have
+seen Pa try to stop. You see, you can't stick in your heel and stop, like
+you can on ice skates, and Pa soon found that out, and he began to turn
+sideways, and then he threw his arms and walked on his heels, and he lost
+his hat, and his eyes began to stick out, cause he was going right towards
+an iron post. One arm caught the post and he circled around it a few
+times, and then he let go and began to fall, and, sir, he kept falling all
+across the room, and everybody got out of the way, except a girl, and Pa
+grabbed her by the polonaise, like a drowning man grabs at straws, though
+there wasn't any straws in her polonaise as I know of, but Pa just pulled
+her along as though she was done up in a shawl-strap, and his
+feet went out from under him and he struck on his shoulders and kept a
+going, with the girl dragging along like a bundle of clothes. If Pa had
+had another pair of roller skates on his shoulders, and castors on his
+ears, he couldn't have slid along any better. Pa is a short, big man, and
+as he was rolling along on his back, he looked like a sofa with castors on
+being pushed across a room by a girl. Finally Pa came to the wall and had
+to stop, and the girl fell right across him, with her roller skates in his
+neck, and she called him an old brute, and told him if he didn't let go of
+her polonaise she would murder him. Just then my chum and me got there and
+we amputated Pa from the girl, and lifted him up, and told him for
+heaven's sake to let us take off the skates, cause he couldn't skate any
+more than a cow, and Pa was mad and said for us to 'let him alone,' and he
+could skate all right, and we let go and he struck out again. Well, sir, I
+was ashamed. An old man like Pa ought to knonv better than to try to be a
+boy. This last time Pa said he was going to spread himself, and if I am
+any judge of a big spread, he did spread himself. Some how the skates had
+got turned around side-ways on his feet, and his feet got to going in
+different directions, and Pa's feet were getting so far apart that I was
+afraid I would have two Pa's, half the size, with one leg apiece.
+
+[Illustration: "PA GRABBED HER BY THE POLONAISE."]
+
+"I tried to get him to take up a collection of his legs, and get them in
+the same ward but his arm flew around and hit me on the nose, and I
+thought if he wanted to strike the best friend he had, he could
+run his old legs his self. When he began to separate I could hear the
+bones crack, but maybe it was his pants, but anyway he came down on the
+floor like one of these fellows in a circus who spreads hisself, and he
+kept agoing and finally he surrounded an iron post with his legs, and
+stopped and looked pale, and the proprietor of the rink told Pa if he
+wanted to give a flying trapeze performance he would have to go to the
+gymnasium, and he couldn't skate on his shoulders any more, cause other
+skaters were afraid of him. Then Pa said he would kick the liver out of
+the proprietor of the rink, and he got up and steaded himself, and then he
+tried to kick the man, but both heels went up to wonct, and Pa turned a
+back summersault and struck right on his vest in front. I guess it knocked
+the breath out of him, for he didn't speak for a few minutes, and then he
+wanted to go home, and we put him in a street car, and he laid down on the
+hay and rode home. O, the work we had to get Pa's clothes off. He had
+cricks in his back, and everywhere, and Ma was away to one of the
+neighbors, to look at the presents, and I had to put liniment on Pa, and I
+made a mistake and got a bottle of furniture polish, and put it on Pa and
+rubbed it in, and when Ma came home, Pa smelled like a coffin at a charity
+funeral, and Ma said there was no way of getting that varnish off of Pa
+till it wore off: Pa says holidays are a condemned nuisance anyway. He
+will have to stay in the house all this week.
+
+"You are pretty rough on the old man," said the grocery man, "after he has
+been so kind to you and given you nice presents."
+
+"Nice presents nothin. All I got was a 'Come to Jesus' Christmas card,
+with brindle fringe, from Ma, and Pa gave me a pair of his old suspenders,
+and a calender with mottoes for every month, some quotations from
+scripture, such as 'honor thy father and mother,' and 'evil communications
+corrupt two in the bush,' and a bird in the hand beats two pair.' Such
+things don't help a boy to be good. What a boy wants is club skates, and
+seven shot revolvers, and such things. Well, I must go and help Pa roll
+over in bed, and put on a new porous plaster. Good bye."
+
+
+TRYING TO SAVE TWO SHILLINGS.
+
+No person ever wants to tell us again how to save two shillings. When we
+started for Chippewa Falls, to attend the celebration, we only had a few
+hundred dollars along, and we felt like saving all that was possible. Just
+before arriving at Sparta, where we were to take supper, Dan McDonald got
+to telling about how to save twenty-five cents on meals at these eating
+houses, when traveling. He said that all you had to do when you come out
+from supper was to look like a bummer, or "traveling man," hand the
+door-keeper fifty cents and wink twice with the left eye, and he would
+pass you right out, as though you had paid seventy-five cents. If you
+handed out a dollar bill, and he only gave you back twenty-five cents, you
+only had to hold out your hand and wink a couple of times, and the man
+would give you the other quarter. Dan said he always did that way, and he
+had saved hundreds of dollars. He said these bummers only paid fifty cents
+a meal, and there was no use of anybody else paying more, if they had
+cheek enough to play it on the landlord.
+
+[Illustration: "OH, THAT WILL BE ALL RIGHT!"]
+
+We never had anything strike us any more reasonable than the statement of
+Mr. McDonald, and we determined to try it. To a man who was traveling a
+good deal lecturing, a saving of twenty-five cents a meal was worth
+looking into, and we made up our mind to begin to economize that very
+night. The train stopped and we walked across the platform as near like a
+bummer as possible. With our hat on one side, we threw a cigar stub into
+the parlor window, said "Hello, old tapeworm," to the landlord in a
+familiar sort of way, chucked our hat into a chair; rushed into the
+dining-room, took a seat at the head of the table, and told a girl to cart
+out all she had got. The landlord looked at us as though he thought we
+were one of Field, Leiter & Co.'s bummers, his good wife looked
+frightened, as though she feared we would kick a leg off the table and
+spill things. However, there is no use of describing the meal, and how we
+went through brook trout and strawberry shortcake, and things. We couldn't
+help feeling sorry for the man that was destined to furnish all that for
+fifty cents. Finally we went out. We felt a sort of palpitation of the
+heart when we approached the hungry-looking man at the door, taking the
+money. He looked as though he was a sick orphan trying to save money
+enough to get to a water cure. Picking our teeth with our finger, like a
+Chicago bummer, and pulling our handkerchief out of our pistol pocket and
+blowing our nose like a thirty-two pounder, just as we had heard a Chicago
+fellow do, we handed the man fifty cents, winked a couple of times and
+started to go by. The tobacco sign standing there said, "twenty-five cents
+more, please." We looked at him, winked, and said, "O, that will be all
+right." "Two shillings more, my friend," said the summer resort. We winked
+some more, and punched him in the ribs with our thumb, and said, "O, now,
+old tapeworm, don't try to play it on us boys." And we laughed a sickly
+sort of laugh. The fact of it was, we began to have doubts about the thing
+working, and had a suspicion that the twinkle in Dan McDonald's eye meant
+that he had been playing it on us. The landlord said he should have to
+have two shillings more, and that we were blocking up the thoroughfare,
+and we fumbled around and found it and paid him, and went out, probably
+the most disgusted excursionist that ever was. Dan, who had watched the
+whole business, slapped us on the shoulder, and said, "How did it work?"
+Though not particularly hungry, we could have eaten him raw. When we go
+east now, we take a lunch along, and when the other passengers are in to
+supper, we sit on the woodpile at Sparta, eat our lunch and gaze at the
+fountains, talk with the brakemen, and wonder if the landlord would know
+us if we should go in and take a toothpick off the counter. Not any more
+bummer for us, and no man must ever tell us how to save two shillings on a
+meal.
+
+
+HOW TO REACH YOUNG MEN.
+
+"How to reach young men," was the topic at the young men's prayer meeting
+on Thursday. An old gentleman on the East Side who broke a toe nail by
+kicking the gate post just as the young man went down the sidewalk, would
+also like to know. Bait your hook with a mighty good looking girl that
+wears a sealskin cloak, and you can reach the young men.
+
+
+CRUSHING NIHILISM.
+
+The Russian government is making an average of four thousand arrests a day
+of persons charged with nihilism. At this rate it is only a question of
+time when the last of the conspirators will be in prison, and the emperor
+can walk out without fear of assassination from his wife and children, as
+these will probably be all the people that will be left.
+
+
+WOMAN-DOZING A DEMOCRAT.
+
+A fearful tale conies 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,
+"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.
+
+[Illustration: "YELL, OR GO DOWN!"]
+
+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 folks 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. Chapin'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 be 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-wood Democrat hurrahed for Garfield.
+
+
+THE WRONG CORPSE.
+
+A corpse got a good joke on the people of Quebec the other day. It came
+there by express, and was only an ordinary, every-day man, but the Kanucks
+were looking for a military corpse, and supposing our ordinary corpse to
+be he, they got up a Fifth avenue funeral, and buried it with military
+honors. The corpse, who didn't know a thing about military matters, must
+have many a good laugh over the mistake. And how the military corpse must
+have felt, when HE came!
+
+
+THE DAY WE REACHED CANADA.
+
+D.H. Pulcifer, of Shawano, announces that he is about to prepare a
+biography of all the members of the territorial legislature and subsequent
+legislatures, state officers, members of congress, etc., and desires all
+men who may have been great or may be so now, to send in the particulars.
+Well, you can get our record at the adjutant general's office, though
+there is one mistake in that record. It was in June, 1862 that we arrived
+in Canada, the day before the draft.
+
+
+A LIVELY TRAIN LOAD.
+
+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 into 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 never have 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 popcorn 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 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.
+
+[Illustration: ME LONG LOST DUKE.]
+
+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.
+
+
+CATS ON THE FENCE.
+
+Some idiot has invented a "cat teaser" to put on fences to keep cats from
+sitting there and singing. It consists of a three-cornered piece of tin,
+nailed on the top of the fence. We hope none of our friends will invest in
+the patent, for statistics show that while cats very often sit on fences
+to meditate, yet when they get it all mediated and get ready to sing a
+duet, they get down off the fence and get under a currant bush. We
+challenge any cat scientist to disprove the assertion.
+
+
+HOW SHARPER THAN A HOUND'S TOOTH.
+
+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 till last week. One day we met Pierce, the Watertown
+Junction hotel man, and he told us that he had a greyhound pup that was
+the finest bread dog--we think he said bread dog, though it might have
+been 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.
+
+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, the dog will reach from here to the Soldier's home.
+
+[Illustration: 'THEREBY HANGS A TAIL'.]
+
+His head is about as big as a graham gem, and runs down to a point no
+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 fall off a wagon track we
+tie a knot in his tail.
+
+
+A SAFE INVESTMENT.
+
+Up to the present time the _Sun_ has struggled along from infancy to
+middle age without a safe in its office. It has never needed one. It does
+not need one now, but custom has to do with these things. The associations
+that surround one, go far towards making these changes. When we look at
+the immense safes in the office of out neighbor, filled with bonds and
+mortgages, we feel that a safe will look well. So we purchased a sort of
+an iron range, with a nickle plated knob, and a lock with as many figures
+on it as a tax list or a lottery advertisement, and placed it where it
+will strike the visitor on his first entrance. Ah, what an imposing affair
+it is! As we lean back in a chair and 1ook at it, and close our eyes, we
+can see millions in it, in our mind. It is a cross between Alex.
+Mitchell's safe and a child's bank. It is not full, but it has evidently
+been taking something. It is a grand feeling to walk along the streets and
+feel that your head contains the secret which opens the safe. No one but
+yourself and your maker, and the maker of the safe knows the three numbers
+which will cause it to open. The numbers are safe with you, and the All
+Seeing Eye you have confidence will not give it away, so that the only
+show a burglar has is to get solid with the maker of the safe.
+
+What a piece of mechanism is the lock of a safe! The man we bought it of
+gave us the programme that opens it. You go to the dial turn the knob, put
+your finger by your nose and wink. If you leave out the wink, the safe
+will not open, but we never leave out the wink. The trouble is, if there
+is a lady customer in with a bill, and we go to open the safe, we wink too
+many times and have to go all over it again. Then we place the numbers in
+their order, 4-11-44, and when the "four" is exactly opposite the
+dipthong, we turn the knob back three revolutions, light a cigar,
+and walk three times around the room. That is to give the mechanism in the
+Inside time to coalesce. Then we put the "eleven" in its place, turn the
+knob forward one revolution, and put on our hat and go out and take a
+drink. That is in the programme, and we sometimes think the inventor of
+the lock is interested in a brewery. Then we come back, wipe our mustache
+on the tail of a linen coat, place the figures "44" directly over the
+pointer, whistle "There's a land that is fairer than this," place the
+right foot forward, then turn the knob, the door swings on its hinges, and
+the untold wealth of the Indies lies before us, in our alleged mind.
+
+O, safe, are you honest? Are you true to us? You look pure and chaste, and
+your new overskirt of varnish, and your puffed ruching of gold and blue
+sets you off to good advantage, but you may not be impregnable. You have
+always gone in good society, and no scandal has ever been attached to your
+name. Your purity and innocence has been remarked by all who have met you,
+and there are none who would dare to intimate but that you would maintain
+your reputation against any attack, but sometimes we think we should
+hesitate to leave you all alone, with the light turned down all night and
+over Sunday, in the company of an eloquent, persuasive, good-looking
+burglar armed with a jimmy, and we fear that his warm hearted can of
+powder would strike a responsive chord in your impulsive nature, and that
+you would yield up the jewels confined to you, and your honor, your
+reputation, your standing among safes would be forever ruined. And yet we
+may be wrong.
+
+But what would it profit a burglar to gain the whole contents and wear out
+his soles. If he got in that safe, he would find a package of bills that
+we tried for a year to collect, and we would give him the bills if he
+asked for them, and he could save his powder. He would find one bill of
+sixteen dollars, with an indorsement that one dollar is paid,
+after thirteen dollars worth of shoe leather had been worn out. And yet
+the burglar would have a soft thing on cigars with that bill, for every
+time he visited the doctor he would tell him when to come again, and give
+him a cigar. Another thing the burglar would find would be a protested
+draft from a great Philadelphia patent medicine advertiser. The burglar
+could take a tie pass that is in the safe, and walk to Philadelphia, and
+trade out the twenty-five dollar draft by taking buchu on account.
+
+But no burglar that has any respect for himself, we feel sure, will ever
+do us the injury to scrape the paint off of that safe.
+
+
+A FASHION ITEM.
+
+A fashion item says, "The drawers this year are made very short, and some
+have lace ruffles." Some fashion reporter has evidently been looking over
+our back fence at the clothes line. But they got awfully fooled. The
+shortness of those drawers was caused by the flannel shrinking and the
+"lace ruffles" the reporter noticed is where a calf chewed them when they
+were hanging out to dry last fall on Black Hawk Island, when a gun kicked
+us out of a boat. Some of these fashion reporters think they are smart.
+
+
+A LECTURER SHOULD KNOW WHAT HE TALKS ABOUT.
+
+A man down east is lecturing on "Hell, Ingersoll, and Whisky." If the
+lecturer is at all familiar with his subjects, we wouldn't believe him
+under oath.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GOES CALLING.
+
+"Say, you are getting too alfired smart," said the grocery man to the bad
+boy as he pushed him into a corner by the molasses barrel, and took him by
+the neck and choked him so his eyes stuck out. "You have driven away
+several of my best customers, and now, confound you, I am going to have
+your life," and he took up a cheese knife and began to sharpen it on his
+boot.
+
+"What's the--gurgle--matter?" asked the choking boy, as the grocery man's
+finger let up on his throat a little, so he could speak. "I haint done
+nothing."
+
+"Didn't you hang up that gray torn cat by the heels, in front of my store,
+with the rabbits I had for sale? I didn't notice it until the minister
+called me out in front of the store, and pointing to the rabbits, asked
+what good fat cats were selling for. By crimus, this thing has got to
+stop. You have got to move out of this ward or I will."
+
+The boy got his breath and said it wasn't him that put the cat up there.
+He said it was the policeman, and he and his chum saw him do it, and he
+just come in to tell the grocery man about it, and before he could speak
+he had his neck nearly pulled off. The boy began to cry, and the grocery
+man said he was only joking, and gave him a box of sardines, and they made
+up. Then he asked the boy how his Pa put in his New Years, and the boy
+sighed and said:
+
+"We had a sad time at our house New Years. Pa insisted on making calls,
+and Ma and me tried to prevent it, but he said he was of age, and guessed
+he could make calls if he wanted to, so he looked at the morning paper and
+got the names of all the places where they were going to receive, and he
+turned his paper collar, and changed ends with his cuffs, and put some
+arnica on his handkerchief, and started out. Ma told him not to
+drink anything, and he said he wouldn't, but he did. He was full the third
+place he went to. O, so full. Some men can get full and not show it, but
+when Pa gets full, he gets so full his back teeth float, and the liquor
+crowds his eyes out, and his mouth gets loose and wiggles all over his
+face, and he laughs all the time, and the perspiration just oozes out of
+him, and his face gets red, and he walks so wide. O, he disgraced us all.
+At one place he wished the hired girl 'a happy new year' more than twenty
+times, and hung his hat on her elbow, and tried to put on a rubber hall
+mat for his over shoes. At another place he walked up a lady's train, and
+carried away a card basket full of bananas and oranges. Ma wanted my chum
+and me to follow Pa and bring him home, and about dark we found him in the
+door yard of a house where they have statues in front of the house, and he
+grabbed me by the arm, and mistook me for another caller, and insisted on
+introducing me to a marble statue without any clothes on. He said it was a
+friend of his, and it was a winter picnic. He hung his hat on an
+evergreen, and put his overcoat on the iron fence, and I was so mortified
+I almost cried. My chum said if his Pa made such a circus of himself he
+would sand bag him. That gave me an idea, and when we got Pa most home I
+went and got a paper box covered with red paper, so it looked just like a
+brick, and a bottle of tomato ketchup, and when we got Pa up on the steps
+at home I hit him with the paper brick, and my chum squirted the ketchup
+on his head, and we demanded his money, and then he yelled murder, and we
+lit out, and Ma and the minister, who was making a call on her, all the
+afternoon, they came to the door and pulled Pa in. He said he had been
+attacked by a band of robbers, and they knocked his brains out, but he
+whipped them, and then Ma saw the ketchup brains oozing out of his head,
+and she screamed, and the minister said. 'Good heavens, he is murdered!'
+and just then I came in the back door and they sent after the
+doctor, and they put Pa on the lounge, and tied up his head with a towel
+to keep the brains in, and Pa began to snore, and when the doctor came in
+it took them half an hour to wake him, and then he was awful sick to his
+stummick, and then Ma asked the doctor if he would live, and the doc.
+analyzed the ketchup and smelled of it and told Ma he would be all right
+if he had a little Worcester sauce to put on with the ketchup, and when he
+said Pa would pull through, Ma looked awful sad. Then Pa opened his eyes
+and saw the minister and said that was one of the robbers that jumped on
+him, and he wanted to whip the minister, but the doc. held Pa's arms and
+Ma sat on his legs, and the minister said he had got some other calls to
+make, and he wished Ma a happy new year in the hall, much as fifteen
+minutes. His happy new year to Ma is most as long as his prayers. Well, we
+got Pa to bed, and when we undressed him we found nine napkins in the
+bosom of his vest, that he had picked up at the places where he had
+called. He is all right this morning, but he says it is the last time he
+will drink coffee when he makes New Years calls.
+
+"Well, then you didn't have much fun yourself on New Years. That's too
+bad," said the grocery man, as he looked at the sad eyed youth. "But you
+look hard. If you were old enough I should say you had been drunk, your
+eyes are red."
+
+[Illustration: HAPPY NEW YEAR, MUM!]
+
+"Didn't have any fun eh? Well, I wish I had as many dollars as I had fun.
+You see, after Pa got to sleep Ma wanted me and my chum to go to the
+houses that Pa had called at and return the napkins he had kleptomaniaced,
+so we dressed up and went. The first house we called at the girls were
+sort of demoralized. I don't know as I ever saw a girl drunk, but those
+girls acted queer. The callers had stopped coming, and the girls were
+drinking something out of shaving cups that looked like lather, and they
+said it was 'aignogg.' They laffed and kicked up their heels wuss nor a
+circus, and their collars got unpinned, and their faces was red, and they
+put their arms around me and my chum and hugged us and asked us if we
+didn't want some of the custard. You'd a dide to see me and my chum drink
+that lather. It looked just like soap suds with nutmaig in it, but by gosh
+it got in its work sudden. At first I was afraid when the girls hugged me,
+but after I had drank a couple of shaving cups full of the 'aignogg' I
+wasn't afraid no more, and I hugged a girl so hard she catched her breath
+and panted and said, 'O, don't.' Then I kissed her, and she is a great big
+girl, bigger'n me, but she didn't care. Say, did you ever kiss a girl full
+of aignogg? If you did it would break up your grocery business. You would
+want to waller in bliss instead of selling mackerel. My chum ain't no
+slouch either. He was sitting in a stuffed chair holding another New
+Year's girl, and I could hear him kiss her so it sounded like a cutter
+scraping on bare ground. But the girl's Pa came in and said he guessed it
+was time to close the place, unless they had a license for an all night
+house, and me and my chum went out. But _wasn't_ we sick when we got out
+doors. O, it seemed as though the pegs in my boots was the only thing that
+kept them down, and my chum he like to dide. He had been to dinner and
+supper and I had only been skating all day, so he had more to contend with
+than I did. O, my, but that lets me out on aignogg. I don't know how I got
+home, but I got in bed with Pa, cause Ma was called away to attend a baby
+matinee in the night. I don't know how it is, but there never is anybody
+in our part of town that has a baby but they have it in the night, and
+they send for Ma. I don't know what she has to be sent for every time for.
+Ma ain't to blame for all the young ones in this town, but she has got up
+a reputashun, and when we hear the bell ring in the night Ma gets up and
+begins to put on her clothes, and the next morning she comes in the dining
+room with a shawl over her head, and says, 'its a girl and weighs ten
+pounds,' or 'a boy,' if it's a boy baby. Ma was out on one of her
+professional engagements, and I got in bed with Pa. I had heard Pa blame
+Ma about her cold feet, so I got a piece of ice about as big as a raisin
+box, just zactly like one of Ma's feet, and laid it right against the
+small of Pa's back. I couldn't help laffing, but pretty soon Pa began to
+squirm and he said, 'Why'n 'ell don't you warm them feet before you come
+to bed,' and then he hauled back his leg and kicked me clear out in the
+middle of the floor, and said if he married again he would marry a woman
+who had lost both her feet in a railroad accident. Then I put the ice back
+in the bed with Pa and went to my room, and in the morning Pa said he
+sweat more'n a pail full in the night. Well, you must excuse me. I have an
+engagement to shovel snow off the sidewalk. But before I go, let me advise
+you not to drink aignogg, and don't sell tom cats for rabbits," and he got
+out of the door just in time to miss the rutabaga that the grocery man
+threw at him.
+
+
+WHAT THE DEMOCRATS WILL DO.
+
+The _Wisconsin_ asks, "What will the Democrats do?" We trust it is not
+betraying a confidence reposed in us by the manager of a party, but we can
+not allow our neighbor to remain in such dense ignorance, as long as we
+are possessed of the desired information. "What will the Democrats do?"
+The Democrats will prove an _alibi!_
+
+
+A SEWING MACHINE GIVEN TO THE BOSS GIRL.
+
+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 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 follow 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.
+
+[Illustration: I WANT TO BE AN ANGEL.]
+
+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 open 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 for 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.
+
+
+SHE WAS NO GENTLEMAN.
+
+From an article in the _Leader_ we gather that Frank Drake, editor of the
+Rushford _Star_, was horsewhipped by a woman who was dissatisfied with
+some article of his that appeared against her, in the _Star_. A woman that
+cowhides an editor is no gentleman.
+
+
+JOKE ON THE HAT.
+
+Somehow, during the election excitement, Frank Hatch happened to bet right
+just once. He bet a hat, and on Monday he went to Putnam & Philbrick and
+selected one of the finest silk ones. When he went out in the street every
+body noticed it, and a reception was held. They all congratulated Frank,
+except Ike Usher. Ike's hat was a year old, and the contrast was so
+remarkable that Ike would not walk on the street with Hatch. Frank said
+that Ike's hat used to be a very fine looking hat, but at present it was a
+disgrace to the force. Mr. Usher was offended, and he swore revenge. He
+went to a professional drunkard on Division street, and said that if he
+should happen to get drunk Monday night and Hatch should happen to arrest
+him, he would give the drunkard five dollars if the drunkard would mash
+Frank's new hat. The fellow said he would flatten it flatter than flatness
+itself. Just after dark Mr. Hatch was walking down Third street, "Whoop,
+hurrah for Tilden, (hic) 'endrix." The remark seemed so out of place that
+Frank went down there. The man was lying on the sidewalk, and telling the
+barrel to roll over and not take up all the bed. Mr. Hatch accosted the
+man gently, telling him he would catch cold there, and that he had better
+go with him to the city hotel. The man said he would--be counted in if he
+did, and Hatch bent over him to take him by the lily white hand, when a
+drunken boot came down on the top of that hat, and drove it clean down to
+Frank's nose. Of course it could go no further. Then the man pulled Frank
+down, and the hat struck the end of a salt barrel, knocked it off, and the
+man raised up and sat down on it, and kicked it into the street. Frank got
+the man away, and a boy brought his hat to the police station, just as
+Usher and Littlejohn and Knutson, and all the policeman entered. It is
+said that all stood on the corner over by Kevin's watching the
+arrest. The hat was a sight to behold, as it laid in state on the safe,
+and all the boys making comments on it. It looked like a six-inch stove
+pipe elbow that a profane man had been attempting to fit to a five-inch
+stove pipe. It looked like some old dripping pan that had been thrown out
+in the street, and had been run over by wagons. It looked like the very
+dickens. And yet we have no doubt Hatch will say this is a lie, because he
+now wears a good hat, but we know the hat he now wears he got by trading a
+flannel shirt to a grasshopper sufferer, and it no more resembles the
+beautiful new hat he won on election than nothing. After Hatch went out of
+the office, Usher let the man "escape," and he is five dollars ahead, and
+Ike has got even with Hatch.
+
+[Illustration: IT LOOKED LIKE AN OLD DRIPPING PAN.]
+
+
+THE THIRSTY GOPHER.
+
+A Minnesota town got a fire steamer on trial, and tested it by trying to
+drown out a gopher. After working it six hours, the gopher came out to get
+a drink. He would have died of thirst if they had kept the hole closed
+much longer.
+
+
+COLORED CONCERT TROUPES.
+
+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 Rose, 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 her red
+trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage looking as though she
+would have to be carried on a dust pan, 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
+the 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
+Wilhelmj or 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 out, 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.
+
+
+MATTIE MASHES MINNESOTA.
+
+Mrs. Mattie A. Bridge is meeting with great success in Minnesota. In some
+places she is retained until she lectures four times. She says the heart
+of Minnesota is warm towards her. We shall feel inclined to put a head on
+Minnesota, if it don't quit allowing its heart to get warm.
+
+
+WHY THE FEVER DIDN'T SPREAD.
+
+Portage City has had a sensation which, though at one time it looked
+serious, turned out to be a farce. A girl was taken sick, and a physician
+was called who pronounced it a case of yellow fever, and he made out a
+prescription for that disease. Mr. Brannan, editor of the Portage
+Register, who lives near, got the news, and imparted it to all whom he
+met, and they in turn told it to others, and a stampede was looked for.
+Fox turned the Fox House over to Bunker, and had his trunks checked for
+the Hot Springs. Corning and Jack Turner hired a wagon to take them to
+Briggsville. Hærtel, the brewery man, offered to sell out his brewery and
+all his property for eight hundred dollars, and he bought a ticket for
+Germany. Bunker left the Fox House to run itself, and went to Devil's
+Lake. Sam. Branuan, telegraphed to George Clinton, at Denver, not
+to come home, as the yellow fever was raging, and people were dying off
+like rotton sheep. And Sam got vaccinated and went to Beaver Dam. The
+excitement was intense. Men became perfectly wild, and were going to rush
+off and leave the women and children to the mercies of the dead plague.
+Chicago and Milwaukee bummers could be seen at the hotels, kneeling beside
+their sample cases trying to pray, but they couldn't. Just before the
+train started that was to carry away the frightened populace, the doctor
+came up town and said that the girl with the yellow fever was better, and
+that she was the mother of a fine nine pound boy. The authorities took
+every precaution to prevent the spread of the yellow fever, by arresting
+the brakemen whom the girl said was the cause of all the trouble. All is
+quiet on the Wisconse now.
+
+[Illustration: DRUMMERS TRYING TO PRAY.]
+
+
+TOO PARTICULAR BY HALF.
+
+It is one of the mottoes of THE SUN never to publish anything that would
+cause a blush to mantle the cheek of innocence, or anybody. And yet,
+occasionally, a person finds fault. Not long since a man said he liked THE
+SUN well enough, only it had too much to say about patched breeches, which
+was offensive to some. Well, some people are so confounded high toned that
+if they were going to have a patch put on they would have it way up on the
+small of their back. Some of the best women in the world have sat up
+nights to sew a patch on their husband's pants. Martha Washington used to
+do it. But, G. Lordy, a family newspaper must not speak of a patch. When
+you take patches away from the people you strike a blow at their
+liberties. Don't be too nice.
+
+
+THE WAY TO NAME CHILDREN.
+
+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 to 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 to the door
+when the grocery delivery wagon was there, he would name the child "Boy
+from Dickson'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 Soltaire 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.
+
+
+AN EDITOR BURGLARIZED.
+
+The residence of John Turner, of the Mauston _Star_, was entered by
+burglars a few nights since, and his clothes were stolen, containing all
+his money and his railroad pass. We can imagine an editor around bare as
+to legs, etcetery, and out of money, but to be without a railroad pass
+must indeed be a sad state of affairs. When burglars burgle an editor it
+is a sign that confidence is restored under Hayes' administration. We
+trust that editors throughout the State who are blessed with this world's
+goods to the extent of more than one pair of pants, will send one pair at
+least to John Turner, Mauston, Wis., by express. We are probably as poor
+as any editor, but we have sent him those alligator pants that have
+created such a sensation in years gone by. It is true they are a little
+bit fringy about the bottoms, and the knees are worn through, and
+concealment, like a worm in the bud, has gnawed the foundation all out of
+them, but in a little town like Mauston, such things will not be noticed.
+John, take them, in welcome, and when the cold winds--but you better carry
+bricks in your coat tail pockets. That is the way we wore them the last
+three or four years.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA DISSECTED.
+
+"I understand your Pa has got to drinking again like a fish," says the
+grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth came in the grocery and took a
+handful of dried apples. The boy ate a dried apple and then made up a
+terrible face, and the grocery man asked him what he was trying to do with
+his face. The boy caught his breath and then said:
+
+"Say, don't you know any better than to keep dried apples where a boy can
+get hold of them when he has got the mumps? You will kill some boy yet by
+such dum carelessness. I thought these were sweet dried apples, but they
+are sour as a boarding house keeper, and they make me tired. Didn't you
+ever have the mumps? Gosh, but don't it hurt though? You have got to be
+darn careful when you have the mumps, and not go out bob-sledding, or
+skating, or you will have your neck swell up biggern a milk pail. Pa says
+he had the mumps once when he was a boy and it broke him all up."
+
+"Well, never mind the mumps, how about your Pa spreeing it. Try one of
+those pickles in the jar there, won't you. I always like to have a boy
+enjoy himself when he comes to see me," said the grocery man, winking to a
+man who was filling an old fashioned tin box with tobacco out of the pail,
+who winked back as much as to say, "if that boy eats a pickle on top of
+them mumps we will have a circus, sure."
+
+"You can't play no pickle on me, not when I have the mumps. Ma passed the
+pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the
+lockjaw. But Ma didn't do it on purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps
+and didn't know how discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn't feel as
+though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But
+about Pa. He has been fuller'n a goose ever since New Year's day. I think
+its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New
+Year's. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone. We
+have got brain, and know when we have got enough, but Pa, when he gets to
+going don't ever stop until he gets so sick that he can't keep his
+stummick inside of hisself. It is getting so they look to me to brace Pa
+up every time he gets on a tear, and I guess I fixed him this time so he
+will never touch liquor again. I scared him so his bald head turned gray
+in a single night."
+
+"What under the heavens have you done to him now?" says the grocery man,
+in astonishment. "I hope you haven't done anything you will regret in
+after years."
+
+"Regret nothing," said the boy, as he turned the lid of the cheese box
+back and took the knife and sliced off a piece of cheese, and took a few
+crackers out of a barrel, and sat down on a soap box by the stove, "You
+see Ma was annoyed to death with Pa. He would come home full, when she had
+company, and lay down on the sofa and snore, and he would smell like a
+distillery. It hurt me to see Ma cry, and I told her I would break Pa of
+drinking if she would let me, and she said if I would promise not to hurt
+Pa to go ahead, and I promised not to. Then I got my chum and another boy,
+to help, and Pa is all right. We went down to the place where they sell
+arms and legs, to folks who have served in the army, or a saw mill, or a
+threshing machine, and lose their limbs, and we borrowed some arms and
+legs, and fixed up a dissecting room. We fixed a long table in the
+basement, big enough to lay Pa out on you know, and then we got false
+whiskers and moustaches, and when Pa came in the house drunk and lay down
+on the sofa, and got to sleep, we took him and laid him out on the table,
+and took some trunk straps, and a circingle and strapped him down
+to the table. He slept right along all through it, and we had another
+table with the false arms and legs on, and we rolled up our sleeves, and
+smoked pipes, just like I read that medical students do when they cut up a
+man.
+
+"Well, you'd a dide to see Pa look at us when he woke up. I saw him open
+his eyes, and then we began to talk about cutting up dead men. We put
+hickery nuts in our mouths so our voices would sound different, so he
+wouldn't know us, and was telling the other boys about what a time we had
+cutting up the last man we bought. I said he was awful tough, and when we
+had got his legs off and had taken out his brain, his friends came to the
+dissecting room and claimed the body, and we had to give it up, but I
+saved the legs. I looked at Pa on the table and he began to turn pale, and
+he squirmed around to get up, but found he was fast. I had pulled his
+shirt up under his arms, while he was asleep, and as he began to move I
+took an icicle, and in the dim light of the candles, that were sitting on
+the table in beer botles, I drew the icicle across Pa's stummick and I
+said to my chum, 'Doc, I guess we had better cut open this old duffer and
+see if he died from inflamation of the stummick, from hard drinking, as
+the coroner said he did.' Pa shuddered all over when he felt the icicle
+going over his bare stummick, and he said, 'For God's sake, gentlemen,
+what does this mean? I am not dead.'
+
+"The other boys looked at Pa with astonishment, and I said 'Well, we
+bought you for dead, and the coroner's jury said you were dead, and by the
+eternal we ain't going to be fooled out of a corpse when we buy one, are
+we Doc?' My chum said not if he knowed his self, and the other students
+said, 'Of course he is dead. He thinks he is alive, but he died day before
+yesterday, fell dead on the street, and his folks said he had been a
+nuisance and they wouldn't claim the corpse, and we bought it at the
+morgue.' Then I drew the icicle across him again, and I said, 'I don't
+know about this, doctor. I find that blood follows the scalpel as I cut
+through the cuticle. Hand me the blood sponge please.' Pa began to wiggle
+around, and we looked at him, and my chum raised his eye-lid, and looked
+solemn, and Pa said, 'Hold on gentlemen. Don't cut into me any more, and I
+can explain this matter. This is all a mistake. I was only drunk.' We went
+in a corner and whispered, and Pa kept talking all the time. He said if we
+would postpone the hog killing he could send and get witnesses to prove
+that he was not dead, but that he was a respectable citizen, and had a
+family. After we held a consultation I went to Pa and told him that what
+he said about being alive might possibly be true, though we had our
+doubts. We had found such cases before in our practice east, where men
+seemed to be alive, but it was only temporary. Before we had got them cut
+up they were dead enough for all practical purposes. Then I laid the
+icicle across Pa's abdomen, and went on to tell him that even if he _was_
+alive it would be better for him to play that he _was_ dead, because he
+was such a nuisance to his family that they did not want him, and I was
+telling him that I had heard that in his lifetime he was very cruel to his
+boy, a bright little fellow who was at the head of his class in Sunday
+school and a pet wherever he was known, when Pa interrupted me and said,
+'Doctor, please take that carving knife off my stomach, for it makes me
+nervous. As for that boy of mine, he is the condemndest little whelp in
+town, and he isn't no pet anywhere. Now, you let up on this dissectin'
+business, and I will make it all right with you.' We held another
+consultation and then I told Pa that we did not feel that it was doing
+justice to society to give up the body of a notorious drunkard, after we
+had paid twenty dollars for the corpse. If there was any hopes that he
+would reform and try and lead a different life, it would be different, and
+I said to the boys, 'gentlemen, we must do our duty. Doc, you dismember
+that leg, and I will attend to the stomach and the upper part of body. He
+will be dead before we are done with him. We must remember that society
+has some claim on us, and not let our better natures be worked upon by the
+_post mortem_ promises of a dead drunkard.' Then I took my icicle and
+began fumbling around the abdomen portion of Pa's remains, and my chum
+took a rough piece of ice and began to saw his leg off, while the other
+boy took hold of the leg and said he would catch it when it dropped off.
+Well, Pa kicked like a steer. He said he wanted to make one more appeal to
+us, and we acted sort of impatent but we let up to hear what he had to
+say. He said if we would turn him loose he would give us ten dollars more
+than we paid for his body, and that he would never drink another drop as
+long as he lived. Then we whispered some more and then told him we thought
+favorably of his last proposition, but he must swear, with his hand on the
+leg of a corpse we were then dissecting that he would never drink again,
+and then he must be blindfolded and be conducted several blocks away from
+the dissecting room, before we could turn him loose. He said that was all
+right, and so we blindfolded him, and made him take a bloody oath, with
+his hand on a piece of ice that we told him was a piece of another corpse,
+and then we took him out of the house and walked him around the block four
+times, and left him on a corner, after he had promised to send the money
+to an address that I gave him. We told him to stand still five minutes
+after we left him, then remove the blindfold, and go home. We watched him,
+from behind a board fence, and he took off the handkerchief, looked at the
+name on a street lamp, and found he was not far from home. He started off
+saying 'That's a pretty narrow escape old man. No more whisky for you.' I
+did not see him again until this morning, and when I asked him where he
+was last night he shuddered and said 'none of your darn business. But I
+never drink any more, you remember that.' Ma was tickled and she told me I
+was worth my weight in gold. Well, good day. That cheese is musty." And
+the boy went and caught on a passing sleigh.
+
+
+COL. INGERSOLL PRAYING.
+
+Bob. Ingersoll is taking a rest from his persecutions of the Creator, and
+is traveling in the Yo Semite region of California. Bob does not believe
+there is a God, but if he was riding a kicking mule, down the precipice
+near the big trees, and the saddle should turn over with him, and his foot
+should be caught in the stirrup, after the mule had kicked him a few times
+in the judgement seat, which is the bowels, in his case, he would be very
+apt to bellow like a calf, and say "O, Lord, please unbuckle that cussed
+strap." We should like to hear Bob had met with some such accident, just
+so he would recognize the foreign government of the Lord, which at present
+he totally ignores. Not that we have anything against Ingersoll.
+
+
+HOW TO INVEST A THOUSAND DOLLARS.
+
+A young man advertises in a Milwaukee paper for a partnership. He wants to
+invest one thousand dollars in some established business. Go to La Crosse
+and go to betting on election. It pays, and is an established business.
+There's millions in it.
+
+
+BOYS AND CIRCUSES.
+
+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 circusses, 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 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 faith in the 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 wont 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 the 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 to 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 shot
+gun, 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.
+
+
+THE WATERS OF LA CROSSE.
+
+We have heretofore entirely overlooked the magnetic qualities of the La
+Crosse water. It will be remembered that the Fond du Lac water is
+advertised as magnetic water, and it has been said that a knife blade,
+after being soaked in the water will take up a watch key or a steel pen.
+That is nothing compared to the La Crosse water. Last week a man who had
+been soaked in La Crosse water, took up a watch, key and all, and a
+policeman who had been using the water took up the man, with the watch. A
+pair of ice tongs, made of steel, on being soaked in water, took up a
+piece of ice weighing over a hundred pounds, and a farmer named Dawson,
+after drinking the water took up a stray colt. A young couple stopped the
+other evening and took a drink of water and up Fourth street, and before
+they got to Seymour's corner they were walking so close together that you
+couldn't tell which the bustle was on. We have never seen water that had
+so much magnetism in as this. A pot of it on a house is better than a
+lightning rod.
+
+
+SARDINEINDIANAPOLIS.
+
+In company with a couple of hundred others who were firm in the belief
+that the Sardinapalus troupe were under the auspices of the Young Men's
+Christian Association, we attended the performance on Monday evening. It
+was heralded as coming from Booth's theater, N.Y., where it had a run of
+four months. Most of them got away while on the trip here, and only a few
+appeared. The scenery, which was also extensively advertised, was no more
+than could have been fixed up with a whitewash brush in half a day, by
+home talent. The play, what there was of it was well rendered, though many
+doubted the propriety of the king calling around him a lot of La Crosse
+soldiers, to hear him tell the Greek slave how he loved her. There was
+much dissatisfaction about the Greek slave. All marble statues of the
+Greek slave represent her with nothing on but a trace chain around one arm
+and one leg. But the party who got up this play went behind the returns
+and invested her with a white night gown, which detracted very much from
+history. The "soldiers" were picked up among the La Crosse boys, and they
+got tangled up, and couldn't form a line to save themselves, and when they
+stood against the wall it was a melancholy fact that they tickled the
+ballet girls in the ribs as they passed by. This was highly wrong. It
+takes the romance out of the affair to gaze upon an Assyrian soldier,
+covered with armor, and carrying a cover to a wash boiler in his hand, and
+to think that he is covered with scars won in battle, and then look at him
+through a glass and have him wink at you, and you find that you have seen
+him thousands of times standing on the postoffice corner, spitting tobacco
+juice across the sidewalk at the hydrant. Mrs. Sardinapalus did not
+appear, having gone to visit her uncle, but "Sard." stuck to the Greek
+slave like a sand burr to a boy's trousers. They laid down
+together on a bale of paper rags and looked at the dance. The dance was
+pretty good. First there came out about a dozen girls in tights, with
+skirts as short as pie crust. Their legs were all round and well got up,
+showing that the sawdust was evenly distributed, with no chance for
+dissatisfaction. They capered around, and smiled at the reflection of the
+red lights in the gallery upon the bald heads before them, and kicked up
+like all possessed, and then they backed up against the wings and fooled
+with the La Cross Assyrians, who came down like a wolf on the fold. Then
+there came out two first-class dancers, one short, fat, plump, but mighty
+small, so small that she didn't look as though she was big enough for a
+cork to a jug. But she could dance. Well, she ought to, as she had no
+clothes to bother her. Next came a brunette, evidently of French
+extraction, with a face that was a protection against assault with intent
+to kill, and legs of the Gothic style. Smith said she was spavined, but
+that's a lie. She danced better than all of them, and walked on her big
+toes till the audience yelled. Then the dancers all got tangled up
+together, the brunette fell over on the little blonde, stuck her hind foot
+right in the air as straight as a liberty pole struck by lightning,
+somebody said "Tableau," and the curtain went down, and the audience
+looked at each other as much as to say, "Let's go home." The boys in the
+gallery cheered, and the curtain was rung up again, but her flag was still
+there. Then they had a fighting scene, where everybody gets mad and goes
+out into the dressing room and clashes old swords together, and come back
+wounded. The king, after killing up a lot ahead, got a furlough and came
+in and lallygaged with the Greek slave a spell, and then the battle was
+lost, and "Sardine." said he might as well die for an old sheep as a lamb.
+So he ordered a funeral pile built of red fire, and he got on it to be
+burned up. The Greek slave said if that was the game she wanted a hand
+dealt to her, as wherever "Sard." went she was going, as she had
+an insurance policy against fire in the Northwestern Mutual. So he invited
+her on to the kindling wood, and after hugging enough to last them through
+perdition--and mighty good hugging it was too--the pile of slabs was
+touched off, the flames rolled, and "Sard." and the Greek slave went down
+to hell clasped in each other's embrace, and we went to the People's store
+and bought a mackerel and went home and told our wife we had been to a
+democratic caucus. We don't know what all the other fellows told their
+wives, but there has been a heap of lying, we know that much.
+
+[Illustration: "SARD." AND THE GREEK SLAVE.]
+
+
+INSECURE ABODES.
+
+Four men fell out of the Oshkosh jail the other day. If Oshkosh would only
+imitate Fond du lac, and paper the county jail with wall paper, it might
+become safe.
+
+
+THE KNIGHT AND THE BRIDAL CHAMBER.
+
+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 backwoods, 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, 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 swow 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 book-keeper 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 in 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.
+
+[Illustration: "THIS IS TOO ALLFIRED MUCH!"]
+
+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.
+
+
+SEVEN YEAR OLD HORSES.
+
+An old farmer once said, "What a year it must have been for colts seven
+years ago this spring." No person who has never attempted to buy a horse
+can appreciate the remark, but if he will let it be known that he wants to
+buy a good horse, he will be struck with the circumstance that all the
+horses that are of any particular account were born seven years ago.
+Occasionally there is one that is six years old, but they are not plenty,
+Now, those of us who lived around here seven years ago did not have our
+attention called to the fact that the country was flooded with colts.
+There were very few twin colts, and it was seldom that a mother had half a
+dozen colts following her. Farmers and stock raisers did not go round
+worrying about what they were going to do with so many colts. The papers,
+if we recollect right, were not filled with accounts of the extraordinary
+number of colts born. And yet it must have been a terrible year for colts,
+because there are only six horses in Milwaukee that are over seven years
+old, but one of them was found to have been pretty well along in years
+when he worked in Burnham's brick yard in 1848, and finally the owner
+owned up that he was mistaken twenty-six years. What a mortality there
+must have been among horses that would now be eight, nine or ten years
+old. There are none of them left. And a year from now, when our present
+stock of horses would naturally be eight years old they will all be dead,
+and a new lot of seven years old horses will take their places. It is
+singular, but it is true. That is, it is true unless horse dealers lie,
+and THE SUN would be slow to charge so grave a crime upon a useful and
+enterprising class of citizens. No, it cannot be, and yet, don't it seem
+peculiar that all the horses in this broad land are seven years old this
+spring? We leave the suject for the youth of the land to wonder over,
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA JOINS A TEMPERANCE SOCIETY.
+
+"Don't you think my Pa is showing his age a good deal more than usual?"
+asked the bad boy of the grocery man, as he took a smoked herring out of a
+box, and peeled off the skin with a broken bladed jack-knife, and split it
+open and ripped off the bone, threw the head at a cat, took some crackers
+and began to eat.
+
+"Well, I don't know but he does look as though he was getting old," said
+the grocery man, as he took a piece of yellow wrapping paper and charged
+the boy's poor old father with a dozen herrings and a pound of crackers;
+"But there is no wonder he is getting old. I wouldn't go through what your
+father has, the last year, for a million dollars. I tell you, boy, when
+your father is dead, and you get a step-father, and he makes you walk the
+chalk mark, you will realize what a bonanza you have fooled yourself out
+of by killing off your father. The way I figure it, your father will last
+about six months, and you ought to treat him right, the little time he has
+to live."
+
+"Well, I am going to," said the boy, as he picked the herring bones out of
+his teeth with a piece of a match that he sharpened with his knife. "But I
+don't believe in borrowing trouble about a step-father so long before
+hand. I don't think Ma could get a man to step into Pa's shoes, as long as
+I lived, not if she was inlaid with diamonds, and owned a brewery. There
+are brave men, I know, that are on the marry, but none of them would want
+to be brevet father to a cherubim like me, except he got pretty good
+wages. And then, since Pa was dissected he is going to lead a different
+life, and I guess I will make a man of him, if he holds out. We got him to
+join the Good Templars last night."
+
+"No, you don't tell me," said the grocery man, as he thought that
+his trade in cider for mince pies would be cut off. "So you got him into
+the Good Templars, eh?"
+
+"Well, he thinks he has joined the Good Templars, so it is all the same.
+You see my chum and me have been going to a private gymnasium, on the west
+side, kept by a Dutchman, and in the back room he has all the tools for
+getting up muscle. There, look at my arm," said the boy, as he rolled up
+his sleeve and showed a muscle about as big as an oyster. "That is the
+result of training at the gymnasium. Before I took lessons I hadn't any
+more muscle than you have got. Well, the Dutchman was going to a dance on
+the south side the other night, and he asked my chum to tend the
+gymnasium, and I told Pa if he would join the Good Templars that night
+there wouldn't be many at the lodge, and he wouldn't be so embarrassed,
+and as I was one of the officers of the lodge I would put it to him light,
+and he said he would go, so my chum got five other boys to help us put him
+through. So we steered him down to the gymnasium and made him rap on the
+storm door outside, and I said 'who comes there?' and he said it was a
+pilgrim who wanted to jine our sublime order. I asked him if he had made
+up his mind to turn from the ways of a hyena, and adopt the customs of the
+truly good, and he said if he knew his own heart he had, and then I told
+him to come in out of the snow and take off his pants. He kicked a little
+at taking off his pants, because it was cold out there in the storm door
+dog house, but I told him they all had to do it. The princes, potentates
+and paupers all had to come to it. He asked me how it was when we
+initiated women, and I told him women never took that degree. He pulled
+off his pants and wanted a check for them, but I told him the Grand Mogul
+would hold his clothes, and then I blind-folded him, and with a base ball
+club I pounded on the floor as I walked around the gymnasium, while the
+lodge, headed by my chum, sung, 'We won't go home till morning' I
+stopped in front of the ice water tank, and said, 'Grand Worthy Duke, I
+bring before you a pilgrim who has drank of the dregs until his stomach
+won't hold water, and who desires to swear off.' The Grand Mogul asked me
+if he was worthy and well qualified, and I told him that he had been drunk
+more or less since the reunion last summer, which ought to qualify him.
+Then the Grand Mogul made Pa repeat the most blood-curdling oath, in which
+Pa agreed, if he ever drank another drop, to allow anybody to pull his
+toe-nails out with tweezers, to have his liver dug out and fed to dogs,
+his head chopped off, and his eyes removed. Then the Mogul said he would
+brand the candidate on the bare back with the initial letters of our
+order, 'G.T.,' that all might read how a brand had been snatched from the
+burning. You'd a dide to see Pa flinch when I pulled up his shirt, and got
+ready to brand him.
+
+"My chum got a piece of ice out of the water cooler, and just as he
+clapped it on Pa's back I burned a piece of horses hoof in the candle, and
+held it to Pa's nose, and I guess Pa actually thought it was his burning
+skin that he smelled. He jumped about six feet and said, 'Great heavens,
+what you dewin,' and then he began to roll over a barrel which I had
+arranged for him. Pa thought he was going down cellar, and he hung to the
+barrel, but he was on top half the time. When Pa and the barrel got
+through fighting I was beside him, and I said, 'Calm yourself, and be
+prepared for the ordeal that is to follow.' Pa asked how much of this dum
+fooling there was, and said he was sorry he joined. He said he could let
+licker alone without having the skin all burned off his back. I told Pa to
+be brave and not weaken, and all would-be well. He wiped the prespiration
+off his face on the end of his shirt, and we put a belt around his body
+and hitched it to a tackle, and pulled him up so his feet just
+off the floor, and then we talked as though we were away off, and I told
+my chum to look out that Pa did not hit the gas fixtures, and Pa actually
+thought he was being hauled clear up to the roof. I could see he was
+scared by the complexion of his hands and feet, as they clawed the air. He
+actually sweat so the drops fell on the floor. Bime-by we let him down,
+and he was awfully relieved though his feet were not more than two inches
+from the floor any of the time. We were just going to slip Pa down a board
+with slivers in to give him a realizing sense of the rough road a reformed
+man has to travel, and got him straddle of the board, when the Dutchman
+came home from the dance fullern a goose, and he drove us boys out, and we
+left Pa, and the Dutchman said, 'Vot you vas doing here mit dose boys, you
+old duffer, and vere vas your pants?' and Pa pulled off the handkerchief
+from his eyes, and the Dutchman said if he didn't get out in a holy minute
+he would kick the stuffing out of him, and Pa got out. He took his pants
+and put them, on in the alley, and then we came up to Pa and told him that
+was the third time the drunken Dutchman had broke up our lodge, but we
+should keep on doing good until we had reformed every drunkard in
+Milwaukee, and Pa said that was right, and he would see us through, if it
+cost every dollar he had. Then we took him home, and when Ma asked if she
+couldn't join the lodge, too, Pa said, 'Now you take my advice, and don't
+you ever join no Good Templars. Your system could not stand the racket.
+Say, I want you to put some cold cream on my back.' I think Pa will be a
+different man now, don't you?"
+
+The grocery man said if he was that boy's pa for fifteen minutes he would
+be a different boy or there would be a funeral, and the boy took a handful
+of soft-shelled almonds and a few layer raisins and skipped out.
+
+
+THE WAY WOMEN BOSS A PILLOW.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: BOSSING THE PILLOW.]
+
+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 cannot 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
+it 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.
+
+
+HUNTING DOGS.
+
+They are making everything out of rubber now. A man has invented a hunting
+dog that can be carried in the pocket. When you get in the field, all you
+have to do is to blow the dog up, and start it to going. This will be a
+great saving, as hunters will not have to pay baggage men a dollar for
+tying their dogs to a trunk, when they go off hunting.
+
+
+ENTERPRISING CHICAGO!
+
+Chicago is to have a hotel built exclusively for men. Under no
+circumstances will a woman be admitted into it. There are so many men who
+go to Chicago, who are liable to wink at women at the table of the hotel,
+before they know their own heart, to lead a different life, that this new
+hotel, without temptation, has been decided upon. There will only be a few
+old bald headed roosters and persons with red noses and sore eyes stopping
+at the new hotel. A hotel without women would be almost as cheerful as a
+reform school.
+
+
+A MAD MINISTER.
+
+There is probably the maddest minister living at Black River Falls, that
+can be found in America to-day. He is a real nice man, and his name is
+Burt Wheeler. He preaches good sound sense, and everybody likes him. He
+has got friends at Neillsville, and all around there. At Black River Falls
+there is no license, and liquor is unknown, while at Neillsville there is
+license, and one can have benzine at every meal. The other day the express
+took a jug from Neillsville to the Falls, directed to the reverend
+gentleman, and on the card attached to the jug handle was the following
+notice:
+
+"Old Bourbon--We have license here, and knowing you have none in your town
+we thought it but kindness to remember your wants."
+
+When a jug, or a keg arrives at the Falls by express, every citizen
+notices it, and they investigate, and when the jug came into the express
+office the expressman winked, and in a few minutes half the population of
+the darling little village was there. They read the note on the card and
+winked at each other. One man as he took a piece of cut sugar out of a
+barrel, said he had long suspected that Burt liked his toddy. Another
+fellow, picking a mouthful off a codfish, remarked that you couldn't
+always tell about these confounded ministers. Frank Cooper, the editor of
+the _Banner_, though he looked pained when he saw the name "Old Bourbon"
+on the jug, and noticed the immense size of the jug remarked that it was
+the best way not to condemn a man till the returns were all in. The
+reverened gentleman was interrupted in his preparation of his sermon by a
+neighboring lady who just dropped in to tell the news, and when she sighed
+and told him that his jug of whisky which he had ordered from Neillsville,
+was in the express office, he could hardly believe his ears. He had
+always, to the best of his knowledge and belief, tried to lead a
+different life, and this was too much--too much bourbon. Scratching out
+the last line that he had written, which was something about something
+biting like an anaconda, and stinging like a ready reckoner, he put on his
+coat and started down town, resolved to face the multitude, conscious of
+his innocence. He approached the express office a little nervous. The
+crowd filled the street, and as he passed a raftsman with red breeches on,
+said he wouldn't have such a nose as that on him for a hundred dollars.
+"He is full now," said another, as the Reverend gentleman put his hand on
+an awning post to steady himself in the trying emergency. A man who was
+sitting on a salt barrel, whittling a shingle, and who had one trousers
+leg tucked in his boot, and a red sash around him, said if it could be
+proved that Wheeler was a drinking man it would be a hard blow at
+religion, but he didn't know as he cared a blank anyway. The elder went in
+the express office and the crowd fell back to give the chief mourner a
+chance to look at the late lamented. There was a different expression on
+every face. Some looked as though they were glad he had been caught in the
+act, while others wore a mournful expression, as though they had been
+suddenly bereaved. He was pale, yet determined, and as he read the
+inscription he said, so help him John Rogers, he had never ordered any
+whisky, and never drank any, and didn't know anything about this jug.
+Turning to those present he said: "This is some horrid nightmare." The
+expressman said it was no nightmare, it was whisky. Wheeler said if the
+charges were paid he would take it, and taking the jug out doors he raised
+it high in the air and dashed it upon the pavement, amid the applause of
+his friends. At this point Hon. Wm. T. Price come along, and was told what
+had happened. He looked at the amber liquid oozing down between the stones
+on the pavement, put his finger in some of it, smelled of it,
+touched it to his tongue, and turning to the yet pale and excited
+Reverend, he said:
+
+"Wheeler, you have maintained a noble principle, but you have destroyed
+four gallons of the d--dest finest maple syrup that was ever brewed in
+Clark county."
+
+It was true, Doc. French and Tom Reed, of Neillsville, two good friends of
+the Rev. Wheeler, had sent him the syrup, knowing that he could use it in
+his family, and being jokers they had put the Bourbon card on the jug,
+just for fun, with the alleged result above stated. Temperance men should
+always smell of the cork, at least, before smashing the jug. We have
+practiced that a good many years, and never lost a gallon of maple syrup.
+
+
+ANNA DICKINSON AS MAZEPPA!
+
+Anna Dickinson is to go upon the stage, and it is said that she will open
+in San Francisco, in the play of "Mazeppa." If there is any society for
+the prevention of cruelty to animals on the Pacific coast, we trust before
+Anna is tied on the wild horse of Tartary, that some one will see to it
+that a cushion is put on the back of the horse.
+
+
+GOOD TEMPLARS ON ICE.
+
+We like to see young Good Templars have a hankering after cold water,
+bright water; but when a Juvenile Lodge about to start on a picnic,
+deliberately loads a hunk of ice belonging to _The Sun_ into an omnibus,
+we feel like reaching for the basement of their roundabouts with a piece
+of clapboard.
+
+
+BOUNCED FROM CHURCH FOR DANCING.
+
+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 intermittant 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 Dr. 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 gripsacks and
+register and ask for a room and a bath, and a fire escape. He will be apt
+to look up to 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.
+
+
+FROZEN EARS.
+
+"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, 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.
+
+
+HARD ON FOND DU LAC.
+
+Forest street, Fond du Lac, is going to be a great place for sparking, one
+of these days. For three years all the children born on that street have
+been girls. Some lay it to the artesian well water.
+
+
+THOSE BOLD BAD DRUMMERS.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE SEXTON IN ALL HIS GLORY.]
+
+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 wore a
+smile. The sexton looked up to the minister, who was picking up 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
+"renigged," 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 from 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.
+
+
+ANNA DICKINSON.
+
+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 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 this test, which we trust
+will be made at the Boston Theatre next week.
+
+
+EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF A DOUGHNUT.
+
+"'Twas midnight's holy hour, and silence was brooding like a gentle spirit
+o'er the still and pulseless world." Not a sound was heard, except
+Robert's dog baying at a sorrel haired young man and a muchmussed girl,
+who were returning home from a suburban picnic. As they passed out of
+hearing, and the dog was peacefully cannibalizing on a link of sausage
+that had been condemned by the board of health, owing to a piece of brass
+padlock that showed through the silky nickel plating made of fiddling
+string material, a soft cry of a child was heard in an upper room of a
+mansion owned by a prosperous business man. The head of the house heard it
+and sat up in bed to still the small voice, but couldn't, when the mother
+of the child said that she had forgotten to bring up anything for the
+child to eat in the night, and she must go down cellar and get a doughnut.
+The man said he could never stay there and enjoy himself in bed and think
+of his wife, groping around in the dark below stairs after it. After
+telling him that he would probably come up with a pickle, ehe let him go.
+Carefully he got out of bed, in an angelic frame of mind and a night
+shirt, and barefooted he prepared to make the descent. As he stopped to
+hold one foot in his hand, the instep of which had struck the rocker of
+the baby crib, she told him the doughnuts were in the third crock in the
+pantry on the floor. He said it was one evidence of a clear headed man,
+that he could walk all over his own house in the dark. At the head of the
+first pair of stairs he tripped on a baby cart and the tongue flew up and
+struck him on the knee, but by hanging to the bannisters he saved himself.
+At the foot of the stairs he tumbled over a block house and broke off a
+toe nail. He said it was a mean man that wouldn't sacrifice a few toe
+nails for his little baby, and he laughed. He fell over a dining room
+chair, and sat down in another, and when he got up he felt that
+though he was not proud, he was stuck up, for on his night shirt was a
+sticky fly paper that had been placed in readiness to catch the unwary
+early fly. After peeling off the sticky paper, and subterraneously
+swearing a neat, delicate little female swear, he groped to the cellar
+door, and began to go down.
+
+[Illustration: THE STARTLED CAT.]
+
+Now, if there is anything a boy ought to be punished for, it is for
+surreptitiously eating a large slice of musk melon and leaving the rind on
+the top stair. It tends to make a boy disliked. The head of the family
+stepped with his bare feet on the piece of melon, and sat down so quick
+that it made his head swim. It made him swim all over, and under, and
+everywhere. But if he sat down soon, he got up sooner. If there is one
+thing that a house cat should be taught, it is to sleep elsewhere than on
+the top stair. When he fell and struck the sleeping cat there was a
+crisis. He took in the situation at once. An occasional disengaged feline
+toe nail, and a squall, told him in burning words that, while his title to
+the seat was contested, it would be impolitic to wait for a commission of
+unbiased judges to decide which was entitled to it. His opponent was
+armed, and had possession, and he felt that it would tend to prevent riot
+and bloodshed if he quietly gave up. But he felt that while in his present
+position the cat was comparatively harmless, if he attempted to rise she
+would bring the whole army and navy into action, and perhaps cripple his
+resources. So he decided to jump up in a hurry before the cat had time to
+think of her toe nails much. His position was not pleasant, to say the
+least, but he jumped up in a hurry, hoping the cat would remain and
+continue her nap. She was not a remaining cat and as soon as his weight
+was removed from her person, she gave a yell as though frightened, and
+began to walk up and down his legs, inside of his night shirt.
+The question as to how many toe nails a cat has got, has never been
+decided, but he says they have a million, and he can show the documents to
+prove it. She went up him as though he was a fence post, and a dog after
+her, and he flew around as though his linen was on fire, and yelled until
+his wife came down to see what was the matter. By unbuttoning the top
+button the cat was coaxed out, under protest however, and after a light
+was lit there was seen about the maddest man in the world. He took a
+candle and went down after the doughnuts, and after running his hand into
+a jar of preserved peaches, and another of pickled pig's feet, he struck
+the right one, and after hot grease from the candle had run down his
+fingers he came up with a doughnut, and then the baby wouldn't eat it,
+then he sat down side-ways in a cushioned chair, applied arnica and swore
+till daylight. A single shot was heard in the cellar that
+morning, and the young life of that cat went out. As he rode down on the
+street car the next morning, people marvelled that he should stand up on
+the back platform, when there were so many vacant seats, and when a
+neighbor asked him to be seated he said, with a yawn, "No thank you, I
+have been sitting down a good deal during the night," and he looked mad.
+It is such things that drive men to commit crimes.
+
+
+TAKE YOUR LATIN STRAIGHT.
+
+The school board, at its last session adopted the following rule: "The
+continental system of pronounciation shall be taught in the high schools
+of La Crosse, and no other allowed except by direction of board of
+education." We are glad the rule has been adopted, as there is no doubt
+that the continental system is the best. We have been pained beyond
+measure, as no doubt all of the school board have, at hearing the scholars
+pronounce Latin by 'tother system. No longer ago than last Saturday, when
+we were in Mons. Anderson's, a girl came in and asked for a pair of Latin
+corsets, by the Onalaska system of pronounciation. The clerk, not
+understanding, went and got a pair of those undershirts and drawers,
+complete in one number, with no tale to be continued. The girl blushed,
+the clerk did not understand, and we had to explain by the continental
+system, and the girl got her corsets, but suppose there had not been a
+Latin scholar standing around there waiting for his wife to buy a package
+of safty pins, what a predicament the girl would have been in. On behalf
+of the people, THE SUN thanks the board of education for adopting the
+continental system of pronounciation, only they ought to go further, and
+make it a crime punishable with suicide for anybody to pronounce it in any
+other way. There has been suffering enough by pronouncing it the old way.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HE IS TOO HEALTHY.
+
+"There, I knew you would get into trouble," said the grocery man to the
+bad boy, as a policeman came along leading him by the ear, the boy having
+an empty champagne bottle in one hand, and a black eye. "What has he been
+doing Mr. Policeman?" asked the grocery man, as the policeman halted with
+the boy in front of the store.
+
+"Well, I was going by a house up here when this kid opened the door with a
+quart bottle of champagne, and he cut the wire and fired the cork at
+another boy, and the champagne went all over the sidewalk, and some of it
+went on me, and I knew there was something wrong, cause champagne is too
+expensive to waste that way, and he said he was running the shebang and if
+I would bring him here you would say he was all right. If you say so I
+will let him go."
+
+The grocery man said he had better let the boy go, as his parents would
+not like to have their little pet locked up. So the policeman let go his
+ear, and he throwed the empty bottle at a coal wagon, and after the
+policeman had brushed the champagne off his coat, and smelled of his
+fingers, and started off, the grocery man turned to the boy, who was
+peeling a cucumber, and said:
+
+"Now, what kind of a circus have you been having, and what do you mean by
+destroying wine that way! and, where are your folks?"
+
+"Well, I'll tell you. Ma she has got the hay fever and has gone to Lake
+Superior to see if she can't stop sneezing, and Saturday Pa said he and me
+would go out to Oconomowoc and stay over Sunday, and try and recuperate
+our health. Pa said it would be a good joke for me not to call him Pa, but
+to act as though I was his younger brother, and we would have a
+real nice time. I knowed what he wanted. He is an old masher, that's
+what's the matter with him, and he was going to play himself for a
+batchelor. O, thunder, I got on to his racket in a minute. He was
+introduced to some of the girls and Saturday evening he danced till the
+cows came home. At home he is awful fraid of rheumatiz, and he never
+sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured off'n him, and he
+stood in the door and let a girl fan him till I was afraid he would
+freeze, and just as he was telling a girl from Tennessee, who was joking
+him about being 'a nold batch,' that he was not sure as he could always
+hold out a woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with the
+charming ladies of the Sunny South. I pulled his coat and said, 'Pa how do
+you spose Ma's hay fever is to-night, I'll bet she is just sneezing the
+top of her head off.' Wall, sir, you just oughten seen that girl and Pa.
+Pa looked at me as if I was a total stranger, and told the porter if that
+freckled faced boot-black belonged around the house he had better be fired
+out of the ball room, and the girl said 'the disgustin' thing!' and just
+before they fired me I told Pa he had better look out or he would sweat
+through his liver pad.
+
+"I went to bed and Pa staid up till the lights were put out. He was mad
+when he came to bed, but he didn't kick me, cause the people in the next
+room would hear him, but the next morning he talked to me. He said I might
+go back home Sunday night, and he would stay a day or two. He sat around
+on the veranda all the afternoon, talking with the girls, and when he
+would see me coming along he would look cross. He took a girl out boat
+riding, and when I asked him if I couldn't go along, he said he was afraid
+I would get drowned, and he said if I went home there was nothing there
+too good for me, and so my chum and me got to firing bottles of champagne,
+and he hit me in the eye with a cork, and I drove him out doors
+and was just going to shell his earth works, when the policeman collared
+me. Say, what's good for a black eye?"
+
+The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home. "What do
+you think your Pa's object was in passing himself off for a single man at
+Oconomowoc?" asked the grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the
+boy's father.
+
+"That's what beats me. Aside from Ma's hay fever she is one of the
+healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose he does it for his health, the
+way they all do when they go to a summer resort, but it leaves a boy an
+orphan, don't it, to have such kitteny parents?"
+
+
+SURE OF HEAVEN.
+
+The only persons that are real sure that their calling and election is
+sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots, are the men who are
+hung for murder. They always announce that they have got a dead thing on
+it, just before the drop falls. How encouraging it must be to children to
+listen to the prayers of our ministers in churches, who admit that they
+are miserable sinners, living on God's charity, and doubtful if they would
+be allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of their
+own unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then let the
+children read an account of a hanging bee, and see how happy the condemned
+man is, how he shouts glory hallelujah, and confesses that, though he
+killed his man, he is going to heaven. A child will naturally ask, why
+don't the ministers murder somebody, and make a dead sure thing of it?
+
+
+THE NAUGHTY BUT NICE CHURCH CHOIR.
+
+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 bookmark 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 the 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 that came in with the old lady, and while he was up
+the soprano put the shoemaker's 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
+shoemaker's wax melts at ninety eight degrees Fahrenheit.
+
+[Illustration: THE TENOR ARRAYED IN ALL HIS GLORY.]
+
+The minister finally got to the amen, and read a hymn, the choir then
+coughed and all rose up. The chair that the tenor sat 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, 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.
+
+
+SUPREME COURT JUDGES AND U.S. SENATORS.
+
+I would call your attention to a change that it seems to me should be made
+in the method of selecting U.S. Senators and Supreme Judges. Heretofore it
+has been noticeable that the men who carried the longest pole knocked down
+the senatorial persimmons. In the matter of the election of Judges of the
+Supreme Court, it has been the practice to secure men for those places at
+an enormous salary, when other men would be willing to do the work and
+board themselves. The suggestion I would make is that you pass a law
+letting the offices of United States Senator and Judges of the Supreme
+Court to the lowest bidder. This method will be economical and will secure
+to the state men who can legislate and judge things well enough for all
+practical purposes. The way times are now we must get things at panic
+prices or go without.
+
+
+OUR CHRISTIAN NEIGHBORS HAVE GONE.
+
+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 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
+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 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 centre
+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 toward
+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 crossed 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 backtalk, 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_.
+
+
+BUTTERMILK BIBBERS.
+
+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 assumes 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.
+
+
+FISHING FOR PIECES OF WOMEN.
+
+There are lots of ludicrous scenes to be observed on the railroads and
+conductors are loaded with stories that would cause a marble monument to
+keep its sides a laughing. Some day we are going to borrow a conductor,
+and take him out in the woods, and place a revolver to his head and make
+him deliver a lot of stories. The other day as conductor Fred Underwood's
+train from Chicago, arrived on the trestle work on the south side, the
+whistle blew, the air break was touched off, and the train came up
+standing so quick that a woman lost her false teeth in the sleeper, and
+everybody's hair stood up like a mule's ears. Every window had a head out,
+and when the conductor got out on the platform he saw the engineer and
+fireman on the ends of the ties looking down into the mud and water,
+shading their eyes as though looking for the eclipse.
+
+There, sticking out of the mud were two human legs, and as one leg had a
+piece of listing around it, just above the veal, the conductor knew,
+instinctively, that the surface indications showed that there was a woman
+in there. Then he thought that the engine had probably struck a female,
+and tore her all to pieces, and of course he knew that the company would
+expect him to bring home enough for a mess, or a funeral. Spitting on his
+hands he called a brakeman with a transom hook out of the sleeper, to fish
+with, they rolled up their trousers and waded in, after telling a porter
+to bring a blanket to put the pieces in. The brakeman got there first and
+took hold of one foot, when the conductor got hold of the brakeman's coat
+tail and pulled. The passengers turned away sick, expecting to see the
+mangled remains brought to the surface. They pulled, and directly the
+balance of the deceased came up. It was an Irish lady, with a tin pail,
+who had been on the way to take her husband's dinner to him, and
+she stood on one side to let the train pass, and had lost her balance and
+fallen into the mud. As her head came out of the mud, she squirted water
+out of her mouth, kicked the brakeman in the ear and said,
+
+"Lave go of me, I am a dacent woman!"
+
+The conductor asked her if she was hurt.
+
+"Hurted is it," said she, "Ivery bone in my body is kilt intirely, and I
+have lost me tay cup," and she looked in her tin pail in distress.
+
+After vainly trying to get the conductor to wade in and search for her
+"tay cup," she permitted them to assist her into the car, where an old
+doctor from Racine volunteered to examine her to see if she was mortally
+injured. He put his hand on her shoulder and asked her if she was in any
+pain.
+
+"Divil the pain, except the loss of me tay cup," said she, "and kape yer
+owld hands off me, for I am a dacent woman."
+
+She shook herself in the car and got mud all over everybody, and finally
+took her pail and jumped off at a crossing before arriving at the depot.
+As the train came into the depot ten minutes late, and the conductor
+jumped off, all mud from head to foot, as though he had been playing
+spaniel and retrieving a wounded duck, Supt. Atkins looked at his clothes
+and said, "Where in ---- have you been all the time?" The conductor took a
+wisp of straw to wipe himself off, and as he threw it under a car he said
+he had been in the artificial propagation of the human race. In fact he
+had been engaged in the noble work of raising woman to a higher sphere. He
+was allowed to go on probation and wash himself. The brakeman went down
+there the next day and was fishing in the same hole. He said he didn't
+know but there might be more woman in there, but they say he was after the
+"tay cup."
+
+
+NEARLY BROKE UP THE BALL.
+
+A party of well meaning young people from Ripon nearly broke up a dance at
+Hazen's cheese factory, out in the country a spell ago. The people around
+there are quiet, sober country people, who confine themselves in dancing,
+to plain quadrilles and country dances, with an occasional monnie musk, or
+a plain waltz. These young Ripon people are on the dance bigger than a
+wolf, and they have learned all the Boston dips, and Saratoga bends, and
+Newport colic dances, and everything new. There is one dance they have
+learned which is peculiar to say the least. It is a species of waltz, but
+the couple get together so odd that a person who sees it for the first
+time just leans against something and fans himself. When the music strikes
+up a waltz the young man opens his arms and doubles himself up like a boy
+with the cholera infantum, his hind leg cramps and his head lops over on
+one side, and he looks sick, his back humps up like a case of chronic
+inflammatory rheumatism, and he is ready. The girl who is with him, when
+he begins to have spasms, at once seems to go into a trance. Her back gets
+up like a cat, she bends over towards him, her forward leg gets out of
+joint at the knee, her neck takes a cramp, her mouth opens and she lolls,
+her eyes roll like a steer that has turned the yoke, and just before she
+dies she falls into the arms of the deceased and they are ready. For a
+moment they stand and squirm like angle-worms on a hook, and froth at the
+mouth, and look, as they stand there, like a pile driver that has been run
+into by an engine. They teeter up and down a little, and then fly off on a
+tangent, and they flop around in unexpected places among the other
+dancers, jump like a box car, bump against other couples, and at every
+bump they are driven closer together, until they are so near that it does
+seem as though they will have to be pried apart with a handspike;
+they look into each other's eyes as though they would bite, and they keep
+going around till their backs are broke. Well, a party of these kind of
+dancers went to the cheese factory where the country people were gathered,
+and after dancing a few quadrilles, the fiddlers struck up an old
+fashioned waltz. While the visiting dancers were going into spasms to get
+ready to wade in, the floor filled with the country couples, who were
+waltzing around old fashioned, when all of a sudden those Ripon people
+began to work. They flopped across the cheese factory, knocked down a
+couple from Pickett's Corners, caromed on a fellow and his girl from
+Brandon and sent them against a barrel of lemonade, glanced across the
+hall and struck an old lady amidships that had just started to call her
+girl off the floor because she was afraid the girl would catch those Ripon
+cramps, knocked her under a bench, where she lay and called for her
+husband Isaiah, to come and pick her up in a basket. In less than two
+minutes all the other dancers hauled off, and stood on benches and looked
+at them. Some of the country girls hid their heads and said they wanted to
+go home. The visitors slid around the hall, caught each other on the fly,
+run the bases, and come under the wire neck and neck, just as the man who
+played second fiddle fell over the base viol in a dead faint, and the man
+that played the piccalo rolled under the music stand, striken with
+apoplexy. The manager of the dance called a constable who was present, and
+told him to arrest the party, and handcuff them and take them to the
+Oshkosh insane asylum, where they had escaped. The young men explained
+that they were not crazy, and that it was only a new kind of dance, and
+they were reluctantly allowed to remain, on condition that they "wouldn't
+cut up any more of them city monkey shines, not afore folks."
+
+
+SUMMER RESORTING.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE RESORTER.]
+
+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 back 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 lunancy. 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 than 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 stairs 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.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA JOKES HIM.
+
+"What on earth is that you have got on your upper lip?" said the grocery
+man to the bad boy, as he came in and began to peel a rutabaga, and his
+upper lip hung down over his teeth, and was covered with something that
+looked like shoemaker's wax, "You look as though you had been digging
+potatoes with your nose."
+
+"O, that is some of Pa's darn smartness. I asked him if he knew anything
+that would make a boy's moustache grow, and he told me the best thing he
+ever tried was tar, and for me to rub it on thick when I went to bed, and
+wash it off in the morning. I put it on last night, and by gosh I can't
+wash it off. Pa told me all I had to do was to use a scouring brick, and
+it would come off, and I used the brick, and it took the skin off, and the
+tar is there yet, and say, does my lip look very bad?"
+
+The grocery man told him it was the worst looking lip he ever saw, but he
+could cure it by rubbing a little cayenne pepper in the tar. He said the
+tar would neutralize the pepper, and the pepper would loosen the tar, and
+act as a cooling lotion to the lacerated lip. The boy went to a can of
+pepper behind the counter, and stuck his finger in and rubbed a lot of it
+on his lip, and then his hair began to raise, and he began to cry, and
+rushed to the water-pail and ran his face into the water to wash off the
+pepper. The grocery man laughed, and when the boy had got the pepper
+washed off, and had resumed his rutabaga, he said:
+
+"That seals your fate. No man ever trifles with the feelings of the bold
+buccanner of the Spanish main, without living to rue it. I will lay for
+you, old man, and don't you forget it. Pa thought he was smart when he got
+me to put tar on my lip, to bring my moustache out, and to-day he
+lays on a bed of pain, and to-morrow your turn will come. You will regret
+that you did not get down on your knees and beg my pardon. You will be
+sorry that you did not prescribe cold cream for my bruised lip, instead of
+cayenne pepper. Beware, you base twelve ounces to the pound huckster, you
+gimlet-eyed seller of dog sausage, you sanded sugar idiot, you small
+potato three card monte sleight of hand rotten egg fiend, you villain that
+sells smoked sturgeon and dogfish for smoked halibut. The avenger is on
+your track."
+
+"Look here, young man, don't you threaten me, or I will take you by the
+ear and walk you through green fields, and beside still waters to the
+front door and kick your pistol pocket clear around so you can wear it for
+a watch pocket in your vest. No boy can frighten me by crimus. But tell
+me, how did you get even with your Pa?"
+
+"Well, give me a glass of cider and we will be friends and I will tell
+you. Thanks! Gosh, but that cider is made out of mouldy dried apples and
+sewer water," and he took a handful of layer raisins off the top of a box
+to take the taste out of his mouth, and while the grocer charged a peck of
+rutabagas, a gallon of cider and two pounds of raisins to the boy's Pa,
+the boy proceeded:
+
+"You see, Pa likes a joke the best of anybody you ever saw, if it is on
+somebody else, but he kicks like a steer when it is on him. I asked him
+this morning if it wouldn't be a good joke to put some soft soap on the
+front step, so the letter-carrier would slip up and spill hisself, and Pa
+said it would be elegant. Pa is a Democrat, and he thinks that anything
+that will make it unpleasant for Republican office holders, is legitimate,
+and he encouraged me to paralyze the letter-carrier. The letter-carrier is
+as old a man as Pa, and I didn't want to humiliate him, but I just wanted
+Pa to give his consent, so he couldn't kick if he got caught in his own
+trap. You see? Well, this morning the minister and two of the
+deacons called on Pa, to have a talk with him about his actions in church,
+on two or three occasions, when he pulled out the pack of cards with his
+handkerchief, and played the music box, and they had a pretty hot time in
+the back parlor, and finally they settled it, and were going to sing a
+hymn, when Pa handed them a little hymn book, and the minister opened it
+and turned pale and said, 'what's this?' and they looked at it, and it was
+a book of Hoyle's games instead of a hymn book. Gosh, wasn't the minister
+mad! He had started to read a hymn and he quit after he had read two lines
+where it said, 'In a game of four-handed euchre, never trump your
+partner's ace, but rely on the ace to take the trick on suit.' Pa was
+trying to explain how the book came to be there, when the minister and the
+deacons started out, and then I poured the two quart tin pail full of soft
+soap on the front step. It was this white soap, just the color of the
+step, and when I got it spread I went down in the basement. The visitors
+came out and Pa was trying to explain to them, about Hoyle, when one of
+the deacons stepped on the soap and his feet flew up and he struck on his
+pants and slid down the steps. The minister said 'great heavens, deacon,
+are you hurt? let me assist you,' and he took two quick steps, and you
+have seen these fellows in a nigger show that kick each other head over
+heels and fall on their ears, and stand on their heads and turn around
+like a top. The minister's feet slipped and the next I saw he was standing
+on his head in his hat, and his legs were sort of wilted and fell limp by
+his side, and he fell over on his stomach. You talk about spreading the
+gospel in heathen lands. It is nothing to the way you can spread it with
+two quarts of soft soap. The minister didn't look pious a bit, when he was
+trying to catch the railing he looked as though he wanted to
+murder every man on earth, but it may be he was tired.
+
+"Well, Pa he was paralyzed, and he and the other deacon rushed out to pick
+up the minister and the first old man, and when they struck the steps they
+went kiting. Pa's feet somehow slipped backwards, and he turned a
+summersault and struck full length on his back, and one heel was across
+the minister's neck, and he slid down the steps, and the other deacon fell
+all over the other three, and Pa swore at them, and it was the worst
+looking lot of pious people I ever saw. I think if the minister had been
+in the woods somewhere, where nobody could have heard him, he would have
+used language. They all seemed mad at each other. The hired girl told Ma
+there was three tramps out on the sidewalk fighting Pa, and Ma she took
+the broom and started to help Pa, and I tried to stop Ma, 'cause her
+constitution is not very strong and I didn't want her to do any flying
+trapeze business, but I couldn't stop her, and she went out with the broom
+and a towel tied around her head. Well, I don't know where Ma did strike,
+but when she came in she said she had palpitation of the heart, but that
+was not the place where she put the arnica. O, but she _did_ go through
+the air like a bullet through cheese, and when she went down the steps
+a-bumpity-bump, I felt sorry for Ma. The minister had got so he could set
+up on the sidewalk, with his back against the lower step, when Ma came
+sliding down, and one of the heels of her gaiters hit the minister in the
+hair, and the other foot went right through between his arm and his side,
+and the broom liked to pushed his teeth down his throat. But he was not
+mad at Ma. As soon as he see it was Ma he said, 'Why, sister, the wicked
+stand in slippery places, don't they?' and Ma she was mad and said for him
+to let go her stocking, and then Pa was mad and he said, 'look-a-here you
+sky-pilot, this thing has gone far enough,' and then a policeman
+came along and first he thought they were all drunk, but he found they
+were respectable, and he got a chip and scraped the soap off of them, and
+they went home, and Pa and Ma they got in the house some way, and just
+then the letter-carrier came along, but he didn't have any letters for us,
+and he didn't come onto the steps, and then I went up stairs and I said,
+'Pa, don't you think it is real mean, after you and I fixed the soap on
+the steps for the letter-carrier, he didn't come on the step at all,' and
+Pa was scraping the soap off his pants with a piece of shingle, and the
+hired girl was putting liniment on Ma, and heating it in for palpitation
+of the heart, and Pa said, 'You dam idjut, no more of this, or I'll maul
+the liver out of you,' and I asked him if he didn't think soft soap would
+help a moustache to grow, and he picked up Ma's work-basket and threw it
+at my head, as I went down stairs, and I came over here. Don't you think
+my Pa is unreasonable to get mad at a little joke that he planned
+himself?"
+
+The grocery man said he didn't know, and the boy went out with a pair of
+skates over his shoulder, and the grocery man is wondering what joke the
+boy will play on him to get even for the cayenne pepper.
+
+
+GATHERED WAISTS!
+
+Andrews' _Bazar_ says: "Gathered waists are very much worn." If the men
+would gather the waists carefully 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.
+
+
+CHURCH KENO.
+
+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
+nineteen 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!_"
+
+[Illustration: "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 taking advice from pious looking traveling men.
+They call her "Little Keno" now.
+
+
+THE OLD SWEET SONGS.
+
+A Boston girl sings: "What is home without a mother," while the old lady
+is mending her daughter's stockings. There is something sweet about those
+old songs.
+
+
+FAILURE OF A SOLID INSTITUTION.
+
+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 thing 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 knew how baked beans ought to be cooked from years of
+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.
+
+
+REGISTRY OF ELECTORS.
+
+The registry law has proved a conspicuous failure, inasmuch as it has
+taken ten years of persistent efforts by its use to make a change in the
+admistration. I would suggest that you amend the registry law by providing
+that all qualified voters have their ears punched, immediately after
+voting, by the inspectors of elections, the same as conductors punch
+tickets. This method will obviate the difficulties heretofore experienced,
+and check illegal voting and prevent repeating.
+
+
+ABOUT HELL.
+
+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 the 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.
+
+
+PREPARING FOR WAR.
+
+The _Sun_ is no alarmist, but it can see in recent events what it believes
+to be a preparation for war. All of the manufactories of fire arms and
+cartridges are working night and day, and the Oneida community have just
+received an order to immediately can 24,000 cans of baked beans. When the
+war will break out we do not know, but all this fixed amunition is not
+being fixed for no 4th of July. It is trouble.
+
+
+A TONY SLAUGHTER HOUSE.
+
+A Milwaukee paper copies what THE SUN said about killing hogs while under
+the influence of chloroform, at Keine & Wilson's packing house, and
+intimates that it is all a lie. Have we lived to this age to have our word
+doubted by a Milwaukee editor? This is too much. Why, bless the dear man,
+the half has not been told. The firm we speak of is desirous of building
+up a trade for gilt edged pork and hams, so every improvement known to the
+trade is inaugurated. We did not think it necessary to describe the whole
+process, but now that our word is doubted, it is necessary to do so. When
+the late lamented hog is transferred from the parlor where he was
+chloroformed, his body is gently, yet firmly placed in a gold lined tank,
+filled with boiling Florida water and cologne, where the body remains
+until the bristles become loose, when it is transferred to a table covered
+with purple velvet, and the bristles are removed by the gentlemanly
+ushers, dressed in the fashions of the time of George III, armed with gold
+candle sticks, studded with diamonds. Then the body is taken by easy
+stages, into the presence of the intestine transporter, who reclines upon
+a downy couch. He raises up, brushes a particle of dust from his sleeve,
+and with a silver knife cuts the hog from Dan to Beersheba, and the patent
+insides are received on a silver salver, and divided among attendant
+maidens. The inside of the hog is washed with bay rum, and sweet majorum
+is put in. Then the hog is removed and cut up. The portions salted are
+salted for keeps, and the hams and bacon are smoked in a room filled with
+incense, and when the smoked meat comes out it is good enough for a king,
+or a queen, or a Milwaukee editor. Lie, indeed! We should like to see
+ourselves lying for one hog.
+
+
+AN ARM THAT IS NOT RELIABLE.
+
+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
+bald-headed 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 but
+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 eight? You are
+silent, you cannot answer, enough?"
+
+[Illustration: "IT IS F-F-FOUR SIZES TOO B-B-BIG."]
+
+They instinctively found their way to the sofa; mutual explanation
+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 BOY AND THE GOAT.
+
+A man on King Street gave a boy a goat the other day, and he tied a rope
+around its neck to lead it home. The boy wanted to go through the gate,
+but as the goat concluded to jump over the fence and pull the boy through
+between the pickets, he let the goat have its own way. The boy got through
+the fence in instalments, leaving his shirt collar and one pants leg on
+the pickets, the goat dragged him out into the middle of the street, and
+then there occurred a sanguinary encounter to see whether the boy or the
+goat should boss the moving. At one time the spectators thought the goat
+would take the boy home. The animal used the boy for a cultivator, and
+they tore up the street like hands working on the road, till the goat
+slipped the rope over his head, and then the boy gathered himself up by
+the armful, and went and told his mother that he got his rope back anyway.
+She combed him with a piece of barrel.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GETS MAD!
+
+"I was down to the drug store this morning and saw your Ma buying a lot of
+court-plaster, enough to make a shirt I should think. What's she doing
+with so much court-plaster?" asked the grocery man of the bad boy, as he
+came in and pulled off his boots by the stove and emptied out a lot of
+snow that had collected as he walked through a drift, which melted and
+made a bad smell.
+
+"O, I guess she was going to patch Pa up so he will hold water. Pa's
+temper got him into the worst muss you ever see, last night. If that
+museum was here now they would hire Pa and exhibit him as the tattooed
+man. I tell you, I have got too old to be mauled as though I was a kid,
+and any man who attacks me from this out, wants to have his peace made
+with the insurance companies, and know that his calling and election is
+sure, because I am a bad man and don't you forget it." And the boy pulled
+on his boots and looked so cross and desperate that the grocer-man asked
+him if he wouldn't try a little new cider.
+
+"Good heavens!" said the grocery man, as the boy swallowed the cider, and
+his face resumed its natural look, and the piratical frown disappeared
+with the cider. "You have not stabbed your father have you? I have feared
+that one thing would bring on another, with you, and that you would yet be
+hung."
+
+"Naw, I haven't stabbed him. It was another cat that stabbed him. You see,
+Pa wants me to do all the work around the house. The other day he bought a
+load of kindling wood, and told me to carry it into the basement. I had
+not been educated up to kindling wood, and I didn't do it. When supper
+time came, and Pa found that I had not carried in the kindling wood, he
+had a hot box, and told me if that wood was not in when he came
+back from the lodge, that he would warm my jacket. Well, I tried to hire
+some one to carry it in, and got a man to promise to come in the morning
+and carry it in and take his pay in groceries, and I was going to buy the
+groceries here and have them charged to Pa. But that wouldn't help me out
+that night. I knew when Pa came home he would search for me. So I slept in
+the back hall on a cot. But I didn't want Pa to have all his trouble for
+nothing, so I borrowed an old torn cat that my chum's old maid aunt owns,
+and put the cat in my bed. I thought if Pa came into my room after me, and
+found that by his unkindness I had changed to a torn cat, he would be
+sorry. That is the biggest cat you ever see, and the worst fighter in our
+ward. It isn't afraid of anything, and can whip a New Foundland dog
+quicker than you could put sand in a barrel of sugar. Well, about eleven
+o'clock I heard Pa tumbing over the kindling wood, and I knew by the
+remark he made as the wood slid around under him, that there was going to
+be a cat fight real quick. He came up to Ma's room, and sounded Ma as to
+whether Hennery had retired to his virtuous couch. Pa is awful sarcastic
+when he tries to be. I could hear him take off his clothes, and hear him
+say, as he picked up a trunk strap, 'I guess I will go up to his room and
+watch the smile on his face, as he dreams of angels. I yearn to press him
+to my aching bosom.' I thought to myself, mebbe you won't yearn so much
+directly. He come up stairs, and I could hear him breathing hard. I looked
+around the corner and could see he just had on his shirt and pants, and
+his suspenders were hanging down, and his bald head shown like a calcium
+light just before it explodes. Pa went into my room, and up to the bed,
+and I could hear him say, 'Come out here and bring in that kindling wood
+or I will start a fire on your base burner with this strap.' And then
+there was a yowling such as I never heard before, and Pa said,
+'Helen Blazes,' and the furniture in my room began to fall around and
+break. O, _my_! I think Pa took the torn cat right by the neck, the way he
+does me, and that left the cat's feet free to get in their work. By the
+way the cat squawled as though it was being choked I know Pa had him by
+the neck. I suppose the cat thought Pa was a whole flock of New Foundland
+dogs, and the cat had a record on dogs, and it kicked awful. Pa's shirt
+was no protection at all in a cat fight, and the cat just walked all
+around Pa's stomach, and Pa yelled 'police,' and 'fire,' and 'turn on the
+hose,' and he called Ma, and the cat yowled. If Pa had had presence of
+mind enough to have dropped the cat, or rolled it up in the mattrass, it
+would have been all right, but a man always gets rattled in time of
+danger, and he held on to the cat and started down stairs yelling murder,
+and he met Ma coming up.
+
+"I guess Ma's night cap or something frightened the cat more, cause he
+stabbed Ma on the night-shirt with one hind foot, and Ma said 'mercy on
+us,' and she went back, and Pa stumbled on a hand-sled that was on the
+stairs, and they all fell down, and the cat got away and went down in the
+coal bin and yowled all night. Pa and Ma went into their room, and I guess
+they annointed themselves with vasaline, and Pond's extract, and I went
+and got into my bed, cause it was cold out in the hall, and the cat had
+warmed my bed as well as it had warmed Pa. It was all I could do to go to
+sleep, with Pa and Ma talking all night, and this morning I came down the
+back stairs, and haven't been to breakfast, cause I don't want to see Pa
+when he is vexed. You let the man that carries in the kindling wood have
+six shillings worth of groceries, and charge them to Pa. I have passed the
+kindling wood period in a boy's life, and have arrived at the coal period.
+I will carry in coal, but I draw the line at kindling wood."
+
+"Well, you are a cruel, bad boy," said the grocery man, as he
+went to the book and charged the six shillings.
+
+"O, I don't know. I think Pa is cruel. A man who will take a poor kitty by
+the neck, that hasn't done any harm, and tries to chastise the poor thing
+with a trunk strap, ought to be looked after by the humane society. And if
+it is cruel to take a cat by the neck, how much more cruel is it to take a
+boy by the neck, that had diphtheria only a few years ago, and whose
+throat is tender? Say, I guess I will accept your invitation to take
+breakfast with you," and the boy cut off a piece of bologna and helped
+himself to the crackers, and while the grocery man was out shoveling off
+the snow from the sidewalk, the boy filled his pockets with raisins and
+loaf sugar, and then went out to watch the man carry in his kindling wood.
+
+
+SPURIOUS TRIPE.
+
+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.
+
+
+"CASH."
+
+On circus day W.H.H. Cash, the great railroad monopolist of New Lisbon,
+was in the city. He had just made a few hundred thousand dollars on a
+railroad contract, and he decided to expend large sums of money in buying
+dry goods. He went into one of our stores and was passing along up the
+floor, when a black-eyed girl with a dimple in her chin, pearly teeth, red
+pouting lips, who was behind the counter, shouted, "_cash, here!_" Mr.
+Cash turned to her, a smile illuminating his face as big as a horse
+collar. He is one of the most modest men in the world, and as he extended
+his great big horny hand to the girl, a blush covered his face, and the
+perspiration stood in great beads on his forehead. "How do yeu dew?" said
+Cash, as she seemed to shrink back in a frightened manner. They gazed at
+each other a moment, in astonishment, when another girl, perhaps a little
+better looking, further on, said, "Here, Cash, quick!" He at once made up
+his mind that she was the one that had spoken to him the first time, so he
+said, "Beg your pardon, miss," to the black-eyed girl, and went on to
+where the other girl was wrapping up a corset in a base ball undershirt.
+As he approached her she smiled, supposing he wanted to buy something. He
+thought she knew him, and he sat down on a stool and put out his hand and
+said, "How have you been?" She didn't seem to shake very much, but asked
+him if there was anything she could show him. He thought may be it was
+against the rules for the clerks to speak to anybody, unless they were
+buying something, so he said, "Yes, of course. Show me corsets, stockings,
+anything, gaul dumbed if I care what." She was just beginning to look upon
+him as though she thought he had escaped, when a little blonde on the
+other side of the store, as sweet as honey, shouted, "Cash, Cash, I need
+thee every hour. Come a running." To say that Cash was astonished, is
+drawing it mild. He knew that they all wanted him, but he couldn't make
+out how they seemed to know his name. He looked at the little blonde a
+minute, trying to think where he had met her, when he decided to go over
+and ask her. On the way over he thought she resembled a girl that used to
+live in Portage. He went up to her, and with a smile that was childlike
+and bland, he said, "Why, how are you, Samantha?" The little blonde looked
+daggers at him. "Didn't you use to wait on tables there at the Fox House,
+at Portage?" The girl picked up a roll of paper cambric, and was about to
+brain him, when the floor walker came along, and asked what was the
+matter. Cash explained that since he came into the store, three or four
+girls had yelled to him, and he couldn't place them. "There," says he, as
+another girl yelled "Cash," "there's another of 'em wants me," and he was
+going to where she was, when the floor walker asked him if his name was
+Cash. "You bet your liver it is," said Cash. It was then explained to him
+that the girls were calling cash boys. He thought it over a minute and
+said, "Sold, by the great baldheaded Elijah. Won't you go down and take
+something? Invite all of them. The girls can take soda. I'll be gaul
+blasted if I ever had such a rig played on me." And he went out into the
+glare of the sunlight, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and just
+then the circus procession came along, and he followed off the elephants.
+There are lots of worse men than Cash.
+
+
+TO WHAT VILE USES MAY WE COME.
+
+A dispatch from Chicago, says that three men were shot on "a boat used for
+the vilest purposes." We never knew that the newspapers were printed on
+boats there in Chicago.
+
+
+THE ADVENT PREACHER AND THE BALLOON.
+
+There occasionally occurs an accident 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."
+
+[Illustration: "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 of 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 had not gone to heaven and opened a
+brewery.
+
+Of course we who are intelligent, and 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.
+
+
+MR. PECK'S SUNDAY LECTURE.
+
+The papers all around here are saying that I have a new Sunday Lecture,
+with a bad title. The way of it was this. A man in a neighboring city
+telegraphed me to know if I would deliver a "Sunday Lecture," and telling
+me to choose my subject, and answer by telegraph. I thought it was some
+joke of the boys. The idea of me delivering a Sunday lecture was
+ridiculous, so, in a moment of thoughtlessness I telegraphed back, "What
+in the d---- do you take me for?" I supposed that that would be enough to
+inform the man that I was not in the business. What do you suppose he did?
+He telegraphed back to me as follows: "All right. We have advertised you
+for Sunday. Subject, 'What the d---- do you take me for.'" You can judge
+something of my surprise and indignation.
+
+That is how it was.
+
+
+RELIGION AND FISH.
+
+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 the way they should go are
+broken into by a deacon with his nose peeled coining 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.
+
+
+THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK.
+
+When you see an article in the editorial columns of a paper headed, "The
+Political Outlook," look at the bottom line, and if it says "sold by all
+druggists," don't read it. There is such an article going the rounds,
+which is an advertisement of a patent medicine. It is a counterfeit well
+calculated to deceive. Don't read a political article unless the owner's
+name is blown in the bottle.
+
+
+ROPE LADDERS.
+
+The law to compel hotel keepers to provide rope ladders for every room
+above the second floor, is said not to be enforced, though it should be by
+all means. The law ought to be amended so as to compel guests to get up
+once or twice during the night and run up or down the rope ladder, outside
+the window, in their night clothes, so as to be in practice in case of
+fire. When every room is provided with rope ladders there will be lots of
+fun. Those men who invariably blow out the gas, will probably think they
+have got to come down stairs on the rope ladder in the morning, and it
+will take an extra clerk to stand in the alleys around a hotel, with a
+shot gun, to keep impecunious guests from going away from the tavern via
+rope ladder. And then imagine an Oshkosh man in a Milwaukee hotel, his
+head full of big schemes, and his skin full of beer. He has been on a
+"bum," and is nervous, and on being shown to his room he sees the rope
+ladder coiled up under the window, ready to spring upon him. He stares at
+it, and the cold sweat stands all over him. The rope ladder returns his
+gaze, and seems to move and to crawl towards his feet. For a moment he is
+powerless to move. His hair stands on end, his heart ceases to beat, cold
+and warm chills follow each other down his trousers legs and he clutches
+at the air, his eyes start from their sockets, and just as the rope ladder
+is about to wind around him, and crush his life out, he regains strength
+enough to rush down stairs head over appetite, and tell the clerk about
+the menagerie up stairs. O, there is going to be fun with these rope
+ladders, sure.
+
+
+A DOCTOR OF LAWS.
+
+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 plaster 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.
+
+
+COMFORTING COMPENSATIONS.
+
+If a farmer's wheat is killed by rain, he is consoled by the fact that
+rain is just what his corn needs. If his cattle die of disease, his
+consolation lies in the hope that pork will bring a good price. If boys
+steal his watermelons, he knows by experience that they will have the
+cholera morbus. So everything that is unpleasant has its compensation.
+
+
+LAY UP APPLES IN HEAVEN.
+
+[Illustration: NO MORE APPLES FOR THE MINISTER.]
+
+They tell a good story at Portage City, at the expense of Senator Barden,
+or a minister, we don't know which. Barden had a lot of apples sent him
+last fall, and he was anxious to sell them, before winter set in. One day
+he thought of a new minister that had settled in Portage, so he made up
+his mind to take him up a couple of barrels, supposing that when he went
+to heaven and saw the big ledger opened, there would be a credit about as
+follows:
+
+                  L.W. BARDEN,
+                      in acc't with Providence,
+
+        1876.
+    Oct. 21. By two bbls. apples, @ $3    $6.00
+     "    "  "  drayage                     .30
+                                          -----
+                              Total       $6.30
+
+Barden loaded them on a dray, and got on it, with his pants in
+his boots, and went up to deliver them himself. He stopped at the
+minister's gate, and hurried the apples off and rolled them inside the
+gate, and tried to get away before the minister had time to thank him.
+Just as he was about to drive away the door opened and the man of God came
+out, and says he:
+
+"Look here! You put them apples in the cellar!"
+
+Barden told him he was in something of a hurry, and really he could not
+spare the time. The minister raised his voice to a sort of "auction
+pitch," and said:
+
+"Here, now. You don't know your business, Mr. Drayman. You roll them
+apples into the cellar, or I won't accept them."
+
+The senator was by this time as mad as senators usually get. He jumped off
+the dray, threw the two barrels of apples on, and drove off, saying he
+didn't care a continental dam if the minister eat dried apples all winter.
+And he took them back to his store, and it is safe to say that he will not
+give many more apples to that minister.
+
+MORAL:--Never despise a man because he wears a ragged coat, for he may be
+a senatorial granger angel in the disguise of a drayman. And you may have
+to fill up on turnips instead of apples.
+
+
+ONE OF BEECHER'S CONVERTS.
+
+Since Beecher, the great revivalist, was here, and spoke so eloquently on
+the fall of man, and the need of making arrangements for the future, I
+have become a changed man. It hurts me to lie now, and when anything
+hurts, then I quit. It is wrong to lie, and a man who follows it up will
+come to some bad end.
+
+
+BUYING A STONE CRUSHER.
+
+The proceedings of the council of the city of Milwaukee shows that the
+aldermen are about to buy a stone crusher, to be run by steam, for the
+purpose of crushing stones to be used on the streets. If the city has
+never indulged in the luxury of a stone crusher, it should interview some
+city that has owned one, before it closes a contract with any party that
+wants to sell one. Every party that owns one does want to sell it.
+Statistics show that. The first city in Wisconsin that bought one was
+Madison. The city owned it for a year or two, and after that no man that
+was in the council when it was bought could ever get in it again. The
+mayor that winked at the purchase of the stone crusher was defeated, and
+there was trouble. No person would ever say what was the matter, but you
+say "stone crusher" to a citizen of Madison, and he would reach his right
+hand around to his pistol pocket, and the conversation would cease.
+
+La Crosse heard that Madison had a stone crusher, and so she wanted one.
+La Crosse is bound to have anything that any other town has, whether it is
+a railroad, an insane asylum, or a speckled hen. La Crosse could have
+bought Madison's stone crusher at a discount, but she wanted one new, with
+the paint all on, fresh. Second-hand stone crusher? Not any for La Crosse.
+So the city ordered a brand new one, right from the mint, at an expense of
+about $5,000.
+
+The idea was that it would be about as big as a straw cutter, or a job
+press, and people were anxious to see it work.
+
+Finally the city was notified that one train of cars loaded with the stone
+crusher had arrived, with red flags on, betokening extra trains running
+wild behind, and the city was told to come down to the depot and pay the
+first installment of freight, and take the stone crusher away--that part
+of it that had arrived. The aldermen went down and took an
+inventory of the hardware, and some of them went and jumped in the river.
+At a cent a pound one can buy a good deal of cast iron for five thousand
+dollars. The city bonded itself, and paid the freight, and during the
+spring all of the trains loaded with the stone crusher arrived. It was
+argued that the only way to get the stone crusher up to the city building
+would be to give the railroad the right of way up town, right through Main
+street.
+
+Some were in favor of letting the railroad company keep it for freight,
+but the company threatened to get out an injunction on the city. Finally a
+man who took contracts to move brick buildings agreed to move it up town
+on shares, and during the summer the most of it was got up there and
+corded up on some vacant lots. If all the cast iron in it came out of one
+mine it must have been an immense mine. People would look at it and weep.
+Every alderman swore he voted against buying it. Occasionally some one in
+the council would suggest that the stone crusher be taken out to the
+bluffs, a couple of miles, and set to work, when another one would move,
+to amend by inserting a clause that the bluffs be moved into the city to
+be crushed, as it would save expense. Then the matter would drop. For
+three years that stone crusher stood there, and it never crushed a pebble.
+New mayors and aldermen were elected, and every day they passed that
+crusher, but they never spoke to it. Finally a job was put up to get rid
+of it. There was a man there who owned a stone quarry, and it occurred to
+somebody to sell it to him. He was a truly good man, and did not believe
+there were any bad men in the world, who would kanoodle him with a stone
+crusher. A committee was appointed to sell it to him. The committee was
+composed of men who had traded horses, sold lightning rods, and been
+insurance agents, and when they told the poor man that the city had
+noticed that he was a deserving man, that they had decided to
+help him along, and would sell him that stone crusher, and he could pay
+for it in crushed stone, and the city would pay him in cash half a dollar
+more than the stone was worth, he said he would take it. They got it on to
+him by buying crushed stone of him and paying cash for it.
+
+We have never heard whether the man lived or not, and have never heard
+whether the city bought any stone of him, but the city got rid of it, and
+then had a celebration. Why, they figured it up, and the thing could crush
+enough stone in twenty-four hours to pave the streets a foot thick all
+over town and thirteen miles in the country. To run it a week would
+bankrupt the State of Wisconsin, It could go up to the stone quarry and
+tunnel a hole right through the hill. It was the biggest elephant that
+ever a city drew in a legalized lottery. Milwaukee will make money if she
+does not buy a stone crusher, not as long as it can buy stone in the
+rough, and have it crushed by tramps, at nothing a day.
+
+
+MERRIE CHRISTMAS.
+
+What proportion of the people who wish each other merry Christmas, do you
+suppose think of the reason that the day is a holiday? Not one in a
+thousand. Do the young fellows who put on a clean shirt and go down town
+and play pool all day, and drink yellow stuff out of a shaving cup, and
+get chalk on their fingers, and eat liver sausage, think that Christ died
+to save them? No! All they think of is the prospect of sticking some other
+fellow for the game. Do the hundreds of thousands of people who get up a
+big feed, and gormandize, think of Christ, or the poor all about them who
+have little to eat to-day, and little prospect of more to eat to-morrow?
+Many of them do not think of the poor, or of anything else except to
+prospect upon how much they will hold and not get sick.
+
+
+THE DIFFERENCE IN HORSES.
+
+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 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 someone 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 the
+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.
+
+
+BASE INGRATITUDE.
+
+I remember once of offering a lady from Eau Claire a slice of bread and a
+half of a red onion in a railroad car. She looked hungry, and yet she said
+she didn't care to eat. Thinking she had a delicacy about accepting food
+at the hands of one who was almost a stranger to her, I turned the bread
+and onion into her lap, and said she was entirely welcome to it. What did
+she do? Instead of eating it, and thanking me, she threw it out of the
+window, and went and sat by the stove. I was never so offended in my life.
+That woman may see the time she will want that onion, and I would see her
+almost perish of starvation before she could have any more of my onion.
+
+
+THE DIFFERENCE.
+
+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
+meningitis; 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 whiskey 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?
+
+
+THOSE STEP LADDERS!
+
+There has got to be a law passed to punish the hardware dealers for
+selling those step ladders that shut up like a jack-knife. A Ninth Street
+woman got onto one the other afternoon when it looked as though there was
+going to be a frost, to take her ivies down and carry them in the house.
+We don't care how handsome a woman is naturally, you put a towel around
+her head and put her up on a step ladder about seven feet high, with a
+tomahawk in her left hand, trying to draw a big nail out of a post on a
+veranda, and she looks like thunder. This woman did. Her husband tried to
+get her to let him do the work, but she said a man never knew how to do
+anything, anyway. So he sat down on the steps to see how it would turn
+out. She said afterwards that he kicked the ladder, but however that may
+be, there was an earthquake, and when he looked up the air was filled with
+calico, toweling, striped stockings, polonaise, trailing arbutus, red
+petticoats, store hair and step ladder. He said the step ladder struck the
+veranda last, but as he picked her off of it, it seemed as though it must
+have lit first. He said the step ladder must have kicked up. In coming
+down she run one leg through the baby wagon, and the other through some
+flower pots, and a boy who was passing along said he guess she had been to
+the turning school.
+
+
+WONDERS OF THE STAGE.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: BEHIND THE SCENES.]
+
+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.
+
+
+HOW FARMERS MAY GET RICH.
+
+The artificial propagation of fish has attracted much attention of late
+years, and the success of experiments has shown that every farmer that has
+a stream of water on his land can raise fish enough to get rich in five
+years, four months and twenty-one days.
+
+
+A CASE OF PARALYSIS.
+
+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 small pox. O, we suppose they have more fun in some of these
+country towns than you can shake a stick at.
+
+
+WE WILL CELEBRATE.
+
+With so many new holidays, and so many new people, it is hardly to be
+wondered at that the day of all days, the day that should be dearest to
+the heart of every American, is in danger of being passed over in silence,
+and were it not for the fire cracker, that begins to get in its work about
+the first of June, in many instances this Anniversary of American
+Independence would be passed without the customary mouth shootzen-fest
+from alleged orators, but when the small boy begins to stir around and
+clandestinely look down the muzzle of the always loaded fire cracker, the
+patriotism of the boys still begins to assert itself, the old man's eyes
+begin to snap, and he talks to his neighbor about how they used to
+celebrate when he was a boy, the stuff begins to work over the
+neighborhood, the village catches it, the country begins.
+
+
+DOGS AND HUMAN BEINGS!
+
+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
+girl's 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.
+
+
+AN ODOROUS BOHEMIAN.
+
+A Bohemian on the train last night had some cheese in his vest pocket that
+was too ripe, and the conductor had to disinfect the car, and order the
+Bohemian to be quarantined before the train would be allowed to enter the
+city. Cheese is all right in its place, but it don't want to be allowed to
+lay above ground too long after it has departed this life. If farmers will
+pay a little attention to cheese in its different stages, much trouble can
+be avoided. In union there is strength. So there is in a smoking car.
+
+
+TRAGEDY ON THE STAGE.
+
+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 drowned 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 unrequitted 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.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN MCCULLOUGH KILLING A TEXAS STEER.]
+
+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.
+
+
+GRANITE HEAD CHEESE.
+
+A few years ago there was some excitement at Grand Rapids over the
+discovery of a bed or quarry of granite. Some of it was taken out, from
+the top of the quarry, and polished, and proved to be as fine as any that
+is imported. Further working of the quarry, however, has developed a
+strange thing. The further they go down the softer it is, and it has been
+learned that the quarry is all head cheese, such as is sold by butchers.
+On top it is petrified, and polishes very nicely, but a little below it is
+nice and fresh, and can be cut out with a knife, all ready for the table.
+A friend in Milwaukee, who has an uncle living at Grand Rapids, has
+furnished us with a quantity of it, some of which we have eaten, and were
+it not for the fact that we know it came from the quarry, it would be hard
+to convince us that it was not concocted out of the remains of a butcher
+shop. The people up there talk of running Hon. J.N. Brundage for Congress,
+on the head cheese ticket, in order that he may use his influence to get
+head cheese adopted as an army ration, and also as currency with which to
+wipe out the national debt.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA AN INVENTOR.
+
+"Ha! Ha! Now I have got you," said the grocery man to the had boy, the
+other morning, as he came in and jumped upon the counter and tied the end
+of a ball of twine to the tail of a dog, and "sicked" the dog on another
+dog that was following a passing sleigh, causing the twine to pay out
+until the whole ball was scattered along the block. "Condemn you, I've a
+notion to choke the liver out of you. Who tied that twine to the dog's
+tail?"
+
+The boy choked up with emotion, and the tears came into his eyes, and he
+said he didn't know anything about the twine or the dog. He said he
+noticed the dog come in, and wag his tail around the twine, but he
+supposed the dog was a friend of the family, and did not disturb him.
+"Everybody lays everything that is done to me," said the boy, as he put
+his handkerchief to his nose, "and, they will be sorry for it when I die.
+I have a good notion to poison myself by eating some of your glucose
+sugar."
+
+"Yes, and you do about everything that is mean. The other day a lady came
+in and told me to send up to her house, some of my country sausage, done
+up in muslin bags, and while she was examining it she noticed something
+hard inside the bags, and asked me what it was, and I opened it, and I
+hope to die if there wasn't a little brass padlock and a piece of red
+morocco dog collar imbedded in the sausage. Now how do you suppose that
+got in there?" and the grocery man looked savage.
+
+The boy looked interested, and put on an expression as though in deep
+thought, and finally said, "I suppose the farmer that put up the sausage
+did not strain the dog meat. Sausage meat ought to be strained."
+
+The grocery man pulled in about half a block of twine, after the
+dog had run against a fence and broke it, and told the boy he knew
+perfectly well how the brass padlock came to be in the sausage, but
+thinking it was safer to have the good will of the boy than the ill will,
+he offered him a handful of prunes.
+
+"No," said the boy, "I have swore off on mouldy prunes. I am no
+kinder-garden any more. For years I have eaten rotten peaches around this
+store, and everything you couldn't sell, but I have turned over a new leaf
+now, and after this nothing is too good for me. Since Pa has got to be an
+inventor, we are going to live high."
+
+"What's your Pa invented? I saw a hearse and three hacks go up on your
+street the other day and I thought may be you had killed your Pa."
+
+"Not much. There will be more than three hacks when I kill Pa, and don't
+you forget it. Well, sir, Pa has struck a fortune, if he can make the
+thing work. He has got an idea about coal stoves that will bring him
+several million dollars, if he gets a royalty of five dollars on every
+cook stove in the world. His idea is to have a coal stove on castors with
+the pipe made to telescope out and in, and rubber hose for one joint, so
+you can pull the stove all around the room and warm any particular place.
+Well, sir, to hear Pa tell about it, you would think it would
+revolutionize the country, and maybe it will when he gets it perfected,
+but he came near burning the house up, and scared us half to death this
+morning, and burned his shirt off, and he is all covered with cotton with
+sweet oil on, and he smells like salad dressing.
+
+"You see Pa had a pipe made and some castors put on our coal stove, and he
+tied a rope to the hearth of the stove, and had me put in some kindling
+wood and coal last night, so he could draw the stove up to the bed and
+light the fire without getting up. Ma told him he would put his foot in
+it, and he told her to dry up, and let him run the stove
+business. He said it took a man with brain to run a patent right, and Ma
+she pulled the clothes over her head and let Pa do the fire act. She has
+been building the fires for twenty years, and thought she would let Pa see
+how good it was. Well, Pa pulled the stove to the bed, and touched off the
+kindling wood. I guess maybe I got a bundle of kindling wood that the
+hired girl had put kerosene on, cause it blazed up awful and smoked, and
+the blaze bursted out the doors and windows of the stove, and Pa yelled
+fire, and I jumped out of bed and rushed in and he was the scartest man
+you ever see, and you'd a dide to see how he kicked when I threw a pail of
+water on his legs and put his shirt out. Ma did not get burned, but she
+was pretty wet, and she told Pa she would pay five dollars royalty on that
+stove and take the castors off and let it remain stationary. Pa says he
+will make it work if he burns the house down. I think it was real mean in
+Pa to get mad at me because I threw cold water on him instead of warm
+water, to put his shirt out. If I had waited till I could heat water to
+the right temperature I would have been an orphan and Pa would have been a
+burnt offering. But some men always kick at everything. Pa has given up
+business entirely and says he shall devote the remainder of his life
+curing himself of the different troubles that I get him into. He has
+retained a doctor by the year, and he buys liniment by the gallon.
+
+"What was it about your folks getting up in the middle of the night to
+eat? The hired girl was over here after some soap the other morning, and
+she said she was going to leave your house."
+
+"Well, that was a picnic. Pa said he wanted breakfast earlier than we was
+in the habit of having it, and he said I might see to it that the house
+was awake early enough. The other night I awoke with the awfulest pain you
+ever heard of. It was that night that you give me and my chum the
+bottle of pickled oysters that had begun to work. Well, I could't sleep,
+and I thought I would call the hired girls, and they got up and got
+breakfast to going, and then I rapped on Pa's and Ma's door and told them
+the breakfast was getting cold, and they got up and came down. We ate
+breakfast by gas light, and Pa yawned and said it made a man feel good to
+get up and get ready for work before daylight, the way he used to on the
+farm, and Ma she yawned and agreed with Pa, 'cause she has to, or have a
+row. After breakfast we sat around for an hour, and Pa said it was a long
+time getting daylight, and bimeby Pa looked at his watch. When he began to
+pull out his watch I lit out and hid in the storeroom, and pretty soon I
+heard Pa and Ma come up stairs and go to bed, and then the hired girls,
+they went to bed, and when it was all still, and the pain had stopped
+inside of my clothes, I went to bed, and I looked to see what time it was
+and it was two o'clock in the morning. We got dinner at eight o'clock in
+the morning, and Pa said he guessed he would call up the house after this,
+so I have lost another job, and it was all on account of that bottle of
+pickled oysters you gave me. My chum says he had colic too, but he didn't
+call up his folks. It was all he could do to get up himself. Why don't you
+give away something that is not spiled?"
+
+The groceryman said he guessed he knew what to give away, and the boy went
+out and hung up a sign in front of the grocery, that he had made on
+wrapping paper with red chalk, which read, "Rotten eggs, good enough for
+custard pies, for 18 cents a dozen."
+
+
+A GOOD LAND ENOUGH.
+
+This land of the free is good enough, if we make it good, and if we make
+it bad, it is just as bad as any country under the sun. It all depends on
+how the people act.
+
+
+THE WOODCOCK.
+
+It is a rainy day, and nothing has occurred of a local nature, that is,
+nothing of a hair standing nature, so we will just spoil a few sheets of
+paper relating, in a Sunday School book style, the circumstances of an
+excursion after woodcock, the other day, indulged in by W.C. Root, the
+Wisconsin amateur Bogardus, Jennings McDonald, Captain of a breech-loading
+steamboat, and the subscriber. In the first place, it may be well to state
+that the woodcock, or "Timber Doodle," as Prof. Agassiz calls it, is a
+game bird. We know it is a game bird, because they charge a dollar apiece
+for them in New York. The meat is about as sweet as deceased cow's liver,
+but they are worth a dollar apiece. The "Timber Doodle" is a patriotic
+bird, because he gets ripe on the 4th of July. He is about the size of a
+doughnut, with a long bill, like a lawyer.
+
+We took passage per skiff at twelve o'clock. If there was one drawback, it
+was the fact that the oar-locks of the boat had been mislaid. After
+consuming an hour in not finding them, Frank Hatch became discouraged at
+seeing us lay around the levee, so he tied the oars on with tarred rope
+and we got off, three of us besides the other dogs. The water was so high
+that we crossed Barron's island, only having to get out and pull the boat
+over two or three sand-bars and a raft or two. Every time we got out to
+pull the boat, the dogs would get out to look for woodcock, around the
+stumps, and when they got in the boat would be full of water and mud, and
+of course we had our best clothes on. Did it ever occur to you how much
+water a dog could carry in his hair? A dog is worse than a sponge. An
+ordinary dog, with luck, can fill a skiff with water at two jumps. Not,
+however, with us in the boat to bail out the water. The woodcock's tail
+sticks up like a sore thumb. We are thus particular to describe
+the woodcock, so if you ever see one you can go right away from him.
+Woodcock and mosquitoes are in "cahoots." While the woodcock bores in the
+ground for snakes and other feed that makes him fat and worth a dollar in
+New York, the mosquito stands on the ramparts and talks to the boys.
+
+Well, speaking about woodcock, after riding five miles, through bushes,
+brambles and things, we got out of the boat and only had to walk a couple
+of miles to get where the birds were. Right here we wish to state that we
+shouldn't have gone after the woodcock at all, only everybody said it was
+such fun. Root showed us a picture of a woodcock in a book, and if that
+didn't convince us, the fact that a small boy came in town and sold three
+dozen, did. Then we wanted to go. There never has been a year when
+woodcock were so plenty at places we didn't visit. The most fun was at a
+ditch which was about a foot wider than any of us could jump. Root gave
+his gun to McDonald and plunged in. Then McDonald threw a gun to Root. It
+hit him on the thumb-nail and dropped in the ditch out of sight. Mc.
+thought it was Root's gun, and he apologized to Root for throwing it so
+carelessly. Root supposed it was Mc.'s gun, and he apologized for not
+catching it. We never saw men more polite in the world. Mc. started to
+jump across, when a dog got between his legs, and both went in up to their
+knees. You never can jump as well with a dog tangled up amongst your legs.
+The dog looked at Jennings as though he wanted to swear. We waded through
+the ditch and only got two feet wet. The rest of them had more than that
+wet.
+
+But about the woodcock. This is, kind reader, purely a woodcock story, and
+more or less must be said about the dollar bird. But this is neither here
+nor there. It was over in the Root river bottoms. Finally we got on the
+woodcock ground and went to work. Talk about mosquitoes! There was no end
+to them. We ought not to say that, either, because there are spots on our
+person that just fit the end of a mosquito. There was an end to them. If
+you never saw mosquitoes in convention, you want to go over there. And
+right here we will give a recipe for keeping mosquitoes from biting. You
+take some cedar oil and put on your coat collar, if you are a man, and if
+you are a woman put it on that gingerbread work around your neck, and a
+mosquito will come up and sing to you and get all ready to take toll, when
+she will smell that oil. She is the sickest mosquito you ever saw. She
+turns over on her back and sends her husband for the nearest doctor. We
+had a bottle of cedar oil, and if Jennings hadn't left it hanging up in
+Hogan's store in his coat, we should have made those mosquitoes sick. As
+it was they did it to us. There isn't a spot on us as big as a billiard
+table but what you can find artesian wells made by mosquitoes.
+
+Woodcock sell higher in the market than any other bird. Lots of people
+that never saw them eat snakes, eat them. When they get up to fly they
+talk Bohemian, and get behind a bush. You shoot right into the bush, and
+if you kill one you think you are a good shot. Talk about getting tired.
+You walk around in the woods several miles, with mosquitoes getting
+acquainted with you, and all the time your nerves strung up in
+anticipation of seeing a dollar bill fly up, and if you don't sleep
+without rocking, we are no prophet. The sport, however, is exhilerating,
+and we are glad we went. We are glad because it learned us one thing, and
+that is, if we ever want a woodcock real bad, it will be cheaper, easier,
+and better to buy it. It will be inferred that we did not see a woodcock.
+Such is the case.
+
+But we made the blackbirds sick.
+
+
+A BALD-HEADED MAN MOST CRAZY.
+
+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 rang 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.
+
+[Illustration: AT THE TELEPHONE.]
+
+If we have done wrong in talking with a total strangers 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.
+
+
+CONVENIENT CURRENCY.
+
+What we want is a currency that every farmer can issue for himself. A law
+should be passed making the products of the farm a legal tender for all
+debts, public and private, including duties on imports, interest on the
+public debt, and contributions for charitable purposes. Then we shall have
+a new money table about as follows:
+
+  Ten ears of corn make one cent.
+  Ten cucumbers make one dime.
+  Ten watermelons make one dollar.
+  Ten bushels of wheat make one eagle.
+
+
+THE GOSPEL CAR.
+
+    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 railroad 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 wheiher 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
+with 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 "square."
+
+That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can occasionally
+practice without having a gospel car.
+
+
+BANKS AND BANKING.
+
+The subject of banking has engrossed the attention of your excellent
+Governor for, lo! these many weeks, and he is constrained to say that some
+radical changes must be made in the method of receiving deposits by banks,
+where an equivalent is not rendered, of His Excellency will be compelled
+to emerge from his present aristocratic quarters and take up his abode in
+the poor-house. I would call your attention to the practice certain banks
+have of issuing checks in lieu of cash. If these checks were available at
+the groceries it would be better than it is. Banks have got in a habit of
+issuing a species of ivory button in receipt for the green coin of the
+realm which is only good at the counter of the bank. These checks are not
+issued by the National Banks, but by the State Banks, denominated "Keno"
+and "Faro." I would not charge that there is "skullduggery" or
+"shenanagen" going on in these institutions, as the president of one of
+them informed me, confidentially, that he dealt on the "square," but it is
+a noticeable fact that the dividends received by those who do business
+with the banks, are almost, as it were, imperceptible. I trust that you
+will cause this branch of industry to be thoroughly investigated, and
+report by bill or otherwise. Our finances should be beyond suspicion of
+dishonesty.
+
+
+LARGE MOUTHS ABE FASHIONABLE.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: "GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!"]
+
+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.
+
+
+INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.
+
+Under this heading I can think of nothing that appears more appropriate
+than the subject of the artificial propagation of fish. It is a subject
+that has arrested the attention of many of the ablest minds of the
+country, and the results of experiments have been thus far so satisfactory
+that it is almost safe to predict that within the next ten centuries every
+man, however poor, may pick bull-heads off of his crab apple vines and
+gather his winter supply of fresh shad from his sweet potato trees at less
+than fifty cents a pound. The experiments that have been made in our own
+state warrant us in going largely into the fish business. A year ago a
+quantity of fish seeds were sub soil plowed into the ice of Lake Mendota,
+and to-day I am informed that boarders at the hotels there have all the
+fish to eat that any reasonable man could desire. The expense is small and
+the returns are enormous. It is estimated that from the six quarts of fish
+seeds that were planted in the lake there are now ready for the market at
+least 11,000,000 car loads of brain-producing food, if you spit on your
+bait when you go fishing.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GETS BOXED.
+
+"You don't want to buy a good parrot, do you?" said the bad boy to the
+grocery man as he put his wet mittens on the top of the stove to dry, and
+kept his back to the stove so he could watch the grocery man, and be
+prepared for a kick, if the man should remember the rotten egg sign that
+the boy put up in front of the grocery last week.
+
+"Naw, I don't want no parrot. I had rather have a fool boy around than a
+parrot. But what's the matter with your Ma's parrot? I thought she
+wouldn't part with him for anything."
+
+"Well, she wouldn't until Wednesday night, but now she says she will not
+have him around, and I may have half I can get for him. She told me to go
+to some saloon or some disreputable place and sell him, and I thought
+maybe he would about suit you," and the boy broke into a bunch of celery,
+and took out a few tender stalks and rubbed them on a codfish to salt
+them, and began to bite the stalks, while he held the sole of one wet boot
+up against the stove to dry it, making a smell of burned leather that came
+near turning the stomach of the cigar sign.
+
+"Look-a-here boy, don't you call this a disreputable place. Some of the
+best people in this town come here," said the grocery man as he held up
+the cheese knife and grated his teeth as though he would like to jab it
+into the youth.
+
+"O, that's all right, they come here 'cause you trust; but you make up
+what you lose by charging it to other people. Pa will make it hot for you
+the last of the week. He has been looking over your bill, and comparing it
+with the hired girl, and she says we haven't ever had a prune, or
+a dried apple, or a raisin, or any cinnamon, or crackers and cheese out of
+your store, and he says you are worse than the James brothers, and that
+you used to be a three card monte man, and he will have you arrested for
+highway robbery, but you can settle that with Pa. I like you, because you
+are no ordinary sneak thief, you are a high-toned, gentlemanly sort of a
+bilk, and wouldn't take anything you couldn't lift. O, keep your seat, and
+don't get excited. It does a man good to hear the truth from one who has
+got the nerve to tell it.
+
+"But about the parrot. Ma has been away from home for a week, having a
+high old time in Chicago, going to theatres and things, and while she was
+gone, I guess the hired girl or somebody learned the parrot some new
+things to say. A parrot that can only say 'Polly wants a cracker,' don't
+amount to anything--what we need is new style parrots that can converse on
+the topics of the day, and say things original. Well, when Ma got back I
+guess her conscience hurt her for the way she had been carrying on in
+Chicago, and so when she heard the basement of the church was being
+frescoed, she invited the committee to hold the Wednesday evening prayer
+meeting at our house. First, there were four people came, and Ma asked Pa
+to stay to make up a quorum, and Pa said seeing he had two pair, he
+guessed he would stay in, and if Ma would deal him a queen he would have a
+full hand. I don't know what Pa meant, but he plays draw poker sometimes.
+Anyway there was eleven people came including the minister, and after they
+had talked about the neighbors a spell, and Ma had showed the women a new
+tidy she had worked for the heathen, with a motto on it which Pa had
+taught her: 'A contrite heart beats a bob-tailed flush,'--and Pa had
+talked to the men about a religious silver mine he was selling stock in,
+which he advised them as a friend to buy for the glory of the church, they
+all went in the back parlor and the minister lead in prayer. He
+got down on his knees right under the parrot's cage, and you'd a dide to
+see Polly hang on to the wires of the cage with one foot, and drop an
+apple core on the minister's head. Ma shook her handkerchief at Polly, and
+looked sassy, and Polly got up on the perch, and as the minister got
+warmed up and began to raise the roof, Polly said, 'O, dry up.' The
+minister had his eyes shut, but he opened one of them a little and looked
+at Pa. Pa was tickled at the parrot, but when the minister looked at Pa as
+though it was him that was making irreverent remarks, Pa was mad.
+
+"The minister got to the 'amen,' and Polly shook hisself and said 'What
+you giving us?' and the minister got up and brushed the bird seed off his
+knees, and he looked mad. I thought Ma would sink with mortification, and
+I was sitting on a piano stool looking as pious as a Sunday school
+superintendent the Sunday before he skips out with the bank's funds; and
+Ma looked at me as though she thought it was me that had been tampering
+with the parrot. Gosh, I never said a word to that parrot, and I can prove
+it by my chum.
+
+"Well, the minister asked one of the sisters if she wouldn't pray, and she
+wasn't engaged, so she said with pleasure, and she kneeled down, but she
+corked herself, cause she got one knee on a cast-iron dumb bell that I had
+been practising with. She said 'O my,' in a disgusted sort of a way, and
+then she began to pray for the reformation of the youth of the land, and
+asked for the spirit to descend on the household, and particularly on the
+boy that was such a care and anxiety to his parents, and just then Polly
+said 'O, pull down your vest.' Well, you'd a dide to see that woman look
+at me. The parrot cage was partly behind the window curtin, and they
+couldn't see it, and she thought it was me. She looked at Ma as though she
+was wondering why she didn't hit me with a poker, but she went on, and
+Polly said 'wipe off your chin,' and then the lady got through
+and got up, and told Ma it must be a great trial to have an idiotic child,
+and then Ma she was mad, and said it wasn't half so bad as it was to be a
+kleptomaniac, and then the woman got up and said she wouldn't stay no
+longer, and Pa said to me to take that parrot outdoors, and that seemed to
+make them all good natured again. Ma said to take the parrot and give it
+to the poor. I took the cage and pointed my finger at the parrot and it
+looked at the woman and said 'old catamaran,' and the woman tried to look
+pious and resigned, but she couldn't. As I was going out the door the
+parrot ruffed up his feathers and said 'Dammit, set 'em up,' and I hurried
+out with the cage for fear he would say something bad, and the folks all
+held up their hands and said it was scandalous. Say, I wonder if a parrot
+can go to hell with the rest of the community. Well, I put the parrot in
+the woodshed, and after they all had their innings, except Pa, who acted
+as umpire, the meeting broke up, and Ma says it is the last time she will
+have that gang at her house.
+
+"That must have been where your Pa got his black eye," said the grocery
+man, as he charged the bunch of celery to the boy's Pa. "Did the minister
+hit him, or was it one of the sisters?"
+
+"O, he didn't get his black eye at prayer meeting!" said the boy, as he
+took his mittens off the stove, and rubbed them to take the stiffening
+out. "It was from boxing. Pa told my chum and me that it was no harm to
+learn to box, cause we could defend ourselves, and he said he used to be a
+holy terror with the boxing gloves when he was a boy, and he has been
+giving us lessons. Well, he is no slouch, now I tell you, and handles
+himself pretty well for a church member. I read in the paper how Zack
+Chandler played it on Conkling by getting Jem Mace, the prize fighter, to
+knock him silly, and I asked Pa if he wouldn't let me bring a
+poor boy who had no father to teach him boxing, to our house to learn to
+box, and Pa said certainly, fetch him along. He said he would be glad to
+do anything for a poor orphan. So I went down in the Third ward and got an
+Irish boy by the name of Duffy, who can knock the socks off any boy in the
+ward. He fit a prize fight once. It would have made you laugh to see Pa
+telling him how to hold his hands and how to guard his face. He told Duffy
+not to be afraid, but strike right out and hit for keeps. Duffy said he
+was afraid Pa would get mad if he hit him, and Pa said, 'nonsense, boy,
+knock me down if you can, and I will laugh ha! ha!' Well, Duffy he hauled
+back and gave Pa one on the nose, and another in both eyes, and cuffed him
+on the ear and punched him in the stomach, and lammed him in the mouth and
+made his teeth bleed, and then he gave him a side winder in both eyes, and
+Pa pulled off his boxing gloves and grabbed a chair, and we adjourned and
+went down stairs as though there was a panic. I haven't seen Pa since. Was
+his eye very black?"
+
+"Black, I should say so," said the grocery man. "And his nose seemed to be
+trying to look into his left ear. He was at the market buying
+beefsteak to put on it."
+
+"O, beefsteak is no account. I must go and see him and tell him that an
+oyster is the best thing for a black eye. Well, I must go. A boy has a
+pretty hard time running a house the way it should be run," and the boy
+went out and hung up a sign in front of the grocery: "_Frowy Butter a
+Speshulty_."
+
+
+CHRISTMAS TREES.
+
+There is too much dress parade about Christmas. Too many Christmas trees
+where rich children get club skates, and gold napkin rings, and poor
+children get pop corn strung on a string, and cornucopias full of
+peppermint candy.
+
+
+THE BOB-TAILED BADGER.
+
+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 a
+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.
+
+
+TERROR IN CHURCH.
+
+A ridiculous scene occurred at 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.
+
+[Illustration: "AH, MY FRIENDS, LOOK DOWN INTO THAT BURNING LAKE!"]
+
+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.
+
+
+FISH HATCHING IN WISCONSIN.
+
+I would suggest that you permit the subject of the artificial hatching of
+fish to engage your attention, and that you appropriate several dollars to
+purchase whale's eggs, vegetable oysters and mock turtle seeds. The
+hatching of fish is easy, and any man can soon learn it; and it is a
+branch of industry that many who are now out of employment, owing to
+circumstances beyond their control, will be glad to avail themselves of.
+How, I ask you, could means better be adapted to the ends than for the
+retiring officers of our State to go to setting on fish eggs?
+
+
+TRAINS WITHOUT CONDUCTORS.
+
+Since the introduction of the patent air brake on passenger trains, by
+which brakemen have been dispensed with, a number of patent right men have
+been studying up some contrivance to do away with conductors. All have
+failed except one, and that fortunate inventor is Col. Johnson, of the
+Railroad Eating House, Milwaukee. He has been engaged for two years on
+this patent, and has got it so near completed that he has filed a caveat
+at the Patent Office, and as his rights are secured, it can do no harm to
+describe the invention, as it is destined to work quite a revolution in
+the railroad business. It has been Col. Johnson's idea that an arrangement
+could be made so that an engineer of a train could have the whole train
+under his charge, to stop it, start it, collect fares, and bounce
+impecunious passengers, from his position on the engine, and do it all by
+steam, wind and water. A series of pneumatic tubes run from the door of
+each car to the engine, with speaking tubes. A passenger gets on the
+platform, and through the speaking tube asks the engineer what the fare is
+to such a place. The answer is returned, the fare is put in the hopper of
+the pneumatic tube, it goes to the engineer, he pulls a string, the door
+flies open and the passenger enters. Not the least important part of the
+machinery is the patent "æolian bouncer," as it is called. A pair of ice
+tongs are placed so as to grasp the passenger by the seat of the pants or
+the polonaise, as the case may be, when he or she gets on the platform.
+These tongs are connected with the air brakes, in such a manner that by
+the engineer's touching a spring the whole force of the compressed air
+takes possession of the tongs, and the passenger is snatched bald-headed,
+metaphorically speaking. For instance, a passenger gets on the platform at
+Portage, and the ice tongs grasp him or her securely. If he or she pays
+the fare, the door is opened, the tongs release their hold, and
+the person is allowed to enter. But if the engineer should find that they
+had no money, or that their pass had run out, and they were trying to beat
+their way, he would pull the string and they would be lifted back on the
+depot steps and stood on their heads, raised in the air and made to see
+stars. Col. Johnson has been offered a fabulous sum for his patent, but he
+has not decided whether to sell or lease it. A trial trip was made at
+Milwaukee, the other day, and though the machine was not perfect, the
+experiment was not altogether a failure. A car was arranged with the
+apparatus, and went out to the Soldier's Home. Col. Johnson and a number
+of prominent railroad men were on board. They got a veteran soldier and a
+Polack waman to allow the machine to experiment on them. The machine took
+hold of the soldier and the engineer jerked. The man had one leg torn off,
+and the seat of his overcoat was ruined. He wouldn't try again, so they
+let the woman step on the platform. The engineer turned it the wrong way,
+and the car seemed full of compressed air, and a smell of limberger cheese
+pervaded the premises. When the smoke cleared off the woman was not to be
+found. After voting the machine a success the party started for Milwaukee.
+On nearing the city a pair of wooden shoes were seen in the air coming
+down, and they lit in the the canal by the tannery. A pair of corsets
+struck on Plankinton's packing house, and sections of spinal cord, and one
+leg of a pair of red drawers came down on the Soldier's home, and hair was
+found on the top of the car. It is thought the engineer loaded the air
+bouncer too heavy, and that it kicked. However, Col. Johnson was not
+discouraged, and will soon have his patent on all cars. The husband of the
+Polack woman wanted Johnson to pay him three dollars, but he said he
+didn't want to buy the woman. All he wanted was to hire her, anyway. Col.
+Johnson is a great inventor. It was he that invented the stomach
+pump, and the automatic candle enunciator, for awakening guests in the
+night to take early trains. The latter he sold to Mr. Williams, of Prairie
+du Chien, for a large amount and took his pay in trade.
+
+
+RAISING ELEPHANTS.
+
+Why not go to raising elephants? A good elephant will sell for eight
+thousand dollars. A pair of elephants can be bought by a community of
+farmers pooling their issues and getting a start, and in a few years every
+farm can be a menagerie of it own, and every year we can rake in from
+eight to twenty-four thousand dollars from the sale of surplus elephants.
+It may be said that elephants are hearty feeders, and that they would go
+through an ordinary farmer in a short time. Well, they can be turned out
+into the highway to browse, and earn their own living. This elephant
+theory is a good one, and any man that is good on figures can sit down and
+figure up a profit in a year sufficient to go into bankruptcy.
+
+
+THE POWER OF ELOQUENCE.
+
+A justice of the peace at Menasha, wanted to kill Pratt, the editor of the
+_Press_. The matter has been compromised, however. Pratt got the justice
+cornered up, and delivered one of the speeches to him that he delivered
+during the campaign last fall, and the justice got on his knees and said,
+"Pratt, this thing is all right, I surrender."
+
+
+A TRYING SITUATION.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE WANDERING OYSTER.]
+
+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 toward 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 slikery 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 GIDDY GIRLS QUARREL.
+
+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 enough 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.
+
+
+THE UNIVERSAL OBJECT.
+
+The object that every man has in view, whether he be farmer, mechanic,
+preacher, editor, or tramp, is to make money.
+
+
+THE MISTAKE ABOUT IT.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: MYSTERY OF A WOMAN'S CLOTHES!]
+
+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 expressman 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 greyhound 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.
+
+
+A NEW SPARKING SCHEME.
+
+A number of fathers who have daughters, have formed a society, the object
+of which is to charge young men who visit the girls, for meals, gas, wear
+and tear of furniture, etc. There has been so much sparking going on which
+did not mean business, that the organization has seemed necessary.
+
+
+EFFECTS OF MINERAL WATER.
+
+A woman from Milwaukee, stopping at Sparta for the summer, had a serious
+accident the other day. She had her dress pinned back so tight that the
+exclamation point where she was vaccinated on the left arm was plainly
+visible, and as she stooped over at the artesian well to dip up a cup full
+of physic, a little dog belonging to a lady from Pilot Knob took hold of
+her striped stocking and shook it, thinking it was a blue racer. The lady
+was overcome with heat and sank down on the damp ground, and the result
+was congestion of the dog, for when she got up she kicked that dog over
+the Court house and sprained her stocking. It is said that beautiful and
+healthful summer resort is fast filling up and everybody swears it is the
+most enjoyable place on the continent. It is certainly the cheapest for us
+La Crosse folks to go. We don't know of a place where, for the money
+invested, one can have so much fun and get so much health. You can leave
+La Crosse at 5:45, and arrive at Sparta at 6:20, after a delightful ride
+of thirty miles, and you will enjoy a race, your train beating the
+Northwestern train, and running like lightning. If you have a pass, or sit
+on the hind platform, it will cost you nothing. You can walk down town, at
+small expense. You want to take supper before leaving home, if economy is
+what you are seeking in addition to health. Go to Condit, at the Warner
+House, and talk as though you were looking for a place to send your
+family, and he will hitch up and drive you all over town. Tell Doc.
+Nichols you never tried a Turkish bath, but that you are troubled with
+hypochondria and often wish you were dead, and that if you were sure the
+baths would help you, you would come down and take them regular. He will
+put you through for nothing, and give you a cigar. Then you can get a
+tooth pick at Condit's and put your thumb under your vest and go to the
+springs and talk loud about railroad stocks and bonds and speculating in
+wheat. (It takes two to do it up right. Frank Hatch and the writer are
+going down some night to "do" the watering place). Then you can swell
+around till half past ten, and sneak off to the depot on foot and come
+home, and your pocket book will be just as empty as when you started,
+unless you get a subscriber, and you will have added bloom to your cheek,
+and had a high old time, and next winter you can talk about the delightful
+time you passed at Sparta last summer during the heated term.
+
+Let's get up a party and go down some night.
+
+
+WHAT THE COUNTRY NEEDS.
+
+What the country needs is a melon from which the incendiary ingredients
+have been removed. It seems to me that by proper care, when the melon is
+growing on the vines, the cholera morbus can be decreased, at least, the
+same as the cranberry has been improved, by cultivation. The experiment of
+planting homeopathic pills in the hill with the melon has been tried, but
+homeopathy, while perhaps good in certain cases, does not seem to reach
+the seat of disease in the watermelon. What I would advise, and the advice
+is free to all, is that a porous plaster be placed upon watermelons, just
+as they are begining to ripen, with a view to draw out the cholera morbus.
+A mustard plaster might have the same effect, but the porous plaster seems
+to me to be the article to fill a want long felt. If, by this means, a
+breed of watermelon can be raised that will not strike terror to the heart
+of the consumer, this agricultural address will not have been delivered in
+vain.
+
+
+THE MAN FROM DUBUQUE.
+
+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 forehead 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.
+
+[Illustration: AN INTRUSIVE NIGGER.]
+
+"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 brakemen 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 PLEA FOR THE BULL HEAD.
+
+The late meeting of the State Fish Commissioners at Milwaukee was an
+important event, and the discussions the wise men indulged in will be
+valuable additions to the literature of the country, and future readers of
+profane history will rise up and call them blessed. It seems that the
+action of the Milwaukee common council in withdrawing the use of the water
+works from the commissioners, will put a stop to the hatching of
+whitefish. This is as it should be. The white fish is an aristocratic
+bird, that will not bite a hook, and the propagation of this species of
+fish is wholly in the interest of wealthy owners of fishing tugs, who have
+nets. By strict attention to business they can catch all the whitefish out
+of the lake a little faster than the State machine can put them in. Poor
+people cannot get a smell of whitefish. The same may be said of brook
+trout. While they will bite a hook, it requires more machinery to catch
+them than ordinary people can possess without mortgaging a house. A man
+has got to have a morocco book of expensive flies, a fifteen dollar bamboo
+jointed rod, a three dollar trout basket with a hole mortised in the top,
+a corduroy suit made in the latest style, top boots of the Wellington
+pattern, with red tassels in the straps, and a flask of Otard brandy in a
+side pocket. Unless a man is got up in that style, a speckled trout will
+see him in Chicago, first, and then it won't bite. The brook trout is even
+more aristocratic than the whitefish, and should not be propagated at
+public expense.
+
+But there are fish that should be propagated in the interest of the
+people. There is a species of fish that never looks at the clothes of the
+man who throws in the bait, a fish that takes whatever is thrown to it,
+and when once hold of the hook never tries to shake a friend, but submits
+to the inevitable, crosses its legs and says "Now I lay me," and
+comes out on the bank and seems to enjoy being taken. It is a fish that is
+a friend of the poor, and one that will sacrifice itself in the interest
+of humanity. This is the fish that the State should adopt as its trade
+mark, and cultivate friendly relations with, and stand by. We allude to
+the bullhead.
+
+The bullhead never went back on a friend. To catch the bullhead it is not
+necessary to tempt his appetite with porter house steak, or to display an
+expensive lot of fishing tackle. A pin hook, a piece of liver, and a
+cistern pole, is all the capital required to catch a bullhead. He lays
+upon the bottom of a stream or pond in the mud, thinking. There is no fish
+that does more thinking or has a better head for grasping great questions,
+or chunks of liver than the bullhead. His brain is large, his heart beats
+for humanity, and if he can't get liver, a piece of a tin tomato can will
+make a meal for him. It is an interesting study to watch a boy catch a
+bullhead. The boy knows where the bullhead congregates, and when he throws
+in his hook it is dollars to buttons that "in the near future" he will get
+a bite. The bullhead is democratic in all its instincts. If the boy's
+shirt is sleeveless, his hat crownless, and his pants a bottomless pit,
+the bullhead will bite just as well as though the boy is dressed in purple
+and fine linen, with knee breeches and plaid stockings. The bull head
+seems to be dozing--bulldozing we might say--on the muddy bottom, and a
+stranger might say that he would not bite. But wait. There is a movement
+of his continuation, and his cow-catcher moves gently toward the piece of
+liver. He does not wait to smell of it, and canvas in his mind whether the
+liver is fresh. It makes no difference to him. He argues that here is a
+family out of meat. "My country calls and I must go," says the bullhead to
+himself, and he opens his mouth and the liver disappears.
+
+It is not certain that the boy will think of his bait for half an
+hour, but the bullhead is in no hurry. He lays in the mud and proceeds to
+digest the liver. He realizes that his days will not be long in the land,
+or water, more properly speaking, and he argues if he swallows the bait
+and digests it before the boy pulls him out, he will be just so much
+ahead. Finally the boy thinks of his bait, and pulls it out, and the
+bullhead is landed on the bank, and the boy cuts him open to get the hook
+out. Some fish only take the bait gingerly, and are only caught around the
+selvage of the mouth, and they are comparatively easy to dislodge. Not so
+with the bullhead. He says if liver is a good thing you can't have too
+much of it, and it tastes good all the way down. The boy gets down on his
+knees to dissect the bullhead, and get his hook, and it may be that the
+boy swears. It would not be astonishing, though he must feel, when he gets
+his hook out of the hidden recesses of the bullhead, like the minister
+that took up a collection and didn't get a cent, though he expressed his
+thanks at getting his hat back. There is one drawback to the bullhead, and
+that is his horns. We doubt if a boy ever descended into the patent
+insides of a bullhead, to mine for Limerick hooks, that did not, before
+his work was done, run a horn into his vital parts. But the boy seems to
+expect it, and the bullhead enjoys it. We have seen a bullhead lay on the
+bank and become dry, and to all appearances dead to all that was going on,
+and when the boy sat down on him and got a horn in his elbow, and yelled
+murder, the bullhead would grin from ear to ear, and wag his tail as
+though applauding for an _end core_.
+
+The bullhead never complains. We have seen a boy take a dull knife and
+proceed to follow a fish line down a bullhead from his head to the end of
+his subsequent anatomy, and all the time there would be an expression of
+sweet peace on the countenance of the bullhead, as though he
+enjoyed it. If we were preparing a picture representing "Resignation," for
+a chromo to give to subscribers, and wished to represent a scene of
+suffering in which the sufferer was light hearted, and seemed to recognize
+that all was for the best, we should take for the subject a bullhead, with
+a boy searching with a knife for a long lost fish hook.
+
+The bullhead is a fish that has no scales, but in lieu thereof is a fine
+India rubber skin, that is as far ahead of fiddle string material for
+strength and durability as possible. The meat of the bullhead is not as
+choice as that of the mackerel, but it fills up a stomach just as well,
+and the _Sun_ insists that the fish commissioners shall drop the hatching
+of aristocratic fish and give the bullhead a chance. There's millions in
+it.
+
+
+WHY NOT RAISE WOLVES?
+
+You devote a good deal of time and labor to the raising of sheep, and what
+do you get for it. The best sheep cannot lay more than eight pounds of
+wool in a season, and even if you get fifty cents a pound for it, you have
+not got any great bonanza. Now, the state encourages the raising of
+wolves, by offering a bounty of ten dollars for a piece of skin off the
+head of each wolf. It does not cost any more to raise a wolf than it does
+to raise a sheep, and while sheep rarely raise more than two lambs a year,
+a pair of good wolves are liable to raise twenty young ones in the course
+of a year, if it is a good year for wolves. In addition to the
+encouragement offered by the state, many counties give as much more, so
+that one wolf scalp will bring more money than five sheep. You will
+readily see that our wise legislators are offering inducements to you that
+you should be thankful for. You can establish a wolf orchard on any farm,
+and with a pair of good wolves to start on, there is millions in it.
+
+
+THE SUDDEN FIRE-WORKS AT RACINE.
+
+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 enterprizing 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 here 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.
+
+[Illustration: MARTINDALE CLIMBS A POLE.]
+
+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 the
+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 an 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 assembly man, 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.
+
+
+LA CROSSE NEBECUDNEZZER WATER.
+
+It is the great ambition of our life to bring to the notice of the people
+of the world the curative powers of the La Crosse water, that all who may
+be suffering from any disease, however complicated, may be cured, and all
+men may become healthy, and women too, and doctors will have to go out
+harvesting. The La Crosse artesian well, was begun last fall, and
+completed as soon as the contractor found he couldn't make any money at
+it. It was rumored that he struck granite, and in fact several little
+specks of granite were found in the stuff that come from the hole, but it
+is pretty generally believed now that the granite particles got in from
+the top, unknown to the contractor. The water came to within ten feet of
+the surface, and struck. It never would come any further, and the world
+would have remained in ignorance of its curative powers, only for Powers,
+who put in a hydraulic ram, and the blockade was broken, the water now
+flows to the surface, and all is well.
+
+Attention was first called to the curative powers of the water, by a
+singular incident. A teamster whose duty it was to haul stone, was in the
+habit of stopping at the well to water his mules. One of the mules was in
+a sad state. He was blind in one eye, had a spavin, a ringbone, the
+heaves, his liver was torpid, his lungs were badly affected, and his
+friends feared that he was not long for the stone quarry. He had no
+family. Soon after the mule began to drink the water, the driver noticed a
+great change come over him. Previously he had seemed resigned to his fate,
+but latterly he was ambitious. One day while playfully mashing the mule
+over the head with a sled stake, the driver noticed that a new eye had
+grown in the place of the former cavity, and as the mule kicked him with
+more than his accustomed vigor, he noticed that the spavin and ring bone
+were gone, and the former plaintive melody of his voice gave
+place to a bray that resembled the whistle of the Alex. Mitchell. When it
+was known that the mule had been cured, others tried the water, men who
+had never drank it before, until to-day there are thousands who will
+testify to the benefits arising from its use. We could give the names of
+many who have been snatched from the grave--the La Crosse water is a
+regular body snatcher--but we will first give an analysis of the water.
+
+Believing that the water was destined to play a prominent part in solving
+the great question of how to euchre death, we sent a quantity of it to the
+eminent Prof. Alonzo Brown, M.D.V.S. of Jefferson, Wis., with a letter of
+transmittal authorizing him to analyze it thoroughly, and give us the
+result, at our expense. The following is Prof. Brown's analysis:
+
+LABRATORY JEFFERSON LIVERY STABLE,
+August 3, 1877.
+
+Lieut. GEO. W. PECK,
+4th Wis. Cavalry,
+
+Dear Sir:
+
+Yours of July 25th, received. I should have attended to the water before,
+but have had several cases of blind staggers in my barn, which has kept me
+busy. I have examined the water by every process known to science, and
+pronounce it bully. I took it apart at my leisure, and find that it
+contains to one U.S. washtub full, of 741 cubic inches, the following
+stuff:
+
+  Chloride, of Sodium, (common salt).............2 sacks.
+  Chloride of Pilgarlic.....................40,021 grains.
+  Bicarbonate of erysipelas.................11,602   "
+  Bicarbonate of pie plant...................2,071   "
+  Blue pills................................21,011   "
+  Bicarbonate of soda water (vanilla.)......17,201   "
+  Sulphate of Potasalager beer..............61,399   "
+  Bicarbonate corrugated iron...............18,020 grains.
+  Mustang Liniment.............................240   "
+  Boneset and summer savory.................10,210   "
+  Dow's Liver Cure, (6 bottles for $1.).....16,297   "
+  Bromide of Alcock's Porous Plaster........22,222   "
+  Flouride of Pain Killer (for cucumbers,).....055   "
+  Paris green..................................001   "
+  Spruce gum and Vinegar Bitters...............075   "
+
+In submitting this analysis permit me to say that I find traces of mock
+turtle soup, and India Rubber. I consider the La Crosse Nebecudnezzer
+water the most comprehensive water that I have ever analyzed, and I would
+recommend it for any disease that human beings or animals may have.
+
+Very Respectfully,
+
+ALONZO BROWN,
+
+Prof. of Chemistry in Jefferson Livery stable, and late Veterinary Surgeon
+4th Wis. Cavalry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have known Mr. Brown long and well, and his statement in regard to the
+water can be relied upon. Citizens should retain a copy of this analysis
+for future reference.
+
+Mr. E.W. Keyes, of Madison, writing under date of August 1st, says: "The
+La Crosse water you sent me has caused an entire new crop of hair to grow
+upon my head. I had been bald for years, and offered five hundred dollars,
+for any medicine that would cause hair to grow. Enclosed find five hundred
+dollars, and send me more water. I want to try it on Murphey, of the
+Sentinel. I think it would be a good joke on Murphey."
+
+But wait till we get all the letters written from prominent men who have
+been cured.
+
+
+THE INFIDEL AND HIS SILVER MINE.
+
+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 the 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 than hear that some infidel who is around the country calling
+God a pirate and 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 Ingersoll 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 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 appoplectic, 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 knows 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 take 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 biown-up bladder. O,
+good God, don't hurt me so. My neck is all chafed."
+
+And then he will die, and God will continue business at the old stand.
+
+
+THE LEGEND OF THE LAKE.
+
+Every noted place of resort has an Indian legend, and the first thing I
+did after getting my dinner was to look up the legendist. I wanted to hear
+how it was that the Indian had ceased to frequent this spot. So in looking
+for the boss legendist I struck Judge Lamoreaux, of Dodge county, who had
+been herewith a party of friends, Mr. Hayes, and Mr. Van Brunt, with all
+their wives. They had been searching for ferns and legends and they had a
+car load. The Judge had heard of the legend, and he took me one side, and
+with tears in his eyes related to me the horrible story just as he had
+received it from an Indian named O'Flanegan, who sells relics in the shape
+of rye. If I can control my emotion long enough to write it, it will be a
+big thing for history.
+
+[Illustration: HIAWASAMANTHA, THE DUSKY DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST.]
+
+Years ago an Indian chief who lived in a dog tent and caught
+rattlesnakes for a side show, had a daughter, a beautiful maiden, about
+the color and odor of smoked bacon, and she wore a red blanket cut biased,
+and a tilter, under a polonaise made over from her last year's striped
+silk. She was the belliest squaw in the hills, and took the premium at all
+the county fairs, and she could shoot a deer equal to any buck Indian. Her
+name was Hiawasamantha, and she had two lovers, a Frenchman and a young
+Indian. In figuring up the returns there was some doubt as to who was
+elected, so the father of the girl decided to go behind the returns, and
+settle it by a commission. There was an eagle's nest half way up the
+rocks, with young eagles in it, and the old chief said that the one that
+got there first and brought him a young eagle, should have the squaw. The
+Frenchman climbed up the back stairs and got there ahead of the Indian,
+when the young Indian drew from his trousers leg a bar of railroad iron
+and drove it to the hilt in the breast of the Frenchman, not, however,
+till the Frenchman had drawn from his pistol pocket a 300 ton Krupp gun
+and sent a solid shot weighing 280 pounds crashing into the skull of the
+Indian, and both rolled to the bottom of the bluff, dead. Dr. Hall, of
+Baraboo, was called, and he probed for the ball, but could not find it,
+and neither could he get the bar of railroad iron out of the Frenchman,
+and so they were buried on the spot where now stands the Cliff House. The
+squaw looked around for another fellow, but they all had other
+engagements, the excursion train having arrived from La Crosse, and so she
+went up on a crag and said, "Big Injun me," and jumped off and was dashed
+into 1,347 pieces, and the wedding was broke up. Pieces of the squaw can
+now be found among the rocks, petrified, but retaining the odor of the
+ancient tribe. I got a piece of her, evidently a piece broken off her ear,
+which retains its shade perfectly, and will long be a reminder of
+my visit to Devil's Lake. (P.S.--Disreputable parties are selling pieces
+of stuff purporting to be genuine remains of this beauteous maiden, but
+they are base imitations. None genuine unless the trade mark is stamped on
+them.)
+
+
+GEOLOGICAL SURVEY.
+
+The Geological Survey is being prosecuted as well as could be expected
+with the limited means at the hands of the searchers in the bowels of the
+earth. They have already found, I am informed, that the earth on which we
+live, and move, and have a being, is composed largely of dirt. The
+discovery of this fact is alone worth the price of admission. This great
+discovery, which will be of such value to the future historian, has only
+cost the state the insignificant sum of $8,280. Rather than remain in
+ignorance of this astonishing fact, I would willingly pay the money
+myself--out of the public treasury. It is rumored that parties employed by
+the State to dive down into the ground and bring up sand in their claws,
+have discovered symptoms that the world was at one time sick to its
+stomach, and threw up divers and sundry kinds of rocks and things, and
+there is a probability that lead ore may be discovered. This will be
+valuable to make bullets in case of a war with Oshkosh. In peace it is
+always best to prepare for war, and I trust you will lend your countenance
+to the able men who are investigating the Lower Silurian age.
+
+
+FOOLING WITH THE BIBLE.
+
+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.
+
+
+A BLACK BEAR AT ONALASKA.
+
+A black bear was brought into town for sale on Friday, having been killed
+by Tom Rand, near Onalaska. He killed it with a little rifle that didn't
+look big enough to hurt a hen. If bears are so sociable as to come within
+sight of La Crosse to be killed, it will be a good excuse for husbands to
+stay at home nights.
+
+
+ANOTHER DEAD FAILURE.
+
+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 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.
+
+
+THE GLORIOUS FOURTH OF JULY.
+
+On this great day we are accustomed to leave our business to hired men,
+and burn with patriotism, and ginger pop, fill ourselves with patriotic
+ferver, and beer, shout the battle cry of freedom, and go home when the
+day is over with our eye-winkers burned off, and to sleep with a
+consciousness that a great duty has been performed, and that we have got
+bank notes to pay on the morrow. For three hundred and sixty-four days in
+the year our patriotism is corked up and wired down, and all we can do is
+to work, and acquire age and strength. On the 4th of July we cut the wire,
+the cork that holds our patriotism flies out, and we bubble and sparkle
+and steam, and make things howl. We hold in as long as we can, but when we
+get the harness off, and are turned into the pasture, we make a picnic of
+ourselves, with music all along the line.
+
+
+THE USES OF THE PAPER BAG.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: SLIPPERY OYSTERS.]
+
+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 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
+tobacce, 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.
+
+
+THE UNIVERSALIST BATH.
+
+Mr. E.H. Lane is canvassing the city for the Universalist Bath. We don't
+know why it should be called a "Universalist Bath," as it more nearly
+resembles a Baptist Bath, as we remember it. The bath is a queer thing,
+consisting of an India rubber hop sack, fastened to an immense ox bow. The
+ends are placed on to chairs, the water put in, and you get in and
+hippotamus and take a complete bath from Dan to Beersheba in a tea cup
+full of water.
+
+
+KILLING BIG GAME.
+
+The conductors on the St. Paul railroad are most all good sports with a
+shot gun. There is Howard and Clason, and Russell, who never tire of
+talking of the millions of chickens, ducks, wild turkeys and so forth that
+they have killed. They have tried to get Conductor Green interested in
+field sports, but he always said the game was not big enough for him. He
+said he had his opinion men that would surround a little chicken with
+spike tailed dogs, and then kill it and call it sport. What he wanted was
+big game. Nothing less than a bear would do him. Last week the owners of
+the cinnamon bear that was brought down from the Yellowstone, decided to
+have it killed, and some one told them to get Green to kill it, as he was
+an old bear hunter from the Rocky Mountains. Green said he was rusty on
+bears, not having had a tussel with a grizzly in several years, but if
+they couldn't get anybody else to chance the bear he would make hash of
+it. So they went down to the ice house where the bear was. Green said he
+didn't want anybody to go in with him, because they might get hurt. He put
+on Clason's hunting suit, took a carving knife in his teeth and a revolver
+in his hand, and went in and looked the bear in the eye. The bear knew
+Green meant business, and he began to feel around for his ticket. The
+conductor advanced to within eleven feet of the bear when all at once the
+animal sprang at him, growling and showing his teeth. Green's first
+impulse was to pull the bell rope, and order the cuss to get out of the
+ice house, but he saw the bear coming through the air towards him, and
+there was not four hours to lose, so he drew the revolver, took aim at the
+bear's left eye, and pulled. There was a puff of smoke, and the bear fell
+lifeless at his feet. Placing the animal in his game sack, he wiped the
+blood from his knife and said to some men who stood outside, their faces
+ashy pale: "Always shoot bears in the left eye." The men were
+pleased to see him come out alive and they shook him warmly by the hand.
+The other conductors, the shooters, are jealous of Green, and they are
+telling how he killed the bear by going up in the loft of the ice house
+and falling on him, and one conductor says Green shot the bear with a crow
+bar through a knot hole. Another said the bear had all four of his legs
+tied and that a dose of poison was administered through a syringe,
+attached to a pole, while another says that the bear died from fright. All
+these stories are the result of jealousy. The bear was killed just as we
+say, and there are few men that would tackle him--that is, few men aside
+from conductors.
+
+
+THE MULE NOT THE EAGLE.
+
+The bird that should have been selected as the emblem of our country, the
+bird of patience, forbearance, perseverance, and the bird of terror when
+aroused, is the mule. There is no bird that combines more virtues to the
+square foot than the mule. With the mule emblazoned on our banners, we
+should be a terror to every foe. We are a nation of uncomplaining hard
+workers. We mean to do the fair thing by everybody. We plod along, doing
+as we would be done by. So does the mule. As a nation we occasionally
+stick our ears forward, and fan flies off of our forehead. So does the
+mule. We allow parties to get on and ride as long as they behave
+themselves. So do does the mule. But when any nation sticks spurs in our
+flanks, and tickles our heels with a straw, we come down stiff-legged in
+front, our ears look to the beautiful beyond, our voice is cut loose, and
+is still for war, and our subsequent end plays the snare drum on anything
+that gets in reach of us, and strikes terror to the hearts of all tyrants.
+So does the mule.
+
+
+OUR BLUE-COATED DOG POISONERS.
+
+"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 Sheenan 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 door-keeper 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 go around assassinating dogs," we as
+people, would think more of them, and perhaps build them a decent station
+house to rest in.
+
+
+A HOT BOX AT A PICNIC.
+
+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 are 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, and 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, 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.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD BACK NUMBER GIRL.]
+
+
+CAMP MEETINGS IN THE DARK OF THE MOON.
+
+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.
+
+
+PALACE CATTLE CARS.
+
+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 Oleomargarine, 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 near 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, "Meet me in
+the slaughter house 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.
+
+
+GEORGE WASHINGTON.
+
+He could not tell a lie, George couldn't. Washington, it is probable,
+never knew what it was to stow away a schooner of beer, and history makes
+no mention that he ever, on any pretext, eat limberger cheese. At least no
+mention was made of it in his farewell address. He never was President of
+a savings bank. Washington never lectured. He never edited a newspaper. He
+could not tell a lie at the rates editors charge. No he was a good man,
+with none of the small vices that are so prevalent these days.
+
+
+BROKE UP A PRAYER MEETING.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE LADY OF THE SEVENTH WARD.]
+
+When we told her that a piece of beef-steak 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 tiptoe, to see if she was
+asleep. She found the girl with all her dolls on the floor having a dolls'
+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 the 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 no one 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 the 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.
+
+
+THE DOG LAW.
+
+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.
+
+
+LUNCH ON THE CARS.
+
+There is nothing that so gives a man away as to open a satchel and take
+out a lunch. I have been riding on the cars and have made the acquaintance
+of people who would listen to my stories, and take in every word as gospel
+truth. They would seem to hang on my words with pleasure, and be
+apparently glad they had become acquainted with one who combined so many
+graces of mind and person, and they would gather around so as not to miss
+a single lie that I might tell. And yet when I took a paper parcel out of
+my valise and opened up a lunch, consisting of bread and onions, and
+sausage and sweitzer cheese, they would draw coldly away from me and sit
+in the farther part of the car, and appear never to have known me.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN***
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Peck's Compendium of Fun, by George W. Peck</title>
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+<body>
+<h1 class="pg">The Project Gutenberg eBook, Peck's Compendium of Fun, by George W. Peck</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Peck's Compendium of Fun</p>
+<p>Author: George W. Peck</p>
+<p>Release Date: January 27, 2005  [eBook #14815]</p>
+<p>Language: english</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4 class="pg">E-text prepared by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier,<br />
+               and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>PECK&rsquo;S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.</h1>
+<h2>COMPRISING THE CHOICEST GEMS OF WIT, HUMOR, SARCASM AND
+PATHOS.</h2>
+<h3><em>Of America&rsquo;s Favorite Humorist</em>,</h3>
+<h2>GEORGE W. PECK,</h2>
+<h3>Editor of &ldquo;PECK&rsquo;S SUN&rdquo; Milwaukee.</h3>
+<h3><em>ILLUSTRATED BY EMINENT ARTISTS.</em></h3>
+<hr class="short" />
+<h4>CHICAGO:</h4>
+<h4>1886.</h4>
+<hr />
+<h3><a id="Contents" name="Contents">CONTENTS.</a></h3>
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#About_Hell">About Hell</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Another_Dead_Failure">Another Dead Failure</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Anna_Dickinson">Anna Dickinson</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Bald-headed_Man_Most_Crazy">A Bald-headed Man Most
+Crazy</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Case_of_Paralysis">A Case of Paralysis</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Doctor_of_Laws">A Doctor of Laws</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Hot_Box_at_a_Picnic">A Hot Box at a Picnic</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Lively_Train_Load">A Lively Train Load</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Mad_Minister">A Mad Minister</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Musical_Critique">A Musical Critique</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Peck_at_the_Cheese">A Peck at the Cheese</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Plea_for_the_Bull_Head">A Plea for the Bull
+Head</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Sewing_Machine_Given_to_the_Boss_Girl">A Sewing
+Machine Given to the Boss Girl</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Safe_Investment">A Safe Investment</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Tony_Slaughter-House">A Tony
+Slaughter-House</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Trying_Situation">A Trying Situation</a></li>
+<li><a href="#An_Arm_That_is_not_Reliable">An Arm That is not
+Reliable</a></li>
+<li><a href="#An_Editor_Burglarized">An Editor Burglarized</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Banks_and_Banking">Banks and Banking</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Bounced_from_Church_for_Dancing">Bounced from Church
+for Dancing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Boys_and_Circuses">Boys and Circuses</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Boys_will_be_Boys">Boys will be Boys</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Broke_up_a_Prayer_Meeting">Broke up a Prayer
+Meeting</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Buying_a_Stone_Crusher">Buying a Stone
+Crusher</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Cash">&ldquo;Cash!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Camp_Meetings_in_the_Dark_of_the_Moon">Camp Meetings
+in the Dark of the Moon</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Church_Keno">Church Keno</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Colored_Concert_Troupes">Colored Concert
+Troupes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Dogs_and_Human_Beings">Dogs and Human Beings</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Effects_of_Mineral_Water">Effects of Mineral
+Water</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Expedition_in_Search_of_a_Doughnut">Expedition in
+Search of a Doughnut</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Failure_of_a_Solid_Institution">Failure of a Solid
+Institution</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Fishing_for_Pieces_of_Women">Fishing for Pieces of
+Women</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Fooling_with_the_Bible">Fooling with the
+Bible</a></li>
+<li><a href="#George_Washington">George Washington</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Granite_Head_Cheese">Granite Head Cheese</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Internal_Improvements">Internal Improvements</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Joke_on_the_Hat">Joke on the Hat</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Killing_Big_Game">Killing Big Game</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Large_Mouths_are_Fashionable">Large Mouths are
+Fashionable</a></li>
+<li><a href="#La_Crosse_Nebecudnezzer_Water">La Crosse
+Nebecudnezzer Water</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Laying_up_Apples_in_Heaven">Laying up Apples in
+Heaven</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Mr_Pecks_Sunday_Lecture">Mr. Peck&rsquo;s Sunday
+Lecture</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Nearly_Broke_up_the_Ball">Nearly Broke up the
+Ball</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Our_Blue-Coated_Dog-Poisoners">Our Blue-Coated
+Dog-Poisoners</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Our_Christian_Neighbors_Have_Gone">Our Christian
+Neighbors Have Gone</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Palace_Cattle_Cars">Palace Cattle Cars</a></li>
+<li>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#He_Becomes_a_Druggist">He Becomes a Druggist</a></li>
+<li><a href="#He_is_too_Healthy">He is too Healthy</a></li>
+<li><a href="#He_Quits_the_Drug_Business">He Quits the Drug
+Business</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_an_Inventor">His Pa an Inventor</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Dissected">His Pa Dissected</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Goes_Calling">His Pa Goes Calling</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Goes_Skating">His Pa Goes Skating</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Gets_Boxed">His Pa Gets Boxed</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Gets_Mad">His Pa Gets Mad</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Joins_a_Temperance_Society">His Pa Joins a
+Temperance Society</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Jokes_Him">His Pa Jokes Him</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_is_Discouraged">His Pa is Discouraged</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Kills_Him">His Pa Kills Him</a></li>
+<li><a href="#His_Pa_Mortified">His Pa Mortified</a></li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li><a href="#Religion_and_Fish">Religion and Fish</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Rope_Ladders">Rope Ladders</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Sardineindianapolis">Sardineindianapolis</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Seven_Year_Old_Horses">Seven Year Old Horses</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Summer_Resorting">Summer Resorting</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Take_Your_Latin_Straight">Take Your Latin
+Straight</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Terror_in_Church">Terror in Church</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Bob-Tailed_Badger">The Bob-Tailed Badger</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Boy_and_the_Goat">The Boy and the Goat</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Difference">The Difference</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Difference_in_Horses">The Difference in
+Horses</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Fire_New_Years_Day">The Fire New Year&rsquo;s
+Day</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Giddy_Girls_Quarrel">The Giddy Girl&rsquo;s
+Quarrel</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Gospel_Car">The Gospel Car</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Infidel_and_His_Silver_Mine">The Infidel and His
+Silver Mine</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Knight_and_the_Bridal_Chamber">The Knight and the
+Bridal Chamber</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Legend_of_the_Lake">The Legend of the
+Lake</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Man_from_Dubuque">The Man from Dubuque</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Mistake_About_It">The Mistake About It</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Naughty_But_Nice_Church_Choir">The Naughty But
+Nice Church Choir</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_New_Coal_Stove">The New Coal Stove</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Sudden_Fire-Works_at_Racine">The Sudden
+Fire-Works at Racine</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Uses_of_the_Paper_Bag">The Uses of the Paper
+Bag</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Waters_of_La_Crosse">The Waters of La
+Crosse</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Way_to_Name_Children">The Way to Name
+Children</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Way_Women_Boss_a_Pillow">The Way Women Boss a
+Pillow</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Woodcock">The Woodcock</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Those_Bold_Bad_Drummers">Those Bold Bad
+Drummers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Those_Step_Ladders">Those Step Ladders!</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Tragedy_on_the_Stage">Tragedy on the Stage</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Trains_Without_Conductors">Trains Without
+Conductors</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Try_to_Save_Two_Shillings">Try to Save Two
+Shillings</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Unscrewing_the_Top_of_a_Fruit_Jar">Unscrewing the Top
+of a Fruit Jar</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Why_the_Fever_Didnt_Spread">Why the Fever
+Did&rsquo;nt Spread</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Woman-Dozing_a_Democrat">Woman-Dozing a
+Democrat</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Wonders_of_the_Stage">Wonders of the Stage</a></li>
+</ul>
+<h3>ELECTRIC FLASHES.</h3>
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#Anna_Dickinson_as_Mazeppa">Anna Dickinson as
+&ldquo;Mazeppa&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Black_Bear_at_Onalaska">A Black Bear at
+Onalaska</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Dead_Sure_Thing">A Dead Sure Thing</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Fashion_Item">A Fashion Item</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Good_Land_Enough">A Good Land Enough</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Lecturer_Should_Know_What_He_Talks_About">A
+Lecturer Should Know What He Talks About</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_Loan_Exhibition">A Loan Exhibition</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_New_Sparking_Scheme">A New Sparking Scheme</a></li>
+<li><a href="#An_Odorous_Bohemian">An Odorous Bohemian</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Base_Ingratitude">Base Ingratitude</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Buttermilk_Bibbers">Buttermilk Bibbers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Cats_on_the_Fence">Cats on the Fence</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Christmas_Trees">Christmas Trees</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Col_Ingersoll_Praying">Col. Ingersoll
+Praying</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Comforting_Compensations">Comforting
+Compensations</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Convenient_Currency">Convenient Currency</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Crushing_Nihilism">Crushing Nihilism</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Enterprising_Chicago">Enterprising Chicago!</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Fish_Hatching_in_Wisconsin">Fish Hatching in
+Wisconsin</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Frozen_Ears">Frozen Ears</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Gathered_Waists">Gathered Waists!</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Geological_Survey">Geological Survey</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Give_us_War">Give us War</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Good_Templars_on_Ice">Good Templars on Ice</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Hard_on_Fond_Du_Lac">Hard on Fond Du Lac</a></li>
+<li><a href="#He_Wouldnt_Have_His_Father_Called_Names">He
+Would&rsquo;nt Have His Father Called Names</a></li>
+<li><a href="#How_Farmers_May_Get_Rich">How Farmers May Get
+Rich</a></li>
+<li><a href="#How_Sharper_Than_a_Hounds_Tooth">&ldquo;How Sharper
+Than a Hound&rsquo;s Tooth!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#How_to_Invest_a_Thousand_Dollars">How to Invest a
+Thousand Dollars</a></li>
+<li><a href="#How_to_Reach_Young_Men">How to Reach Young
+Men</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Hunting_Dogs">Hunting Dogs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Insecure_Abodes">Insecure Abodes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Lunch_on_the_Cars">Lunch on the Cars</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Mattie_Mashes_Minnesota">Mattie Mashes
+Minnesota</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Merrie_Christmas">Merrie Christmas</a></li>
+<li><a href="#More_Dangerous_Than_Kerosene">More Dangerous Than
+Kerosene</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Mrs_Langtry">Mrs. Langtry</a></li>
+<li><a href="#One_of_Beechers_Converts">One of Beecher&rsquo;s
+Converts</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Preparing_for_War">Preparing for War</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Raising_Elephants">Raising Elephants</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Registry_of_Electors">Registry of Electors</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Selling_Clams">Selling Clams</a></li>
+<li><a href="#She_was_no_Gentleman">She was no Gentleman</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Southern_Honaw">Southern &ldquo;Honaw&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Spurious_Tripe">Spurious Tripe</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Sure_of_Heaven">Sure of Heaven</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Supreme_Court_Judges_and_US_Senators">Supreme Court
+Judges and U.S. Senators</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Ten_Days_in_Love">Ten Days in Love</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Advent_Preacher_and_the_Balloon">The Advent
+Preacher and the Balloon</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Day_We_Reached_Canada">The Day We Reached
+Canada</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Dog_Law">The Dog Law</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Glorious_Fourth_of_July">The Glorious Fourth of
+July</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Mule_not_the_Eagle">The Mule not the
+Eagle</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Old_Sweet_Songs">The Old Sweet Songs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Political_Outlook">The Political Outlook</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Power_of_Eloquence">The Power of
+Eloquence</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Thirsty_Gopher">The Thirsty Gopher</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Universalist_Bath">The Universalist Bath</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Universal_Object">The Universal Object</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Wicked_Mon_Kee">The Wicked Mon Kee</a></li>
+<li><a href="#The_Wrong_Corpse">The Wrong Corpse</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Three_Inches_of_Leg">Three Inches of Leg</a></li>
+<li><a href="#To_What_Vile_Uses_May_We_Come">To What Vile Uses May
+We Come</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Too_Particular_by_Half">Too Particular by
+Half</a></li>
+<li><a href="#What_the_Country_Needs">What the Country
+Needs</a></li>
+<li><a href="#What_the_Democrats_Will_Do">What the Democrats Will
+Do</a></li>
+<li><a href="#We_Will_Celebrate">We Will Celebrate</a></li>
+<li><a href="#Why_not_Raise_Wolves">Why not Raise Wolves?</a></li>
+</ul>
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS.</h3>
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#img050">A Scene in Paradise</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img217">&ldquo;Ah, my Friends, Look Down Into That
+Burning Lake!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img234">An Intrusive Nigger</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img202">At the Telephone</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img185">Behind the Scenes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img114">Bossing the Pillow</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img167">&ldquo;Do not Pass me by!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img090">Drummers Trying to Pray</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img209">&ldquo;Get Thee to a Nunnery!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img079">&ldquo;Happy New Year, Mum!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img248">Hiawasamantha, the Dusky Daughter of the
+Golden West</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img084">&ldquo;I Want to be an Angel&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img087">It Looked Like an old Dripping Pan</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img159">&ldquo;It is F-f-four Sizes too
+Big!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img192">John McCullough Killing a Texas
+Steer</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img045">&ldquo;Just as I am&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img151">&ldquo;Keno!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img240">Martindale Climbs a Pole</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img068">&ldquo;Me Long Lost Duke!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img228">Mystery of a Woman&rsquo;s Clothes</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img021">New Way of Taking Seidlitz Powders</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img175">No More Apples for the Minister</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img061">&ldquo;Oh, That Will be all
+Right&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img057">&ldquo;Pa Grabbed Her by the
+Polonaise&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img105">&ldquo;Sard,&rdquo; and the Greek
+Slave</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img017">Sacred Memories</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img256">Slippery Oysters</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img033">Swallow-Tails on the Climb</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img268">The Lady of the Seventh Ward</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img263">The Old Back Number Girl</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img027">The Old Man Tries His Hand</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img142">The Resorter</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img041">The Rotund Urso</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img121">The Sexton in all His Glory</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img126">The Startled Cat</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img132">The Tenor Arrayed in all His Glory</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img222">The Wandering Oyster</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img071">&ldquo;Thereby Hangs a Tail.&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img108">&ldquo;This is too Allfired
+Much!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img037">&ldquo;Too Late, Pa, I Die at the Hand of an
+Assassin!&rdquo;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img010">Turning the Proper Dingus</a></li>
+<li><a href="#img064">&ldquo;Yell, or go Down!&rdquo;</a></li>
+</ul>
+<hr />
+<h2 style="padding-top:3em;">PECK&rsquo;S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.</h2>
+<h3><a id="The_New_Coal_Stove" name="The_New_Coal_Stove">THE NEW
+COAL STOVE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>We never had a coal stove around the house until last Saturday.
+Have always used pine slabs and pieces of our neighbor&rsquo;s
+fence. They burn well, too, but the fence got all burned up, and
+the neighbor said he wouldn&rsquo;t build a new one, so we went
+down to Jones&rsquo; and got a coal stove.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s house, and people all round
+the neighborhood put on linen clothes. And we couldn&rsquo;t stop
+the confounded thing.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;clock the
+whole family had to get up and sit on the fence.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/010.png"><img src=
+"images/010.png" alt=
+"A man wearing a blanket covered in flames reaches for a stove."
+id="img010" name="img010" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>TURNING THE PROPER DINGUS.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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 got to learn how to engineer it, or you may get
+roasted.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_is_Discouraged" name="His_Pa_is_Discouraged">HIS
+PA IS DISCOURAGED.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, you leave here mighty quick,&rdquo; said the grocery
+man to the bad boy, as he came in, with his arm in a sling, and
+backed up against the stove to get warm. &ldquo;Everything has gone
+wrong since you got to coming here, and I think you are a regular
+Jonah. I find sand in my sugar, kerosene in the butter, the codfish
+is all picked off, and there is something wrong every time you come
+here. Now you leave.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I aint no Joner,&rdquo; said the boy as he wiped his nose
+on his coat sleeve, and reached into a barrel for a snow apple.
+&ldquo;I never swallered no whale. Say, do you believe that story
+about Joner being in the whale&rsquo;s belly, all night? I
+don&rsquo;t. The minister was telling about it at Sunday school
+last Sunday, and asked me what I thought Joner was doing while he
+was in there, and I told him I interpreted the story this way, that
+the whale was fixed up inside with upper and lower berths, like a
+sleeping car, and Joner had a lower berth, and the porter made up
+the berth as soon as Joner came in with his satchel, and Joner
+pulled off his boots and gave them to the porter to black, and put
+his watch under the pillow and turned in. The boys in Sunday school
+all laffed, and the minister said I was a bigger fool than Pa was,
+and that was useless. If you go back on me, now, I won&rsquo;t have
+a friend, except my chum and a dog, and I swear, by my halidom,
+that I never put no sand in your sugar, or kerosene in your butter.
+I admit the picking off of the codfish, but you can charge it to
+Pa, the same as you did the eggs that I pushed my chum over into
+last summer, though I thought you did wrong in charging Christmas
+prices for dog days eggs. When my chum&rsquo;s Ma scraped his pants
+she said there was not an egg represented on there that was less
+than two years old. The Sunday school folks have all gone back on
+me, since I put kyan pepper on the stove, when they were singing
+&lsquo;Little Drops of Water,&rsquo; and they all had to go out
+doors and air themselves, but I didn&rsquo;t mean to let the pepper
+drop on the stove. I was just holding it over the stove to warm it,
+when my chum hit the funny bone of my elbow. Pa says I am a terror
+to cats. Every time Pa says anything, it gives me a new idea. I
+tell you Pa has got a great brain, but sometimes he don&rsquo;t
+have it with him. When he said I was a terror to cats I thought
+what fun there is in cats, and me and my chum went to stealing cats
+right off, and before night we had eleven cats caged. We had one in
+a canary bird cage, three in Pa&rsquo;s old hat boxes, three in
+Ma&rsquo;s band box, four in valises, two in a trunk, and the rest
+in a closet up stairs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That night Pa said he wanted me to stay home because the
+committee that is going to get up a noyster supper in the church
+was going to meet at our house, and they might want to send me on
+errands. I asked him if my chum couldn&rsquo;t stay too,
+&rsquo;cause he is the healthiest infant to run after errands that
+ever was, and Pa said he could stay, but we must remember that
+there musn&rsquo;t be no monkey business going on. I told him there
+shouldn&rsquo;t be no monkey business, but I didn&rsquo;t promise
+nothing about cats. Well, sir, you&rsquo;d a dide. The committee
+was in the library by the back stairs, and me and my chum got the
+cat boxes all together, at the top of the stairs, and we took them
+all out and put them in a clothes basket, and just as the minister
+was speaking, and telling what a great good was done by these
+oyster sociables, in bringing the young people together, and taking
+their minds from the wickedness of the world, and turning their
+thoughts into different channels, one of the old tom cats in the
+basket gave a &lsquo;purmeow&rsquo; that sounded like the wail of a
+lost soul, or a challenge to battle. I told my chum that we
+couldn&rsquo;t hold the bread-board over the clothes basket much
+longer, when two or three cats began to yowl, and the minister
+stopped talking and Pa told Ma to open the stair door and tell the
+hired girl to see what was the matter up there. She thought our cat
+had got shut up in the storm door, and she opened the stair door to
+yell to the girl, and then I pushed the clothes basket, cats and
+all down the back stairs. Well, sir, I suppose no committee for a
+noyster supper, was ever more astonished. I heard Ma fall over a
+willow rocking chair, and say, &lsquo;scat,&rsquo; and I heard Pa
+say, &lsquo;well. I&rsquo;m dam&rsquo;d,&rsquo; and a girl that
+sings in the choir say, &lsquo;Heavens, I am stabbed,&rsquo; then
+my chum and me ran to the front of the house and come down the
+front stairs looking as innocent as could be, and we went in the
+library, and I was just going to tell Pa if there was any errands
+he wanted run my chum and me was just aching to run them, when a
+yellow cat without any tail was walking over the minister, and Pa
+was throwing a hassock at two cats that were clawing each other
+under the piano, and Ma was trying to get her frizzes back on her
+head, and the choir girl was standing on the lounge with her dress
+pulled up, trying to scare cats with her striped stockings, and the
+minister was holding his hands up, and I guess he was asking a
+blessing on the cats, and my chum opened the front door and all the
+cats went out. Pa and Ma looked at me, and I said it wasn&rsquo;t
+me, and the minister wanted to know how so much cat hair got on my
+coat and vest, and I said a cat met me in the hall and kicked me,
+and Ma cried, and Pa said &lsquo;that boy beats hell,&rsquo; and
+the minister said, I would be all right if I had been properly
+brought up, and then Ma was mad, and the committee broke up. Well,
+to tell the honest truth Pa basted me, and yanked me around until I
+had to have my arm in a sling, but what&rsquo;s the use of making
+such a fuss about a few cats. Ma said she never wanted to have my
+company again, &rsquo;cause I spoiled everything. But I got even
+with Pa for basting me, this morning, and I dassent go home. You
+see Ma has got a great big bath sponge as big as a chair cushion,
+and this morning I took the sponge and filled it with warm water,
+and took the feather cushion out of the chair Pa sits in at the
+table, and put the sponge in its place, and covered it over with
+the cushion cover, and when we all got set down to the table Pa
+came in and sat down on it to ask a blessing. He started in by
+closing his eyes and placing his hands up in front of him like the
+letter V, and then he began to ask that the food we were about to
+partake off be blessed, and then he was going on to ask that all of
+us be made to see the error of our ways, when he began to hitch
+around, and he opened one eye and looked at me, and I looked as
+pious as a boy can look when he knows the pancakes are getting
+cold, and Pa he kind of sighed and said &lsquo;Amen&rsquo; sort of
+snappish, and he got up and told Ma he didn&rsquo;t feel well, and
+she would have to take his place and pass around the sassidge and
+potatoes, and he looked kind of scart and went out with his hand on
+his pistol pocket, as though he would like to shoot, and Ma she got
+up and went around and sat in Pa&rsquo;s chair. The sponge
+didn&rsquo;t hold more than half a pail full of water, and I
+didn&rsquo;t want to play no joke on Ma, cause the cats nearly
+broke her up, but she sat down and was just going to help me, when
+she rung the bell and called the hired girl, and said she felt as
+though her neuralgia was coming on, and she would go to her room,
+and told the girl to sit down and help Hennery. The girl sat down
+and poured me out some coffee, and then she said, &lsquo;Howly
+Saint Patrick, but I blave those pancakes are burning,&rsquo; and
+she went out in the kitchen. I drank my coffee, and then took the
+big sponge out of the chair and put the cushion in the place of it,
+and then I put the sponge in the bath room, and I went up to Pa and
+Ma&rsquo;s room, and asked them if I should go after the doctor,
+and Pa had changed his clothes and got on his Sunday pants, and he
+said, &lsquo;never mind the doctor, I guess we will pull
+through,&rsquo; and for me to get out and go to the devil, and I
+came over here. Say, there is no harm in a little warm water, is
+there? Well, I&rsquo;d like to know what Pa and Ma and the hired
+girl thought. I am the only real healthy one there is in our
+family.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Three_Inches_of_Leg" name="Three_Inches_of_Leg">THREE
+INCHES OF LEG.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Blanche Williams, of Philadelphia, who met with an accident at
+Fairmount Water-works, by which one leg was broken, and rendered
+three inches shorter than the rest of her legs, has recovered
+$10,000 damages. It would seem, to the student of nature, to be a
+pretty good price for three inches of ordinary leg, but then some
+people will make such a fuss.</p>
+<h3><a id="More_Dangerous_Than_Kerosene" name=
+"More_Dangerous_Than_Kerosene">MORE DANGEROUS THAN
+KEROSENE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The regular weekly murder is reported from Peshtigo. Two men
+named Glass and Penrue, got to quarreling about a girl, in a hay
+loft, over a barn. Glass stabbed Penrue quite a number of times and
+he died. There is nothing much more dangerous, unless it is
+kerosene, than two men and a girl, in a hay loft quarreling.</p>
+<h3><a id="Ten_Days_in_Love" name="Ten_Days_in_Love">TEN DAYS IN
+LOVE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There is a fearfully harrowing story going the rounds of the
+papers headed &ldquo;Ten Days in Love.&rdquo; It must have been
+dreadful, with no Sunday, no day of rest, no holiday, just nothing
+but love, for ten long days. By the way, did the person live?</p>
+<h3><a id="Boys_will_be_Boys" name="Boys_will_be_Boys">BOYS WILL BE
+BOYS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 <em>The Sun</em> man, who was present,
+disguised as a preacher, came to the conclusion that ministers were
+rather human than otherwise when they are young.</p>
+<p>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:
+&ldquo;Jim, do you remember the time we carried the cow and calf up
+into the recitation room?&rdquo; For a moment &ldquo;Jim&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;You bet your life I remember it. I have got a
+scar on my shin now where that d&mdash;blessed cow hooked
+me,&rdquo; and he began to roll up his trouser leg to show the
+scar. They told him they would take his word, and he pulled down
+his pants and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you see I was detailed to attend to the calf, and I
+carried the calf up stairs, assisted by Bill Smith&mdash;who is
+preaching in Chicago; got a soft thing&mdash;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 horseflesh or of
+Bill, and if he don&rsquo;t put on an old driving coat and go out
+on the road occasionally and catch on for a race with some
+wordly-minded man, then I am another. You hear me&mdash;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&rsquo;t get much of a
+breeze the next morning, did we, when we had to clean out the
+recitation room?&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/017.png"><img src=
+"images/017.png" alt="A group of men smoking." id="img017" name=
+"img017" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>SACRED MEMORIES</p>
+</div>
+<p>A solemn-looking minister, with red hair, who was present, and
+whose eyes twinkled some through the smoke, said to another:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Charlie, you remember you were completely gone on the
+professor&rsquo;s niece who was visiting there from Poughkeepsie?
+What become of her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Charlie put his feet on the table, struck a match on his
+trousers, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I wasn&rsquo;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&mdash;just the color of
+yours, Hank&mdash;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&rsquo;am, as she would if she had
+married me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Boys, do you remember the time we stole that three-seated
+wagon and went out across the marsh to Kingsley&rsquo;s farm, after
+watermelons?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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. &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Then the small brunette minister asked if he was not entitled to
+some credit for blacking the farmer&rsquo;s eyes. Says he:
+&ldquo;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 &lsquo;one, two, three&rsquo; about the nose, with my
+blessing, and he let go that horse and took his dog back to the
+house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; says the red haired minister, &ldquo;those
+melons were green, anyway, but it was the fun of stealing them that
+we were after.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At this point the door opened and the host entered, and, pushing
+the smoke away with his hands, he said: &ldquo;Well, gentlemen, you
+are enjoying yourselves?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="He_Becomes_a_Druggist" name="He_Becomes_a_Druggist">HE
+BECOMES A DRUGGIST.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whew! What is that smells so about this store? It seems
+as though everything had turned frowy,&rdquo; said the grocery man
+to his clerk in the presence of the bad boy, who was standing with
+his back to the stove, his coat-tails parted with his hands, and a
+cigarette in his mouth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;May be it is me that smells frowy,&rdquo; said the boy as
+he put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and spit at the
+keyhole in the door. &ldquo;I have gone into business.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By thunder, I believe it is you,&rdquo; said the grocery
+man, as he went up to the boy and snuffed a couple of times and
+then held his hand to his nose. &ldquo;The board of health will
+kerosene you if they ever smell that smell, and send you to the
+glue factory. What business have you gone into to make you smell so
+rank?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you see Pa began to think it was time I learned a
+trade, or a profession, and he saw a sign in a drug store window
+&lsquo;boy wanted,&rsquo; and as he had a boy he didn&rsquo;t want,
+he went to the druggist and got a job for me. This smell on me will
+go off in a few weeks. You know I wanted to try all the perfumery
+in the store, and after I had got about forty different extracts on
+my clothes, another boy that worked there he fixed up a bottle of
+benzine and assafety and brimstone, and a whole lot of other horrid
+stuff, and labeled it &lsquo;rose geranium,&rsquo; and I guess I
+just wallered in it. It <em>is</em> awful, aint it? It kerflummixed
+Ma when I went into the dining-room the first night that I got home
+from the store, and broke Pa all up. He said I reminded him of the
+time they had a litter of skunks under the barn. The air seemed
+fixed around where I am, and everybody seems to know who fixed it.
+A girl came into the store yesterday to buy a satchet, and there
+wasn&rsquo;t anybody there but me, and I didn&rsquo;t know what it
+was, and I took down everything in the store pretty near before I
+found it, and then I wouldn&rsquo;t have found it only the
+proprietor came in. The girl asked the proprietor if there
+wasn&rsquo;t a good deal of sewer gas in the store, and he told me
+to go out and shake myself. I think the girl was mad at me because
+I got a nursing bottle out of the show case with a rubber muzzle,
+and asked her if that was what she wanted. Well, she told me a
+sachet was something for the stummick, and I thought a nursing
+bottle was the nearest thing to it.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/021.png"><img src=
+"images/021.png" alt="A man spits something while a clerk watches."
+id="img021" name="img021" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>NEW WAY OF TAKING SEIDLITZ POWDERS</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;I should think you would drive all the customers away
+from the store,&rdquo; said the groceryman as he opened the door to
+let the fresh air in.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know but I will, but I am hired for a month
+on trial, and I shall stay. You see, I sha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t practice
+on anybody but Pa for a spell. I made up my mind to that when I
+gave a woman some salts instead of powdered borax, and she came
+back mad. Pa seems to want to encourage me, and is willing to take
+anything that I ask him to. He had a sore throat and wanted
+something for it, and the boss drugger told me to put some tannin
+and chlorate of potash in a mortar and grind it, and I let Pa pound
+it with the mortar, and while he was pounding I dropped in a couple
+of drops of sulphuric acid, and it exploded and blowed Pa&rsquo;s
+hat clear across the store, and Pa was whiter than a sheet. He said
+he guessed his throat was all right, and he wouldn&rsquo;t come
+near me again that day. The next day Pa came in, and I was laying
+for him. I took a white seidletz powder and a blue one, and
+dissolved them in separate glasses, and when Pa came in I asked him
+if he didn&rsquo;t want some lemonade, and he said he did, and I
+gave him the sour one and he drank it. He said it was too sour, and
+then I gave him the other glass that looked like water, to take the
+taste out of his mouth, and he drank it. Well, sir, when those two
+powders got together in Pa&rsquo;s stummick, and began to siz and
+steam and foam, Pa pretty near choked to death, and the suds came
+out of his nostrils, and his eyes stuck out, and as soon as he
+could get his breath he yelled &lsquo;fire,&rsquo; and said he was
+poisoned, and called for a doctor, but I thought as long as we had
+a doctor right in the family there was no use of hiring one, so I
+got a stomach pump and would have baled him out in no time, only
+the proprietor came in and told me to go and wash some bottles, and
+he gave Pa a drink of brandy, and Pa said he felt better. Pa has
+learned where we keep the liquor, and he comes in two or three
+times a day with a pain in his stomach. They play awful mean tricks
+on a boy in a drug store. The first day they put a chunk of
+something blue into a mortar, and told me to pulverize it and then
+make it up into two grain pills. Well, sir, I pounded that chunk
+all the forenoon, and it never pulverized at all, and the boss told
+me to hurry up as the woman was waiting for the pills, and I mauled
+it till I was nearly dead, and when it was time to go to supper the
+boss came and looked in the mortar, and took out the chunk and
+said, &lsquo;You dum fool, you have been pounding all day on a
+chunk of India rubber, instead of blue mass!&rsquo; Well, how did I
+know? But I will get even with them if I stay there long enough,
+and don&rsquo;t you forget it. If you have a prescription you want
+filled you can come down to the store and I will put it up for you
+myself, and then you will be sure to get what you pay
+for.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he cut off a piece
+of limberg cheese and put it on the stove to purify the air in the
+room, &ldquo;I should laugh to see myself taking any medicine you
+put up. You will kill some one yet, by giving them poison instead
+of quinine. But what has your Pa got his nose tied up for? He looks
+as though he had had a fight.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, that was from my treatment. He had a wart on his nose.
+You know that wart. You remember how the minister told him if other
+peoples&rsquo; business had a button hole in it, Pa could button
+the wart in the button-hole, as he always had his nose there. Well,
+I told Pa I could cure that wart with caustic, and he said he would
+give five dollars if I could cure it, so I took a stick of caustic
+and burned the wart off, but I guess I burned down into the nose a
+little, for it swelled up as big as a lobster. Pa says he would
+rather have a whole nest of warts than such a nose, but it will be
+all right in a year or two.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Loan_Exhibition" name="A_Loan_Exhibition">A LOAN
+EXHIBITION.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is a loan exhibition?&rdquo; asks a correspondent.
+Well, when a fellow borrows ten dollars of you, to be paid next
+Saturday, and he lets it run a year and a half, and don&rsquo;t pay
+it, and he meets you on the street and asks for five dollars more,
+and you turn him around and kick him right before the crowd, that
+is a loan exhibition.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Wicked_Mon_Kee" name="The_Wicked_Mon_Kee">THE WICKED
+MON KEE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Mon Kee, a Chinaman that was converted to regular United States
+religious doctrines, and opened a mission in New York for the
+purpose of converting more heathens and shethens, has been arrested
+for stealing. This is a terrible blow, and Mon Kee was a terrible
+plower. A few weeks since the religious papers made more blow over
+the coming into the fold of that Chinaman than they did over all
+the editors in the country, who went not astray. Now they have shut
+up their yawp about him, since he has proved to be no better than
+Talmage or Beecher.</p>
+<h3><a id="Unscrewing_the_Top_of_a_Fruit_Jar" name=
+"Unscrewing_the_Top_of_a_Fruit_Jar">UNSCREWING THE TOP OF A FRUIT
+JAR.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 away 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, pulls off his coat and takes the jar.</p>
+<p>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 when strategy, brain, and muscle are required, then they
+can&rsquo;t get along without a man. He tries to unscrew the cover,
+and his thumb slips off and knocks the skin off the knuckle. He
+breathes a silent prayer and calls for the kerosene can, and pours
+a little oil into the crevice, and lets it soak, and then he tries
+again, and swears audibly.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/027.png"><img src=
+"images/027.png" alt="A man tries to open a jar." id="img027" name=
+"img027" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>THE OLD MAN TRIES HIS HAND.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>All come to the table smiling, as though nothing had happened,
+and the house-wife don&rsquo;t allow any of the family to have any
+sauce for fear they will get broken glass into their stomachs, but
+the &ldquo;company&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;don&rsquo;t want
+no strawberries pickled in kerosene.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="He_Wouldnt_Have_His_Father_Called_Names" name=
+"He_Wouldnt_Have_His_Father_Called_Names">HE WOULDN&rsquo;T HAVE
+HIS FATHER CALLED NAMES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A man died in Oshkosh who was over eighty years of age. After
+the funeral the minister who conducted the services, said to the
+son of the deceased, &ldquo;your father was an octogenarian.&rdquo;
+The young man colored up, doubled up his fist, and said to the
+minister that he would like to have him repeat that remark. The
+minister said, &ldquo;I say your father was an old
+octogenarian.&rdquo; He had not more than got the word out of his
+mouth before the young man struck him on the nose, knocked him
+down, kicked him in the ear, and when pulled off by a policeman, he
+said no holyghoster could call his dead father names, not around
+him. The minister said he couldn&rsquo;t have been more surprised
+if some one had paid a year&rsquo;s pew rent, than he was when that
+young man&rsquo;s fist hit him.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="He_Quits_the_Drug_Business" name=
+"He_Quits_the_Drug_Business">HE QUITS THE DRUG BUSINESS.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you loafing around here for,&rdquo; says the
+grocery man to the bad boy one day this week. &ldquo;It is after
+nine o&rsquo;clock, and I should think you would want to be down to
+the drug store. How do you know but there may be somebody dying for
+a dose of pills?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, darn the drug store. I have got sick of that business,
+and I have dissolved with the drugger. I have resigned. The policy
+of the store did not meet with my approval, and I have stepped out
+and am waiting for them to come and tender me a better position at
+an increased salary,&rdquo; said the boy, as he threw a cigar stub
+into a barrel of prunes and lit a fresh one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Resigned, eh?&rdquo; said the grocery man as he fished
+out the cigar stub and charged the boy&rsquo;s father with two
+pounds of prunes, didn&rsquo;t you and the boss agree?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not exactly, I gave an old lady some gin when she asked
+for camphor and water, and she made a show of herself. I thought I
+would fool her, but she knew mighty well what it was, and she drank
+about half a pint of gin, and got to tipping over bottles and kegs
+of paint, and when the drug man came in with his wife, the old
+woman threw her arms around his neck and called him her darling,
+and when he pushed her away, and told her she was drunk, she picked
+up a bottle of citrate of magnesia and pointed it at him, and the
+cork came out like a pistol, and he thought he was shot, and his
+wife fainted away, and the police came and took the old gin
+refrigerator away, and then the drug man told me to face the door,
+and, when I wasn&rsquo;t looking he kicked me four times, and I
+landed in the street, and he said if I ever came in sight of the
+store again he would kill me dead. That is the way I resigned. I
+tell you, they will send for me again. They never can run that
+store without me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guess they will worry along without you,&rdquo; said
+the grocery man. &ldquo;How does your Pa take your being fired out?
+I should think it would brake him all up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, I think Pa rather likes it. At first he thought he had
+a soft snap with me in the drug store, cause he has got to drinking
+again, like a fish, and he has gone back on the church entirely;
+but after I had put a few things in his brandy he concluded it was
+cheaper to buy it, and he is now patronizing a barrel house down by
+the river.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One day I put some Castile soap in a drink of drandy, and
+Pa leaned over the back fence more than an hour, with his finger
+down his throat. The man that collects the ashes from the alley
+asked Pa if he had lost anything, and Pa said he was only
+&lsquo;sugaring off.&rsquo; I don&rsquo;t know what that is. When
+Pa felt better he came in and wanted a little whisky to take the
+taste out of his mouth, and I gave him some, with about a
+teaspoonful of pulverized alum in it. Well, sir, you&rsquo;d a
+dide. Pa&rsquo;s mouth and throat was so puckered up that he
+couldn&rsquo;t talk. I don&rsquo;t think that drugman will make
+anything by firing me out, because I shall turn all the trade that
+I control to another store. Why, sir, sometimes there were eight
+and nine girls in the store all at wonct, on account of my being
+there. They came to have me put extracts on their handkerchiefs,
+and to eat gum drops&mdash;he will lose all that trade now. My girl
+that went back on me for the telegraph messenger boy, she came with
+the rest of the girls, but she found that I could be as
+&lsquo;hawty as a dook.&rsquo; I got even with her, though. I
+pretended I wasn&rsquo;t mad, and when she wanted me to put some
+perfumery on her handkerchief I said &lsquo;all right,&rsquo; and I
+put on a little geranium and white rose, and then I got some
+tincture of assafety, and sprinkled it on her dress and cloak when
+she went out. That is about the worst smelling stuff that ever was,
+and I was glad when she went out and met the telegraph boy on the
+corner. They went off together; but he came back pretty soon, about
+the homesickest boy you ever saw, and he told my chum he would
+never go with that girl again because she smelled like spoiled
+oysters or sewer gas. Her folks noticed it, and made her go and
+wash her feet and soak herself, and her brother told my chum it
+didn&rsquo;t do any good, she smelled just like a glue factory, and
+my chum&mdash;the darn fool&mdash;told her brother that it was me
+who perfumed her, and he hit me in the eye with a frozen fish, down
+by the fish store, and that&rsquo;s what made my eye black; but I
+know how to cure a black eye. I have not been in a drug store eight
+days, and not know how to cure a black eye; and I guess I learned
+that girl not to go back on a boy &lsquo;cause he smelled like a
+goat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, what was it about your leaving the wrong medicine
+at houses? The policeman in this ward told me you come pretty near
+killing several people by leaving the wrong medicine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The way of it was this. There was about a dozen different
+kinds of medicine to leave at different places, and I was in a
+hurry to go to the roller skating rink, so I got my chum to help
+me, and we just took the numbers of the houses, and when we rung
+the bell we would hand out the first package we come to, and I
+understand there was a good deal of complaint. One old maid who
+ordered powder for her face, her ticket drew some worm lozengers,
+and she kicked awfully, and a widow who was going to be married,
+she ordered a celluloid comb and brush, and she got a nursing
+bottle with a rubber nozzle, and a toothing ring, and she made
+quite a fuss; but the woman who was weaning her baby and wanted the
+nursing bottle, she got the comb and brush and some blue pills, and
+she never made any fuss at all. It makes a good deal of difference,
+I notice, whether a person gets a better thing than they order or
+not. But the drug business is too lively for me. I have got to have
+a quiet place, and I guess I will be a cash boy in a store. Pa says
+he thinks I was cut out for a bunko steerer, and I may look for
+that kind of a job. Pa he is a terror since he got to drinking
+again. He came home the other day, when the minister was calling on
+Ma, and just cause the minister was sitting on the sofa with Ma,
+and had his hand on her shoulder, where she said the pain was when
+the rheumatiz came on, Pa was mad and told the minister he would
+kick his liver clear around on the other side if he caught him
+there again, and Ma felt awful about it. After the minister had
+gone away, Ma told Pa he had got no feeling at all, and Pa said he
+had got enough feeling for one family, and he didn&rsquo;t want no
+sky-sharp to help him. He said he could cure all the rheumatiz
+there was around the house, and then he went down town and
+didn&rsquo;t get home till most breakfast time. Ma says she thinks
+I am responsible for Pa&rsquo;s falling into bad ways again, and
+now I am going to cure him. You watch me, and see if I don&rsquo;t
+have Pa in the church in less than a week, praying and singing, and
+going home with the choir singers, just as pious as ever. I am
+going to get a boy that writes a woman&rsquo;s hand to write to Pa,
+and&mdash;but I must not give it away. But you just watch Pa,
+that&rsquo;s all. Well, I must go and saw some wood. It is coming
+down a good deal, from a drug clerk to sawing wood, but I will get
+on top yet, and don&rsquo;t you forget it.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Give_us_War" name="Give_us_War">GIVE US WAR!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>We are in receipt of a circular from the American peace society,
+requesting us to leave a sum of money, in our will, to the society
+to be applied to the interest of peace. We are opposed to peace, on
+such terms. Give us war, every time.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Fire_New_Years_Day" name=
+"The_Fire_New_Years_Day">THE FIRE NEW YEAR&rsquo;S DAY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>If there is anything the young men of Rescue Hose Company pride
+themselves upon, it is in getting themselves up, regardless of
+expense, on New Year&rsquo;s day, and calling upon their lady
+friends. On Monday last these young men arrayed themselves in their
+best clothes and sat around in stores and waited for the time to go
+calling. Solomon in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of
+these firemen.</p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/033.png"><img src=
+"images/033.png" alt="A fireman climbs a ladder." id="img033" name=
+"img033" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>SWALLOW-TAILS ON THE CLIMB.</p>
+</div>
+<p>Just as the young gentlemen were about throwing away their last
+cigar at noon, preparatory to calling at the first place on the
+list, the fire-bell rang, and there was a lively procession
+followed the steamer down Fourth street in a few minutes. It looked
+as though a wedding had been broken up and bridegrooms were running
+around loose. The party arrived at the scene of the fire, which was
+Matt. Larsen&rsquo;s hotel on the corner of Second and King
+streets, and such a shinning of swallow-tailed coats up blue
+ladders was never seen. The fellows that belonged in the house
+threw out bedsteads and crockery on to stove-pipe hats, and emptied
+beds on to broadcloth coats. The wedding party disappeared in the
+third story window with the hose, in the smoke, and after half an
+hour&rsquo;s work they came out looking as though they had been in
+the Ashtabula railroad accident. Young Mr. Smith had a stream of
+dirty water sent up his trousers leg, which went clear up to his
+collar, and wilted it beyond repair. Mr. Hatch entwined his doeskin
+pants around the burnt ridge-pole of the roof, hung on to a rafter
+with his teeth, and chopped shingles, and the pipemen kept him wet,
+and he looked like a bundle of damp stuff in a paper mill. Mr.
+Spence was on the top of the ladder, and Mr. Drummond was next
+below him. In falling, Mr. D. caught hold of one tail of Mr.
+Spence&rsquo;s swallow hammer coat, and stretched the tail about
+two feet longer than the other. Mr. Foote was as dry as a bone,
+until the pipeman saw him, and they nailed him up against the wall
+with a stream and Foote was damp as a wet nurse in a minute.</p>
+<p>Young Mr. Osborne, confidential adviser of Hyde, Cargill &amp;
+Co., got half way up the ladder, and a leak in the hose struck him
+and froze him to the ladder, and Mr. Watson had to strike a match
+and thaw him loose. He wet his pants from Genesis to Revelations,
+and had to go calling with an ulster overcoat on. The most of the
+young men, after returning from the fire, stood by the stove and
+dried themselves, and went calling all the same, but the girls said
+they smelt like burnt shingles. The boys were all dry enough at the
+dance in the evening.</p>
+<h3><a id="Southern_Honaw" name="Southern_Honaw">SOUTHERN
+&ldquo;HONAW.&rdquo;</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Bennett and May fought a duel in Maryland the other day, and as
+near as the truth can be arrived at neither party received a
+scratch. But their &ldquo;honaw&rdquo; was satisfied.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Kills_Him" name="His_Pa_Kills_Him">HIS PA KILLS
+HIM.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;For heaven&rsquo;s sake dry up that whistling,&rdquo;
+said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he sat on a bag of peanuts,
+whistling and filling his pockets. &ldquo;There is no sense in such
+whistling. What do you whistle for, anyway?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am practicing my profession,&rdquo; said the boy, as he
+got up and stretched himself, and cut off a slice of cheese, and
+took a few crackers. &ldquo;I have always been a good whistler, and
+I have decided to turn my talent to account. I am going to hire an
+office and put out a sign, &lsquo;Boy furnished to whistle for lost
+dogs.&rsquo; You see there are dogs lost every day, and any man
+would give half a dollar to a boy to find his dog. I can hire out
+to whistle for dogs, and can go around whistling and enjoy myself,
+and make money. Don&rsquo;t you think it is a good scheme?&rdquo;
+asked the boy of the grocery man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Naw,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he charged the
+cheese to the boy&rsquo;s father, and picked up his cigar stub,
+which he had left on the counter, and which the boy had rubbed on
+the kerosene barrel, &ldquo;No, sir, that whistle would scare any
+dog that heard it. Say, what was your Pa running after the doctor
+in his shirt sleeves for last Sunday morning? He looked scared. Was
+your Ma sick again?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, no; Ma is healthy enough, now she has got a new fur
+lined cloak. She played consumption on Pa, and coughed so she liked
+to raise her lights and liver, and made Pa believe she
+couldn&rsquo;t live, and got the doctor to prescribe a fur lined
+circular, and Pa went and got one, and Ma has improved awfully. Her
+cough is all gone, and she can walk ten miles. I was the one that
+was sick. You see, I wanted to get Pa into the church again, and
+get him to stop drinking, so I got a boy to write a letter to him,
+in a female hand, and sign the name of a choir singer Pa was mashed
+on, and tell him she was yearning for him to come back to the
+church, and that the church seemed a blank without his smiling
+face, and benevolent heart, and to please come back for her sake.
+Pa got the letters Saturday night and he seemed tickled, but I
+guess he dreamed about it all night, and Sunday morning he was mad,
+and he took me by the ear and said I couldn&rsquo;t come no
+&lsquo;Daisy&rsquo; business on him the second time. He said he
+knew I wrote the letter, and for me to go up to the store room and
+prepare for the almightiest licking a boy ever had, and he went
+down stairs and broke up an apple barrel and got a stave to whip me
+with. Well, I had to think mighty quick, but I was enough for him.
+I got a dried bladder in my room, one that me and my chum got to
+the slotter house, and I blowed it partly up, so it would be sort
+of flat like, and I put it down inside the back part of my pants,
+right about where Pa hits when he punishes me. I knowed when the
+barrel stave hit the bladder it would explode. Well, Pa came up and
+found me crying. I can cry just as easy as you can turn on the
+water at a faucet, and Pa took off his coat and looked sorry. I was
+afraid he would give up whipping me when he saw me cry, and I
+wanted the bladder experiment to go on, so I looked kind of hard,
+as if I was defying him to do his worst, and then he took me by the
+neck and laid me across a trunk. I didn&rsquo;t dare struggle much
+for fear the bladder would loose itself, and Pa said, &lsquo;Now,
+Hennery, I am going to break you of this damfoolishness, or I will
+break your back,&rsquo; and he spit on his hands and brought the
+barrel stave down on my best pants. Well, you&rsquo;d a dide if you
+had heard the explosion. It almost knocked me off the trunk. It
+sounded like firing a firecracker away down cellar in a barrel, and
+Pa looked scared. I rolled off the trunk, on the floor, and put
+some flour on my face, to make me look pale, and then I kind of
+kicked my legs like a fellow who is dying on the stage, after being
+stabbed with a piece of lath, and groaned, and said, &lsquo;Pa you
+have killed me, but I forgive you,&rsquo; and then rolled around,
+and frothed at the mouth, cause I had a piece of soap in my mouth
+to make foam. Well, Pa was all broke up. He said, &lsquo;Great God,
+what have I done? I have broke his spinal column. O, my poor boy,
+do not die!&rsquo; I kept chewing the soap and foaming at the
+mouth, and I drew my legs up and kicked them out, and clutched my
+hair, and rolled my eyes, and then kicked Pa in the stummick as he
+bent over me, and knocked his breath out of him, and then my limbs
+began to get rigid, and I said, &lsquo;Too late, Pa, I die at the
+hand of an assassin. Go for a doctor.&rsquo; Pa throwed his coat
+over me, and started down stairs on a run, &lsquo;I have murdered
+my brave boy,&rsquo; and he told Ma to go up stairs and stay with
+me, cause I had fallen off a trunk and ruptured a blood vessel, and
+he went after a doctor. When he went out the front door, I sat up
+and lit a cigarette, and Ma came up and I told her all about how I
+fooled Pa, and if she would take on and cry, when Pa got back, I
+would get him to go to church again, and swear off drinking, and
+she said she would.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/037.png"><img src=
+"images/037.png" alt=
+"A lays on the ground while another walks away carrying a stick."
+id="img037" name="img037" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;TOO LATE, PA, I DIE AT THE HAND OF AN
+ASSASSIN!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;So when Pa and the doc. came back, Ma was sitting on a
+velocipede I used to ride, which was in the store-room, and she had
+her apron over her face, and she just more than bellowed. Pa he was
+pale, and he told the doc. he was just playing with me with a
+little piece of board, and he heard something crack, and he guessed
+my spine got broke falling off the trunk. The doctor wanted to feel
+where my spine got broke, but I opened my eyes and had a vacant
+kind of stare, like a woman who leads a dog by a string, and looked
+as though my mind was wandering, and I told the doctor there was no
+use setting my spine, as it was broke in several places, and I
+wouldn&rsquo;t let him feel of the dried bladder. I told Pa I was
+going to die, and I wanted him to promise me two things on my dying
+bed. He cried and said he would, and I told him to promise me he
+would quit drinking, and attend church regular, and he said he
+would never drink another drop, and would go to church every
+Sunday. I made him get down on his knees beside me and swear it,
+and the doc. witnessed it, and Ma said she was so glad, and Ma
+called the doctor out in the hall and told him the joke, and the
+doc. came in and told Pa he was afraid Pa&rsquo;s presence would
+excite the patient, and for him to put on his coat and go out and
+walk around the block, or go to church, and Ma and he would remove
+me to another room, and do all that was possible to make my last
+hours pleasant. Pa he cried, and said he would put on his plug hat
+and go to church, and he kissed me, and got flour on his nose, and
+I came near laughing right out, to see the white flour on his red
+nose, when I thought how the people in church would laugh at Pa.
+But he went out feeling mighty bad, and then I got up and pulled
+the bladder out of my pants, and Ma and the doc. laughed awful.
+When Pa got back from church and asked for me, Ma said that I had
+gone down town. She said the doctor found my spine was only
+uncoupled and he coupled it together, and I was all right. Pa was
+nervous all the afternoon, and Ma thinks he suspects that we played
+it on him. Say, you don&rsquo;t think there is any harm in playing
+it on an old man a little for a good cause, do you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man said he supposed, in the interest of reform it
+was all right, but if it was his boy that played such tricks he
+would take an ax to him, and the boy went out, apparently
+encouraged, saying he hadn&rsquo;t seen the old man since the day
+before, and he was almost afraid to meet him.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Musical_Critique" name="A_Musical_Critique">A MUSICAL
+CRITIQUE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/041.png"><img src=
+"images/041.png" alt="A large woman plays the violin." id="img041"
+name="img041" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE ROTUND URSO.</p>
+</div>
+<p>The second lecture of the Library Association course was
+delivered on Tuesday evening by a female lecturer named Camilla
+Urso, on a fiddle. The lecturer was supported by a female singer,
+two male clamsellers, and a piano masher, all of them decidedly
+talented in their particular lines. The lecture on the fiddle gave
+the most unbounded satisfaction, and the Association in taking this
+new departure, has struck a popular chord. Scarcely a person in the
+vast audience but would prefer such an entertainment to a dry
+lecture by some dictionary sharp. Of the performance, it is
+unnecessary to go into details, as all our readers were there, with
+few exceptions. The fat female, Urso, more than carved the fiddle.
+She dug sweet morsels of music out of it, all the way from the
+wish-bone to the part that goes over the fence last. She made it
+talk Norwegian, and squeezed little notes out of it not bigger than
+a cambric needle, and as smooth as a book agent. The female singer
+was fair, though nothing to brag on, while the male grasshopper
+sufferers sang as well as was necessary. But the most agile
+flea-catcher that has been here since Anna Dickinson&rsquo;s time,
+was sixteen-fingered Jack, the sandhill crane that had the
+disturbance with the piano. We never knew what the row was about,
+but when he walked up to the piano smiling, and shied his castor
+into the ring, everybody could see there was going to be trouble.
+He spit on his hands, sparred a little, and suddenly landed a
+stunning blow right on the ivory, which staggered the piano, and
+caused an exclamation of agony. First knock down for Jack. He
+paused a moment and then began putting in blows right and left, in
+such a cruel manner that the spectators came near breaking into the
+ring. Whenever a key showed its head he mauled it. We never saw a
+piano stand so much punishment, and live, and Jack never got a
+scratch. The whole concert was a success, and the troupe can always
+get a good house here.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Dead_Sure_Thing" name="A_Dead_Sure_Thing">A DEAD SURE
+THING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The only persons that are real sure that their calling and
+election is sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots,
+are the men who are hung for murder. They always announce that they
+have got a dead thing on it, just before the drop falls. How
+encouraging it must be to children to listen to the prayers of our
+ministers in churches, who admit that they are miserable sinners
+living on God&rsquo;s charity, and doubtful if they would be
+allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of
+their unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then let
+the children read an account of a hanging bee, and see how happy
+the condemned man is, how he shouts glory hallelujah, and confesses
+that, though he killed his man, he is going to heaven. A child will
+naturally ask why don&rsquo;t the ministers murder somebody and
+make a dead sure thing of it?</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Mortified" name="His_Pa_Mortified">HIS PA
+MORTIFIED.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was the health officer doing over to your house this
+morning?&rdquo; said the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth
+was firing frozen potatoes at the man who collects garbage in the
+alley.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, they are searching for sewer gas and such things, and
+they have got plumbers and other society experts till you
+can&rsquo;t rest, and I came away for fear they would find the
+sewer gas and warm my jacket. Say, do you think it is right when
+anything smells awfully, to always lay it to a boy?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, in nine cases out of ten they would hit it right,
+but what do you think is the trouble over to your house,
+honest?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;S-h-h! Now don&rsquo;t breathe a word of it to a living
+soul, or I am a dead boy. You see I was over to the dairy fair at
+the Exposition building Saturday night, and when they were breaking
+up me and my chum helped to carry boxes of cheese and firkins of
+butter, and a cheese man gave each of us a piece of limberger
+cheese, wrapped up in tin foil. Sunday morning I opened my piece,
+and it made me tired. O, it was the offulest smell I ever heard of,
+except the smell when they found a tramp who hung himself in the
+woods on the Whitefish Bay road, and had been dead three weeks. It
+was just like an old back number funeral. Pa and Ma were just
+getting ready to go to church, and I cut off a piece of cheese and
+put it in the inside pocket of Pa&rsquo;s vest, and I put another
+in the lining of Ma&rsquo;s muff, and they went to church. I went
+down to church too, and sat on a back seat with my chum, looking
+just as pious as though I was taking up a collection. The church
+was pretty warm, and by the time they got up to sing the first hymn
+Pa&rsquo;s cheese began to smell a match against Ma&rsquo;s cheese.
+Pa held one side of the hymn book and Ma held the other, and Pa he
+always sings for all that is out, and when he braced himself and
+sang &lsquo;Just as I am,&rsquo; Ma thought Pa&rsquo;s voice was
+tinctured a little with biliousness, and she looked at him and
+hunched him, and told him to stop singing and breathe through his
+nose, cause his breath was enough to stop a clock. Pa stopped
+singing and turned around kind of cross towards Ma, and then he
+smelled Ma&rsquo;s cheese and he turned his head the other way and
+said, &lsquo;whew,&rsquo; and they didn&rsquo;t sing any more, but
+they looked at each other as though they smelled frowy. When they
+sat down they sat as far apart as they could get, and Pa sat next
+to a woman who used to be a nurse in a hospital, and when she
+smelled Pa&rsquo;s cheese she looked at him as though she thought
+he had the small pox, and she held her handkerchief to her nose.
+The man in the other end of the pew, that Ma sat near, he was a
+stranger from Racine, who belongs to our church, and he looked at
+Ma sort of queer, and after the minister prayed, and they got up to
+sing again, the man took his hat and went out, and when he came by
+me he said something in a whisper about a female glue factory.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/045.png"><img src=
+"images/045.png" alt="Two men look at a hymnal during church." id=
+"img045" name="img045" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;JUST AS I AM.&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, sir, before the sermon was over everybody in that
+part of the church had their handkerchiefs to their noses, and they
+looked at Pa and Ma scandalous, and the two ushers they came around
+in the pews looking for a dog, and when the minister got over his
+sermon, and wiped the prespiration off his face, he said he would
+like to have the trustees of the church stay after meeting, as
+there was some business of importance to transact. He said the
+question of proper ventilation and sewerage for the church would be
+brought up, and that he presumed the congregation had noticed this
+morning that the church was unusually full of sewer gas. He said he
+had spoken of the matter before, and expected it would be attended
+to before this. He said he was a meek and humble follower of the
+lamb, and was willing to cast his lot wherever the Master decided,
+but he would be blessed if he would preach any longer in a church
+that smelled like a bone boiling establishment. He said religion
+was a good thing, but no person could enjoy religion as well in a
+fat rendering establishment as he could in a flower garden, and as
+far as he was concerned he had got enough. Everybody looked at
+everybody else, and Pa looked at Ma as though he knew where the
+sewer gas came from, and Ma looked at Pa real mad, and me and my
+chum lit out, and I went home and distributed my cheese all around.
+I put a slice in Ma&rsquo;s bureau drawer, down under her
+underclothes, and a piece in the spare room, under the bed, and a
+piece in the bath-room in the soap dish, and a slice in the album
+on the parlor table, and a piece in the library in a book, and I
+went to the dining room and put some under the table, and dropped a
+piece under the range in the kitchen. I tell you the house was
+loaded for bear. Ma came home from church first, and when I asked
+where Pa was, she said she hoped he had gone to walk around the
+block to air hisself. Pa came home to dinner and when he got a
+smell of the house he opened all the doors, and Ma put a
+comfortable around her shoulders, and told Pa he was a disgrace to
+civilization. She tried to get Pa to drink some carbolic acid. Pa
+finally convinced Ma that it was not him, and then they decided it
+was the house that smelled so, as well as the church, and all
+Sunday afternoon they went visiting, and this morning Pa went down
+to the health office and got the inspector of nuisances to come up
+to the house, and when he smelled around a spell he said there was
+dead rats in the main sewer pipe, and they sent for plumbers, and
+Ma went out to a neighbors to borry some fresh air, and when the
+plumbers began to dig up the floor in the basement I came over
+here. If they find any of that limberger cheese it will go hard
+with me. The hired girls have both quit, and Ma says she is going
+to break up keeping house and board. That is just into my hand. I
+want to board at a hotel, where you can have a bill-of-fare, and
+tooth picks, and billiards, and everything. Well I guess I will go
+over to the house and stand in the back door and listen to the
+mocking bird. If you see me come flying out of the alley with my
+coat tail full of boots you can bet they have discovered the sewer
+gas.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Mrs_Langtry" name="Mrs_Langtry">MRS. LANGTRY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>America is to be visited by the most beautiful woman in all
+England, Mrs. Langtry. It is said that she is so sweet that when
+you look at her you feel caterpillars crawling up the small of your
+back, your heart begins to jump like a box car, and a streak of
+lightning goes down one trousers leg and up the other, and escapes
+up the back of your neck, causing the hair to raise and be filled
+with electricity enough to light a circus tent, and that when
+looking at her your hands clutch nervously as though you wanted to
+grasp something to hold you up, a sense of faintness comes over
+you, your eyes roll heavenward, your head falls helpless on your
+breast, your left side becomes numb, your liver quits working, your
+breath comes hot and heavy, your lips turn livid and tremble, your
+teeth chew on imaginary taffy, and you look around imploringly for
+somebody to take her away. If all this occurs to a person from
+looking at her, it would be sudden death or six months illness, to
+shake hands with her. If she comes to Milwaukee, there is one bald
+headed man going to the country where they are not so bad. You
+bet!</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Peck_at_the_Cheese" name="A_Peck_at_the_Cheese">A PECK
+AT THE CHEESE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Geo. W. Peck, of the <em>Sun</em>, recently delivered an address
+before the Wisconsin State Dairyman&rsquo;s Association. The
+following is an extract from the document:</p>
+<p><em>Fellow Cremationists:</em> 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&rsquo;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&mdash;<em>runnet</em>.</p>
+<p>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 will 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 &ldquo;Hold the fort for I am coming through the
+rye,&rdquo; while Eve sat on the verandah altering over her last
+year&rsquo;s polonaise, and winking at the devil who stood behind
+the milk house singing, &ldquo;I want to be an angel.&rdquo; After
+he got through milking he came up and saw Eve blushing, and he
+said, &ldquo;Madame, cheese it,&rdquo; and she chose it.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/050.png"><img src=
+"images/050.png" alt=
+"A smiling, smoking fellow in a top hat holds a pail and leans on a farm fence."
+id="img050" name="img050" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>A SCENE IN PARADISE.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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 from 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&frac12;
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 with 300 oxen. This is susceptible of
+demonstration. If any boy showed a desire to become a statesman, I
+would say to him, &ldquo;Young man, get married, buy a mooly cow,
+go to Sheboygan county, and start a cheese factory.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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-shaped chunk, all rind at one end, and as thin as a
+Congressman&rsquo;s excuse for voting back pay at the other? Make
+your cheese square and the consumer will rise up and call you
+another.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&mdash;I do not accuse you of
+cheating, but don&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s work to hew off cheese enough for a meal. Time has
+worked wonders in cheese.</p>
+<h3><a id="Selling_Clams" name="Selling_Clams">SELLING
+CLAMS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>At the concert Wednesday night, the last piece sung was a trio,
+by Marie Rose, Brignoli, and Carleton. The men stood on each side
+of the girl and began to jaw at her. It was in some other language,
+and we could only understand by the motion of their mouths and
+their actions. It seemed as though the men were trying to sell
+clams to her. First Brignoli began to whoop it up, and describe the
+clams he had to sell, and tried to get her to invest. He yelled at
+her, and seemed really put out, and she was as spunky as any girl
+we ever saw. When Brignoli got out of breath, Carleton began to
+tell her that Brig had been lying to her, that his clams were made
+of India rubber, and that she could never digest them in the wide
+world, and he wound up by telling her that she could have his clams
+at ten per cent discount for cash. By this time she was about as
+mad as she could be, and she pitched into both of them, looking
+cross, and sung like blazes, went away up the musical ladder to
+zero, and wound up by telling them both, to their face, that she
+would see them in Chicago before she would buy a condemned clam.
+And then they all went off the stage as though they had been having
+a regular fight, and Brignoli acted as though he would like to eat
+her raw. That&rsquo;s the way it seemed to us, but we are no
+musician.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Goes_Skating" name="His_Pa_Goes_Skating">HIS PA
+GOES SKATING.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is that stuff on your shirt bosom, that looks like
+soap grease?&rdquo; said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came
+into the grocery the morning after Christmas.</p>
+<p>The boy looked at his shirt front, put his finger on the stuff
+and smelled of his fingers, and then said, &ldquo;O, that is
+nothing but a little of the turkey dressing and gravy. You see
+after Pa and I got back from the roller skating rink yesterday, Pa
+was all broke up and he couldn&rsquo;t carve the turkey, and I had
+to do it, and Pa sat in a stuffed chair with his head tied up, and
+a pillow amongst his legs, and he kept complaining that I
+didn&rsquo;t do it right. Gol darn a turkey any way. I should think
+they would make a turkey flat on the back, so he would lay on a
+greasy platter without skating all around the table. It looks easy
+to see Pa carve a turkey, but when I speared into the bosom of that
+turkey, and began to saw on it, the turkey rolled around as though
+it was on castors, and it was all I could do to keep it out of
+Ma&rsquo;s lap. But I rasseled with it till I got off enough white
+meat for Pa and Ma and dark meat enough for me, and I dug out the
+dressing, but most of it flew into my shirt bosom, cause the string
+that tied up the place where the dressing was concealed about the
+person of the turkey, broke prematurely, and one oyster hit Pa in
+the eye, and he said I was as awkward as a cross-eyed girl trying
+to kiss a man with a hair lip. If I ever get to be the head of a
+family I shall carve turkeys with a corn sheller.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what broke your Pa up at the roller skating
+rink?&rdquo; asked the grocery man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, everything broke him up. He is split up so Ma buttons
+the top of his pants to his collar button, like a bicycle rider.
+Well, he had no business to have told me and my chum that he used
+to be the best skater in North America, when he was a boy. He said
+he skated once from Albany to New York in an hour and eighty
+minutes. Me and my chum thought if Pa was such a terror on skates
+we would get him to put on a pair of roller skates and enter him as
+the &lsquo;great unknown,&rsquo; and clean out the whole gang. We
+told Pa that he must remember that roller skates were different
+from ice skates, and that maybe he couldn&rsquo;t skate on them,
+but he said it didn&rsquo;t make any difference what they were as
+long as they were skates, and he would just paralyze the whole
+crowd. So we got a pair of big roller skates for him, and while we
+were strapping them on, Pa looked at the skaters glide around on
+the smooth wax floor just as though they were greased. Pa looked at
+the skates on his feet, after they were fastened, sort of forlorn
+like, the way a horse thief does when they put shackles on his
+legs, and I told him if he was afraid he couldn&rsquo;t skate with
+them we would take them off, but he said he would beat anybody
+there was there, or bust a suspender. Then we straightened Pa up,
+and pointed him towards the middle of the room, and he said,
+&lsquo;leggo,&rsquo; and we just give him a little push to start
+him, and he began to go. Well, by gosh, you&rsquo;d a dide to have
+seen Pa try to stop. You see, you can&rsquo;t stick in your heel
+and stop, like you can on ice skates, and Pa soon found that out,
+and he began to turn sideways, and then he threw his arms and
+walked on his heels, and he lost his hat, and his eyes began to
+stick out, cause he was going right towards an iron post. One arm
+caught the post and he circled around it a few times, and then he
+let go and began to fall, and, sir, he kept falling all across the
+room, and everybody got out of the way, except a girl, and Pa
+grabbed her by the polonaise, like a drowning man grabs at straws,
+though there wasn&rsquo;t any straws in her polonaise as I know of,
+but Pa just pulled her along as though she was done up in a
+shawl-strap, and his feet went out from under him and he struck on
+his shoulders and kept a going, with the girl dragging along like a
+bundle of clothes. If Pa had had another pair of roller skates on
+his shoulders, and castors on his ears, he couldn&rsquo;t have slid
+along any better. Pa is a short, big man, and as he was rolling
+along on his back, he looked like a sofa with castors on being
+pushed across a room by a girl. Finally Pa came to the wall and had
+to stop, and the girl fell right across him, with her roller skates
+in his neck, and she called him an old brute, and told him if he
+didn&rsquo;t let go of her polonaise she would murder him. Just
+then my chum and me got there and we amputated Pa from the girl,
+and lifted him up, and told him for heaven&rsquo;s sake to let us
+take off the skates, cause he couldn&rsquo;t skate any more than a
+cow, and Pa was mad and said for us to &lsquo;let him alone,&rsquo;
+and he could skate all right, and we let go and he struck out
+again. Well, sir, I was ashamed. An old man like Pa ought to knonv
+better than to try to be a boy. This last time Pa said he was going
+to spread himself, and if I am any judge of a big spread, he did
+spread himself. Some how the skates had got turned around side-ways
+on his feet, and his feet got to going in different directions, and
+Pa&rsquo;s feet were getting so far apart that I was afraid I would
+have two Pa&rsquo;s, half the size, with one leg apiece.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/057.png"><img src=
+"images/057.png" alt=
+"A man grabs a woman's clothing as he falls while ice skating." id=
+"img057" name="img057" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;PA GRABBED HER BY THE POLONAISE.&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;I tried to get him to take up a collection of his legs,
+and get them in the same ward but his arm flew around and hit me on
+the nose, and I thought if he wanted to strike the best friend he
+had, he could run his old legs his self. When he began to separate
+I could hear the bones crack, but maybe it was his pants, but
+anyway he came down on the floor like one of these fellows in a
+circus who spreads hisself, and he kept agoing and finally he
+surrounded an iron post with his legs, and stopped and looked pale,
+and the proprietor of the rink told Pa if he wanted to give a
+flying trapeze performance he would have to go to the gymnasium,
+and he couldn&rsquo;t skate on his shoulders any more, cause other
+skaters were afraid of him. Then Pa said he would kick the liver
+out of the proprietor of the rink, and he got up and steaded
+himself, and then he tried to kick the man, but both heels went up
+to wonct, and Pa turned a back summersault and struck right on his
+vest in front. I guess it knocked the breath out of him, for he
+didn&rsquo;t speak for a few minutes, and then he wanted to go
+home, and we put him in a street car, and he laid down on the hay
+and rode home. O, the work we had to get Pa&rsquo;s clothes off. He
+had cricks in his back, and everywhere, and Ma was away to one of
+the neighbors, to look at the presents, and I had to put liniment
+on Pa, and I made a mistake and got a bottle of furniture polish,
+and put it on Pa and rubbed it in, and when Ma came home, Pa
+smelled like a coffin at a charity funeral, and Ma said there was
+no way of getting that varnish off of Pa till it wore off: Pa says
+holidays are a condemned nuisance anyway. He will have to stay in
+the house all this week.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are pretty rough on the old man,&rdquo; said the
+grocery man, &ldquo;after he has been so kind to you and given you
+nice presents.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nice presents nothin. All I got was a &lsquo;Come to
+Jesus&rsquo; Christmas card, with brindle fringe, from Ma, and Pa
+gave me a pair of his old suspenders, and a calender with mottoes
+for every month, some quotations from scripture, such as
+&lsquo;honor thy father and mother,&rsquo; and &lsquo;evil
+communications corrupt two in the bush,&rsquo; and a bird in the
+hand beats two pair.&rsquo; Such things don&rsquo;t help a boy to
+be good. What a boy wants is club skates, and seven shot revolvers,
+and such things. Well, I must go and help Pa roll over in bed, and
+put on a new porous plaster. Good bye.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Try_to_Save_Two_Shillings" name=
+"Try_to_Save_Two_Shillings">TRYING TO SAVE TWO SHILLINGS.</a></h3>
+<!-- Transcriber's note: this is the way it is in the book (Try vs. Trying) -->
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>No person ever wants to tell us again how to save two shillings.
+When we started for Chippewa Falls, to attend the celebration, we
+only had a few hundred dollars along, and we felt like saving all
+that was possible. Just before arriving at Sparta, where we were to
+take supper, Dan McDonald got to telling about how to save
+twenty-five cents on meals at these eating houses, when traveling.
+He said that all you had to do when you come out from supper was to
+look like a bummer, or &ldquo;traveling man,&rdquo; hand the
+door-keeper fifty cents and wink twice with the left eye, and he
+would pass you right out, as though you had paid seventy-five
+cents. If you handed out a dollar bill, and he only gave you back
+twenty-five cents, you only had to hold out your hand and wink a
+couple of times, and the man would give you the other quarter. Dan
+said he always did that way, and he had saved hundreds of dollars.
+He said these bummers only paid fifty cents a meal, and there was
+no use of anybody else paying more, if they had cheek enough to
+play it on the landlord.</p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/061.png"><img src=
+"images/061.png" alt=
+"Two men gesture at each other by a sign marked 'Pay Here'" id=
+"img061" name="img061" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;OH, THAT WILL BE ALL RIGHT!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>We never had anything strike us any more reasonable than the
+statement of Mr. McDonald, and we determined to try it. To a man
+who was traveling a good deal lecturing, a saving of twenty-five
+cents a meal was worth looking into, and we made up our mind to
+begin to economize that very night. The train stopped and we walked
+across the platform as near like a bummer as possible. With our hat
+on one side, we threw a cigar stub into the parlor window, said
+&ldquo;Hello, old tapeworm,&rdquo; to the landlord in a familiar
+sort of way, chucked our hat into a chair; rushed into the
+dining-room, took a seat at the head of the table, and told a girl
+to cart out all she had got. The landlord looked at us as though he
+thought we were one of Field, Leiter &amp; Co.&rsquo;s bummers, his
+good wife looked frightened, as though she feared we would kick a
+leg off the table and spill things. However, there is no use of
+describing the meal, and how we went through brook trout and
+strawberry shortcake, and things. We couldn&rsquo;t help feeling
+sorry for the man that was destined to furnish all that for fifty
+cents. Finally we went out. We felt a sort of palpitation of the
+heart when we approached the hungry-looking man at the door, taking
+the money. He looked as though he was a sick orphan trying to save
+money enough to get to a water cure. Picking our teeth with our
+finger, like a Chicago bummer, and pulling our handkerchief out of
+our pistol pocket and blowing our nose like a thirty-two pounder,
+just as we had heard a Chicago fellow do, we handed the man fifty
+cents, winked a couple of times and started to go by. The tobacco
+sign standing there said, &ldquo;twenty-five cents more,
+please.&rdquo; We looked at him, winked, and said, &ldquo;O, that
+will be all right.&rdquo; &ldquo;Two shillings more, my
+friend,&rdquo; said the summer resort. We winked some more, and
+punched him in the ribs with our thumb, and said, &ldquo;O, now,
+old tapeworm, don&rsquo;t try to play it on us boys.&rdquo; And we
+laughed a sickly sort of laugh. The fact of it was, we began to
+have doubts about the thing working, and had a suspicion that the
+twinkle in Dan McDonald&rsquo;s eye meant that he had been playing
+it on us. The landlord said he should have to have two shillings
+more, and that we were blocking up the thoroughfare, and we fumbled
+around and found it and paid him, and went out, probably the most
+disgusted excursionist that ever was. Dan, who had watched the
+whole business, slapped us on the shoulder, and said, &ldquo;How
+did it work?&rdquo; Though not particularly hungry, we could have
+eaten him raw. When we go east now, we take a lunch along, and when
+the other passengers are in to supper, we sit on the woodpile at
+Sparta, eat our lunch and gaze at the fountains, talk with the
+brakemen, and wonder if the landlord would know us if we should go
+in and take a toothpick off the counter. Not any more bummer for
+us, and no man must ever tell us how to save two shillings on a
+meal.</p>
+<h3><a id="How_to_Reach_Young_Men" name=
+"How_to_Reach_Young_Men">HOW TO REACH YOUNG MEN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;How to reach young men,&rdquo; was the topic at the young
+men&rsquo;s prayer meeting on Thursday. An old gentleman on the
+East Side who broke a toe nail by kicking the gate post just as the
+young man went down the sidewalk, would also like to know. Bait
+your hook with a mighty good looking girl that wears a sealskin
+cloak, and you can reach the young men.</p>
+<h3><a id="Crushing_Nihilism" name="Crushing_Nihilism">CRUSHING
+NIHILISM.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The Russian government is making an average of four thousand
+arrests a day of persons charged with nihilism. At this rate it is
+only a question of time when the last of the conspirators will be
+in prison, and the emperor can walk out without fear of
+assassination from his wife and children, as these will probably be
+all the people that will be left.</p>
+<h3><a id="Woman-Dozing_a_Democrat" name=
+"Woman-Dozing_a_Democrat">WOMAN-DOZING A DEMOCRAT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A fearful tale conies 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.</p>
+<p>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</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hurrah for Garfield, or I will plunge you headlong into
+the yawning gulf below!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;Last call! Yell, or down you go!&rdquo; he
+opened his mouth and yelled so they heard it in Kilbourn City:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hurrah for Garfield! Now lemme go!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/064.png"><img src=
+"images/064.png" alt="A woman pushes a man from a cliff." id=
+"img064" name="img064" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;YELL, OR GO DOWN!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t fool him. After what had
+occurred, he didn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>They tried to interest him in conversation by drawing war maps
+with three-tined folks 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. Chapin&rsquo;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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Moak, that is played out. People will notice
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But he relapsed again into semi-unconsciousness, and never spoke
+again, not a great deal, till he got home.</p>
+<p>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 be 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.</p>
+<p>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-wood Democrat hurrahed for
+Garfield.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Wrong_Corpse" name="The_Wrong_Corpse">THE WRONG
+CORPSE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A corpse got a good joke on the people of Quebec the other day.
+It came there by express, and was only an ordinary, every-day man,
+but the Kanucks were looking for a military corpse, and supposing
+our ordinary corpse to be he, they got up a Fifth avenue funeral,
+and buried it with military honors. The corpse, who didn&rsquo;t
+know a thing about military matters, must have many a good laugh
+over the mistake. And how the military corpse must have felt, when
+HE came!</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Day_We_Reached_Canada" name=
+"The_Day_We_Reached_Canada">THE DAY WE REACHED CANADA.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>D.H. Pulcifer, of Shawano, announces that he is about to prepare
+a biography of all the members of the territorial legislature and
+subsequent legislatures, state officers, members of congress, etc.,
+and desires all men who may have been great or may be so now, to
+send in the particulars. Well, you can get our record at the
+adjutant general&rsquo;s office, though there is one mistake in
+that record. It was in June, 1862 that we arrived in Canada, the
+day before the draft.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Lively_Train_Load" name="A_Lively_Train_Load">A LIVELY
+TRAIN LOAD.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 into the car to
+sell pop corn.</p>
+<p>Stopping at the first seat, where a middle-aged lady was sitting
+alone, the pop corn man passed out his basket and said,
+&ldquo;fresh pop corn.&rdquo; The lady took her foot down off the
+stove, looked at the man a moment with eyes glaring and wild, and
+said, &ldquo;It is&mdash;no, it cannot be&mdash;and yet it
+<em>is</em> me long lost Duke of Oshkosh,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;Madame, you are
+mistaken. I never have been a duke in Oshkosh. I live here at the
+Junction.&rdquo; The woman looked at him as though she doubted his
+statement, but let him go.</p>
+<p>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 popcorn and putting it
+in his coat tail pocket, the serious man said, &ldquo;I was
+honestly elected President of the United States in 1876, but was
+counted out by the vilest conspiracy that ever was concocted on
+earth, and I believe you are one of the conspirators,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/068.png"><img src=
+"images/068.png" alt="A woman pulls a man towards her." id="img068"
+name="img068" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>ME LONG LOST DUKE.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;I will be ready when the carriage calls
+at 8.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;but,&rdquo; says he, as he picked some pieces
+of paper collar out of the back of his neck, &ldquo;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&rsquo;t know my business.&rdquo; Fitz told him they were
+patients going to the Insane Asylum.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Cats_on_the_Fence" name="Cats_on_the_Fence">CATS ON THE
+FENCE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Some idiot has invented a &ldquo;cat teaser&rdquo; to put on
+fences to keep cats from sitting there and singing. It consists of
+a three-cornered piece of tin, nailed on the top of the fence. We
+hope none of our friends will invest in the patent, for statistics
+show that while cats very often sit on fences to meditate, yet when
+they get it all mediated and get ready to sing a duet, they get
+down off the fence and get under a currant bush. We challenge any
+cat scientist to disprove the assertion.</p>
+<h3><a id="How_Sharper_Than_a_Hounds_Tooth" name=
+"How_Sharper_Than_a_Hounds_Tooth">HOW SHARPER THAN A HOUND&rsquo;S
+TOOTH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 <em>via</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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 till last week.
+One day we met Pierce, the Watertown Junction hotel man, and he
+told us that he had a greyhound pup that was the finest bread
+dog&mdash;we think he said bread dog, though it might have been
+sausage dog he said&mdash;anyway he told us it was blooded, and
+that when it grew up to be a man&mdash;that is, figuratively
+speaking&mdash;when it grew up to be a dog full size, it would be
+the handsomest canine in the Northwest.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Well&mdash;(excuse us while we go into a corner and mutter a
+silent remark)&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>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, the dog will reach from here to the
+Soldier&rsquo;s home.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/071.png"><img src=
+"images/071.png" alt="A dog with an extremely long tail." id=
+"img071" name="img071" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&lsquo;THEREBY HANGS A TAIL&rsquo;.</p>
+</div>
+<p>His head is about as big as a graham gem, and runs down to a
+point no 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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
+<em>him</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Pierce said he would be a nice dog to run with a horse, or under
+a carriage. Why, bless you, he won&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t be
+frightened at that dog nothing would scare him.</p>
+<p>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
+fall off a wagon track we tie a knot in his tail.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Safe_Investment" name="A_Safe_Investment">A SAFE
+INVESTMENT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Up to the present time the <em>Sun</em> has struggled along from
+infancy to middle age without a safe in its office. It has never
+needed one. It does not need one now, but custom has to do with
+these things. The associations that surround one, go far towards
+making these changes. When we look at the immense safes in the
+office of out neighbor, filled with bonds and mortgages, we feel
+that a safe will look well. So we purchased a sort of an iron
+range, with a nickle plated knob, and a lock with as many figures
+on it as a tax list or a lottery advertisement, and placed it where
+it will strike the visitor on his first entrance. Ah, what an
+imposing affair it is! As we lean back in a chair and 1ook at it,
+and close our eyes, we can see millions in it, in our mind. It is a
+cross between Alex. Mitchell&rsquo;s safe and a child&rsquo;s bank.
+It is not full, but it has evidently been taking something. It is a
+grand feeling to walk along the streets and feel that your head
+contains the secret which opens the safe. No one but yourself and
+your maker, and the maker of the safe knows the three numbers which
+will cause it to open. The numbers are safe with you, and the All
+Seeing Eye you have confidence will not give it away, so that the
+only show a burglar has is to get solid with the maker of the
+safe.</p>
+<p>What a piece of mechanism is the lock of a safe! The man we
+bought it of gave us the programme that opens it. You go to the
+dial turn the knob, put your finger by your nose and wink. If you
+leave out the wink, the safe will not open, but we never leave out
+the wink. The trouble is, if there is a lady customer in with a
+bill, and we go to open the safe, we wink too many times and have
+to go all over it again. Then we place the numbers in their order,
+4-11-44, and when the &ldquo;four&rdquo; is exactly opposite the
+dipthong, we turn the knob back three revolutions, light a cigar,
+and walk three times around the room. That is to give the mechanism
+in the Inside time to coalesce. Then we put the
+&ldquo;eleven&rdquo; in its place, turn the knob forward one
+revolution, and put on our hat and go out and take a drink. That is
+in the programme, and we sometimes think the inventor of the lock
+is interested in a brewery. Then we come back, wipe our mustache on
+the tail of a linen coat, place the figures &ldquo;44&rdquo;
+directly over the pointer, whistle &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a land that
+is fairer than this,&rdquo; place the right foot forward, then turn
+the knob, the door swings on its hinges, and the untold wealth of
+the Indies lies before us, in our alleged mind.</p>
+<p>O, safe, are you honest? Are you true to us? You look pure and
+chaste, and your new overskirt of varnish, and your puffed ruching
+of gold and blue sets you off to good advantage, but you may not be
+impregnable. You have always gone in good society, and no scandal
+has ever been attached to your name. Your purity and innocence has
+been remarked by all who have met you, and there are none who would
+dare to intimate but that you would maintain your reputation
+against any attack, but sometimes we think we should hesitate to
+leave you all alone, with the light turned down all night and over
+Sunday, in the company of an eloquent, persuasive, good-looking
+burglar armed with a jimmy, and we fear that his warm hearted can
+of powder would strike a responsive chord in your impulsive nature,
+and that you would yield up the jewels confined to you, and your
+honor, your reputation, your standing among safes would be forever
+ruined. And yet we may be wrong.</p>
+<p>But what would it profit a burglar to gain the whole contents
+and wear out his soles. If he got in that safe, he would find a
+package of bills that we tried for a year to collect, and we would
+give him the bills if he asked for them, and he could save his
+powder. He would find one bill of sixteen dollars, with an
+indorsement that one dollar is paid, after thirteen dollars worth
+of shoe leather had been worn out. And yet the burglar would have a
+soft thing on cigars with that bill, for every time he visited the
+doctor he would tell him when to come again, and give him a cigar.
+Another thing the burglar would find would be a protested draft
+from a great Philadelphia patent medicine advertiser. The burglar
+could take a tie pass that is in the safe, and walk to
+Philadelphia, and trade out the twenty-five dollar draft by taking
+buchu on account.</p>
+<p>But no burglar that has any respect for himself, we feel sure,
+will ever do us the injury to scrape the paint off of that
+safe.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Fashion_Item" name="A_Fashion_Item">A FASHION
+ITEM.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A fashion item says, &ldquo;The drawers this year are made very
+short, and some have lace ruffles.&rdquo; Some fashion reporter has
+evidently been looking over our back fence at the clothes line. But
+they got awfully fooled. The shortness of those drawers was caused
+by the flannel shrinking and the &ldquo;lace ruffles&rdquo; the
+reporter noticed is where a calf chewed them when they were hanging
+out to dry last fall on Black Hawk Island, when a gun kicked us out
+of a boat. Some of these fashion reporters think they are
+smart.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Lecturer_Should_Know_What_He_Talks_About" name=
+"A_Lecturer_Should_Know_What_He_Talks_About">A LECTURER SHOULD KNOW
+WHAT HE TALKS ABOUT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A man down east is lecturing on &ldquo;Hell, Ingersoll, and
+Whisky.&rdquo; If the lecturer is at all familiar with his
+subjects, we wouldn&rsquo;t believe him under oath.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Goes_Calling" name="His_Pa_Goes_Calling">HIS PA
+GOES CALLING.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, you are getting too alfired smart,&rdquo; said the
+grocery man to the bad boy as he pushed him into a corner by the
+molasses barrel, and took him by the neck and choked him so his
+eyes stuck out. &ldquo;You have driven away several of my best
+customers, and now, confound you, I am going to have your
+life,&rdquo; and he took up a cheese knife and began to sharpen it
+on his boot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the&mdash;gurgle&mdash;matter?&rdquo; asked
+the choking boy, as the grocery man&rsquo;s finger let up on his
+throat a little, so he could speak. &ldquo;I haint done
+nothing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you hang up that gray torn cat by the heels,
+in front of my store, with the rabbits I had for sale? I
+didn&rsquo;t notice it until the minister called me out in front of
+the store, and pointing to the rabbits, asked what good fat cats
+were selling for. By crimus, this thing has got to stop. You have
+got to move out of this ward or I will.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy got his breath and said it wasn&rsquo;t him that put the
+cat up there. He said it was the policeman, and he and his chum saw
+him do it, and he just come in to tell the grocery man about it,
+and before he could speak he had his neck nearly pulled off. The
+boy began to cry, and the grocery man said he was only joking, and
+gave him a box of sardines, and they made up. Then he asked the boy
+how his Pa put in his New Years, and the boy sighed and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We had a sad time at our house New Years. Pa insisted on
+making calls, and Ma and me tried to prevent it, but he said he was
+of age, and guessed he could make calls if he wanted to, so he
+looked at the morning paper and got the names of all the places
+where they were going to receive, and he turned his paper collar,
+and changed ends with his cuffs, and put some arnica on his
+handkerchief, and started out. Ma told him not to drink anything,
+and he said he wouldn&rsquo;t, but he did. He was full the third
+place he went to. O, so full. Some men can get full and not show
+it, but when Pa gets full, he gets so full his back teeth float,
+and the liquor crowds his eyes out, and his mouth gets loose and
+wiggles all over his face, and he laughs all the time, and the
+perspiration just oozes out of him, and his face gets red, and he
+walks so wide. O, he disgraced us all. At one place he wished the
+hired girl &lsquo;a happy new year&rsquo; more than twenty times,
+and hung his hat on her elbow, and tried to put on a rubber hall
+mat for his over shoes. At another place he walked up a
+lady&rsquo;s train, and carried away a card basket full of bananas
+and oranges. Ma wanted my chum and me to follow Pa and bring him
+home, and about dark we found him in the door yard of a house where
+they have statues in front of the house, and he grabbed me by the
+arm, and mistook me for another caller, and insisted on introducing
+me to a marble statue without any clothes on. He said it was a
+friend of his, and it was a winter picnic. He hung his hat on an
+evergreen, and put his overcoat on the iron fence, and I was so
+mortified I almost cried. My chum said if his Pa made such a circus
+of himself he would sand bag him. That gave me an idea, and when we
+got Pa most home I went and got a paper box covered with red paper,
+so it looked just like a brick, and a bottle of tomato ketchup, and
+when we got Pa up on the steps at home I hit him with the paper
+brick, and my chum squirted the ketchup on his head, and we
+demanded his money, and then he yelled murder, and we lit out, and
+Ma and the minister, who was making a call on her, all the
+afternoon, they came to the door and pulled Pa in. He said he had
+been attacked by a band of robbers, and they knocked his brains
+out, but he whipped them, and then Ma saw the ketchup brains oozing
+out of his head, and she screamed, and the minister said.
+&lsquo;Good heavens, he is murdered!&rsquo; and just then I came in
+the back door and they sent after the doctor, and they put Pa on
+the lounge, and tied up his head with a towel to keep the brains
+in, and Pa began to snore, and when the doctor came in it took them
+half an hour to wake him, and then he was awful sick to his
+stummick, and then Ma asked the doctor if he would live, and the
+doc. analyzed the ketchup and smelled of it and told Ma he would be
+all right if he had a little Worcester sauce to put on with the
+ketchup, and when he said Pa would pull through, Ma looked awful
+sad. Then Pa opened his eyes and saw the minister and said that was
+one of the robbers that jumped on him, and he wanted to whip the
+minister, but the doc. held Pa&rsquo;s arms and Ma sat on his legs,
+and the minister said he had got some other calls to make, and he
+wished Ma a happy new year in the hall, much as fifteen minutes.
+His happy new year to Ma is most as long as his prayers. Well, we
+got Pa to bed, and when we undressed him we found nine napkins in
+the bosom of his vest, that he had picked up at the places where he
+had called. He is all right this morning, but he says it is the
+last time he will drink coffee when he makes New Years calls.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, then you didn&rsquo;t have much fun yourself on New
+Years. That&rsquo;s too bad,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he
+looked at the sad eyed youth. &ldquo;But you look hard. If you were
+old enough I should say you had been drunk, your eyes are
+red.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/079.png"><img src=
+"images/079.png" alt="A man doffs his hat at a nude statue." id=
+"img079" name="img079" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>HAPPY NEW YEAR, MUM!</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t have any fun eh? Well, I wish I had as many
+dollars as I had fun. You see, after Pa got to sleep Ma wanted me
+and my chum to go to the houses that Pa had called at and return
+the napkins he had kleptomaniaced, so we dressed up and went. The
+first house we called at the girls were sort of demoralized. I
+don&rsquo;t know as I ever saw a girl drunk, but those girls acted
+queer. The callers had stopped coming, and the girls were drinking
+something out of shaving cups that looked like lather, and they
+said it was &lsquo;aignogg.&rsquo; They laffed and kicked up their
+heels wuss nor a circus, and their collars got unpinned, and their
+faces was red, and they put their arms around me and my chum and
+hugged us and asked us if we didn&rsquo;t want some of the custard.
+You&rsquo;d a dide to see me and my chum drink that lather. It
+looked just like soap suds with nutmaig in it, but by gosh it got
+in its work sudden. At first I was afraid when the girls hugged me,
+but after I had drank a couple of shaving cups full of the
+&lsquo;aignogg&rsquo; I wasn&rsquo;t afraid no more, and I hugged a
+girl so hard she catched her breath and panted and said, &lsquo;O,
+don&rsquo;t.&rsquo; Then I kissed her, and she is a great big girl,
+bigger&rsquo;n me, but she didn&rsquo;t care. Say, did you ever
+kiss a girl full of aignogg? If you did it would break up your
+grocery business. You would want to waller in bliss instead of
+selling mackerel. My chum ain&rsquo;t no slouch either. He was
+sitting in a stuffed chair holding another New Year&rsquo;s girl,
+and I could hear him kiss her so it sounded like a cutter scraping
+on bare ground. But the girl&rsquo;s Pa came in and said he guessed
+it was time to close the place, unless they had a license for an
+all night house, and me and my chum went out. But
+<em>wasn&rsquo;t</em> we sick when we got out doors. O, it seemed
+as though the pegs in my boots was the only thing that kept them
+down, and my chum he like to dide. He had been to dinner and supper
+and I had only been skating all day, so he had more to contend with
+than I did. O, my, but that lets me out on aignogg. I don&rsquo;t
+know how I got home, but I got in bed with Pa, cause Ma was called
+away to attend a baby matinee in the night. I don&rsquo;t know how
+it is, but there never is anybody in our part of town that has a
+baby but they have it in the night, and they send for Ma. I
+don&rsquo;t know what she has to be sent for every time for. Ma
+ain&rsquo;t to blame for all the young ones in this town, but she
+has got up a reputashun, and when we hear the bell ring in the
+night Ma gets up and begins to put on her clothes, and the next
+morning she comes in the dining room with a shawl over her head,
+and says, &lsquo;its a girl and weighs ten pounds,&rsquo; or
+&lsquo;a boy,&rsquo; if it&rsquo;s a boy baby. Ma was out on one of
+her professional engagements, and I got in bed with Pa. I had heard
+Pa blame Ma about her cold feet, so I got a piece of ice about as
+big as a raisin box, just zactly like one of Ma&rsquo;s feet, and
+laid it right against the small of Pa&rsquo;s back. I
+couldn&rsquo;t help laffing, but pretty soon Pa began to squirm and
+he said, &lsquo;Why&rsquo;n &rsquo;ell don&rsquo;t you warm them
+feet before you come to bed,&rsquo; and then he hauled back his leg
+and kicked me clear out in the middle of the floor, and said if he
+married again he would marry a woman who had lost both her feet in
+a railroad accident. Then I put the ice back in the bed with Pa and
+went to my room, and in the morning Pa said he sweat more&rsquo;n a
+pail full in the night. Well, you must excuse me. I have an
+engagement to shovel snow off the sidewalk. But before I go, let me
+advise you not to drink aignogg, and don&rsquo;t sell tom cats for
+rabbits,&rdquo; and he got out of the door just in time to miss the
+rutabaga that the grocery man threw at him.</p>
+<h3><a id="What_the_Democrats_Will_Do" name=
+"What_the_Democrats_Will_Do">WHAT THE DEMOCRATS WILL DO.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The <em>Wisconsin</em> asks, &ldquo;What will the Democrats
+do?&rdquo; We trust it is not betraying a confidence reposed in us
+by the manager of a party, but we can not allow our neighbor to
+remain in such dense ignorance, as long as we are possessed of the
+desired information. &ldquo;What will the Democrats do?&rdquo; The
+Democrats will prove an <em>alibi!</em></p>
+<h3><a id="A_Sewing_Machine_Given_to_the_Boss_Girl" name=
+"A_Sewing_Machine_Given_to_the_Boss_Girl">A SEWING MACHINE GIVEN TO
+THE BOSS GIRL.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;boss combination girl&rdquo; of
+Rock County. With the machine he sent the following letter, which
+explains his meaning of a &ldquo;combination girl,&rdquo; etc.:</p>
+<p class="rgt">MILWAUKEE, June 7, 1881.</p>
+<p>W.T. VANKIRK&mdash;<em>Dear Sir:</em> Your letter, in reference
+to 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 follow
+result:</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;combination girl&rdquo; in Rock
+County, with the compliments of the <em>Sun</em>.</p>
+<p>What I mean by a &ldquo;combination,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t want to give this machine to any female statue, or
+parlor ornament, who don&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Fair Girl,&rdquo;
+that takes this machine, must be &ldquo;the boss.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s roses
+will discount any preparation ever made by man, and so well-formed
+that nothing artificial is needed to&mdash;well, Van, you know what
+I mean.</p>
+<p>You want to pick out a thoroughbred, that is, all wool, a yard
+wide&mdash;that is, understand me, I don&rsquo;t want the girl to
+be a yard wide, but just right. Your Committee don&rsquo;t want to
+get &ldquo;mashed&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s work, if necessary, and one there is no danger
+of breaking in two if her intended should hug her.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/084.png"><img src=
+"images/084.png" alt=
+"A woman plays the piano and sings enthusiastically." id="img084"
+name="img084" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>I WANT TO BE AN ANGEL.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know Venus,
+but I have heard that she takes the cake&mdash;I say, if you find
+one that is perfect in everything, but shirks her duties at home,
+and plays, &ldquo;I Want to Be an Angel,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t give her the machine. You catch the idea?</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 open 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 for a prize.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p class="rgt">Your friend<br />
+GEO. W. PECK.</p>
+<h3><a id="She_was_no_Gentleman" name="She_was_no_Gentleman">SHE
+WAS NO GENTLEMAN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>From an article in the <em>Leader</em> we gather that Frank
+Drake, editor of the Rushford <em>Star</em>, was horsewhipped by a
+woman who was dissatisfied with some article of his that appeared
+against her, in the <em>Star</em>. A woman that cowhides an editor
+is no gentleman.</p>
+<h3><a id="Joke_on_the_Hat" name="Joke_on_the_Hat">JOKE ON THE
+HAT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Somehow, during the election excitement, Frank Hatch happened to
+bet right just once. He bet a hat, and on Monday he went to Putnam
+&amp; Philbrick and selected one of the finest silk ones. When he
+went out in the street every body noticed it, and a reception was
+held. They all congratulated Frank, except Ike Usher. Ike&rsquo;s
+hat was a year old, and the contrast was so remarkable that Ike
+would not walk on the street with Hatch. Frank said that
+Ike&rsquo;s hat used to be a very fine looking hat, but at present
+it was a disgrace to the force. Mr. Usher was offended, and he
+swore revenge. He went to a professional drunkard on Division
+street, and said that if he should happen to get drunk Monday night
+and Hatch should happen to arrest him, he would give the drunkard
+five dollars if the drunkard would mash Frank&rsquo;s new hat. The
+fellow said he would flatten it flatter than flatness itself. Just
+after dark Mr. Hatch was walking down Third street, &ldquo;Whoop,
+hurrah for Tilden, (hic) &rsquo;endrix.&rdquo; The remark seemed so
+out of place that Frank went down there. The man was lying on the
+sidewalk, and telling the barrel to roll over and not take up all
+the bed. Mr. Hatch accosted the man gently, telling him he would
+catch cold there, and that he had better go with him to the city
+hotel. The man said he would&mdash;be counted in if he did, and
+Hatch bent over him to take him by the lily white hand, when a
+drunken boot came down on the top of that hat, and drove it clean
+down to Frank&rsquo;s nose. Of course it could go no further. Then
+the man pulled Frank down, and the hat struck the end of a salt
+barrel, knocked it off, and the man raised up and sat down on it,
+and kicked it into the street. Frank got the man away, and a boy
+brought his hat to the police station, just as Usher and Littlejohn
+and Knutson, and all the policeman entered. It is said that all
+stood on the corner over by Kevin&rsquo;s watching the arrest. The
+hat was a sight to behold, as it laid in state on the safe, and all
+the boys making comments on it. It looked like a six-inch stove
+pipe elbow that a profane man had been attempting to fit to a
+five-inch stove pipe. It looked like some old dripping pan that had
+been thrown out in the street, and had been run over by wagons. It
+looked like the very dickens. And yet we have no doubt Hatch will
+say this is a lie, because he now wears a good hat, but we know the
+hat he now wears he got by trading a flannel shirt to a grasshopper
+sufferer, and it no more resembles the beautiful new hat he won on
+election than nothing. After Hatch went out of the office, Usher
+let the man &ldquo;escape,&rdquo; and he is five dollars ahead, and
+Ike has got even with Hatch.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/087.png"><img src=
+"images/087.png" alt="Three men stand around a beat-up hat." id=
+"img087" name="img087" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>IT LOOKED LIKE AN OLD DRIPPING PAN.</p>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="The_Thirsty_Gopher" name="The_Thirsty_Gopher">THE
+THIRSTY GOPHER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Minnesota town got a fire steamer on trial, and tested it by
+trying to drown out a gopher. After working it six hours, the
+gopher came out to get a drink. He would have died of thirst if
+they had kept the hole closed much longer.</p>
+<h3><a id="Colored_Concert_Troupes" name=
+"Colored_Concert_Troupes">COLORED CONCERT TROUPES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t know how
+to sing.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>They get too big, these colored people do, and can&rsquo;t
+strike their level. People who have heard Kellogg, and Marie Rose,
+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 her red trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage
+looking as though she would have to be carried on a dust pan, 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, &ldquo;Ise a Gwine
+to See Massa Jesus Early in de Mornin&rsquo;,&rdquo; they would
+have split the air wide open with cheers, and called her out five
+times.</p>
+<p>The fact is, they haven&rsquo;t got sense.</p>
+<p>There was a hungry-looking, round-shouldered, sick-looking
+colored man in the 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, &ldquo;Now we will have some fun.&rdquo; 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
+Wilhelmj or Ole Bull had played it, but the colored brother
+couldn&rsquo;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,&mdash;and the audience
+wished to heaven he had, and when he became exhausted and squeezed
+the last note out, 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 &ldquo;The
+Devil&rsquo;s Dream,&rdquo; or &ldquo;The Arkansaw Traveler,&rdquo;
+that crowd would have cheered him till he thought he was a bigger
+man than Grant.</p>
+<p>But he didn&rsquo;t have any sense.</p>
+<h3><a id="Mattie_Mashes_Minnesota" name=
+"Mattie_Mashes_Minnesota">MATTIE MASHES MINNESOTA.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Mrs. Mattie A. Bridge is meeting with great success in
+Minnesota. In some places she is retained until she lectures four
+times. She says the heart of Minnesota is warm towards her. We
+shall feel inclined to put a head on Minnesota, if it don&rsquo;t
+quit allowing its heart to get warm.</p>
+<h3><a id="Why_the_Fever_Didnt_Spread" name=
+"Why_the_Fever_Didnt_Spread">WHY THE FEVER DIDN&rsquo;T
+SPREAD.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Portage City has had a sensation which, though at one time it
+looked serious, turned out to be a farce. A girl was taken sick,
+and a physician was called who pronounced it a case of yellow
+fever, and he made out a prescription for that disease. Mr.
+Brannan, editor of the Portage Register, who lives near, got the
+news, and imparted it to all whom he met, and they in turn told it
+to others, and a stampede was looked for. Fox turned the Fox House
+over to Bunker, and had his trunks checked for the Hot Springs.
+Corning and Jack Turner hired a wagon to take them to Briggsville.
+H&aelig;rtel, the brewery man, offered to sell out his brewery and
+all his property for eight hundred dollars, and he bought a ticket
+for Germany. Bunker left the Fox House to run itself, and went to
+Devil&rsquo;s Lake. Sam. Branuan, telegraphed to George Clinton, at
+Denver, not to come home, as the yellow fever was raging, and
+people were dying off like rotton sheep. And Sam got vaccinated and
+went to Beaver Dam. The excitement was intense. Men became
+perfectly wild, and were going to rush off and leave the women and
+children to the mercies of the dead plague. Chicago and Milwaukee
+bummers could be seen at the hotels, kneeling beside their sample
+cases trying to pray, but they couldn&rsquo;t. Just before the
+train started that was to carry away the frightened populace, the
+doctor came up town and said that the girl with the yellow fever
+was better, and that she was the mother of a fine nine pound boy.
+The authorities took every precaution to prevent the spread of the
+yellow fever, by arresting the brakemen whom the girl said was the
+cause of all the trouble. All is quiet on the Wisconse now.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/090.png"><img src=
+"images/090.png" alt=
+"A man next to a case marked 'Samples' prays while kneeling." id=
+"img090" name="img090" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>DRUMMERS TRYING TO PRAY.</p>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="Too_Particular_by_Half" name=
+"Too_Particular_by_Half">TOO PARTICULAR BY HALF.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>It is one of the mottoes of THE SUN never to publish anything
+that would cause a blush to mantle the cheek of innocence, or
+anybody. And yet, occasionally, a person finds fault. Not long
+since a man said he liked THE SUN well enough, only it had too much
+to say about patched breeches, which was offensive to some. Well,
+some people are so confounded high toned that if they were going to
+have a patch put on they would have it way up on the small of their
+back. Some of the best women in the world have sat up nights to sew
+a patch on their husband&rsquo;s pants. Martha Washington used to
+do it. But, G. Lordy, a family newspaper must not speak of a patch.
+When you take patches away from the people you strike a blow at
+their liberties. Don&rsquo;t be too nice.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Way_to_Name_Children" name=
+"The_Way_to_Name_Children">THE WAY TO NAME CHILDREN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The names of Indians are sometimes so peculiar that people are
+made to wonder how the red men became possessed of them. That of
+&ldquo;Sitting Bull,&rdquo; &ldquo;Crazy Horse,&rdquo; &ldquo;Man
+Afraid of his Horses,&rdquo; &ldquo;Red Cloud,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Sitting Bull.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;George Washington&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;Hanner Jane,&rdquo; and such beautiful names, some of
+the worst jaw-breakers that ever was. Suppose the attending
+physician should go to the door after a child was born and name it
+after the first object he saw. We might have some future statesman
+named &ldquo;Red Headed Servant Girl with a Rubber Bag of Hot
+Water,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Bald Headed Husband Walking Up and Down the
+Alley with His Hands in His Pockets swearing this thing shall never
+Happen Again.&rdquo; If the doctor happened to go to the door when
+the grocery delivery wagon was there, he would name the child
+&ldquo;Boy from Dickson&rsquo;s Grocery with a Codfish by the Tail
+and a Bag of Oatmeal,&rdquo; or if the ice man was the first object
+the doctor saw, some beautiful girl might go down to history with
+the name, &ldquo;Pirate with a Lump of Ice About as Big as a
+Soltaire Diamond.&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;Candidate for Office so full of Bug
+Juice that His Back Teeth are afloat;&rdquo; or suppose he should
+look out and see a woman crossing a muddy street, he might name a
+child &ldquo;Woman with a Sealskin Cloak and a Hole in Her Stocking
+going Down Town to Buy a Red Hat.&rdquo; It wouldn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="An_Editor_Burglarized" name="An_Editor_Burglarized">AN
+EDITOR BURGLARIZED.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The residence of John Turner, of the Mauston <em>Star</em>, was
+entered by burglars a few nights since, and his clothes were
+stolen, containing all his money and his railroad pass. We can
+imagine an editor around bare as to legs, etcetery, and out of
+money, but to be without a railroad pass must indeed be a sad state
+of affairs. When burglars burgle an editor it is a sign that
+confidence is restored under Hayes&rsquo; administration. We trust
+that editors throughout the State who are blessed with this
+world&rsquo;s goods to the extent of more than one pair of pants,
+will send one pair at least to John Turner, Mauston, Wis., by
+express. We are probably as poor as any editor, but we have sent
+him those alligator pants that have created such a sensation in
+years gone by. It is true they are a little bit fringy about the
+bottoms, and the knees are worn through, and concealment, like a
+worm in the bud, has gnawed the foundation all out of them, but in
+a little town like Mauston, such things will not be noticed. John,
+take them, in welcome, and when the cold winds&mdash;but you better
+carry bricks in your coat tail pockets. That is the way we wore
+them the last three or four years.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Dissected" name="His_Pa_Dissected">HIS PA
+DISSECTED.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;I understand your Pa has got to drinking again like a
+fish,&rdquo; says the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth came
+in the grocery and took a handful of dried apples. The boy ate a
+dried apple and then made up a terrible face, and the grocery man
+asked him what he was trying to do with his face. The boy caught
+his breath and then said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, don&rsquo;t you know any better than to keep dried
+apples where a boy can get hold of them when he has got the mumps?
+You will kill some boy yet by such dum carelessness. I thought
+these were sweet dried apples, but they are sour as a boarding
+house keeper, and they make me tired. Didn&rsquo;t you ever have
+the mumps? Gosh, but don&rsquo;t it hurt though? You have got to be
+darn careful when you have the mumps, and not go out bob-sledding,
+or skating, or you will have your neck swell up biggern a milk
+pail. Pa says he had the mumps once when he was a boy and it broke
+him all up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, never mind the mumps, how about your Pa spreeing
+it. Try one of those pickles in the jar there, won&rsquo;t you. I
+always like to have a boy enjoy himself when he comes to see
+me,&rdquo; said the grocery man, winking to a man who was filling
+an old fashioned tin box with tobacco out of the pail, who winked
+back as much as to say, &ldquo;if that boy eats a pickle on top of
+them mumps we will have a circus, sure.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t play no pickle on me, not when I have the
+mumps. Ma passed the pickles to me this morning, and I took one
+mouthful, and like to had the lockjaw. But Ma didn&rsquo;t do it on
+purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps and didn&rsquo;t know how
+discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn&rsquo;t feel as though I
+had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But about Pa.
+He has been fuller&rsquo;n a goose ever since New Year&rsquo;s day.
+I think its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with
+liquor on New Year&rsquo;s. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink
+and then let it alone. We have got brain, and know when we have got
+enough, but Pa, when he gets to going don&rsquo;t ever stop until
+he gets so sick that he can&rsquo;t keep his stummick inside of
+hisself. It is getting so they look to me to brace Pa up every time
+he gets on a tear, and I guess I fixed him this time so he will
+never touch liquor again. I scared him so his bald head turned gray
+in a single night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What under the heavens have you done to him now?&rdquo;
+says the grocery man, in astonishment. &ldquo;I hope you
+haven&rsquo;t done anything you will regret in after
+years.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Regret nothing,&rdquo; said the boy, as he turned the lid
+of the cheese box back and took the knife and sliced off a piece of
+cheese, and took a few crackers out of a barrel, and sat down on a
+soap box by the stove, &ldquo;You see Ma was annoyed to death with
+Pa. He would come home full, when she had company, and lay down on
+the sofa and snore, and he would smell like a distillery. It hurt
+me to see Ma cry, and I told her I would break Pa of drinking if
+she would let me, and she said if I would promise not to hurt Pa to
+go ahead, and I promised not to. Then I got my chum and another
+boy, to help, and Pa is all right. We went down to the place where
+they sell arms and legs, to folks who have served in the army, or a
+saw mill, or a threshing machine, and lose their limbs, and we
+borrowed some arms and legs, and fixed up a dissecting room. We
+fixed a long table in the basement, big enough to lay Pa out on you
+know, and then we got false whiskers and moustaches, and when Pa
+came in the house drunk and lay down on the sofa, and got to sleep,
+we took him and laid him out on the table, and took some trunk
+straps, and a circingle and strapped him down to the table. He
+slept right along all through it, and we had another table with the
+false arms and legs on, and we rolled up our sleeves, and smoked
+pipes, just like I read that medical students do when they cut up a
+man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you&rsquo;d a dide to see Pa look at us when he
+woke up. I saw him open his eyes, and then we began to talk about
+cutting up dead men. We put hickery nuts in our mouths so our
+voices would sound different, so he wouldn&rsquo;t know us, and was
+telling the other boys about what a time we had cutting up the last
+man we bought. I said he was awful tough, and when we had got his
+legs off and had taken out his brain, his friends came to the
+dissecting room and claimed the body, and we had to give it up, but
+I saved the legs. I looked at Pa on the table and he began to turn
+pale, and he squirmed around to get up, but found he was fast. I
+had pulled his shirt up under his arms, while he was asleep, and as
+he began to move I took an icicle, and in the dim light of the
+candles, that were sitting on the table in beer botles, I drew the
+icicle across Pa&rsquo;s stummick and I said to my chum,
+&lsquo;Doc, I guess we had better cut open this old duffer and see
+if he died from inflamation of the stummick, from hard drinking, as
+the coroner said he did.&rsquo; Pa shuddered all over when he felt
+the icicle going over his bare stummick, and he said, &lsquo;For
+God&rsquo;s sake, gentlemen, what does this mean? I am not
+dead.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The other boys looked at Pa with astonishment, and I said
+&lsquo;Well, we bought you for dead, and the coroner&rsquo;s jury
+said you were dead, and by the eternal we ain&rsquo;t going to be
+fooled out of a corpse when we buy one, are we Doc?&rsquo; My chum
+said not if he knowed his self, and the other students said,
+&lsquo;Of course he is dead. He thinks he is alive, but he died day
+before yesterday, fell dead on the street, and his folks said he
+had been a nuisance and they wouldn&rsquo;t claim the corpse, and
+we bought it at the morgue.&rsquo; Then I drew the icicle across
+him again, and I said, &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t know about this,
+doctor. I find that blood follows the scalpel as I cut through the
+cuticle. Hand me the blood sponge please.&rsquo; Pa began to wiggle
+around, and we looked at him, and my chum raised his eye-lid, and
+looked solemn, and Pa said, &lsquo;Hold on gentlemen. Don&rsquo;t
+cut into me any more, and I can explain this matter. This is all a
+mistake. I was only drunk.&rsquo; We went in a corner and
+whispered, and Pa kept talking all the time. He said if we would
+postpone the hog killing he could send and get witnesses to prove
+that he was not dead, but that he was a respectable citizen, and
+had a family. After we held a consultation I went to Pa and told
+him that what he said about being alive might possibly be true,
+though we had our doubts. We had found such cases before in our
+practice east, where men seemed to be alive, but it was only
+temporary. Before we had got them cut up they were dead enough for
+all practical purposes. Then I laid the icicle across Pa&rsquo;s
+abdomen, and went on to tell him that even if he <em>was</em> alive
+it would be better for him to play that he <em>was</em> dead,
+because he was such a nuisance to his family that they did not want
+him, and I was telling him that I had heard that in his lifetime he
+was very cruel to his boy, a bright little fellow who was at the
+head of his class in Sunday school and a pet wherever he was known,
+when Pa interrupted me and said, &lsquo;Doctor, please take that
+carving knife off my stomach, for it makes me nervous. As for that
+boy of mine, he is the condemndest little whelp in town, and he
+isn&rsquo;t no pet anywhere. Now, you let up on this
+dissectin&rsquo; business, and I will make it all right with
+you.&rsquo; We held another consultation and then I told Pa that we
+did not feel that it was doing justice to society to give up the
+body of a notorious drunkard, after we had paid twenty dollars for
+the corpse. If there was any hopes that he would reform and try and
+lead a different life, it would be different, and I said to the
+boys, &lsquo;gentlemen, we must do our duty. Doc, you dismember
+that leg, and I will attend to the stomach and the upper part of
+body. He will be dead before we are done with him. We must remember
+that society has some claim on us, and not let our better natures
+be worked upon by the <em>post mortem</em> promises of a dead
+drunkard.&rsquo; Then I took my icicle and began fumbling around
+the abdomen portion of Pa&rsquo;s remains, and my chum took a rough
+piece of ice and began to saw his leg off, while the other boy took
+hold of the leg and said he would catch it when it dropped off.
+Well, Pa kicked like a steer. He said he wanted to make one more
+appeal to us, and we acted sort of impatent but we let up to hear
+what he had to say. He said if we would turn him loose he would
+give us ten dollars more than we paid for his body, and that he
+would never drink another drop as long as he lived. Then we
+whispered some more and then told him we thought favorably of his
+last proposition, but he must swear, with his hand on the leg of a
+corpse we were then dissecting that he would never drink again, and
+then he must be blindfolded and be conducted several blocks away
+from the dissecting room, before we could turn him loose. He said
+that was all right, and so we blindfolded him, and made him take a
+bloody oath, with his hand on a piece of ice that we told him was a
+piece of another corpse, and then we took him out of the house and
+walked him around the block four times, and left him on a corner,
+after he had promised to send the money to an address that I gave
+him. We told him to stand still five minutes after we left him,
+then remove the blindfold, and go home. We watched him, from behind
+a board fence, and he took off the handkerchief, looked at the name
+on a street lamp, and found he was not far from home. He started
+off saying &lsquo;That&rsquo;s a pretty narrow escape old man. No
+more whisky for you.&rsquo; I did not see him again until this
+morning, and when I asked him where he was last night he shuddered
+and said &lsquo;none of your darn business. But I never drink any
+more, you remember that.&rsquo; Ma was tickled and she told me I
+was worth my weight in gold. Well, good day. That cheese is
+musty.&rdquo; And the boy went and caught on a passing sleigh.</p>
+<h3><a id="Col_Ingersoll_Praying" name="Col_Ingersoll_Praying">COL.
+INGERSOLL PRAYING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Bob. Ingersoll is taking a rest from his persecutions of the
+Creator, and is traveling in the Yo Semite region of California.
+Bob does not believe there is a God, but if he was riding a kicking
+mule, down the precipice near the big trees, and the saddle should
+turn over with him, and his foot should be caught in the stirrup,
+after the mule had kicked him a few times in the judgement seat,
+which is the bowels, in his case, he would be very apt to bellow
+like a calf, and say &ldquo;O, Lord, please unbuckle that cussed
+strap.&rdquo; We should like to hear Bob had met with some such
+accident, just so he would recognize the foreign government of the
+Lord, which at present he totally ignores. Not that we have
+anything against Ingersoll.</p>
+<h3><a id="How_to_Invest_a_Thousand_Dollars" name=
+"How_to_Invest_a_Thousand_Dollars">HOW TO INVEST A THOUSAND
+DOLLARS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A young man advertises in a Milwaukee paper for a partnership.
+He wants to invest one thousand dollars in some established
+business. Go to La Crosse and go to betting on election. It pays,
+and is an established business. There&rsquo;s millions in it.</p>
+<h3><a id="Boys_and_Circuses" name="Boys_and_Circuses">BOYS AND
+CIRCUSES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+circusses, and we contend that it is the duty of teachers to place
+as few temptations to lie as possible in the way of boys.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t go. If
+he knows 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo; heaven.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>You may try to paralyze him by the story of Daniel in the den of
+lions, and how he was saved by faith in the power above, and the
+boy&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>At a certain age a circus can hold over heaven or anything else
+in a boy&rsquo;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 wont 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.</p>
+<p>Suppose, a day or two before the circus arrives, the teacher
+should say to the school: &ldquo;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 to the circus,
+and if any of you can&rsquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Of course it is a male teacher we are supposing said this. Well,
+don&rsquo;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&rsquo;t any money to go and he had no school funds
+to be used for such a purpose.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>O, we are too smart. We are trying to fire education into boys
+with a shot gun, 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&rsquo;t lay up a cent.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Waters_of_La_Crosse" name=
+"The_Waters_of_La_Crosse">THE WATERS OF LA CROSSE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>We have heretofore entirely overlooked the magnetic qualities of
+the La Crosse water. It will be remembered that the Fond du Lac
+water is advertised as magnetic water, and it has been said that a
+knife blade, after being soaked in the water will take up a watch
+key or a steel pen. That is nothing compared to the La Crosse
+water. Last week a man who had been soaked in La Crosse water, took
+up a watch, key and all, and a policeman who had been using the
+water took up the man, with the watch. A pair of ice tongs, made of
+steel, on being soaked in water, took up a piece of ice weighing
+over a hundred pounds, and a farmer named Dawson, after drinking
+the water took up a stray colt. A young couple stopped the other
+evening and took a drink of water and up Fourth street, and before
+they got to Seymour&rsquo;s corner they were walking so close
+together that you couldn&rsquo;t tell which the bustle was on. We
+have never seen water that had so much magnetism in as this. A pot
+of it on a house is better than a lightning rod.</p>
+<h3><a id="Sardineindianapolis" name=
+"Sardineindianapolis">SARDINEINDIANAPOLIS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>In company with a couple of hundred others who were firm in the
+belief that the Sardinapalus troupe were under the auspices of the
+Young Men&rsquo;s Christian Association, we attended the
+performance on Monday evening. It was heralded as coming from
+Booth&rsquo;s theater, N.Y., where it had a run of four months.
+Most of them got away while on the trip here, and only a few
+appeared. The scenery, which was also extensively advertised, was
+no more than could have been fixed up with a whitewash brush in
+half a day, by home talent. The play, what there was of it was well
+rendered, though many doubted the propriety of the king calling
+around him a lot of La Crosse soldiers, to hear him tell the Greek
+slave how he loved her. There was much dissatisfaction about the
+Greek slave. All marble statues of the Greek slave represent her
+with nothing on but a trace chain around one arm and one leg. But
+the party who got up this play went behind the returns and invested
+her with a white night gown, which detracted very much from
+history. The &ldquo;soldiers&rdquo; were picked up among the La
+Crosse boys, and they got tangled up, and couldn&rsquo;t form a
+line to save themselves, and when they stood against the wall it
+was a melancholy fact that they tickled the ballet girls in the
+ribs as they passed by. This was highly wrong. It takes the romance
+out of the affair to gaze upon an Assyrian soldier, covered with
+armor, and carrying a cover to a wash boiler in his hand, and to
+think that he is covered with scars won in battle, and then look at
+him through a glass and have him wink at you, and you find that you
+have seen him thousands of times standing on the postoffice corner,
+spitting tobacco juice across the sidewalk at the hydrant. Mrs.
+Sardinapalus did not appear, having gone to visit her uncle, but
+&ldquo;Sard.&rdquo; stuck to the Greek slave like a sand burr to a
+boy&rsquo;s trousers. They laid down together on a bale of paper
+rags and looked at the dance. The dance was pretty good. First
+there came out about a dozen girls in tights, with skirts as short
+as pie crust. Their legs were all round and well got up, showing
+that the sawdust was evenly distributed, with no chance for
+dissatisfaction. They capered around, and smiled at the reflection
+of the red lights in the gallery upon the bald heads before them,
+and kicked up like all possessed, and then they backed up against
+the wings and fooled with the La Cross Assyrians, who came down
+like a wolf on the fold. Then there came out two first-class
+dancers, one short, fat, plump, but mighty small, so small that she
+didn&rsquo;t look as though she was big enough for a cork to a jug.
+But she could dance. Well, she ought to, as she had no clothes to
+bother her. Next came a brunette, evidently of French extraction,
+with a face that was a protection against assault with intent to
+kill, and legs of the Gothic style. Smith said she was spavined,
+but that&rsquo;s a lie. She danced better than all of them, and
+walked on her big toes till the audience yelled. Then the dancers
+all got tangled up together, the brunette fell over on the little
+blonde, stuck her hind foot right in the air as straight as a
+liberty pole struck by lightning, somebody said
+&ldquo;Tableau,&rdquo; and the curtain went down, and the audience
+looked at each other as much as to say, &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go
+home.&rdquo; The boys in the gallery cheered, and the curtain was
+rung up again, but her flag was still there. Then they had a
+fighting scene, where everybody gets mad and goes out into the
+dressing room and clashes old swords together, and come back
+wounded. The king, after killing up a lot ahead, got a furlough and
+came in and lallygaged with the Greek slave a spell, and then the
+battle was lost, and &ldquo;Sardine.&rdquo; said he might as well
+die for an old sheep as a lamb. So he ordered a funeral pile built
+of red fire, and he got on it to be burned up. The Greek slave said
+if that was the game she wanted a hand dealt to her, as wherever
+&ldquo;Sard.&rdquo; went she was going, as she had an insurance
+policy against fire in the Northwestern Mutual. So he invited her
+on to the kindling wood, and after hugging enough to last them
+through perdition&mdash;and mighty good hugging it was
+too&mdash;the pile of slabs was touched off, the flames rolled, and
+&ldquo;Sard.&rdquo; and the Greek slave went down to hell clasped
+in each other&rsquo;s embrace, and we went to the People&rsquo;s
+store and bought a mackerel and went home and told our wife we had
+been to a democratic caucus. We don&rsquo;t know what all the other
+fellows told their wives, but there has been a heap of lying, we
+know that much.</p>
+<div class="figure"><a href="images/105.png"><img src=
+"images/105.png" alt="A couple embraces." id="img105" name="img105"
+width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;SARD.&rdquo; AND THE GREEK SLAVE.</p>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="Insecure_Abodes" name="Insecure_Abodes">INSECURE
+ABODES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Four men fell out of the Oshkosh jail the other day. If Oshkosh
+would only imitate Fond du lac, and paper the county jail with wall
+paper, it might become safe.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Knight_and_the_Bridal_Chamber" name=
+"The_Knight_and_the_Bridal_Chamber">THE KNIGHT AND THE BRIDAL
+CHAMBER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t know whether you are on foot or a
+horseback. Of course some of the Knights in attendance were from
+the backwoods, and while they were well up in all the secret
+workings of the order, they were awful &ldquo;new&rdquo; in regard
+to city ways.</p>
+<p>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 <em>was</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;had tried to sleep
+on one of them cots down to camp, but it nearly broke his
+back,&rdquo; and he would be mighty glad to strike a lounge. The
+clerk called a bell boy and said, &ldquo;Show the gentleman to
+253.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy took the Knight&rsquo;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, then at the elevator boy, whom
+he supposed was the bridegroom, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;t nothing mean about me, only I swow it&rsquo;s
+pretty cramped quarters, ain&rsquo;t it, miss?&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sir!&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t take on. The book-keeper told me I could
+sleep on the lounge, but you can have it, and I will turn in on the
+floor. I ain&rsquo;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&rsquo;t you forget it,&rdquo; and he began tugging
+on the boot again.</p>
+<p>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
+&ldquo;didn&rsquo;t want to go to no floor,&rdquo; unless that
+woman wanted the lounge, but if she was huffy, and didn&rsquo;t
+want to stay there, he was going to sleep on the lounge, and he
+began to unbutton his vest.</p>
+<p>Just then a dozen ladies and gentlemen got in 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/108.png"><img src=
+"images/108.png" alt="An angry man is confronted by a policeman."
+id="img108" name="img108" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;THIS IS TOO ALLFIRED MUCH!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Seven_Year_Old_Horses" name=
+"Seven_Year_Old_Horses">SEVEN YEAR OLD HORSES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>An old farmer once said, &ldquo;What a year it must have been
+for colts seven years ago this spring.&rdquo; No person who has
+never attempted to buy a horse can appreciate the remark, but if he
+will let it be known that he wants to buy a good horse, he will be
+struck with the circumstance that all the horses that are of any
+particular account were born seven years ago. Occasionally there is
+one that is six years old, but they are not plenty, Now, those of
+us who lived around here seven years ago did not have our attention
+called to the fact that the country was flooded with colts. There
+were very few twin colts, and it was seldom that a mother had half
+a dozen colts following her. Farmers and stock raisers did not go
+round worrying about what they were going to do with so many colts.
+The papers, if we recollect right, were not filled with accounts of
+the extraordinary number of colts born. And yet it must have been a
+terrible year for colts, because there are only six horses in
+Milwaukee that are over seven years old, but one of them was found
+to have been pretty well along in years when he worked in
+Burnham&rsquo;s brick yard in 1848, and finally the owner owned up
+that he was mistaken twenty-six years. What a mortality there must
+have been among horses that would now be eight, nine or ten years
+old. There are none of them left. And a year from now, when our
+present stock of horses would naturally be eight years old they
+will all be dead, and a new lot of seven years old horses will take
+their places. It is singular, but it is true. That is, it is true
+unless horse dealers lie, and THE SUN would be slow to charge so
+grave a crime upon a useful and enterprising class of citizens. No,
+it cannot be, and yet, don&rsquo;t it seem peculiar that all the
+horses in this broad land are seven years old this spring? We leave
+the suject for the youth of the land to wonder over,</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Joins_a_Temperance_Society" name=
+"His_Pa_Joins_a_Temperance_Society">HIS PA JOINS A TEMPERANCE
+SOCIETY.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think my Pa is showing his age a good
+deal more than usual?&rdquo; asked the bad boy of the grocery man,
+as he took a smoked herring out of a box, and peeled off the skin
+with a broken bladed jack-knife, and split it open and ripped off
+the bone, threw the head at a cat, took some crackers and began to
+eat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t know but he does look as though he
+was getting old,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he took a piece of
+yellow wrapping paper and charged the boy&rsquo;s poor old father
+with a dozen herrings and a pound of crackers; &ldquo;But there is
+no wonder he is getting old. I wouldn&rsquo;t go through what your
+father has, the last year, for a million dollars. I tell you, boy,
+when your father is dead, and you get a step-father, and he makes
+you walk the chalk mark, you will realize what a bonanza you have
+fooled yourself out of by killing off your father. The way I figure
+it, your father will last about six months, and you ought to treat
+him right, the little time he has to live.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I am going to,&rdquo; said the boy, as he picked
+the herring bones out of his teeth with a piece of a match that he
+sharpened with his knife. &ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t believe in
+borrowing trouble about a step-father so long before hand. I
+don&rsquo;t think Ma could get a man to step into Pa&rsquo;s shoes,
+as long as I lived, not if she was inlaid with diamonds, and owned
+a brewery. There are brave men, I know, that are on the marry, but
+none of them would want to be brevet father to a cherubim like me,
+except he got pretty good wages. And then, since Pa was dissected
+he is going to lead a different life, and I guess I will make a man
+of him, if he holds out. We got him to join the Good Templars last
+night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, you don&rsquo;t tell me,&rdquo; said the grocery man,
+as he thought that his trade in cider for mince pies would be cut
+off. &ldquo;So you got him into the Good Templars, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, he thinks he has joined the Good Templars, so it is
+all the same. You see my chum and me have been going to a private
+gymnasium, on the west side, kept by a Dutchman, and in the back
+room he has all the tools for getting up muscle. There, look at my
+arm,&rdquo; said the boy, as he rolled up his sleeve and showed a
+muscle about as big as an oyster. &ldquo;That is the result of
+training at the gymnasium. Before I took lessons I hadn&rsquo;t any
+more muscle than you have got. Well, the Dutchman was going to a
+dance on the south side the other night, and he asked my chum to
+tend the gymnasium, and I told Pa if he would join the Good
+Templars that night there wouldn&rsquo;t be many at the lodge, and
+he wouldn&rsquo;t be so embarrassed, and as I was one of the
+officers of the lodge I would put it to him light, and he said he
+would go, so my chum got five other boys to help us put him
+through. So we steered him down to the gymnasium and made him rap
+on the storm door outside, and I said &lsquo;who comes
+there?&rsquo; and he said it was a pilgrim who wanted to jine our
+sublime order. I asked him if he had made up his mind to turn from
+the ways of a hyena, and adopt the customs of the truly good, and
+he said if he knew his own heart he had, and then I told him to
+come in out of the snow and take off his pants. He kicked a little
+at taking off his pants, because it was cold out there in the storm
+door dog house, but I told him they all had to do it. The princes,
+potentates and paupers all had to come to it. He asked me how it
+was when we initiated women, and I told him women never took that
+degree. He pulled off his pants and wanted a check for them, but I
+told him the Grand Mogul would hold his clothes, and then I
+blind-folded him, and with a base ball club I pounded on the floor
+as I walked around the gymnasium, while the lodge, headed by my
+chum, sung, &lsquo;We won&rsquo;t go home till morning&rsquo; I
+stopped in front of the ice water tank, and said, &lsquo;Grand
+Worthy Duke, I bring before you a pilgrim who has drank of the
+dregs until his stomach won&rsquo;t hold water, and who desires to
+swear off.&rsquo; The Grand Mogul asked me if he was worthy and
+well qualified, and I told him that he had been drunk more or less
+since the reunion last summer, which ought to qualify him. Then the
+Grand Mogul made Pa repeat the most blood-curdling oath, in which
+Pa agreed, if he ever drank another drop, to allow anybody to pull
+his toe-nails out with tweezers, to have his liver dug out and fed
+to dogs, his head chopped off, and his eyes removed. Then the Mogul
+said he would brand the candidate on the bare back with the initial
+letters of our order, &lsquo;G.T.,&rsquo; that all might read how a
+brand had been snatched from the burning. You&rsquo;d a dide to see
+Pa flinch when I pulled up his shirt, and got ready to brand
+him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My chum got a piece of ice out of the water cooler, and
+just as he clapped it on Pa&rsquo;s back I burned a piece of horses
+hoof in the candle, and held it to Pa&rsquo;s nose, and I guess Pa
+actually thought it was his burning skin that he smelled. He jumped
+about six feet and said, &lsquo;Great heavens, what you
+dewin,&rsquo; and then he began to roll over a barrel which I had
+arranged for him. Pa thought he was going down cellar, and he hung
+to the barrel, but he was on top half the time. When Pa and the
+barrel got through fighting I was beside him, and I said,
+&lsquo;Calm yourself, and be prepared for the ordeal that is to
+follow.&rsquo; Pa asked how much of this dum fooling there was, and
+said he was sorry he joined. He said he could let licker alone
+without having the skin all burned off his back. I told Pa to be
+brave and not weaken, and all would-be well. He wiped the
+prespiration off his face on the end of his shirt, and we put a
+belt around his body and hitched it to a tackle, and pulled him up
+so his feet just off the floor, and then we talked as though we
+were away off, and I told my chum to look out that Pa did not hit
+the gas fixtures, and Pa actually thought he was being hauled clear
+up to the roof. I could see he was scared by the complexion of his
+hands and feet, as they clawed the air. He actually sweat so the
+drops fell on the floor. Bime-by we let him down, and he was
+awfully relieved though his feet were not more than two inches from
+the floor any of the time. We were just going to slip Pa down a
+board with slivers in to give him a realizing sense of the rough
+road a reformed man has to travel, and got him straddle of the
+board, when the Dutchman came home from the dance fullern a goose,
+and he drove us boys out, and we left Pa, and the Dutchman said,
+&lsquo;Vot you vas doing here mit dose boys, you old duffer, and
+vere vas your pants?&rsquo; and Pa pulled off the handkerchief from
+his eyes, and the Dutchman said if he didn&rsquo;t get out in a
+holy minute he would kick the stuffing out of him, and Pa got out.
+He took his pants and put them, on in the alley, and then we came
+up to Pa and told him that was the third time the drunken Dutchman
+had broke up our lodge, but we should keep on doing good until we
+had reformed every drunkard in Milwaukee, and Pa said that was
+right, and he would see us through, if it cost every dollar he had.
+Then we took him home, and when Ma asked if she couldn&rsquo;t join
+the lodge, too, Pa said, &lsquo;Now you take my advice, and
+don&rsquo;t you ever join no Good Templars. Your system could not
+stand the racket. Say, I want you to put some cold cream on my
+back.&rsquo; I think Pa will be a different man now, don&rsquo;t
+you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man said if he was that boy&rsquo;s pa for fifteen
+minutes he would be a different boy or there would be a funeral,
+and the boy took a handful of soft-shelled almonds and a few layer
+raisins and skipped out.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Way_Women_Boss_a_Pillow" name=
+"The_Way_Women_Boss_a_Pillow">THE WAY WOMEN BOSS A PILLOW.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/114.png"><img src=
+"images/114.png" alt=
+"A woman holds a pillow in her teeth and puts a pillowcase on it."
+id="img114" name="img114" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>BOSSING THE PILLOW.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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 cannot be
+replaced by any invention.</p>
+<p>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 it 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s jaws about the only rest they
+get during the day.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Hunting_Dogs" name="Hunting_Dogs">HUNTING DOGS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>They are making everything out of rubber now. A man has invented
+a hunting dog that can be carried in the pocket. When you get in
+the field, all you have to do is to blow the dog up, and start it
+to going. This will be a great saving, as hunters will not have to
+pay baggage men a dollar for tying their dogs to a trunk, when they
+go off hunting.</p>
+<h3><a id="Enterprising_Chicago" name=
+"Enterprising_Chicago">ENTERPRISING CHICAGO!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Chicago is to have a hotel built exclusively for men. Under no
+circumstances will a woman be admitted into it. There are so many
+men who go to Chicago, who are liable to wink at women at the table
+of the hotel, before they know their own heart, to lead a different
+life, that this new hotel, without temptation, has been decided
+upon. There will only be a few old bald headed roosters and persons
+with red noses and sore eyes stopping at the new hotel. A hotel
+without women would be almost as cheerful as a reform school.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Mad_Minister" name="A_Mad_Minister">A MAD
+MINISTER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There is probably the maddest minister living at Black River
+Falls, that can be found in America to-day. He is a real nice man,
+and his name is Burt Wheeler. He preaches good sound sense, and
+everybody likes him. He has got friends at Neillsville, and all
+around there. At Black River Falls there is no license, and liquor
+is unknown, while at Neillsville there is license, and one can have
+benzine at every meal. The other day the express took a jug from
+Neillsville to the Falls, directed to the reverend gentleman, and
+on the card attached to the jug handle was the following
+notice:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Old Bourbon&mdash;We have license here, and knowing you
+have none in your town we thought it but kindness to remember your
+wants.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When a jug, or a keg arrives at the Falls by express, every
+citizen notices it, and they investigate, and when the jug came
+into the express office the expressman winked, and in a few minutes
+half the population of the darling little village was there. They
+read the note on the card and winked at each other. One man as he
+took a piece of cut sugar out of a barrel, said he had long
+suspected that Burt liked his toddy. Another fellow, picking a
+mouthful off a codfish, remarked that you couldn&rsquo;t always
+tell about these confounded ministers. Frank Cooper, the editor of
+the <em>Banner</em>, though he looked pained when he saw the name
+&ldquo;Old Bourbon&rdquo; on the jug, and noticed the immense size
+of the jug remarked that it was the best way not to condemn a man
+till the returns were all in. The reverened gentleman was
+interrupted in his preparation of his sermon by a neighboring lady
+who just dropped in to tell the news, and when she sighed and told
+him that his jug of whisky which he had ordered from Neillsville,
+was in the express office, he could hardly believe his ears. He had
+always, to the best of his knowledge and belief, tried to lead a
+different life, and this was too much&mdash;too much bourbon.
+Scratching out the last line that he had written, which was
+something about something biting like an anaconda, and stinging
+like a ready reckoner, he put on his coat and started down town,
+resolved to face the multitude, conscious of his innocence. He
+approached the express office a little nervous. The crowd filled
+the street, and as he passed a raftsman with red breeches on, said
+he wouldn&rsquo;t have such a nose as that on him for a hundred
+dollars. &ldquo;He is full now,&rdquo; said another, as the
+Reverend gentleman put his hand on an awning post to steady himself
+in the trying emergency. A man who was sitting on a salt barrel,
+whittling a shingle, and who had one trousers leg tucked in his
+boot, and a red sash around him, said if it could be proved that
+Wheeler was a drinking man it would be a hard blow at religion, but
+he didn&rsquo;t know as he cared a blank anyway. The elder went in
+the express office and the crowd fell back to give the chief
+mourner a chance to look at the late lamented. There was a
+different expression on every face. Some looked as though they were
+glad he had been caught in the act, while others wore a mournful
+expression, as though they had been suddenly bereaved. He was pale,
+yet determined, and as he read the inscription he said, so help him
+John Rogers, he had never ordered any whisky, and never drank any,
+and didn&rsquo;t know anything about this jug. Turning to those
+present he said: &ldquo;This is some horrid nightmare.&rdquo; The
+expressman said it was no nightmare, it was whisky. Wheeler said if
+the charges were paid he would take it, and taking the jug out
+doors he raised it high in the air and dashed it upon the pavement,
+amid the applause of his friends. At this point Hon. Wm. T. Price
+come along, and was told what had happened. He looked at the amber
+liquid oozing down between the stones on the pavement, put his
+finger in some of it, smelled of it, touched it to his tongue, and
+turning to the yet pale and excited Reverend, he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wheeler, you have maintained a noble principle, but you
+have destroyed four gallons of the d&mdash;dest finest maple syrup
+that was ever brewed in Clark county.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was true, Doc. French and Tom Reed, of Neillsville, two good
+friends of the Rev. Wheeler, had sent him the syrup, knowing that
+he could use it in his family, and being jokers they had put the
+Bourbon card on the jug, just for fun, with the alleged result
+above stated. Temperance men should always smell of the cork, at
+least, before smashing the jug. We have practiced that a good many
+years, and never lost a gallon of maple syrup.</p>
+<h3><a id="Anna_Dickinson_as_Mazeppa" name=
+"Anna_Dickinson_as_Mazeppa">ANNA DICKINSON AS MAZEPPA!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Anna Dickinson is to go upon the stage, and it is said that she
+will open in San Francisco, in the play of &ldquo;Mazeppa.&rdquo;
+If there is any society for the prevention of cruelty to animals on
+the Pacific coast, we trust before Anna is tied on the wild horse
+of Tartary, that some one will see to it that a cushion is put on
+the back of the horse.</p>
+<h3><a id="Good_Templars_on_Ice" name="Good_Templars_on_Ice">GOOD
+TEMPLARS ON ICE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>We like to see young Good Templars have a hankering after cold
+water, bright water; but when a Juvenile Lodge about to start on a
+picnic, deliberately loads a hunk of ice belonging to <em>The
+Sun</em> into an omnibus, we feel like reaching for the basement of
+their roundabouts with a piece of clapboard.</p>
+<h3><a id="Bounced_from_Church_for_Dancing" name=
+"Bounced_from_Church_for_Dancing">BOUNCED FROM CHURCH FOR
+DANCING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s religion
+enough to cause him to backslide.</p>
+<p>If it was this new &ldquo;waltz quadrille&rdquo; that Donaldson
+indulged in, where there is intermittant 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.</p>
+<p>We presume the wicked and perverse Dr. 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.</p>
+<p>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 gripsacks and register and ask for a room
+and a bath, and a fire escape. He will be apt to look up to 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Frozen_Ears" name="Frozen_Ears">FROZEN EARS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo; A girl that will go out sleigh-riding with a young
+man and allow his ears to freeze is no gentleman, 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 &ldquo;sis,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Hard_on_Fond_Du_Lac" name="Hard_on_Fond_Du_Lac">HARD ON
+FOND DU LAC.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Forest street, Fond du Lac, is going to be a great place for
+sparking, one of these days. For three years all the children born
+on that street have been girls. Some lay it to the artesian well
+water.</p>
+<h3><a id="Those_Bold_Bad_Drummers" name=
+"Those_Bold_Bad_Drummers">THOSE BOLD BAD DRUMMERS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/121.png"><img src=
+"images/121.png" alt="A man holds an overflowing collection plate."
+id="img121" name="img121" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE SEXTON IN ALL HIS GLORY.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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&rsquo;t go twice to the
+same drummer.</p>
+<p>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 wore a smile. The sexton looked up to the
+minister, who was picking up a hymn, as much as to say,
+&ldquo;Boss, we have struck it rich, and I am going back to work
+the lead some more.&rdquo; The minister looked at the boys, and
+then at the sexton as though saying, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;passed&rdquo; or &ldquo;renigged,&rdquo; and when the
+last drummer had been interviewed the sexton carried the biggest
+load of silver back to the table that he ever saw.</p>
+<p>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
+from his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief and winked, as much
+as to say, &ldquo;The first man that speaks disrespectfully of a
+traveling man in my presence will get thumped, and don&rsquo;t you
+forget it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The minister rose up in the pulpit, looked at the wealth on the
+table, and read the hymn, &ldquo;A charge to keep I have,&rdquo;
+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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;view the remains.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Anna_Dickinson" name="Anna_Dickinson">ANNA
+DICKINSON.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Anna Dickinson is going upon the stage again and is to play male
+characters, such as &ldquo;Hamlet,&rdquo; &ldquo;Macbeth,&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;Claude Melnotte.&rdquo; 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,
+&ldquo;Alas, poor Yorick, I was pretty solid with him,&rdquo; let
+the spider crawl out of one of the eye holes onto Hamlet&rsquo;s
+hand, and proceed to walk up Miss Dickinson&rsquo;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 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&rsquo;s back and spits,
+then Miss Dickinson is a woman. The country will watch eagerly for
+the result of this test, which we trust will be made at the Boston
+Theatre next week.</p>
+<h3><a id="Expedition_in_Search_of_a_Doughnut" name=
+"Expedition_in_Search_of_a_Doughnut">EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF A
+DOUGHNUT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Twas midnight&rsquo;s holy hour, and silence was
+brooding like a gentle spirit o&rsquo;er the still and pulseless
+world.&rdquo; Not a sound was heard, except Robert&rsquo;s dog
+baying at a sorrel haired young man and a muchmussed girl, who were
+returning home from a suburban picnic. As they passed out of
+hearing, and the dog was peacefully cannibalizing on a link of
+sausage that had been condemned by the board of health, owing to a
+piece of brass padlock that showed through the silky nickel plating
+made of fiddling string material, a soft cry of a child was heard
+in an upper room of a mansion owned by a prosperous business man.
+The head of the house heard it and sat up in bed to still the small
+voice, but couldn&rsquo;t, when the mother of the child said that
+she had forgotten to bring up anything for the child to eat in the
+night, and she must go down cellar and get a doughnut. The man said
+he could never stay there and enjoy himself in bed and think of his
+wife, groping around in the dark below stairs after it. After
+telling him that he would probably come up with a pickle, ehe let
+him go. Carefully he got out of bed, in an angelic frame of mind
+and a night shirt, and barefooted he prepared to make the descent.
+As he stopped to hold one foot in his hand, the instep of which had
+struck the rocker of the baby crib, she told him the doughnuts were
+in the third crock in the pantry on the floor. He said it was one
+evidence of a clear headed man, that he could walk all over his own
+house in the dark. At the head of the first pair of stairs he
+tripped on a baby cart and the tongue flew up and struck him on the
+knee, but by hanging to the bannisters he saved himself. At the
+foot of the stairs he tumbled over a block house and broke off a
+toe nail. He said it was a mean man that wouldn&rsquo;t sacrifice a
+few toe nails for his little baby, and he laughed. He fell over a
+dining room chair, and sat down in another, and when he got up he
+felt that though he was not proud, he was stuck up, for on his
+night shirt was a sticky fly paper that had been placed in
+readiness to catch the unwary early fly. After peeling off the
+sticky paper, and subterraneously swearing a neat, delicate little
+female swear, he groped to the cellar door, and began to go
+down.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/126.png"><img src=
+"images/126.png" alt="A man and a cat are both yelling." id=
+"img126" name="img126" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>THE STARTLED CAT.</p>
+</div>
+<p>Now, if there is anything a boy ought to be punished for, it is
+for surreptitiously eating a large slice of musk melon and leaving
+the rind on the top stair. It tends to make a boy disliked. The
+head of the family stepped with his bare feet on the piece of
+melon, and sat down so quick that it made his head swim. It made
+him swim all over, and under, and everywhere. But if he sat down
+soon, he got up sooner. If there is one thing that a house cat
+should be taught, it is to sleep elsewhere than on the top stair.
+When he fell and struck the sleeping cat there was a crisis. He
+took in the situation at once. An occasional disengaged feline toe
+nail, and a squall, told him in burning words that, while his title
+to the seat was contested, it would be impolitic to wait for a
+commission of unbiased judges to decide which was entitled to it.
+His opponent was armed, and had possession, and he felt that it
+would tend to prevent riot and bloodshed if he quietly gave up. But
+he felt that while in his present position the cat was
+comparatively harmless, if he attempted to rise she would bring the
+whole army and navy into action, and perhaps cripple his resources.
+So he decided to jump up in a hurry before the cat had time to
+think of her toe nails much. His position was not pleasant, to say
+the least, but he jumped up in a hurry, hoping the cat would remain
+and continue her nap. She was not a remaining cat and as soon as
+his weight was removed from her person, she gave a yell as though
+frightened, and began to walk up and down his legs, inside of his
+night shirt. The question as to how many toe nails a cat has got,
+has never been decided, but he says they have a million, and he can
+show the documents to prove it. She went up him as though he was a
+fence post, and a dog after her, and he flew around as though his
+linen was on fire, and yelled until his wife came down to see what
+was the matter. By unbuttoning the top button the cat was coaxed
+out, under protest however, and after a light was lit there was
+seen about the maddest man in the world. He took a candle and went
+down after the doughnuts, and after running his hand into a jar of
+preserved peaches, and another of pickled pig&rsquo;s feet, he
+struck the right one, and after hot grease from the candle had run
+down his fingers he came up with a doughnut, and then the baby
+wouldn&rsquo;t eat it, then he sat down side-ways in a cushioned
+chair, applied arnica and swore till daylight. A single shot was
+heard in the cellar that morning, and the young life of that cat
+went out. As he rode down on the street car the next morning,
+people marvelled that he should stand up on the back platform, when
+there were so many vacant seats, and when a neighbor asked him to
+be seated he said, with a yawn, &ldquo;No thank you, I have been
+sitting down a good deal during the night,&rdquo; and he looked
+mad. It is such things that drive men to commit crimes.</p>
+<h3><a id="Take_Your_Latin_Straight" name=
+"Take_Your_Latin_Straight">TAKE YOUR LATIN STRAIGHT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The school board, at its last session adopted the following
+rule: &ldquo;The continental system of pronounciation shall be
+taught in the high schools of La Crosse, and no other allowed
+except by direction of board of education.&rdquo; We are glad the
+rule has been adopted, as there is no doubt that the continental
+system is the best. We have been pained beyond measure, as no doubt
+all of the school board have, at hearing the scholars pronounce
+Latin by &rsquo;tother system. No longer ago than last Saturday,
+when we were in Mons. Anderson&rsquo;s, a girl came in and asked
+for a pair of Latin corsets, by the Onalaska system of
+pronounciation. The clerk, not understanding, went and got a pair
+of those undershirts and drawers, complete in one number, with no
+tale to be continued. The girl blushed, the clerk did not
+understand, and we had to explain by the continental system, and
+the girl got her corsets, but suppose there had not been a Latin
+scholar standing around there waiting for his wife to buy a package
+of safty pins, what a predicament the girl would have been in. On
+behalf of the people, THE SUN thanks the board of education for
+adopting the continental system of pronounciation, only they ought
+to go further, and make it a crime punishable with suicide for
+anybody to pronounce it in any other way. There has been suffering
+enough by pronouncing it the old way.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="He_is_too_Healthy" name="He_is_too_Healthy">HE IS TOO
+HEALTHY.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;There, I knew you would get into trouble,&rdquo; said the
+grocery man to the bad boy, as a policeman came along leading him
+by the ear, the boy having an empty champagne bottle in one hand,
+and a black eye. &ldquo;What has he been doing Mr.
+Policeman?&rdquo; asked the grocery man, as the policeman halted
+with the boy in front of the store.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I was going by a house up here when this kid opened
+the door with a quart bottle of champagne, and he cut the wire and
+fired the cork at another boy, and the champagne went all over the
+sidewalk, and some of it went on me, and I knew there was something
+wrong, cause champagne is too expensive to waste that way, and he
+said he was running the shebang and if I would bring him here you
+would say he was all right. If you say so I will let him
+go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man said he had better let the boy go, as his
+parents would not like to have their little pet locked up. So the
+policeman let go his ear, and he throwed the empty bottle at a coal
+wagon, and after the policeman had brushed the champagne off his
+coat, and smelled of his fingers, and started off, the grocery man
+turned to the boy, who was peeling a cucumber, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, what kind of a circus have you been having, and what
+do you mean by destroying wine that way! and, where are your
+folks?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll tell you. Ma she has got the hay fever
+and has gone to Lake Superior to see if she can&rsquo;t stop
+sneezing, and Saturday Pa said he and me would go out to Oconomowoc
+and stay over Sunday, and try and recuperate our health. Pa said it
+would be a good joke for me not to call him Pa, but to act as
+though I was his younger brother, and we would have a real nice
+time. I knowed what he wanted. He is an old masher, that&rsquo;s
+what&rsquo;s the matter with him, and he was going to play himself
+for a batchelor. O, thunder, I got on to his racket in a minute. He
+was introduced to some of the girls and Saturday evening he danced
+till the cows came home. At home he is awful fraid of rheumatiz,
+and he never sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured
+off&rsquo;n him, and he stood in the door and let a girl fan him
+till I was afraid he would freeze, and just as he was telling a
+girl from Tennessee, who was joking him about being &lsquo;a nold
+batch,&rsquo; that he was not sure as he could always hold out a
+woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with the charming
+ladies of the Sunny South. I pulled his coat and said, &lsquo;Pa
+how do you spose Ma&rsquo;s hay fever is to-night, I&rsquo;ll bet
+she is just sneezing the top of her head off.&rsquo; Wall, sir, you
+just oughten seen that girl and Pa. Pa looked at me as if I was a
+total stranger, and told the porter if that freckled faced
+boot-black belonged around the house he had better be fired out of
+the ball room, and the girl said &lsquo;the disgustin&rsquo;
+thing!&rsquo; and just before they fired me I told Pa he had better
+look out or he would sweat through his liver pad.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I went to bed and Pa staid up till the lights were put
+out. He was mad when he came to bed, but he didn&rsquo;t kick me,
+cause the people in the next room would hear him, but the next
+morning he talked to me. He said I might go back home Sunday night,
+and he would stay a day or two. He sat around on the veranda all
+the afternoon, talking with the girls, and when he would see me
+coming along he would look cross. He took a girl out boat riding,
+and when I asked him if I couldn&rsquo;t go along, he said he was
+afraid I would get drowned, and he said if I went home there was
+nothing there too good for me, and so my chum and me got to firing
+bottles of champagne, and he hit me in the eye with a cork, and I
+drove him out doors and was just going to shell his earth works,
+when the policeman collared me. Say, what&rsquo;s good for a black
+eye?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home.
+&ldquo;What do you think your Pa&rsquo;s object was in passing
+himself off for a single man at Oconomowoc?&rdquo; asked the
+grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the boy&rsquo;s
+father.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what beats me. Aside from Ma&rsquo;s hay
+fever she is one of the healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose
+he does it for his health, the way they all do when they go to a
+summer resort, but it leaves a boy an orphan, don&rsquo;t it, to
+have such kitteny parents?&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Sure_of_Heaven" name="Sure_of_Heaven">SURE OF
+HEAVEN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The only persons that are real sure that their calling and
+election is sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots,
+are the men who are hung for murder. They always announce that they
+have got a dead thing on it, just before the drop falls. How
+encouraging it must be to children to listen to the prayers of our
+ministers in churches, who admit that they are miserable sinners,
+living on God&rsquo;s charity, and doubtful if they would be
+allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of
+their own unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then
+let the children read an account of a hanging bee, and see how
+happy the condemned man is, how he shouts glory hallelujah, and
+confesses that, though he killed his man, he is going to heaven. A
+child will naturally ask, why don&rsquo;t the ministers murder
+somebody, and make a dead sure thing of it?</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Naughty_But_Nice_Church_Choir" name=
+"The_Naughty_But_Nice_Church_Choir">THE NAUGHTY BUT NICE CHURCH
+CHOIR.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 bookmark 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 the 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&rsquo;t know one card from another.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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 that came in with the old lady, and
+while he was up the soprano put the shoemaker&rsquo;s 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 shoemaker&rsquo;s
+wax melts at ninety eight degrees Fahrenheit.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/132.png"><img src=
+"images/132.png" alt="A man stands looking over a rail." id=
+"img132" name="img132" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE TENOR ARRAYED IN ALL HIS GLORY.</p>
+</div>
+<p>The minister finally got to the amen, and read a hymn, the choir
+then coughed and all rose up. The chair that the tenor sat in stuck
+to him like a brother, and came right along and nearly broke his
+suspenders.</p>
+<p>It was the tenor to bat, and as the great organ struck up he
+pushed the chair, 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Hold the Fort.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;laying&rdquo; for the soprano ever
+since to get even.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Candy had been passed around, and just before the hymn was given
+out in which the soprano was to sing a solo, &ldquo;Nearer My God
+to Thee,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>Well, if a democratic torch-light procession had marched
+unbidden down her throat she couldn&rsquo;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, &ldquo;A Charge to Keep I Have,&rdquo; and
+the congregation was almost melted to tears.</p>
+<p>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
+&ldquo;whoosh,&rdquo; to cool her mouth. The audience saw her wipe
+a tear away, but did not hear the sound of her voice as she
+&ldquo;whooshed.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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:
+&ldquo;Young man, I will get even with you for that peppermint
+candy if I have to live a thousand years, and don&rsquo;t you
+forget it,&rdquo; and then they all sat down and looked pious,
+while the minister preached a most beautiful sermon on
+&ldquo;Faith.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Supreme_Court_Judges_and_US_Senators" name=
+"Supreme_Court_Judges_and_US_Senators">SUPREME COURT JUDGES AND
+U.S. SENATORS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>I would call your attention to a change that it seems to me
+should be made in the method of selecting U.S. Senators and Supreme
+Judges. Heretofore it has been noticeable that the men who carried
+the longest pole knocked down the senatorial persimmons. In the
+matter of the election of Judges of the Supreme Court, it has been
+the practice to secure men for those places at an enormous salary,
+when other men would be willing to do the work and board
+themselves. The suggestion I would make is that you pass a law
+letting the offices of United States Senator and Judges of the
+Supreme Court to the lowest bidder. This method will be economical
+and will secure to the state men who can legislate and judge things
+well enough for all practical purposes. The way times are now we
+must get things at panic prices or go without.</p>
+<h3><a id="Our_Christian_Neighbors_Have_Gone" name=
+"Our_Christian_Neighbors_Have_Gone">OUR CHRISTIAN NEIGHBORS HAVE
+GONE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>It pains us to announce that the Young Men&rsquo;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 it was possible to do for their
+comfort, and to cheer them in their lonely life. That their
+proximity to the <em>Sun</em> office has been beneficial to them we
+are assured, and the closeness has not done us any hurt as we know
+of.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>No one has been more punctual at these free feeds than we have,
+though we 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <em>did</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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 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.</p>
+<p>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 centre 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 toward 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.</p>
+<p>They are all gone. They have crossed the beautiful river, and
+have camped near the <em>Christian Statesman</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s gate, if there is any backtalk, 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&rsquo;s
+Christian Association, and he is asked to pass them in and charge
+it up to the <em>Sun</em>.</p>
+<h3><a id="Buttermilk_Bibbers" name="Buttermilk_Bibbers">BUTTERMILK
+BIBBERS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Another thing, buttermilk does not cause the nose to become red,
+and the consumer&rsquo;s breath does not smell like the next day
+after a sangerfest. The complexion of the nose of a buttermilk
+drinker assumes 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Fishing_for_Pieces_of_Women" name=
+"Fishing_for_Pieces_of_Women">FISHING FOR PIECES OF WOMEN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There are lots of ludicrous scenes to be observed on the
+railroads and conductors are loaded with stories that would cause a
+marble monument to keep its sides a laughing. Some day we are going
+to borrow a conductor, and take him out in the woods, and place a
+revolver to his head and make him deliver a lot of stories. The
+other day as conductor Fred Underwood&rsquo;s train from Chicago,
+arrived on the trestle work on the south side, the whistle blew,
+the air break was touched off, and the train came up standing so
+quick that a woman lost her false teeth in the sleeper, and
+everybody&rsquo;s hair stood up like a mule&rsquo;s ears. Every
+window had a head out, and when the conductor got out on the
+platform he saw the engineer and fireman on the ends of the ties
+looking down into the mud and water, shading their eyes as though
+looking for the eclipse.</p>
+<p>There, sticking out of the mud were two human legs, and as one
+leg had a piece of listing around it, just above the veal, the
+conductor knew, instinctively, that the surface indications showed
+that there was a woman in there. Then he thought that the engine
+had probably struck a female, and tore her all to pieces, and of
+course he knew that the company would expect him to bring home
+enough for a mess, or a funeral. Spitting on his hands he called a
+brakeman with a transom hook out of the sleeper, to fish with, they
+rolled up their trousers and waded in, after telling a porter to
+bring a blanket to put the pieces in. The brakeman got there first
+and took hold of one foot, when the conductor got hold of the
+brakeman&rsquo;s coat tail and pulled. The passengers turned away
+sick, expecting to see the mangled remains brought to the surface.
+They pulled, and directly the balance of the deceased came up. It
+was an Irish lady, with a tin pail, who had been on the way to take
+her husband&rsquo;s dinner to him, and she stood on one side to let
+the train pass, and had lost her balance and fallen into the mud.
+As her head came out of the mud, she squirted water out of her
+mouth, kicked the brakeman in the ear and said,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lave go of me, I am a dacent woman!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The conductor asked her if she was hurt.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hurted is it,&rdquo; said she, &ldquo;Ivery bone in my
+body is kilt intirely, and I have lost me tay cup,&rdquo; and she
+looked in her tin pail in distress.</p>
+<p>After vainly trying to get the conductor to wade in and search
+for her &ldquo;tay cup,&rdquo; she permitted them to assist her
+into the car, where an old doctor from Racine volunteered to
+examine her to see if she was mortally injured. He put his hand on
+her shoulder and asked her if she was in any pain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Divil the pain, except the loss of me tay cup,&rdquo;
+said she, &ldquo;and kape yer owld hands off me, for I am a dacent
+woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook herself in the car and got mud all over everybody, and
+finally took her pail and jumped off at a crossing before arriving
+at the depot. As the train came into the depot ten minutes late,
+and the conductor jumped off, all mud from head to foot, as though
+he had been playing spaniel and retrieving a wounded duck, Supt.
+Atkins looked at his clothes and said, &ldquo;Where in
+&mdash;&mdash; have you been all the time?&rdquo; The conductor
+took a wisp of straw to wipe himself off, and as he threw it under
+a car he said he had been in the artificial propagation of the
+human race. In fact he had been engaged in the noble work of
+raising woman to a higher sphere. He was allowed to go on probation
+and wash himself. The brakeman went down there the next day and was
+fishing in the same hole. He said he didn&rsquo;t know but there
+might be more woman in there, but they say he was after the
+&ldquo;tay cup.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Nearly_Broke_up_the_Ball" name=
+"Nearly_Broke_up_the_Ball">NEARLY BROKE UP THE BALL.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A party of well meaning young people from Ripon nearly broke up
+a dance at Hazen&rsquo;s cheese factory, out in the country a spell
+ago. The people around there are quiet, sober country people, who
+confine themselves in dancing, to plain quadrilles and country
+dances, with an occasional monnie musk, or a plain waltz. These
+young Ripon people are on the dance bigger than a wolf, and they
+have learned all the Boston dips, and Saratoga bends, and Newport
+colic dances, and everything new. There is one dance they have
+learned which is peculiar to say the least. It is a species of
+waltz, but the couple get together so odd that a person who sees it
+for the first time just leans against something and fans himself.
+When the music strikes up a waltz the young man opens his arms and
+doubles himself up like a boy with the cholera infantum, his hind
+leg cramps and his head lops over on one side, and he looks sick,
+his back humps up like a case of chronic inflammatory rheumatism,
+and he is ready. The girl who is with him, when he begins to have
+spasms, at once seems to go into a trance. Her back gets up like a
+cat, she bends over towards him, her forward leg gets out of joint
+at the knee, her neck takes a cramp, her mouth opens and she lolls,
+her eyes roll like a steer that has turned the yoke, and just
+before she dies she falls into the arms of the deceased and they
+are ready. For a moment they stand and squirm like angle-worms on a
+hook, and froth at the mouth, and look, as they stand there, like a
+pile driver that has been run into by an engine. They teeter up and
+down a little, and then fly off on a tangent, and they flop around
+in unexpected places among the other dancers, jump like a box car,
+bump against other couples, and at every bump they are driven
+closer together, until they are so near that it does seem as though
+they will have to be pried apart with a handspike; they look into
+each other&rsquo;s eyes as though they would bite, and they keep
+going around till their backs are broke. Well, a party of these
+kind of dancers went to the cheese factory where the country people
+were gathered, and after dancing a few quadrilles, the fiddlers
+struck up an old fashioned waltz. While the visiting dancers were
+going into spasms to get ready to wade in, the floor filled with
+the country couples, who were waltzing around old fashioned, when
+all of a sudden those Ripon people began to work. They flopped
+across the cheese factory, knocked down a couple from
+Pickett&rsquo;s Corners, caromed on a fellow and his girl from
+Brandon and sent them against a barrel of lemonade, glanced across
+the hall and struck an old lady amidships that had just started to
+call her girl off the floor because she was afraid the girl would
+catch those Ripon cramps, knocked her under a bench, where she lay
+and called for her husband Isaiah, to come and pick her up in a
+basket. In less than two minutes all the other dancers hauled off,
+and stood on benches and looked at them. Some of the country girls
+hid their heads and said they wanted to go home. The visitors slid
+around the hall, caught each other on the fly, run the bases, and
+come under the wire neck and neck, just as the man who played
+second fiddle fell over the base viol in a dead faint, and the man
+that played the piccalo rolled under the music stand, striken with
+apoplexy. The manager of the dance called a constable who was
+present, and told him to arrest the party, and handcuff them and
+take them to the Oshkosh insane asylum, where they had escaped. The
+young men explained that they were not crazy, and that it was only
+a new kind of dance, and they were reluctantly allowed to remain,
+on condition that they &ldquo;wouldn&rsquo;t cut up any more of
+them city monkey shines, not afore folks.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Summer_Resorting" name="Summer_Resorting">SUMMER
+RESORTING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/142.png"><img src=
+"images/142.png" alt="A man on a bench." id="img142" name="img142"
+width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE RESORTER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>A friend who was on the car, on the way up town, after a
+day&rsquo;s work, with a clean shirt on, a white vest and a general
+look of coolness, accosted the traveler as follows:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Been summer resorting, I hear?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The dirty-looking man crossed his legs with a painful effort, as
+though his drawers stuck to his legs and almost peeled the back
+off, and answered:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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,&rdquo; and he wiped a cinder out of his eye with what was
+once a clean handkerchief.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Had a good, cool time, I suppose, and enjoyed
+yourself,&rdquo; said the man who had not been out of town.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cool time, hell,&rdquo; said the man, who has a pew in
+two churches, as he kicked his limp satchel of dirty clothes under
+the car seat. &ldquo;I had rather been sentenced to the House of
+Correction for a month.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, what&rsquo;s the trouble?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 lunancy. 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 than I have
+never raised six children.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The only night&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 stairs 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
+&lsquo;Allegezan and Kalamazoo.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, at one place I was woke up at 3 o&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, I don&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And the sticky, cross man got off swearing at summer hotels and
+pirates. We don&rsquo;t see where he could have been traveling.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Jokes_Him" name="His_Pa_Jokes_Him">HIS PA JOKES
+HIM.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;What on earth is that you have got on your upper
+lip?&rdquo; said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came in and
+began to peel a rutabaga, and his upper lip hung down over his
+teeth, and was covered with something that looked like
+shoemaker&rsquo;s wax, &ldquo;You look as though you had been
+digging potatoes with your nose.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, that is some of Pa&rsquo;s darn smartness. I asked him
+if he knew anything that would make a boy&rsquo;s moustache grow,
+and he told me the best thing he ever tried was tar, and for me to
+rub it on thick when I went to bed, and wash it off in the morning.
+I put it on last night, and by gosh I can&rsquo;t wash it off. Pa
+told me all I had to do was to use a scouring brick, and it would
+come off, and I used the brick, and it took the skin off, and the
+tar is there yet, and say, does my lip look very bad?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man told him it was the worst looking lip he ever
+saw, but he could cure it by rubbing a little cayenne pepper in the
+tar. He said the tar would neutralize the pepper, and the pepper
+would loosen the tar, and act as a cooling lotion to the lacerated
+lip. The boy went to a can of pepper behind the counter, and stuck
+his finger in and rubbed a lot of it on his lip, and then his hair
+began to raise, and he began to cry, and rushed to the water-pail
+and ran his face into the water to wash off the pepper. The grocery
+man laughed, and when the boy had got the pepper washed off, and
+had resumed his rutabaga, he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That seals your fate. No man ever trifles with the
+feelings of the bold buccanner of the Spanish main, without living
+to rue it. I will lay for you, old man, and don&rsquo;t you forget
+it. Pa thought he was smart when he got me to put tar on my lip, to
+bring my moustache out, and to-day he lays on a bed of pain, and
+to-morrow your turn will come. You will regret that you did not get
+down on your knees and beg my pardon. You will be sorry that you
+did not prescribe cold cream for my bruised lip, instead of cayenne
+pepper. Beware, you base twelve ounces to the pound huckster, you
+gimlet-eyed seller of dog sausage, you sanded sugar idiot, you
+small potato three card monte sleight of hand rotten egg fiend, you
+villain that sells smoked sturgeon and dogfish for smoked halibut.
+The avenger is on your track.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look here, young man, don&rsquo;t you threaten me, or I
+will take you by the ear and walk you through green fields, and
+beside still waters to the front door and kick your pistol pocket
+clear around so you can wear it for a watch pocket in your vest. No
+boy can frighten me by crimus. But tell me, how did you get even
+with your Pa?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, give me a glass of cider and we will be friends and
+I will tell you. Thanks! Gosh, but that cider is made out of mouldy
+dried apples and sewer water,&rdquo; and he took a handful of layer
+raisins off the top of a box to take the taste out of his mouth,
+and while the grocer charged a peck of rutabagas, a gallon of cider
+and two pounds of raisins to the boy&rsquo;s Pa, the boy
+proceeded:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see, Pa likes a joke the best of anybody you ever
+saw, if it is on somebody else, but he kicks like a steer when it
+is on him. I asked him this morning if it wouldn&rsquo;t be a good
+joke to put some soft soap on the front step, so the letter-carrier
+would slip up and spill hisself, and Pa said it would be elegant.
+Pa is a Democrat, and he thinks that anything that will make it
+unpleasant for Republican office holders, is legitimate, and he
+encouraged me to paralyze the letter-carrier. The letter-carrier is
+as old a man as Pa, and I didn&rsquo;t want to humiliate him, but I
+just wanted Pa to give his consent, so he couldn&rsquo;t kick if he
+got caught in his own trap. You see? Well, this morning the
+minister and two of the deacons called on Pa, to have a talk with
+him about his actions in church, on two or three occasions, when he
+pulled out the pack of cards with his handkerchief, and played the
+music box, and they had a pretty hot time in the back parlor, and
+finally they settled it, and were going to sing a hymn, when Pa
+handed them a little hymn book, and the minister opened it and
+turned pale and said, &lsquo;what&rsquo;s this?&rsquo; and they
+looked at it, and it was a book of Hoyle&rsquo;s games instead of a
+hymn book. Gosh, wasn&rsquo;t the minister mad! He had started to
+read a hymn and he quit after he had read two lines where it said,
+&lsquo;In a game of four-handed euchre, never trump your
+partner&rsquo;s ace, but rely on the ace to take the trick on
+suit.&rsquo; Pa was trying to explain how the book came to be
+there, when the minister and the deacons started out, and then I
+poured the two quart tin pail full of soft soap on the front step.
+It was this white soap, just the color of the step, and when I got
+it spread I went down in the basement. The visitors came out and Pa
+was trying to explain to them, about Hoyle, when one of the deacons
+stepped on the soap and his feet flew up and he struck on his pants
+and slid down the steps. The minister said &lsquo;great heavens,
+deacon, are you hurt? let me assist you,&rsquo; and he took two
+quick steps, and you have seen these fellows in a nigger show that
+kick each other head over heels and fall on their ears, and stand
+on their heads and turn around like a top. The minister&rsquo;s
+feet slipped and the next I saw he was standing on his head in his
+hat, and his legs were sort of wilted and fell limp by his side,
+and he fell over on his stomach. You talk about spreading the
+gospel in heathen lands. It is nothing to the way you can spread it
+with two quarts of soft soap. The minister didn&rsquo;t look pious
+a bit, when he was trying to catch the railing he looked as though
+he wanted to murder every man on earth, but it may be he was
+tired.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, Pa he was paralyzed, and he and the other deacon
+rushed out to pick up the minister and the first old man, and when
+they struck the steps they went kiting. Pa&rsquo;s feet somehow
+slipped backwards, and he turned a summersault and struck full
+length on his back, and one heel was across the minister&rsquo;s
+neck, and he slid down the steps, and the other deacon fell all
+over the other three, and Pa swore at them, and it was the worst
+looking lot of pious people I ever saw. I think if the minister had
+been in the woods somewhere, where nobody could have heard him, he
+would have used language. They all seemed mad at each other. The
+hired girl told Ma there was three tramps out on the sidewalk
+fighting Pa, and Ma she took the broom and started to help Pa, and
+I tried to stop Ma, &rsquo;cause her constitution is not very
+strong and I didn&rsquo;t want her to do any flying trapeze
+business, but I couldn&rsquo;t stop her, and she went out with the
+broom and a towel tied around her head. Well, I don&rsquo;t know
+where Ma did strike, but when she came in she said she had
+palpitation of the heart, but that was not the place where she put
+the arnica. O, but she <em>did</em> go through the air like a
+bullet through cheese, and when she went down the steps
+a-bumpity-bump, I felt sorry for Ma. The minister had got so he
+could set up on the sidewalk, with his back against the lower step,
+when Ma came sliding down, and one of the heels of her gaiters hit
+the minister in the hair, and the other foot went right through
+between his arm and his side, and the broom liked to pushed his
+teeth down his throat. But he was not mad at Ma. As soon as he see
+it was Ma he said, &lsquo;Why, sister, the wicked stand in slippery
+places, don&rsquo;t they?&rsquo; and Ma she was mad and said for
+him to let go her stocking, and then Pa was mad and he said,
+&lsquo;look-a-here you sky-pilot, this thing has gone far
+enough,&rsquo; and then a policeman came along and first he thought
+they were all drunk, but he found they were respectable, and he got
+a chip and scraped the soap off of them, and they went home, and Pa
+and Ma they got in the house some way, and just then the
+letter-carrier came along, but he didn&rsquo;t have any letters for
+us, and he didn&rsquo;t come onto the steps, and then I went up
+stairs and I said, &lsquo;Pa, don&rsquo;t you think it is real
+mean, after you and I fixed the soap on the steps for the
+letter-carrier, he didn&rsquo;t come on the step at all,&rsquo; and
+Pa was scraping the soap off his pants with a piece of shingle, and
+the hired girl was putting liniment on Ma, and heating it in for
+palpitation of the heart, and Pa said, &lsquo;You dam idjut, no
+more of this, or I&rsquo;ll maul the liver out of you,&rsquo; and I
+asked him if he didn&rsquo;t think soft soap would help a moustache
+to grow, and he picked up Ma&rsquo;s work-basket and threw it at my
+head, as I went down stairs, and I came over here. Don&rsquo;t you
+think my Pa is unreasonable to get mad at a little joke that he
+planned himself?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man said he didn&rsquo;t know, and the boy went out
+with a pair of skates over his shoulder, and the grocery man is
+wondering what joke the boy will play on him to get even for the
+cayenne pepper.</p>
+<h3><a id="Gathered_Waists" name="Gathered_Waists">GATHERED
+WAISTS!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Andrews&rsquo; <em>Bazar</em> says: &ldquo;Gathered waists are
+very much worn.&rdquo; If the men would gather the waists carefully
+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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Church_Keno" name="Church_Keno">CHURCH KENO.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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
+nineteen drew the quilt and the little sister turned to the
+traveling man and said, &ldquo;My! that is my number. I have drawn
+it. What shall I do?&rdquo; &ldquo;Hold up your ticket and shout
+keno,&rdquo; said he.</p>
+<p>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,
+&ldquo;<em>Keno!</em>&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/151.png"><img src=
+"images/151.png" alt=
+"A woman holds a ticket towards an astonished man." id="img151"
+name="img151" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;KENO!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>If a bank had burst in the building there couldn&rsquo;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 &ldquo;keno&rdquo; meant. He said he didn&rsquo;t know
+exactly, but he had always seen people, when they won anything at
+that game, yell &ldquo;keno.&rdquo; She isn&rsquo;t exactly clear
+yet what &ldquo;keno&rdquo; is, but she says she has sworn off
+taking advice from pious looking traveling men. They call her
+&ldquo;Little Keno&rdquo; now.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Old_Sweet_Songs" name="The_Old_Sweet_Songs">THE OLD
+SWEET SONGS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Boston girl sings: &ldquo;What is home without a
+mother,&rdquo; while the old lady is mending her daughter&rsquo;s
+stockings. There is something sweet about those old songs.</p>
+<h3><a id="Failure_of_a_Solid_Institution" name=
+"Failure_of_a_Solid_Institution">FAILURE OF A SOLID
+INSTITUTION.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 thing
+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.</p>
+<p>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 knew how baked beans ought to be
+cooked from years of 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Registry_of_Electors" name=
+"Registry_of_Electors">REGISTRY OF ELECTORS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The registry law has proved a conspicuous failure, inasmuch as
+it has taken ten years of persistent efforts by its use to make a
+change in the admistration. I would suggest that you amend the
+registry law by providing that all qualified voters have their ears
+punched, immediately after voting, by the inspectors of elections,
+the same as conductors punch tickets. This method will obviate the
+difficulties heretofore experienced, and check illegal voting and
+prevent repeating.</p>
+<h3><a id="About_Hell" name="About_Hell">ABOUT HELL.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 the hundredth part of a second, and that it
+would not cause as much &ldquo;sissing&rdquo; as a drop of water on
+a hot griddle.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;Now I lay me,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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 <em>too</em> 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Preparing_for_War" name="Preparing_for_War">PREPARING
+FOR WAR.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The <em>Sun</em> is no alarmist, but it can see in recent events
+what it believes to be a preparation for war. All of the
+manufactories of fire arms and cartridges are working night and
+day, and the Oneida community have just received an order to
+immediately can 24,000 cans of baked beans. When the war will break
+out we do not know, but all this fixed amunition is not being fixed
+for no 4th of July. It is trouble.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Tony_Slaughter-House" name="A_Tony_Slaughter-House">A
+TONY SLAUGHTER HOUSE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Milwaukee paper copies what THE SUN said about killing hogs
+while under the influence of chloroform, at Keine &amp;
+Wilson&rsquo;s packing house, and intimates that it is all a lie.
+Have we lived to this age to have our word doubted by a Milwaukee
+editor? This is too much. Why, bless the dear man, the half has not
+been told. The firm we speak of is desirous of building up a trade
+for gilt edged pork and hams, so every improvement known to the
+trade is inaugurated. We did not think it necessary to describe the
+whole process, but now that our word is doubted, it is necessary to
+do so. When the late lamented hog is transferred from the parlor
+where he was chloroformed, his body is gently, yet firmly placed in
+a gold lined tank, filled with boiling Florida water and cologne,
+where the body remains until the bristles become loose, when it is
+transferred to a table covered with purple velvet, and the bristles
+are removed by the gentlemanly ushers, dressed in the fashions of
+the time of George III, armed with gold candle sticks, studded with
+diamonds. Then the body is taken by easy stages, into the presence
+of the intestine transporter, who reclines upon a downy couch. He
+raises up, brushes a particle of dust from his sleeve, and with a
+silver knife cuts the hog from Dan to Beersheba, and the patent
+insides are received on a silver salver, and divided among
+attendant maidens. The inside of the hog is washed with bay rum,
+and sweet majorum is put in. Then the hog is removed and cut up.
+The portions salted are salted for keeps, and the hams and bacon
+are smoked in a room filled with incense, and when the smoked meat
+comes out it is good enough for a king, or a queen, or a Milwaukee
+editor. Lie, indeed! We should like to see ourselves lying for one
+hog.</p>
+<h3><a id="An_Arm_That_is_not_Reliable" name=
+"An_Arm_That_is_not_Reliable">AN ARM THAT IS NOT RELIABLE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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,&mdash;which is seldom, on account of the old folks.&mdash;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&rsquo;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 bald-headed and mean. &ldquo;You
+want to give her something that will be a constant reminder of
+you?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that was what was
+the matter.&rdquo; &ldquo;Does she have any corns?&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t do. The old man hesitated a moment,
+scratched his head, and finally said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The young man blushed, and said that was about the size of
+it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I presume she enjoys that part of the discourse,
+eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy said that, as near as he could tell, by the way she
+acted, she was not opposed to being held up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is there any attachment to it that will make her dream of
+me all night?&rdquo; asked the boy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir! Don&rsquo;t be a hog,&rdquo; said the bad
+man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then what is it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The old man said one word, &ldquo;Corset!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The young man was delighted, and he went to a store to buy a
+nice corset.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What size do you want?&rdquo; asked the girl who waited
+on him.</p>
+<p>That was a puzzler. He didn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take a tape measure and measure my arm; that will just
+fit.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figright"><a href="images/159.png"><img src=
+"images/159.png" alt="A woman cries while a man looks on." id=
+"img159" name="img159" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;IT IS F-F-FOUR SIZES TOO B-B-BIG.&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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&rsquo;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 but a corset,
+but if she felt insulted he would take his leave, give the corset
+to some poor family, and go drown himself.</p>
+<p>He was about to go away, when she burst out crying, and sobbed
+out the following words, wet with salt brine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was v-v-v-very thoughtful of y-y-you, but I
+<em>couldn&rsquo;t feel it</em>! It is f-f-four sizes too b-b-big!
+Why didn&rsquo;t you get number eight? You are silent, you cannot
+answer, enough?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They instinctively found their way to the sofa; mutual
+explanation 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Boy_and_the_Goat" name="The_Boy_and_the_Goat">THE
+BOY AND THE GOAT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A man on King Street gave a boy a goat the other day, and he
+tied a rope around its neck to lead it home. The boy wanted to go
+through the gate, but as the goat concluded to jump over the fence
+and pull the boy through between the pickets, he let the goat have
+its own way. The boy got through the fence in instalments, leaving
+his shirt collar and one pants leg on the pickets, the goat dragged
+him out into the middle of the street, and then there occurred a
+sanguinary encounter to see whether the boy or the goat should boss
+the moving. At one time the spectators thought the goat would take
+the boy home. The animal used the boy for a cultivator, and they
+tore up the street like hands working on the road, till the goat
+slipped the rope over his head, and then the boy gathered himself
+up by the armful, and went and told his mother that he got his rope
+back anyway. She combed him with a piece of barrel.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Gets_Mad" name="His_Pa_Gets_Mad">HIS PA GETS
+MAD!</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was down to the drug store this morning and saw your Ma
+buying a lot of court-plaster, enough to make a shirt I should
+think. What&rsquo;s she doing with so much court-plaster?&rdquo;
+asked the grocery man of the bad boy, as he came in and pulled off
+his boots by the stove and emptied out a lot of snow that had
+collected as he walked through a drift, which melted and made a bad
+smell.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, I guess she was going to patch Pa up so he will hold
+water. Pa&rsquo;s temper got him into the worst muss you ever see,
+last night. If that museum was here now they would hire Pa and
+exhibit him as the tattooed man. I tell you, I have got too old to
+be mauled as though I was a kid, and any man who attacks me from
+this out, wants to have his peace made with the insurance
+companies, and know that his calling and election is sure, because
+I am a bad man and don&rsquo;t you forget it.&rdquo; And the boy
+pulled on his boots and looked so cross and desperate that the
+grocer-man asked him if he wouldn&rsquo;t try a little new
+cider.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good heavens!&rdquo; said the grocery man, as the boy
+swallowed the cider, and his face resumed its natural look, and the
+piratical frown disappeared with the cider. &ldquo;You have not
+stabbed your father have you? I have feared that one thing would
+bring on another, with you, and that you would yet be
+hung.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Naw, I haven&rsquo;t stabbed him. It was another cat that
+stabbed him. You see, Pa wants me to do all the work around the
+house. The other day he bought a load of kindling wood, and told me
+to carry it into the basement. I had not been educated up to
+kindling wood, and I didn&rsquo;t do it. When supper time came, and
+Pa found that I had not carried in the kindling wood, he had a hot
+box, and told me if that wood was not in when he came back from the
+lodge, that he would warm my jacket. Well, I tried to hire some one
+to carry it in, and got a man to promise to come in the morning and
+carry it in and take his pay in groceries, and I was going to buy
+the groceries here and have them charged to Pa. But that
+wouldn&rsquo;t help me out that night. I knew when Pa came home he
+would search for me. So I slept in the back hall on a cot. But I
+didn&rsquo;t want Pa to have all his trouble for nothing, so I
+borrowed an old torn cat that my chum&rsquo;s old maid aunt owns,
+and put the cat in my bed. I thought if Pa came into my room after
+me, and found that by his unkindness I had changed to a torn cat,
+he would be sorry. That is the biggest cat you ever see, and the
+worst fighter in our ward. It isn&rsquo;t afraid of anything, and
+can whip a New Foundland dog quicker than you could put sand in a
+barrel of sugar. Well, about eleven o&rsquo;clock I heard Pa
+tumbing over the kindling wood, and I knew by the remark he made as
+the wood slid around under him, that there was going to be a cat
+fight real quick. He came up to Ma&rsquo;s room, and sounded Ma as
+to whether Hennery had retired to his virtuous couch. Pa is awful
+sarcastic when he tries to be. I could hear him take off his
+clothes, and hear him say, as he picked up a trunk strap, &lsquo;I
+guess I will go up to his room and watch the smile on his face, as
+he dreams of angels. I yearn to press him to my aching
+bosom.&rsquo; I thought to myself, mebbe you won&rsquo;t yearn so
+much directly. He come up stairs, and I could hear him breathing
+hard. I looked around the corner and could see he just had on his
+shirt and pants, and his suspenders were hanging down, and his bald
+head shown like a calcium light just before it explodes. Pa went
+into my room, and up to the bed, and I could hear him say,
+&lsquo;Come out here and bring in that kindling wood or I will
+start a fire on your base burner with this strap.&rsquo; And then
+there was a yowling such as I never heard before, and Pa said,
+&lsquo;Helen Blazes,&rsquo; and the furniture in my room began to
+fall around and break. O, <em>my</em>! I think Pa took the torn cat
+right by the neck, the way he does me, and that left the
+cat&rsquo;s feet free to get in their work. By the way the cat
+squawled as though it was being choked I know Pa had him by the
+neck. I suppose the cat thought Pa was a whole flock of New
+Foundland dogs, and the cat had a record on dogs, and it kicked
+awful. Pa&rsquo;s shirt was no protection at all in a cat fight,
+and the cat just walked all around Pa&rsquo;s stomach, and Pa
+yelled &lsquo;police,&rsquo; and &lsquo;fire,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;turn on the hose,&rsquo; and he called Ma, and the cat
+yowled. If Pa had had presence of mind enough to have dropped the
+cat, or rolled it up in the mattrass, it would have been all right,
+but a man always gets rattled in time of danger, and he held on to
+the cat and started down stairs yelling murder, and he met Ma
+coming up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guess Ma&rsquo;s night cap or something frightened the
+cat more, cause he stabbed Ma on the night-shirt with one hind
+foot, and Ma said &lsquo;mercy on us,&rsquo; and she went back, and
+Pa stumbled on a hand-sled that was on the stairs, and they all
+fell down, and the cat got away and went down in the coal bin and
+yowled all night. Pa and Ma went into their room, and I guess they
+annointed themselves with vasaline, and Pond&rsquo;s extract, and I
+went and got into my bed, cause it was cold out in the hall, and
+the cat had warmed my bed as well as it had warmed Pa. It was all I
+could do to go to sleep, with Pa and Ma talking all night, and this
+morning I came down the back stairs, and haven&rsquo;t been to
+breakfast, cause I don&rsquo;t want to see Pa when he is vexed. You
+let the man that carries in the kindling wood have six shillings
+worth of groceries, and charge them to Pa. I have passed the
+kindling wood period in a boy&rsquo;s life, and have arrived at the
+coal period. I will carry in coal, but I draw the line at kindling
+wood.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you are a cruel, bad boy,&rdquo; said the grocery
+man, as he went to the book and charged the six shillings.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, I don&rsquo;t know. I think Pa is cruel. A man who
+will take a poor kitty by the neck, that hasn&rsquo;t done any
+harm, and tries to chastise the poor thing with a trunk strap,
+ought to be looked after by the humane society. And if it is cruel
+to take a cat by the neck, how much more cruel is it to take a boy
+by the neck, that had diphtheria only a few years ago, and whose
+throat is tender? Say, I guess I will accept your invitation to
+take breakfast with you,&rdquo; and the boy cut off a piece of
+bologna and helped himself to the crackers, and while the grocery
+man was out shoveling off the snow from the sidewalk, the boy
+filled his pockets with raisins and loaf sugar, and then went out
+to watch the man carry in his kindling wood.</p>
+<h3><a id="Spurious_Tripe" name="Spurious_Tripe">SPURIOUS
+TRIPE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Cash" name="Cash">&ldquo;CASH.&rdquo;</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>On circus day W.H.H. Cash, the great railroad monopolist of New
+Lisbon, was in the city. He had just made a few hundred thousand
+dollars on a railroad contract, and he decided to expend large sums
+of money in buying dry goods. He went into one of our stores and
+was passing along up the floor, when a black-eyed girl with a
+dimple in her chin, pearly teeth, red pouting lips, who was behind
+the counter, shouted, &ldquo;<em>cash, here!</em>&rdquo; Mr. Cash
+turned to her, a smile illuminating his face as big as a horse
+collar. He is one of the most modest men in the world, and as he
+extended his great big horny hand to the girl, a blush covered his
+face, and the perspiration stood in great beads on his forehead.
+&ldquo;How do yeu dew?&rdquo; said Cash, as she seemed to shrink
+back in a frightened manner. They gazed at each other a moment, in
+astonishment, when another girl, perhaps a little better looking,
+further on, said, &ldquo;Here, Cash, quick!&rdquo; He at once made
+up his mind that she was the one that had spoken to him the first
+time, so he said, &ldquo;Beg your pardon, miss,&rdquo; to the
+black-eyed girl, and went on to where the other girl was wrapping
+up a corset in a base ball undershirt. As he approached her she
+smiled, supposing he wanted to buy something. He thought she knew
+him, and he sat down on a stool and put out his hand and said,
+&ldquo;How have you been?&rdquo; She didn&rsquo;t seem to shake
+very much, but asked him if there was anything she could show him.
+He thought may be it was against the rules for the clerks to speak
+to anybody, unless they were buying something, so he said,
+&ldquo;Yes, of course. Show me corsets, stockings, anything, gaul
+dumbed if I care what.&rdquo; She was just beginning to look upon
+him as though she thought he had escaped, when a little blonde on
+the other side of the store, as sweet as honey, shouted,
+&ldquo;Cash, Cash, I need thee every hour. Come a running.&rdquo;
+To say that Cash was astonished, is drawing it mild. He knew that
+they all wanted him, but he couldn&rsquo;t make out how they seemed
+to know his name. He looked at the little blonde a minute, trying
+to think where he had met her, when he decided to go over and ask
+her. On the way over he thought she resembled a girl that used to
+live in Portage. He went up to her, and with a smile that was
+childlike and bland, he said, &ldquo;Why, how are you,
+Samantha?&rdquo; The little blonde looked daggers at him.
+&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you use to wait on tables there at the Fox
+House, at Portage?&rdquo; The girl picked up a roll of paper
+cambric, and was about to brain him, when the floor walker came
+along, and asked what was the matter. Cash explained that since he
+came into the store, three or four girls had yelled to him, and he
+couldn&rsquo;t place them. &ldquo;There,&rdquo; says he, as another
+girl yelled &ldquo;Cash,&rdquo; &ldquo;there&rsquo;s another of
+&lsquo;em wants me,&rdquo; and he was going to where she was, when
+the floor walker asked him if his name was Cash. &ldquo;You bet
+your liver it is,&rdquo; said Cash. It was then explained to him
+that the girls were calling cash boys. He thought it over a minute
+and said, &ldquo;Sold, by the great baldheaded Elijah. Won&rsquo;t
+you go down and take something? Invite all of them. The girls can
+take soda. I&rsquo;ll be gaul blasted if I ever had such a rig
+played on me.&rdquo; And he went out into the glare of the
+sunlight, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and just then the
+circus procession came along, and he followed off the elephants.
+There are lots of worse men than Cash.</p>
+<h3><a id="To_What_Vile_Uses_May_We_Come" name=
+"To_What_Vile_Uses_May_We_Come">TO WHAT VILE USES MAY WE
+COME.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A dispatch from Chicago, says that three men were shot on
+&ldquo;a boat used for the vilest purposes.&rdquo; We never knew
+that the newspapers were printed on boats there in Chicago.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Advent_Preacher_and_the_Balloon" name=
+"The_Advent_Preacher_and_the_Balloon">THE ADVENT PREACHER AND THE
+BALLOON.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There occasionally occurs an accident 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, &ldquo;O,
+Jesus, do not pass me by.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/167.png"><img src=
+"images/167.png" alt="A man calls to a hot air balloon." id=
+"img167" name="img167" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;DO NOT PASS ME BY!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>We should pity the poor man for his ignorance, we who believe
+that when Christ <em>does</em> 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&rsquo;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,
+&ldquo;Where in &mdash;&mdash; are we?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>He must have come to the conclusion that the Son of 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 had not gone to heaven and opened a brewery.</p>
+<p>Of course we who are intelligent, and 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>He had been waiting for the wagon, full of hope, and when it
+came, and he saw the helmet on King&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>The Adventist would have been justified in renouncing his
+religion and joining the Democratic party. It is sad, indeed.</p>
+<h3><a id="Mr_Pecks_Sunday_Lecture" name=
+"Mr_Pecks_Sunday_Lecture">MR. PECK&rsquo;S SUNDAY LECTURE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The papers all around here are saying that I have a new Sunday
+Lecture, with a bad title. The way of it was this. A man in a
+neighboring city telegraphed me to know if I would deliver a
+&ldquo;Sunday Lecture,&rdquo; and telling me to choose my subject,
+and answer by telegraph. I thought it was some joke of the boys.
+The idea of me delivering a Sunday lecture was ridiculous, so, in a
+moment of thoughtlessness I telegraphed back, &ldquo;What in the
+d&mdash;&mdash; do you take me for?&rdquo; I supposed that that
+would be enough to inform the man that I was not in the business.
+What do you suppose he did? He telegraphed back to me as follows:
+&ldquo;All right. We have advertised you for Sunday. Subject,
+&lsquo;What the d&mdash;&mdash; do you take me for.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+You can judge something of my surprise and indignation.</p>
+<p>That is how it was.</p>
+<h3><a id="Religion_and_Fish" name="Religion_and_Fish">RELIGION AND
+FISH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;Amen&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>Discussions on how to bring up children in the the way they
+should go are broken into by a deacon with his nose peeled coining
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;mashed&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s only hook, it was setting a bad
+example.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Political_Outlook" name="The_Political_Outlook">THE
+POLITICAL OUTLOOK.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>When you see an article in the editorial columns of a paper
+headed, &ldquo;The Political Outlook,&rdquo; look at the bottom
+line, and if it says &ldquo;sold by all druggists,&rdquo;
+don&rsquo;t read it. There is such an article going the rounds,
+which is an advertisement of a patent medicine. It is a counterfeit
+well calculated to deceive. Don&rsquo;t read a political article
+unless the owner&rsquo;s name is blown in the bottle.</p>
+<h3><a id="Rope_Ladders" name="Rope_Ladders">ROPE LADDERS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The law to compel hotel keepers to provide rope ladders for
+every room above the second floor, is said not to be enforced,
+though it should be by all means. The law ought to be amended so as
+to compel guests to get up once or twice during the night and run
+up or down the rope ladder, outside the window, in their night
+clothes, so as to be in practice in case of fire. When every room
+is provided with rope ladders there will be lots of fun. Those men
+who invariably blow out the gas, will probably think they have got
+to come down stairs on the rope ladder in the morning, and it will
+take an extra clerk to stand in the alleys around a hotel, with a
+shot gun, to keep impecunious guests from going away from the
+tavern via rope ladder. And then imagine an Oshkosh man in a
+Milwaukee hotel, his head full of big schemes, and his skin full of
+beer. He has been on a &ldquo;bum,&rdquo; and is nervous, and on
+being shown to his room he sees the rope ladder coiled up under the
+window, ready to spring upon him. He stares at it, and the cold
+sweat stands all over him. The rope ladder returns his gaze, and
+seems to move and to crawl towards his feet. For a moment he is
+powerless to move. His hair stands on end, his heart ceases to
+beat, cold and warm chills follow each other down his trousers legs
+and he clutches at the air, his eyes start from their sockets, and
+just as the rope ladder is about to wind around him, and crush his
+life out, he regains strength enough to rush down stairs head over
+appetite, and tell the clerk about the menagerie up stairs. O,
+there is going to be fun with these rope ladders, sure.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Doctor_of_Laws" name="A_Doctor_of_Laws">A DOCTOR OF
+LAWS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A doctor at Ashland is also a Justice of the Peace, and when he
+is called to visit a house he don&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 plaster on her chest, and some onions around her
+neck.</p>
+<p>She was mad, and flared right up, and said she wasn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>The doctor got mad, and asked her if she thought he didn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>But the doc. had cheek. Just as he was leaving he asked the
+bridegroom if he didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t
+care much about going to Ashland anyway.</p>
+<h3><a id="Comforting_Compensations" name=
+"Comforting_Compensations">COMFORTING COMPENSATIONS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>If a farmer&rsquo;s wheat is killed by rain, he is consoled by
+the fact that rain is just what his corn needs. If his cattle die
+of disease, his consolation lies in the hope that pork will bring a
+good price. If boys steal his watermelons, he knows by experience
+that they will have the cholera morbus. So everything that is
+unpleasant has its compensation.</p>
+<h3><a id="Laying_up_Apples_in_Heaven" name=
+"Laying_up_Apples_in_Heaven">LAY UP APPLES IN HEAVEN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>They tell a good story at Portage City, at the expense of
+Senator Barden, or a minister, we don&rsquo;t know which. Barden
+had a lot of apples sent him last fall, and he was anxious to sell
+them, before winter set in. One day he thought of a new minister
+that had settled in Portage, so he made up his mind to take him up
+a couple of barrels, supposing that when he went to heaven and saw
+the big ledger opened, there would be a credit about as
+follows:</p>
+<table summary="Barden's account" style="width:70%;margin:auto;">
+<tr>
+<td colspan="5">
+<p class="cen">L.W. BARDEN,<br />
+in acc't with Providence,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2" style="text-align:right;">1876.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Oct.</td>
+<td>21.</td>
+<td>By</td>
+<td>two bbls. apples, @ $3</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">$6.00</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td style="text-align:center;">"</td>
+<td style="text-align:center;">"</td>
+<td style="text-align:center;">"</td>
+<td>drayage</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">.30</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td></td>
+<td></td>
+<td></td>
+<td style="text-align:center;">Total</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;border-top:solid 1px;">$6.30</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<div class="figright" style="clear:left;"><a href=
+"images/175.png"><img src="images/175.png" alt=
+"A man yells at a drayman from a house." id="img175" name="img175"
+width="100%" /></a>
+<p>NO MORE APPLES FOR THE MINISTER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>Barden loaded them on a dray, and got on it, with his pants in
+his boots, and went up to deliver them himself. He stopped at the
+minister&rsquo;s gate, and hurried the apples off and rolled them
+inside the gate, and tried to get away before the minister had time
+to thank him. Just as he was about to drive away the door opened
+and the man of God came out, and says he:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look here! You put them apples in the cellar!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Barden told him he was in something of a hurry, and really he
+could not spare the time. The minister raised his voice to a sort
+of &ldquo;auction pitch,&rdquo; and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here, now. You don&rsquo;t know your business, Mr.
+Drayman. You roll them apples into the cellar, or I won&rsquo;t
+accept them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The senator was by this time as mad as senators usually get. He
+jumped off the dray, threw the two barrels of apples on, and drove
+off, saying he didn&rsquo;t care a continental dam if the minister
+eat dried apples all winter. And he took them back to his store,
+and it is safe to say that he will not give many more apples to
+that minister.</p>
+<p>MORAL:&mdash;Never despise a man because he wears a ragged coat,
+for he may be a senatorial granger angel in the disguise of a
+drayman. And you may have to fill up on turnips instead of
+apples.</p>
+<h3><a id="One_of_Beechers_Converts" name=
+"One_of_Beechers_Converts">ONE OF BEECHER&rsquo;S
+CONVERTS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Since Beecher, the great revivalist, was here, and spoke so
+eloquently on the fall of man, and the need of making arrangements
+for the future, I have become a changed man. It hurts me to lie
+now, and when anything hurts, then I quit. It is wrong to lie, and
+a man who follows it up will come to some bad end.</p>
+<h3><a id="Buying_a_Stone_Crusher" name=
+"Buying_a_Stone_Crusher">BUYING A STONE CRUSHER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The proceedings of the council of the city of Milwaukee shows
+that the aldermen are about to buy a stone crusher, to be run by
+steam, for the purpose of crushing stones to be used on the
+streets. If the city has never indulged in the luxury of a stone
+crusher, it should interview some city that has owned one, before
+it closes a contract with any party that wants to sell one. Every
+party that owns one does want to sell it. Statistics show that. The
+first city in Wisconsin that bought one was Madison. The city owned
+it for a year or two, and after that no man that was in the council
+when it was bought could ever get in it again. The mayor that
+winked at the purchase of the stone crusher was defeated, and there
+was trouble. No person would ever say what was the matter, but you
+say &ldquo;stone crusher&rdquo; to a citizen of Madison, and he
+would reach his right hand around to his pistol pocket, and the
+conversation would cease.</p>
+<p>La Crosse heard that Madison had a stone crusher, and so she
+wanted one. La Crosse is bound to have anything that any other town
+has, whether it is a railroad, an insane asylum, or a speckled hen.
+La Crosse could have bought Madison&rsquo;s stone crusher at a
+discount, but she wanted one new, with the paint all on, fresh.
+Second-hand stone crusher? Not any for La Crosse. So the city
+ordered a brand new one, right from the mint, at an expense of
+about $5,000.</p>
+<p>The idea was that it would be about as big as a straw cutter, or
+a job press, and people were anxious to see it work.</p>
+<p>Finally the city was notified that one train of cars loaded with
+the stone crusher had arrived, with red flags on, betokening extra
+trains running wild behind, and the city was told to come down to
+the depot and pay the first installment of freight, and take the
+stone crusher away&mdash;that part of it that had arrived. The
+aldermen went down and took an inventory of the hardware, and some
+of them went and jumped in the river. At a cent a pound one can buy
+a good deal of cast iron for five thousand dollars. The city bonded
+itself, and paid the freight, and during the spring all of the
+trains loaded with the stone crusher arrived. It was argued that
+the only way to get the stone crusher up to the city building would
+be to give the railroad the right of way up town, right through
+Main street.</p>
+<p>Some were in favor of letting the railroad company keep it for
+freight, but the company threatened to get out an injunction on the
+city. Finally a man who took contracts to move brick buildings
+agreed to move it up town on shares, and during the summer the most
+of it was got up there and corded up on some vacant lots. If all
+the cast iron in it came out of one mine it must have been an
+immense mine. People would look at it and weep. Every alderman
+swore he voted against buying it. Occasionally some one in the
+council would suggest that the stone crusher be taken out to the
+bluffs, a couple of miles, and set to work, when another one would
+move, to amend by inserting a clause that the bluffs be moved into
+the city to be crushed, as it would save expense. Then the matter
+would drop. For three years that stone crusher stood there, and it
+never crushed a pebble. New mayors and aldermen were elected, and
+every day they passed that crusher, but they never spoke to it.
+Finally a job was put up to get rid of it. There was a man there
+who owned a stone quarry, and it occurred to somebody to sell it to
+him. He was a truly good man, and did not believe there were any
+bad men in the world, who would kanoodle him with a stone crusher.
+A committee was appointed to sell it to him. The committee was
+composed of men who had traded horses, sold lightning rods, and
+been insurance agents, and when they told the poor man that the
+city had noticed that he was a deserving man, that they had decided
+to help him along, and would sell him that stone crusher, and he
+could pay for it in crushed stone, and the city would pay him in
+cash half a dollar more than the stone was worth, he said he would
+take it. They got it on to him by buying crushed stone of him and
+paying cash for it.</p>
+<p>We have never heard whether the man lived or not, and have never
+heard whether the city bought any stone of him, but the city got
+rid of it, and then had a celebration. Why, they figured it up, and
+the thing could crush enough stone in twenty-four hours to pave the
+streets a foot thick all over town and thirteen miles in the
+country. To run it a week would bankrupt the State of Wisconsin, It
+could go up to the stone quarry and tunnel a hole right through the
+hill. It was the biggest elephant that ever a city drew in a
+legalized lottery. Milwaukee will make money if she does not buy a
+stone crusher, not as long as it can buy stone in the rough, and
+have it crushed by tramps, at nothing a day.</p>
+<h3><a id="Merrie_Christmas" name="Merrie_Christmas">MERRIE
+CHRISTMAS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>What proportion of the people who wish each other merry
+Christmas, do you suppose think of the reason that the day is a
+holiday? Not one in a thousand. Do the young fellows who put on a
+clean shirt and go down town and play pool all day, and drink
+yellow stuff out of a shaving cup, and get chalk on their fingers,
+and eat liver sausage, think that Christ died to save them? No! All
+they think of is the prospect of sticking some other fellow for the
+game. Do the hundreds of thousands of people who get up a big feed,
+and gormandize, think of Christ, or the poor all about them who
+have little to eat to-day, and little prospect of more to eat
+to-morrow? Many of them do not think of the poor, or of anything
+else except to prospect upon how much they will hold and not get
+sick.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Difference_in_Horses" name=
+"The_Difference_in_Horses">THE DIFFERENCE IN HORSES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s father kicked the young man all over the orchard, and
+broke the mainspring of his watch.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s arm would steal around her waist, and she would snug
+up to him, and&mdash;Oh, pshaw, you have heard it before.</p>
+<p>Well, late years the livery men have &ldquo;got onto the
+racket,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;Them children will get all smashed up
+one of these days.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl&rsquo;s mother and father see the team start, and their
+minds experience a relief as they reflect that &ldquo;as long as
+John drives that frisky team there can&rsquo;t be no hugging a
+going on.&rdquo; The girl&rsquo;s older sister sighs and says,
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s so,&rdquo; and goes to her room and laughs
+right out loud.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>But a change comes over them. A carriage appears in front,
+coming towards them. It may be someone 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.</p>
+<p>If you meet the party on the Whitefish Bay road at 10
+o&rsquo;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 the 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Base_Ingratitude" name="Base_Ingratitude">BASE
+INGRATITUDE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>I remember once of offering a lady from Eau Claire a slice of
+bread and a half of a red onion in a railroad car. She looked
+hungry, and yet she said she didn&rsquo;t care to eat. Thinking she
+had a delicacy about accepting food at the hands of one who was
+almost a stranger to her, I turned the bread and onion into her
+lap, and said she was entirely welcome to it. What did she do?
+Instead of eating it, and thanking me, she threw it out of the
+window, and went and sat by the stove. I was never so offended in
+my life. That woman may see the time she will want that onion, and
+I would see her almost perish of starvation before she could have
+any more of my onion.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Difference" name="The_Difference">THE
+DIFFERENCE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>One of the great female writers on dress reform, in trying to
+illustrate how terrible the female dress is, says:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;s
+dress is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now you think you have done it, don&rsquo;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&rsquo;s four
+shilling drawers on her that are so tight that when they get damp,
+from perspiration, sis, they stick so you can&rsquo;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
+meningitis; 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 whiskey cocktails, and walk around in
+the sun with tight boots on, sis, and then you will know what a
+man&rsquo;s dress is.</p>
+<p>Come to figure it up, it is about an even thing,
+sis,&mdash;isn&rsquo;t it?</p>
+<h3><a id="Those_Step_Ladders" name="Those_Step_Ladders">THOSE STEP
+LADDERS!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There has got to be a law passed to punish the hardware dealers
+for selling those step ladders that shut up like a jack-knife. A
+Ninth Street woman got onto one the other afternoon when it looked
+as though there was going to be a frost, to take her ivies down and
+carry them in the house. We don&rsquo;t care how handsome a woman
+is naturally, you put a towel around her head and put her up on a
+step ladder about seven feet high, with a tomahawk in her left
+hand, trying to draw a big nail out of a post on a veranda, and she
+looks like thunder. This woman did. Her husband tried to get her to
+let him do the work, but she said a man never knew how to do
+anything, anyway. So he sat down on the steps to see how it would
+turn out. She said afterwards that he kicked the ladder, but
+however that may be, there was an earthquake, and when he looked up
+the air was filled with calico, toweling, striped stockings,
+polonaise, trailing arbutus, red petticoats, store hair and step
+ladder. He said the step ladder struck the veranda last, but as he
+picked her off of it, it seemed as though it must have lit first.
+He said the step ladder must have kicked up. In coming down she run
+one leg through the baby wagon, and the other through some flower
+pots, and a boy who was passing along said he guess she had been to
+the turning school.</p>
+<h3><a id="Wonders_of_the_Stage" name=
+"Wonders_of_the_Stage">WONDERS OF THE STAGE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/185.png"><img src=
+"images/185.png" alt=
+"A woman sits on a backwards chair and drinks from a bottle." id=
+"img185" name="img185" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>BEHIND THE SCENES.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;twelve years is supposed to elapse,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="How_Farmers_May_Get_Rich" name=
+"How_Farmers_May_Get_Rich">HOW FARMERS MAY GET RICH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The artificial propagation of fish has attracted much attention
+of late years, and the success of experiments has shown that every
+farmer that has a stream of water on his land can raise fish enough
+to get rich in five years, four months and twenty-one days.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Case_of_Paralysis" name="A_Case_of_Paralysis">A CASE
+OF PARALYSIS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;uncle,&rdquo; John Comstock,
+who keeps a pawnbrokery there, he broke ground for the shoes.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t change his shoes.</p>
+<p>The judge looked down at the vast expanse of leather, both
+sections pointing inwardly, and said, &ldquo;Well, dam a
+fool,&rdquo; and &ldquo;changed cars&rdquo; 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 small pox. O, we suppose they have more fun in some of these
+country towns than you can shake a stick at.</p>
+<h3><a id="We_Will_Celebrate" name="We_Will_Celebrate">WE WILL
+CELEBRATE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>With so many new holidays, and so many new people, it is hardly
+to be wondered at that the day of all days, the day that should be
+dearest to the heart of every American, is in danger of being
+passed over in silence, and were it not for the fire cracker, that
+begins to get in its work about the first of June, in many
+instances this Anniversary of American Independence would be passed
+without the customary mouth shootzen-fest from alleged orators, but
+when the small boy begins to stir around and clandestinely look
+down the muzzle of the always loaded fire cracker, the patriotism
+of the boys still begins to assert itself, the old man&rsquo;s eyes
+begin to snap, and he talks to his neighbor about how they used to
+celebrate when he was a boy, the stuff begins to work over the
+neighborhood, the village catches it, the country begins.</p>
+<h3><a id="Dogs_and_Human_Beings" name="Dogs_and_Human_Beings">DOGS
+AND HUMAN BEINGS!</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.]</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 girl&rsquo;s
+master&rsquo;s dog, no one need come around here lecturing at a
+dollar a head and telling us there is no hell.</p>
+<p>When a poor girl, who has gone creeping to her work at daylight,
+looks out of the window at noon to see her master&rsquo;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&rsquo;t want to fool away any time trying to get us
+to go to a heaven where such heartless employers are expected.</p>
+<p>It is seldom the <em>Sun</em> gets on its ear, but it can say
+with great fervency, &ldquo;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!&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>It seems now&mdash;though we may change our mind the first day
+at the fire&mdash;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="An_Odorous_Bohemian" name="An_Odorous_Bohemian">AN
+ODOROUS BOHEMIAN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Bohemian on the train last night had some cheese in his vest
+pocket that was too ripe, and the conductor had to disinfect the
+car, and order the Bohemian to be quarantined before the train
+would be allowed to enter the city. Cheese is all right in its
+place, but it don&rsquo;t want to be allowed to lay above ground
+too long after it has departed this life. If farmers will pay a
+little attention to cheese in its different stages, much trouble
+can be avoided. In union there is strength. So there is in a
+smoking car.</p>
+<h3><a id="Tragedy_on_the_Stage" name=
+"Tragedy_on_the_Stage">TRAGEDY ON THE STAGE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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
+drowned 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The star butcher could sit on a barrel of pigs&rsquo; feet, or a
+pile of heads and horns, and soliloquize over his unrequitted 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.</p>
+<p>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, <em>en train</em>, with
+a white reception hat with ostrich feathers, and, wading through
+the blood of the steer on the carpet, shout, &ldquo;Stay your hand,
+Reginald!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;What wiltest
+thou, Mary Anderson de Montmorence?&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/192.png"><img src=
+"images/192.png" alt="A man in on stage stabs at a bull." id=
+"img192" name="img192" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>JOHN MCCULLOUGH KILLING A TEXAS STEER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Imagine John McCullough, or Barrett, instead of killing Roman
+supes with night gowns on, and bare legs, killing a Texas steer.
+There&rsquo;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Granite_Head_Cheese" name="Granite_Head_Cheese">GRANITE
+HEAD CHEESE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A few years ago there was some excitement at Grand Rapids over
+the discovery of a bed or quarry of granite. Some of it was taken
+out, from the top of the quarry, and polished, and proved to be as
+fine as any that is imported. Further working of the quarry,
+however, has developed a strange thing. The further they go down
+the softer it is, and it has been learned that the quarry is all
+head cheese, such as is sold by butchers. On top it is petrified,
+and polishes very nicely, but a little below it is nice and fresh,
+and can be cut out with a knife, all ready for the table. A friend
+in Milwaukee, who has an uncle living at Grand Rapids, has
+furnished us with a quantity of it, some of which we have eaten,
+and were it not for the fact that we know it came from the quarry,
+it would be hard to convince us that it was not concocted out of
+the remains of a butcher shop. The people up there talk of running
+Hon. J.N. Brundage for Congress, on the head cheese ticket, in
+order that he may use his influence to get head cheese adopted as
+an army ration, and also as currency with which to wipe out the
+national debt.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_an_Inventor" name="His_Pa_an_Inventor">HIS PA AN
+INVENTOR.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ha! Ha! Now I have got you,&rdquo; said the grocery man
+to the had boy, the other morning, as he came in and jumped upon
+the counter and tied the end of a ball of twine to the tail of a
+dog, and &ldquo;sicked&rdquo; the dog on another dog that was
+following a passing sleigh, causing the twine to pay out until the
+whole ball was scattered along the block. &ldquo;Condemn you,
+I&rsquo;ve a notion to choke the liver out of you. Who tied that
+twine to the dog&rsquo;s tail?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy choked up with emotion, and the tears came into his
+eyes, and he said he didn&rsquo;t know anything about the twine or
+the dog. He said he noticed the dog come in, and wag his tail
+around the twine, but he supposed the dog was a friend of the
+family, and did not disturb him. &ldquo;Everybody lays everything
+that is done to me,&rdquo; said the boy, as he put his handkerchief
+to his nose, &ldquo;and, they will be sorry for it when I die. I
+have a good notion to poison myself by eating some of your glucose
+sugar.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, and you do about everything that is mean. The other
+day a lady came in and told me to send up to her house, some of my
+country sausage, done up in muslin bags, and while she was
+examining it she noticed something hard inside the bags, and asked
+me what it was, and I opened it, and I hope to die if there
+wasn&rsquo;t a little brass padlock and a piece of red morocco dog
+collar imbedded in the sausage. Now how do you suppose that got in
+there?&rdquo; and the grocery man looked savage.</p>
+<p>The boy looked interested, and put on an expression as though in
+deep thought, and finally said, &ldquo;I suppose the farmer that
+put up the sausage did not strain the dog meat. Sausage meat ought
+to be strained.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The grocery man pulled in about half a block of twine, after the
+dog had run against a fence and broke it, and told the boy he knew
+perfectly well how the brass padlock came to be in the sausage, but
+thinking it was safer to have the good will of the boy than the ill
+will, he offered him a handful of prunes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the boy, &ldquo;I have swore off on
+mouldy prunes. I am no kinder-garden any more. For years I have
+eaten rotten peaches around this store, and everything you
+couldn&rsquo;t sell, but I have turned over a new leaf now, and
+after this nothing is too good for me. Since Pa has got to be an
+inventor, we are going to live high.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s your Pa invented? I saw a hearse and three
+hacks go up on your street the other day and I thought may be you
+had killed your Pa.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not much. There will be more than three hacks when I kill
+Pa, and don&rsquo;t you forget it. Well, sir, Pa has struck a
+fortune, if he can make the thing work. He has got an idea about
+coal stoves that will bring him several million dollars, if he gets
+a royalty of five dollars on every cook stove in the world. His
+idea is to have a coal stove on castors with the pipe made to
+telescope out and in, and rubber hose for one joint, so you can
+pull the stove all around the room and warm any particular place.
+Well, sir, to hear Pa tell about it, you would think it would
+revolutionize the country, and maybe it will when he gets it
+perfected, but he came near burning the house up, and scared us
+half to death this morning, and burned his shirt off, and he is all
+covered with cotton with sweet oil on, and he smells like salad
+dressing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see Pa had a pipe made and some castors put on our
+coal stove, and he tied a rope to the hearth of the stove, and had
+me put in some kindling wood and coal last night, so he could draw
+the stove up to the bed and light the fire without getting up. Ma
+told him he would put his foot in it, and he told her to dry up,
+and let him run the stove business. He said it took a man with
+brain to run a patent right, and Ma she pulled the clothes over her
+head and let Pa do the fire act. She has been building the fires
+for twenty years, and thought she would let Pa see how good it was.
+Well, Pa pulled the stove to the bed, and touched off the kindling
+wood. I guess maybe I got a bundle of kindling wood that the hired
+girl had put kerosene on, cause it blazed up awful and smoked, and
+the blaze bursted out the doors and windows of the stove, and Pa
+yelled fire, and I jumped out of bed and rushed in and he was the
+scartest man you ever see, and you&rsquo;d a dide to see how he
+kicked when I threw a pail of water on his legs and put his shirt
+out. Ma did not get burned, but she was pretty wet, and she told Pa
+she would pay five dollars royalty on that stove and take the
+castors off and let it remain stationary. Pa says he will make it
+work if he burns the house down. I think it was real mean in Pa to
+get mad at me because I threw cold water on him instead of warm
+water, to put his shirt out. If I had waited till I could heat
+water to the right temperature I would have been an orphan and Pa
+would have been a burnt offering. But some men always kick at
+everything. Pa has given up business entirely and says he shall
+devote the remainder of his life curing himself of the different
+troubles that I get him into. He has retained a doctor by the year,
+and he buys liniment by the gallon.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was it about your folks getting up in the middle of
+the night to eat? The hired girl was over here after some soap the
+other morning, and she said she was going to leave your
+house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, that was a picnic. Pa said he wanted breakfast
+earlier than we was in the habit of having it, and he said I might
+see to it that the house was awake early enough. The other night I
+awoke with the awfulest pain you ever heard of. It was that night
+that you give me and my chum the bottle of pickled oysters that had
+begun to work. Well, I could&rsquo;t sleep, and I thought I would
+call the hired girls, and they got up and got breakfast to going,
+and then I rapped on Pa&rsquo;s and Ma&rsquo;s door and told them
+the breakfast was getting cold, and they got up and came down. We
+ate breakfast by gas light, and Pa yawned and said it made a man
+feel good to get up and get ready for work before daylight, the way
+he used to on the farm, and Ma she yawned and agreed with Pa,
+&rsquo;cause she has to, or have a row. After breakfast we sat
+around for an hour, and Pa said it was a long time getting
+daylight, and bimeby Pa looked at his watch. When he began to pull
+out his watch I lit out and hid in the storeroom, and pretty soon I
+heard Pa and Ma come up stairs and go to bed, and then the hired
+girls, they went to bed, and when it was all still, and the pain
+had stopped inside of my clothes, I went to bed, and I looked to
+see what time it was and it was two o&rsquo;clock in the morning.
+We got dinner at eight o&rsquo;clock in the morning, and Pa said he
+guessed he would call up the house after this, so I have lost
+another job, and it was all on account of that bottle of pickled
+oysters you gave me. My chum says he had colic too, but he
+didn&rsquo;t call up his folks. It was all he could do to get up
+himself. Why don&rsquo;t you give away something that is not
+spiled?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The groceryman said he guessed he knew what to give away, and
+the boy went out and hung up a sign in front of the grocery, that
+he had made on wrapping paper with red chalk, which read,
+&ldquo;Rotten eggs, good enough for custard pies, for 18 cents a
+dozen.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Good_Land_Enough" name="A_Good_Land_Enough">A GOOD
+LAND ENOUGH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>This land of the free is good enough, if we make it good, and if
+we make it bad, it is just as bad as any country under the sun. It
+all depends on how the people act.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Woodcock" name="The_Woodcock">THE WOODCOCK.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>It is a rainy day, and nothing has occurred of a local nature,
+that is, nothing of a hair standing nature, so we will just spoil a
+few sheets of paper relating, in a Sunday School book style, the
+circumstances of an excursion after woodcock, the other day,
+indulged in by W.C. Root, the Wisconsin amateur Bogardus, Jennings
+McDonald, Captain of a breech-loading steamboat, and the
+subscriber. In the first place, it may be well to state that the
+woodcock, or &ldquo;Timber Doodle,&rdquo; as Prof. Agassiz calls
+it, is a game bird. We know it is a game bird, because they charge
+a dollar apiece for them in New York. The meat is about as sweet as
+deceased cow&rsquo;s liver, but they are worth a dollar apiece. The
+&ldquo;Timber Doodle&rdquo; is a patriotic bird, because he gets
+ripe on the 4th of July. He is about the size of a doughnut, with a
+long bill, like a lawyer.</p>
+<p>We took passage per skiff at twelve o&rsquo;clock. If there was
+one drawback, it was the fact that the oar-locks of the boat had
+been mislaid. After consuming an hour in not finding them, Frank
+Hatch became discouraged at seeing us lay around the levee, so he
+tied the oars on with tarred rope and we got off, three of us
+besides the other dogs. The water was so high that we crossed
+Barron&rsquo;s island, only having to get out and pull the boat
+over two or three sand-bars and a raft or two. Every time we got
+out to pull the boat, the dogs would get out to look for woodcock,
+around the stumps, and when they got in the boat would be full of
+water and mud, and of course we had our best clothes on. Did it
+ever occur to you how much water a dog could carry in his hair? A
+dog is worse than a sponge. An ordinary dog, with luck, can fill a
+skiff with water at two jumps. Not, however, with us in the boat to
+bail out the water. The woodcock&rsquo;s tail sticks up like a sore
+thumb. We are thus particular to describe the woodcock, so if you
+ever see one you can go right away from him. Woodcock and
+mosquitoes are in &ldquo;cahoots.&rdquo; While the woodcock bores
+in the ground for snakes and other feed that makes him fat and
+worth a dollar in New York, the mosquito stands on the ramparts and
+talks to the boys.</p>
+<p>Well, speaking about woodcock, after riding five miles, through
+bushes, brambles and things, we got out of the boat and only had to
+walk a couple of miles to get where the birds were. Right here we
+wish to state that we shouldn&rsquo;t have gone after the woodcock
+at all, only everybody said it was such fun. Root showed us a
+picture of a woodcock in a book, and if that didn&rsquo;t convince
+us, the fact that a small boy came in town and sold three dozen,
+did. Then we wanted to go. There never has been a year when
+woodcock were so plenty at places we didn&rsquo;t visit. The most
+fun was at a ditch which was about a foot wider than any of us
+could jump. Root gave his gun to McDonald and plunged in. Then
+McDonald threw a gun to Root. It hit him on the thumb-nail and
+dropped in the ditch out of sight. Mc. thought it was Root&rsquo;s
+gun, and he apologized to Root for throwing it so carelessly. Root
+supposed it was Mc.&rsquo;s gun, and he apologized for not catching
+it. We never saw men more polite in the world. Mc. started to jump
+across, when a dog got between his legs, and both went in up to
+their knees. You never can jump as well with a dog tangled up
+amongst your legs. The dog looked at Jennings as though he wanted
+to swear. We waded through the ditch and only got two feet wet. The
+rest of them had more than that wet.</p>
+<p>But about the woodcock. This is, kind reader, purely a woodcock
+story, and more or less must be said about the dollar bird. But
+this is neither here nor there. It was over in the Root river
+bottoms. Finally we got on the woodcock ground and went to work.
+Talk about mosquitoes! There was no end to them. We ought not to
+say that, either, because there are spots on our person that just
+fit the end of a mosquito. There was an end to them. If you never
+saw mosquitoes in convention, you want to go over there. And right
+here we will give a recipe for keeping mosquitoes from biting. You
+take some cedar oil and put on your coat collar, if you are a man,
+and if you are a woman put it on that gingerbread work around your
+neck, and a mosquito will come up and sing to you and get all ready
+to take toll, when she will smell that oil. She is the sickest
+mosquito you ever saw. She turns over on her back and sends her
+husband for the nearest doctor. We had a bottle of cedar oil, and
+if Jennings hadn&rsquo;t left it hanging up in Hogan&rsquo;s store
+in his coat, we should have made those mosquitoes sick. As it was
+they did it to us. There isn&rsquo;t a spot on us as big as a
+billiard table but what you can find artesian wells made by
+mosquitoes.</p>
+<p>Woodcock sell higher in the market than any other bird. Lots of
+people that never saw them eat snakes, eat them. When they get up
+to fly they talk Bohemian, and get behind a bush. You shoot right
+into the bush, and if you kill one you think you are a good shot.
+Talk about getting tired. You walk around in the woods several
+miles, with mosquitoes getting acquainted with you, and all the
+time your nerves strung up in anticipation of seeing a dollar bill
+fly up, and if you don&rsquo;t sleep without rocking, we are no
+prophet. The sport, however, is exhilerating, and we are glad we
+went. We are glad because it learned us one thing, and that is, if
+we ever want a woodcock real bad, it will be cheaper, easier, and
+better to buy it. It will be inferred that we did not see a
+woodcock. Such is the case.</p>
+<p>But we made the blackbirds sick.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Bald-headed_Man_Most_Crazy" name=
+"A_Bald-headed_Man_Most_Crazy">A BALD-HEADED MAN MOST
+CRAZY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Last Wednesday the bell to our telephone rung violently at 8
+o&rsquo;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,
+&ldquo;Julia has got worms, doctor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;O, go to the devil, will
+you?&rdquo; We couldn&rsquo;t tell whose voice it was, but it
+sounded like the clerk at the Plankinton House, and we sat
+down.</p>
+<p>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 rang
+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&rsquo;s ear all day is no fun.</p>
+<p>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,
+&ldquo;Are you going to receive to-morrow?&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/202.png"><img src=
+"images/202.png" alt=
+"A man falls backward away from a wall-mounted telephone" id=
+"img202" name="img202" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>AT THE TELEPHONE.</p>
+</div>
+<p>If we have done wrong in talking with a total strangers who took
+us for a lady friend, we are willing to die. We couldn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>And still the bell did flut. We went to the cornucopia, put our
+ear to the toddy stick and said, &ldquo;What ailest thou darling,
+why dost thy hand tremble? Whisper all thou feelest to thine old
+baldy.&rdquo; Then there came over the wire and into our mansard by
+a side window the following touching remarks: &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Then there was a stuttering, and then another voice
+said, &ldquo;Go over to Loomis&rsquo; pawn shop. A man shot
+in&rdquo;&mdash;and another voice broke in singing, &ldquo;The
+sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful&rdquo;&mdash;and
+another voice said&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Convenient_Currency" name=
+"Convenient_Currency">CONVENIENT CURRENCY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>What we want is a currency that every farmer can issue for
+himself. A law should be passed making the products of the farm a
+legal tender for all debts, public and private, including duties on
+imports, interest on the public debt, and contributions for
+charitable purposes. Then we shall have a new money table about as
+follows:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Ten ears of corn make one cent.</p>
+<p>Ten cucumbers make one dime.</p>
+<p>Ten watermelons make one dollar.</p>
+<p>Ten bushels of wheat make one eagle.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="The_Gospel_Car" name="The_Gospel_Car">THE GOSPEL
+CAR.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>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 railroad companies to fit up
+&ldquo;Gospel cars.&rdquo; 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.&mdash;<em>Chicago
+News</em>.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&mdash;and they do not travel for
+anything else&mdash;that they are going into a &ldquo;Gospel
+car&rdquo; to listen to some sky pirate who has been picked up for
+the purpose, talk about the prospects of landing the cargo in
+heaven?</p>
+<p>Not much!</p>
+<p>The women are too much engaged looking after their baggage, and
+keeping the cinders out of their eyes, and keeping the
+children&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;A charge to keep I have,&rdquo;
+some pious sinner who was trying to take a nap in the corner of the
+gospel car would say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, go and hire a hall!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t get two persons on an average
+train full that would put up a nickel.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>A man&mdash;as we understand religion from those who have had
+it&mdash;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&mdash;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 wheiher the
+children of Israel went through the Red Sea with life-preservers,
+or wore rubber hunting boots.</p>
+<p>Take your gospel-car half dollar and buy a vegetable ivory
+rattle of the train boy, and give it to the sick emigrant
+mother&rsquo;s pale baby, and you make four persons happy&mdash;the
+baby, the mother, the train boy and yourself.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t-care-a-damative appearance. The citizen asked
+the prisoner how he was fixed for money to buy tobacco with in
+prison. He said he hadn&rsquo;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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, every time you take a chew of tobacco in prison,
+just make up your mind to be square when you get out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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&mdash;the other
+eye had been gouged out while &ldquo;having some fun with the
+boys&rdquo; at Oshkosh&mdash;and his lips trembled as he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So help me God, I will!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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
+&ldquo;square.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can
+occasionally practice without having a gospel car.</p>
+<h3><a id="Banks_and_Banking" name="Banks_and_Banking">BANKS AND
+BANKING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The subject of banking has engrossed the attention of your
+excellent Governor for, lo! these many weeks, and he is constrained
+to say that some radical changes must be made in the method of
+receiving deposits by banks, where an equivalent is not rendered,
+of His Excellency will be compelled to emerge from his present
+aristocratic quarters and take up his abode in the poor-house. I
+would call your attention to the practice certain banks have of
+issuing checks in lieu of cash. If these checks were available at
+the groceries it would be better than it is. Banks have got in a
+habit of issuing a species of ivory button in receipt for the green
+coin of the realm which is only good at the counter of the bank.
+These checks are not issued by the National Banks, but by the State
+Banks, denominated &ldquo;Keno&rdquo; and &ldquo;Faro.&rdquo; I
+would not charge that there is &ldquo;skullduggery&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;shenanagen&rdquo; going on in these institutions, as the
+president of one of them informed me, confidentially, that he dealt
+on the &ldquo;square,&rdquo; but it is a noticeable fact that the
+dividends received by those who do business with the banks, are
+almost, as it were, imperceptible. I trust that you will cause this
+branch of industry to be thoroughly investigated, and report by
+bill or otherwise. Our finances should be beyond suspicion of
+dishonesty.</p>
+<h3><a id="Large_Mouths_are_Fashionable" name=
+"Large_Mouths_are_Fashionable">LARGE MOUTHS ABE
+FASHIONABLE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t certainly, be any
+better for kissing.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/209.png"><img src=
+"images/209.png" alt="A woman yells at a man." id="img209" name=
+"img209" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&rsquo; worth out of what was left unemployed.</p>
+<p>This was too much, and she gave him a terrible look, and
+returned him his ten cents, saying, &ldquo;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,&rdquo; and he went and bought a lemonade with the
+money.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Internal_Improvements" name=
+"Internal_Improvements">INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Under this heading I can think of nothing that appears more
+appropriate than the subject of the artificial propagation of fish.
+It is a subject that has arrested the attention of many of the
+ablest minds of the country, and the results of experiments have
+been thus far so satisfactory that it is almost safe to predict
+that within the next ten centuries every man, however poor, may
+pick bull-heads off of his crab apple vines and gather his winter
+supply of fresh shad from his sweet potato trees at less than fifty
+cents a pound. The experiments that have been made in our own state
+warrant us in going largely into the fish business. A year ago a
+quantity of fish seeds were sub soil plowed into the ice of Lake
+Mendota, and to-day I am informed that boarders at the hotels there
+have all the fish to eat that any reasonable man could desire. The
+expense is small and the returns are enormous. It is estimated that
+from the six quarts of fish seeds that were planted in the lake
+there are now ready for the market at least 11,000,000 car loads of
+brain-producing food, if you spit on your bait when you go
+fishing.</p>
+<h3>PECK&rsquo;S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.</h3>
+<h4><a id="His_Pa_Gets_Boxed" name="His_Pa_Gets_Boxed">HIS PA GETS
+BOXED.</a></h4>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want to buy a good parrot, do you?&rdquo;
+said the bad boy to the grocery man as he put his wet mittens on
+the top of the stove to dry, and kept his back to the stove so he
+could watch the grocery man, and be prepared for a kick, if the man
+should remember the rotten egg sign that the boy put up in front of
+the grocery last week.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Naw, I don&rsquo;t want no parrot. I had rather have a
+fool boy around than a parrot. But what&rsquo;s the matter with
+your Ma&rsquo;s parrot? I thought she wouldn&rsquo;t part with him
+for anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, she wouldn&rsquo;t until Wednesday night, but now
+she says she will not have him around, and I may have half I can
+get for him. She told me to go to some saloon or some disreputable
+place and sell him, and I thought maybe he would about suit
+you,&rdquo; and the boy broke into a bunch of celery, and took out
+a few tender stalks and rubbed them on a codfish to salt them, and
+began to bite the stalks, while he held the sole of one wet boot up
+against the stove to dry it, making a smell of burned leather that
+came near turning the stomach of the cigar sign.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look-a-here boy, don&rsquo;t you call this a disreputable
+place. Some of the best people in this town come here,&rdquo; said
+the grocery man as he held up the cheese knife and grated his teeth
+as though he would like to jab it into the youth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, that&rsquo;s all right, they come here &rsquo;cause
+you trust; but you make up what you lose by charging it to other
+people. Pa will make it hot for you the last of the week. He has
+been looking over your bill, and comparing it with the hired girl,
+and she says we haven&rsquo;t ever had a prune, or a dried apple,
+or a raisin, or any cinnamon, or crackers and cheese out of your
+store, and he says you are worse than the James brothers, and that
+you used to be a three card monte man, and he will have you
+arrested for highway robbery, but you can settle that with Pa. I
+like you, because you are no ordinary sneak thief, you are a
+high-toned, gentlemanly sort of a bilk, and wouldn&rsquo;t take
+anything you couldn&rsquo;t lift. O, keep your seat, and
+don&rsquo;t get excited. It does a man good to hear the truth from
+one who has got the nerve to tell it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But about the parrot. Ma has been away from home for a
+week, having a high old time in Chicago, going to theatres and
+things, and while she was gone, I guess the hired girl or somebody
+learned the parrot some new things to say. A parrot that can only
+say &lsquo;Polly wants a cracker,&rsquo; don&rsquo;t amount to
+anything&mdash;what we need is new style parrots that can converse
+on the topics of the day, and say things original. Well, when Ma
+got back I guess her conscience hurt her for the way she had been
+carrying on in Chicago, and so when she heard the basement of the
+church was being frescoed, she invited the committee to hold the
+Wednesday evening prayer meeting at our house. First, there were
+four people came, and Ma asked Pa to stay to make up a quorum, and
+Pa said seeing he had two pair, he guessed he would stay in, and if
+Ma would deal him a queen he would have a full hand. I don&rsquo;t
+know what Pa meant, but he plays draw poker sometimes. Anyway there
+was eleven people came including the minister, and after they had
+talked about the neighbors a spell, and Ma had showed the women a
+new tidy she had worked for the heathen, with a motto on it which
+Pa had taught her: &lsquo;A contrite heart beats a bob-tailed
+flush,&rsquo;&mdash;and Pa had talked to the men about a religious
+silver mine he was selling stock in, which he advised them as a
+friend to buy for the glory of the church, they all went in the
+back parlor and the minister lead in prayer. He got down on his
+knees right under the parrot&rsquo;s cage, and you&rsquo;d a dide
+to see Polly hang on to the wires of the cage with one foot, and
+drop an apple core on the minister&rsquo;s head. Ma shook her
+handkerchief at Polly, and looked sassy, and Polly got up on the
+perch, and as the minister got warmed up and began to raise the
+roof, Polly said, &lsquo;O, dry up.&rsquo; The minister had his
+eyes shut, but he opened one of them a little and looked at Pa. Pa
+was tickled at the parrot, but when the minister looked at Pa as
+though it was him that was making irreverent remarks, Pa was
+mad.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The minister got to the &lsquo;amen,&rsquo; and Polly
+shook hisself and said &lsquo;What you giving us?&rsquo; and the
+minister got up and brushed the bird seed off his knees, and he
+looked mad. I thought Ma would sink with mortification, and I was
+sitting on a piano stool looking as pious as a Sunday school
+superintendent the Sunday before he skips out with the bank&rsquo;s
+funds; and Ma looked at me as though she thought it was me that had
+been tampering with the parrot. Gosh, I never said a word to that
+parrot, and I can prove it by my chum.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, the minister asked one of the sisters if she
+wouldn&rsquo;t pray, and she wasn&rsquo;t engaged, so she said with
+pleasure, and she kneeled down, but she corked herself, cause she
+got one knee on a cast-iron dumb bell that I had been practising
+with. She said &lsquo;O my,&rsquo; in a disgusted sort of a way,
+and then she began to pray for the reformation of the youth of the
+land, and asked for the spirit to descend on the household, and
+particularly on the boy that was such a care and anxiety to his
+parents, and just then Polly said &lsquo;O, pull down your
+vest.&rsquo; Well, you&rsquo;d a dide to see that woman look at me.
+The parrot cage was partly behind the window curtin, and they
+couldn&rsquo;t see it, and she thought it was me. She looked at Ma
+as though she was wondering why she didn&rsquo;t hit me with a
+poker, but she went on, and Polly said &lsquo;wipe off your
+chin,&rsquo; and then the lady got through and got up, and told Ma
+it must be a great trial to have an idiotic child, and then Ma she
+was mad, and said it wasn&rsquo;t half so bad as it was to be a
+kleptomaniac, and then the woman got up and said she wouldn&rsquo;t
+stay no longer, and Pa said to me to take that parrot outdoors, and
+that seemed to make them all good natured again. Ma said to take
+the parrot and give it to the poor. I took the cage and pointed my
+finger at the parrot and it looked at the woman and said &lsquo;old
+catamaran,&rsquo; and the woman tried to look pious and resigned,
+but she couldn&rsquo;t. As I was going out the door the parrot
+ruffed up his feathers and said &lsquo;Dammit, set &rsquo;em
+up,&rsquo; and I hurried out with the cage for fear he would say
+something bad, and the folks all held up their hands and said it
+was scandalous. Say, I wonder if a parrot can go to hell with the
+rest of the community. Well, I put the parrot in the woodshed, and
+after they all had their innings, except Pa, who acted as umpire,
+the meeting broke up, and Ma says it is the last time she will have
+that gang at her house.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That must have been where your Pa got his black
+eye,&rdquo; said the grocery man, as he charged the bunch of celery
+to the boy&rsquo;s Pa. &ldquo;Did the minister hit him, or was it
+one of the sisters?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, he didn&rsquo;t get his black eye at prayer
+meeting!&rdquo; said the boy, as he took his mittens off the stove,
+and rubbed them to take the stiffening out. &ldquo;It was from
+boxing. Pa told my chum and me that it was no harm to learn to box,
+cause we could defend ourselves, and he said he used to be a holy
+terror with the boxing gloves when he was a boy, and he has been
+giving us lessons. Well, he is no slouch, now I tell you, and
+handles himself pretty well for a church member. I read in the
+paper how Zack Chandler played it on Conkling by getting Jem Mace,
+the prize fighter, to knock him silly, and I asked Pa if he
+wouldn&rsquo;t let me bring a poor boy who had no father to teach
+him boxing, to our house to learn to box, and Pa said certainly,
+fetch him along. He said he would be glad to do anything for a poor
+orphan. So I went down in the Third ward and got an Irish boy by
+the name of Duffy, who can knock the socks off any boy in the ward.
+He fit a prize fight once. It would have made you laugh to see Pa
+telling him how to hold his hands and how to guard his face. He
+told Duffy not to be afraid, but strike right out and hit for
+keeps. Duffy said he was afraid Pa would get mad if he hit him, and
+Pa said, &lsquo;nonsense, boy, knock me down if you can, and I will
+laugh ha! ha!&rsquo; Well, Duffy he hauled back and gave Pa one on
+the nose, and another in both eyes, and cuffed him on the ear and
+punched him in the stomach, and lammed him in the mouth and made
+his teeth bleed, and then he gave him a side winder in both eyes,
+and Pa pulled off his boxing gloves and grabbed a chair, and we
+adjourned and went down stairs as though there was a panic. I
+haven&rsquo;t seen Pa since. Was his eye very black?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Black, I should say so,&rdquo; said the grocery man.
+&ldquo;And his nose seemed to be trying to look into his left ear.
+He was at the market buying beefsteak to put on it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;O, beefsteak is no account. I must go and see him and
+tell him that an oyster is the best thing for a black eye. Well, I
+must go. A boy has a pretty hard time running a house the way it
+should be run,&rdquo; and the boy went out and hung up a sign in
+front of the grocery: &ldquo;<em>Frowy Butter a
+Speshulty</em>.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="Christmas_Trees" name="Christmas_Trees">CHRISTMAS
+TREES.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There is too much dress parade about Christmas. Too many
+Christmas trees where rich children get club skates, and gold
+napkin rings, and poor children get pop corn strung on a string,
+and cornucopias full of peppermint candy.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Bob-Tailed_Badger" name="The_Bob-Tailed_Badger">THE
+BOB-TAILED BADGER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 <em>sic semper Americanus
+scunch</em>. We do not complain that the sailor with a 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Terror_in_Church" name="Terror_in_Church">TERROR IN
+CHURCH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A ridiculous scene occurred at 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.</p>
+<p>Wiping the perspiration from his face, he said, pointing, to the
+floor, &ldquo;Ah, my friends, look down into that seething, burning
+lake, and&mdash;&rdquo; Just at this point the trap door raised a
+little, and the sexton&rsquo;s face, with coal smut all over it,
+appeared. He wanted to come up and hear the sermon.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/217.png"><img src=
+"images/217.png" alt="A man peers up from a hole in the floor." id=
+"img217" name="img217" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>&ldquo;AH, MY FRIENDS, LOOK DOWN INTO THAT BURNING
+LAKE!&rdquo;</p>
+</div>
+<p>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, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right, brother; he has only <em>been
+down below to see about the fire</em>.&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t see how he could help
+it.</p>
+<h3><a id="Fish_Hatching_in_Wisconsin" name=
+"Fish_Hatching_in_Wisconsin">FISH HATCHING IN WISCONSIN.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>I would suggest that you permit the subject of the artificial
+hatching of fish to engage your attention, and that you appropriate
+several dollars to purchase whale&rsquo;s eggs, vegetable oysters
+and mock turtle seeds. The hatching of fish is easy, and any man
+can soon learn it; and it is a branch of industry that many who are
+now out of employment, owing to circumstances beyond their control,
+will be glad to avail themselves of. How, I ask you, could means
+better be adapted to the ends than for the retiring officers of our
+State to go to setting on fish eggs?</p>
+<h3><a id="Trains_Without_Conductors" name=
+"Trains_Without_Conductors">TRAINS WITHOUT CONDUCTORS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Since the introduction of the patent air brake on passenger
+trains, by which brakemen have been dispensed with, a number of
+patent right men have been studying up some contrivance to do away
+with conductors. All have failed except one, and that fortunate
+inventor is Col. Johnson, of the Railroad Eating House, Milwaukee.
+He has been engaged for two years on this patent, and has got it so
+near completed that he has filed a caveat at the Patent Office, and
+as his rights are secured, it can do no harm to describe the
+invention, as it is destined to work quite a revolution in the
+railroad business. It has been Col. Johnson&rsquo;s idea that an
+arrangement could be made so that an engineer of a train could have
+the whole train under his charge, to stop it, start it, collect
+fares, and bounce impecunious passengers, from his position on the
+engine, and do it all by steam, wind and water. A series of
+pneumatic tubes run from the door of each car to the engine, with
+speaking tubes. A passenger gets on the platform, and through the
+speaking tube asks the engineer what the fare is to such a place.
+The answer is returned, the fare is put in the hopper of the
+pneumatic tube, it goes to the engineer, he pulls a string, the
+door flies open and the passenger enters. Not the least important
+part of the machinery is the patent &ldquo;&aelig;olian
+bouncer,&rdquo; as it is called. A pair of ice tongs are placed so
+as to grasp the passenger by the seat of the pants or the
+polonaise, as the case may be, when he or she gets on the platform.
+These tongs are connected with the air brakes, in such a manner
+that by the engineer&rsquo;s touching a spring the whole force of
+the compressed air takes possession of the tongs, and the passenger
+is snatched bald-headed, metaphorically speaking. For instance, a
+passenger gets on the platform at Portage, and the ice tongs grasp
+him or her securely. If he or she pays the fare, the door is
+opened, the tongs release their hold, and the person is allowed to
+enter. But if the engineer should find that they had no money, or
+that their pass had run out, and they were trying to beat their
+way, he would pull the string and they would be lifted back on the
+depot steps and stood on their heads, raised in the air and made to
+see stars. Col. Johnson has been offered a fabulous sum for his
+patent, but he has not decided whether to sell or lease it. A trial
+trip was made at Milwaukee, the other day, and though the machine
+was not perfect, the experiment was not altogether a failure. A car
+was arranged with the apparatus, and went out to the
+Soldier&rsquo;s Home. Col. Johnson and a number of prominent
+railroad men were on board. They got a veteran soldier and a Polack
+waman to allow the machine to experiment on them. The machine took
+hold of the soldier and the engineer jerked. The man had one leg
+torn off, and the seat of his overcoat was ruined. He
+wouldn&rsquo;t try again, so they let the woman step on the
+platform. The engineer turned it the wrong way, and the car seemed
+full of compressed air, and a smell of limberger cheese pervaded
+the premises. When the smoke cleared off the woman was not to be
+found. After voting the machine a success the party started for
+Milwaukee. On nearing the city a pair of wooden shoes were seen in
+the air coming down, and they lit in the the canal by the tannery.
+A pair of corsets struck on Plankinton&rsquo;s packing house, and
+sections of spinal cord, and one leg of a pair of red drawers came
+down on the Soldier&rsquo;s home, and hair was found on the top of
+the car. It is thought the engineer loaded the air bouncer too
+heavy, and that it kicked. However, Col. Johnson was not
+discouraged, and will soon have his patent on all cars. The husband
+of the Polack woman wanted Johnson to pay him three dollars, but he
+said he didn&rsquo;t want to buy the woman. All he wanted was to
+hire her, anyway. Col. Johnson is a great inventor. It was he that
+invented the stomach pump, and the automatic candle enunciator, for
+awakening guests in the night to take early trains. The latter he
+sold to Mr. Williams, of Prairie du Chien, for a large amount and
+took his pay in trade.</p>
+<h3><a id="Raising_Elephants" name="Raising_Elephants">RAISING
+ELEPHANTS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Why not go to raising elephants? A good elephant will sell for
+eight thousand dollars. A pair of elephants can be bought by a
+community of farmers pooling their issues and getting a start, and
+in a few years every farm can be a menagerie of it own, and every
+year we can rake in from eight to twenty-four thousand dollars from
+the sale of surplus elephants. It may be said that elephants are
+hearty feeders, and that they would go through an ordinary farmer
+in a short time. Well, they can be turned out into the highway to
+browse, and earn their own living. This elephant theory is a good
+one, and any man that is good on figures can sit down and figure up
+a profit in a year sufficient to go into bankruptcy.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Power_of_Eloquence" name=
+"The_Power_of_Eloquence">THE POWER OF ELOQUENCE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A justice of the peace at Menasha, wanted to kill Pratt, the
+editor of the <em>Press</em>. The matter has been compromised,
+however. Pratt got the justice cornered up, and delivered one of
+the speeches to him that he delivered during the campaign last
+fall, and the justice got on his knees and said, &ldquo;Pratt, this
+thing is all right, I surrender.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Trying_Situation" name="A_Trying_Situation">A TRYING
+SITUATION.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t think raw oysters would go further at a sociable, than
+stewed oysters.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/222.png"><img src=
+"images/222.png" alt="A man bows." id="img222" name="img222" width=
+"80%" /></a>
+<p>THE WANDERING OYSTER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>He said he thought raw oysters would go further, but they
+wouldn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>They had some shell oysters, and he took up one on a
+fork&mdash;a large, fat one&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+toward his shoes, that they winked at each other, though they might
+have been winking at something else.</p>
+<p>The oyster seemed to be real spry until it got out of reach, and
+then it got to going slow as the slikery 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Giddy_Girls_Quarrel" name=
+"The_Giddy_Girls_Quarrel">THE GIDDY GIRLS QUARREL.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A dispatch from Brooklyn states that at the conclusion of a
+performance at the theatre, Fanny Davenport&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Now, the question is, what is Anna Dickinson going to do with
+Fanny&rsquo;s wardrobe? She may think Fanny&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Fanny&rsquo;s dress, accustomed to so much talent, would have to
+be stuffed full of stuff. There would be room enough in
+Fanny&rsquo;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&rsquo;t go in the dress in any one given locality. If Anna
+should put on Fanny&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Why, if Dickinson should put on a pair of Davenport&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Universal_Object" name="The_Universal_Object">THE
+UNIVERSAL OBJECT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The object that every man has in view, whether he be farmer,
+mechanic, preacher, editor, or tramp, is to make money.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Mistake_About_It" name="The_Mistake_About_It">THE
+MISTAKE ABOUT IT.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Excuse me, madame, but I think your wearing apparel is
+becoming disarranged. You might step right into Clark&rsquo;s,
+here, and fix it,&rdquo; and he pointed to the bottom of her
+dress.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Madame, you better drop into a millinery store and fasten
+up your&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/228.png"><img src=
+"images/228.png" alt="A woman points a pistol at a man." id=
+"img228" name="img228" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>MYSTERY OF A WOMAN&rsquo;S CLOTHES!</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Pierce, the hotel man, is one of the most noticin&rsquo; persons
+anywhere, and she hadn&rsquo;t been seated a York minute before his
+eye caught the discrepancy in her apparel.</p>
+<p>He tried to get the telegraph operator and the expressman to go
+and tell her about it, but they wouldn&rsquo;t, so he went and took
+a seat near her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is a warm day, madame,&rdquo; said Pierce, looking at
+the red strip at the bottom of her dress.</p>
+<p>She drew her pistol, cocked it, and pointed it at Pierce, who
+was trembling in every leg, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;s clothes it
+is too much, and the shooting is going to commence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Pierce made one bound and reached the door, and then got
+behind a white greyhound 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your apparel, madame, seems to be demoralized,&rdquo; but
+she rushed into the car, and was seen no more.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_New_Sparking_Scheme" name="A_New_Sparking_Scheme">A
+NEW SPARKING SCHEME.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A number of fathers who have daughters, have formed a society,
+the object of which is to charge young men who visit the girls, for
+meals, gas, wear and tear of furniture, etc. There has been so much
+sparking going on which did not mean business, that the
+organization has seemed necessary.</p>
+<h3><a id="Effects_of_Mineral_Water" name=
+"Effects_of_Mineral_Water">EFFECTS OF MINERAL WATER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A woman from Milwaukee, stopping at Sparta for the summer, had a
+serious accident the other day. She had her dress pinned back so
+tight that the exclamation point where she was vaccinated on the
+left arm was plainly visible, and as she stooped over at the
+artesian well to dip up a cup full of physic, a little dog
+belonging to a lady from Pilot Knob took hold of her striped
+stocking and shook it, thinking it was a blue racer. The lady was
+overcome with heat and sank down on the damp ground, and the result
+was congestion of the dog, for when she got up she kicked that dog
+over the Court house and sprained her stocking. It is said that
+beautiful and healthful summer resort is fast filling up and
+everybody swears it is the most enjoyable place on the continent.
+It is certainly the cheapest for us La Crosse folks to go. We
+don&rsquo;t know of a place where, for the money invested, one can
+have so much fun and get so much health. You can leave La Crosse at
+5:45, and arrive at Sparta at 6:20, after a delightful ride of
+thirty miles, and you will enjoy a race, your train beating the
+Northwestern train, and running like lightning. If you have a pass,
+or sit on the hind platform, it will cost you nothing. You can walk
+down town, at small expense. You want to take supper before leaving
+home, if economy is what you are seeking in addition to health. Go
+to Condit, at the Warner House, and talk as though you were looking
+for a place to send your family, and he will hitch up and drive you
+all over town. Tell Doc. Nichols you never tried a Turkish bath,
+but that you are troubled with hypochondria and often wish you were
+dead, and that if you were sure the baths would help you, you would
+come down and take them regular. He will put you through for
+nothing, and give you a cigar. Then you can get a tooth pick at
+Condit&rsquo;s and put your thumb under your vest and go to the
+springs and talk loud about railroad stocks and bonds and
+speculating in wheat. (It takes two to do it up right. Frank Hatch
+and the writer are going down some night to &ldquo;do&rdquo; the
+watering place). Then you can swell around till half past ten, and
+sneak off to the depot on foot and come home, and your pocket book
+will be just as empty as when you started, unless you get a
+subscriber, and you will have added bloom to your cheek, and had a
+high old time, and next winter you can talk about the delightful
+time you passed at Sparta last summer during the heated term.</p>
+<p>Let&rsquo;s get up a party and go down some night.</p>
+<h3><a id="What_the_Country_Needs" name=
+"What_the_Country_Needs">WHAT THE COUNTRY NEEDS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>What the country needs is a melon from which the incendiary
+ingredients have been removed. It seems to me that by proper care,
+when the melon is growing on the vines, the cholera morbus can be
+decreased, at least, the same as the cranberry has been improved,
+by cultivation. The experiment of planting homeopathic pills in the
+hill with the melon has been tried, but homeopathy, while perhaps
+good in certain cases, does not seem to reach the seat of disease
+in the watermelon. What I would advise, and the advice is free to
+all, is that a porous plaster be placed upon watermelons, just as
+they are begining to ripen, with a view to draw out the cholera
+morbus. A mustard plaster might have the same effect, but the
+porous plaster seems to me to be the article to fill a want long
+felt. If, by this means, a breed of watermelon can be raised that
+will not strike terror to the heart of the consumer, this
+agricultural address will not have been delivered in vain.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Man_from_Dubuque" name="The_Man_from_Dubuque">THE
+MAN FROM DUBUQUE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;Show the gentleman to No 65
+and the lady to 67,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;Hold on, &rsquo;squire!
+One room will do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say, can a man enjoy religion in this house?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why,&rdquo; says the manager of the house, &ldquo;has
+anybody interfered with your devotions here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, not here,&rdquo; said the man, wiping his forehead
+with a red handkerchief. &ldquo;But they have at Dubuque.
+I&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, we went to our room in the afternoon, and she began
+to cry, and said if she wasn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This seal ring on my finger caught in her frizzes and
+I&rsquo;ll be cussed if the whole top of her head didn&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;t let my temper get away with me, but as it was three
+hours before dark I didn&rsquo;t see what was the use of a lamp,
+and I told him to get out of there. Before 6 o&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figure"><a href="images/234.png"><img src=
+"images/234.png" alt=
+"A black man looks on as a woman falls against a dresser and a man looks angry."
+id="img234" name="img234" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>AN INTRUSIVE NIGGER.</p>
+</div>
+<p>&ldquo;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 brakemen 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?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Plea_for_the_Bull_Head" name=
+"A_Plea_for_the_Bull_Head">A PLEA FOR THE BULL HEAD.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The late meeting of the State Fish Commissioners at Milwaukee
+was an important event, and the discussions the wise men indulged
+in will be valuable additions to the literature of the country, and
+future readers of profane history will rise up and call them
+blessed. It seems that the action of the Milwaukee common council
+in withdrawing the use of the water works from the commissioners,
+will put a stop to the hatching of whitefish. This is as it should
+be. The white fish is an aristocratic bird, that will not bite a
+hook, and the propagation of this species of fish is wholly in the
+interest of wealthy owners of fishing tugs, who have nets. By
+strict attention to business they can catch all the whitefish out
+of the lake a little faster than the State machine can put them in.
+Poor people cannot get a smell of whitefish. The same may be said
+of brook trout. While they will bite a hook, it requires more
+machinery to catch them than ordinary people can possess without
+mortgaging a house. A man has got to have a morocco book of
+expensive flies, a fifteen dollar bamboo jointed rod, a three
+dollar trout basket with a hole mortised in the top, a corduroy
+suit made in the latest style, top boots of the Wellington pattern,
+with red tassels in the straps, and a flask of Otard brandy in a
+side pocket. Unless a man is got up in that style, a speckled trout
+will see him in Chicago, first, and then it won&rsquo;t bite. The
+brook trout is even more aristocratic than the whitefish, and
+should not be propagated at public expense.</p>
+<p>But there are fish that should be propagated in the interest of
+the people. There is a species of fish that never looks at the
+clothes of the man who throws in the bait, a fish that takes
+whatever is thrown to it, and when once hold of the hook never
+tries to shake a friend, but submits to the inevitable, crosses its
+legs and says &ldquo;Now I lay me,&rdquo; and comes out on the bank
+and seems to enjoy being taken. It is a fish that is a friend of
+the poor, and one that will sacrifice itself in the interest of
+humanity. This is the fish that the State should adopt as its trade
+mark, and cultivate friendly relations with, and stand by. We
+allude to the bullhead.</p>
+<p>The bullhead never went back on a friend. To catch the bullhead
+it is not necessary to tempt his appetite with porter house steak,
+or to display an expensive lot of fishing tackle. A pin hook, a
+piece of liver, and a cistern pole, is all the capital required to
+catch a bullhead. He lays upon the bottom of a stream or pond in
+the mud, thinking. There is no fish that does more thinking or has
+a better head for grasping great questions, or chunks of liver than
+the bullhead. His brain is large, his heart beats for humanity, and
+if he can&rsquo;t get liver, a piece of a tin tomato can will make
+a meal for him. It is an interesting study to watch a boy catch a
+bullhead. The boy knows where the bullhead congregates, and when he
+throws in his hook it is dollars to buttons that &ldquo;in the near
+future&rdquo; he will get a bite. The bullhead is democratic in all
+its instincts. If the boy&rsquo;s shirt is sleeveless, his hat
+crownless, and his pants a bottomless pit, the bullhead will bite
+just as well as though the boy is dressed in purple and fine linen,
+with knee breeches and plaid stockings. The bull head seems to be
+dozing&mdash;bulldozing we might say&mdash;on the muddy bottom, and
+a stranger might say that he would not bite. But wait. There is a
+movement of his continuation, and his cow-catcher moves gently
+toward the piece of liver. He does not wait to smell of it, and
+canvas in his mind whether the liver is fresh. It makes no
+difference to him. He argues that here is a family out of meat.
+&ldquo;My country calls and I must go,&rdquo; says the bullhead to
+himself, and he opens his mouth and the liver disappears.</p>
+<p>It is not certain that the boy will think of his bait for half
+an hour, but the bullhead is in no hurry. He lays in the mud and
+proceeds to digest the liver. He realizes that his days will not be
+long in the land, or water, more properly speaking, and he argues
+if he swallows the bait and digests it before the boy pulls him
+out, he will be just so much ahead. Finally the boy thinks of his
+bait, and pulls it out, and the bullhead is landed on the bank, and
+the boy cuts him open to get the hook out. Some fish only take the
+bait gingerly, and are only caught around the selvage of the mouth,
+and they are comparatively easy to dislodge. Not so with the
+bullhead. He says if liver is a good thing you can&rsquo;t have too
+much of it, and it tastes good all the way down. The boy gets down
+on his knees to dissect the bullhead, and get his hook, and it may
+be that the boy swears. It would not be astonishing, though he must
+feel, when he gets his hook out of the hidden recesses of the
+bullhead, like the minister that took up a collection and
+didn&rsquo;t get a cent, though he expressed his thanks at getting
+his hat back. There is one drawback to the bullhead, and that is
+his horns. We doubt if a boy ever descended into the patent insides
+of a bullhead, to mine for Limerick hooks, that did not, before his
+work was done, run a horn into his vital parts. But the boy seems
+to expect it, and the bullhead enjoys it. We have seen a bullhead
+lay on the bank and become dry, and to all appearances dead to all
+that was going on, and when the boy sat down on him and got a horn
+in his elbow, and yelled murder, the bullhead would grin from ear
+to ear, and wag his tail as though applauding for an <em>end
+core</em>.</p>
+<p>The bullhead never complains. We have seen a boy take a dull
+knife and proceed to follow a fish line down a bullhead from his
+head to the end of his subsequent anatomy, and all the time there
+would be an expression of sweet peace on the countenance of the
+bullhead, as though he enjoyed it. If we were preparing a picture
+representing &ldquo;Resignation,&rdquo; for a chromo to give to
+subscribers, and wished to represent a scene of suffering in which
+the sufferer was light hearted, and seemed to recognize that all
+was for the best, we should take for the subject a bullhead, with a
+boy searching with a knife for a long lost fish hook.</p>
+<p>The bullhead is a fish that has no scales, but in lieu thereof
+is a fine India rubber skin, that is as far ahead of fiddle string
+material for strength and durability as possible. The meat of the
+bullhead is not as choice as that of the mackerel, but it fills up
+a stomach just as well, and the <em>Sun</em> insists that the fish
+commissioners shall drop the hatching of aristocratic fish and give
+the bullhead a chance. There&rsquo;s millions in it.</p>
+<h3><a id="Why_not_Raise_Wolves" name="Why_not_Raise_Wolves">WHY
+NOT RAISE WOLVES?</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>You devote a good deal of time and labor to the raising of
+sheep, and what do you get for it. The best sheep cannot lay more
+than eight pounds of wool in a season, and even if you get fifty
+cents a pound for it, you have not got any great bonanza. Now, the
+state encourages the raising of wolves, by offering a bounty of ten
+dollars for a piece of skin off the head of each wolf. It does not
+cost any more to raise a wolf than it does to raise a sheep, and
+while sheep rarely raise more than two lambs a year, a pair of good
+wolves are liable to raise twenty young ones in the course of a
+year, if it is a good year for wolves. In addition to the
+encouragement offered by the state, many counties give as much
+more, so that one wolf scalp will bring more money than five sheep.
+You will readily see that our wise legislators are offering
+inducements to you that you should be thankful for. You can
+establish a wolf orchard on any farm, and with a pair of good
+wolves to start on, there is millions in it.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Sudden_Fire-Works_at_Racine" name=
+"The_Sudden_Fire-Works_at_Racine">THE SUDDEN FIRE-WORKS AT
+RACINE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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 enterprizing 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.</p>
+<p>Thousands of citizens had gathered there, from city and country,
+and bright Roman candles shone o&rsquo;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 here to
+see a specialist to have a splinter from a rocket stick removed
+from his ear.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s
+feelings.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t want to take off his clothes up there and come down,
+even if it <em>was</em> dark, because it would be just his luck to
+have some one fire off a Roman candle when he got down.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/240.png"><img src=
+"images/240.png" alt=
+"A man hangs from a telephone pole by the seat of his pants." id=
+"img240" name="img240" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>MARTINDALE CLIMBS A POLE.</p>
+</div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The girl felt some one feeling, as she supposed, for her
+pocket-book, and she started to run, yelling,
+&ldquo;pickpocket,&rdquo; and left the burning polonaise in Mr.
+Field&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>The steward of the Gideon&rsquo;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 the 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.</p>
+<p>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
+<em>News</em> office he had to jump over an 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;t got time, as he was going down to the river to take a
+sitz bath for his health.</p>
+<p>The man that keeps the hotel next door to the <em>News</em>
+office came out with a pail of water, yelled &ldquo;fire,&rdquo;
+and threw the water on Mr. Curt Treat&rsquo;s head. Mr. Treat was
+very much vexed, and told the hotel man if he couldn&rsquo;t tell
+the difference between an auburn haired young man and a pin-wheel,
+he&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 assembly man, had
+crawled into the pipe.</p>
+<p>By the way, Mr. Oberman finally got down from his terrible
+position by the aid of the editor of the <em>Journal</em>, 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="La_Crosse_Nebecudnezzer_Water" name=
+"La_Crosse_Nebecudnezzer_Water">LA CROSSE NEBECUDNEZZER
+WATER.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>It is the great ambition of our life to bring to the notice of
+the people of the world the curative powers of the La Crosse water,
+that all who may be suffering from any disease, however
+complicated, may be cured, and all men may become healthy, and
+women too, and doctors will have to go out harvesting. The La
+Crosse artesian well, was begun last fall, and completed as soon as
+the contractor found he couldn&rsquo;t make any money at it. It was
+rumored that he struck granite, and in fact several little specks
+of granite were found in the stuff that come from the hole, but it
+is pretty generally believed now that the granite particles got in
+from the top, unknown to the contractor. The water came to within
+ten feet of the surface, and struck. It never would come any
+further, and the world would have remained in ignorance of its
+curative powers, only for Powers, who put in a hydraulic ram, and
+the blockade was broken, the water now flows to the surface, and
+all is well.</p>
+<p>Attention was first called to the curative powers of the water,
+by a singular incident. A teamster whose duty it was to haul stone,
+was in the habit of stopping at the well to water his mules. One of
+the mules was in a sad state. He was blind in one eye, had a
+spavin, a ringbone, the heaves, his liver was torpid, his lungs
+were badly affected, and his friends feared that he was not long
+for the stone quarry. He had no family. Soon after the mule began
+to drink the water, the driver noticed a great change come over
+him. Previously he had seemed resigned to his fate, but latterly he
+was ambitious. One day while playfully mashing the mule over the
+head with a sled stake, the driver noticed that a new eye had grown
+in the place of the former cavity, and as the mule kicked him with
+more than his accustomed vigor, he noticed that the spavin and ring
+bone were gone, and the former plaintive melody of his voice gave
+place to a bray that resembled the whistle of the Alex. Mitchell.
+When it was known that the mule had been cured, others tried the
+water, men who had never drank it before, until to-day there are
+thousands who will testify to the benefits arising from its use. We
+could give the names of many who have been snatched from the
+grave&mdash;the La Crosse water is a regular body
+snatcher&mdash;but we will first give an analysis of the water.</p>
+<p>Believing that the water was destined to play a prominent part
+in solving the great question of how to euchre death, we sent a
+quantity of it to the eminent Prof. Alonzo Brown, M.D.V.S. of
+Jefferson, Wis., with a letter of transmittal authorizing him to
+analyze it thoroughly, and give us the result, at our expense. The
+following is Prof. Brown&rsquo;s analysis:</p>
+<p class="cen">LABRATORY JEFFERSON LIVERY STABLE,</p>
+<p class="rgt">August 3, 1877.</p>
+<p>Lieut. GEO. W. PECK,<br />
+4th Wis. Cavalry,</p>
+<p>Dear Sir:</p>
+<p>Yours of July 25th, received. I should have attended to the
+water before, but have had several cases of blind staggers in my
+barn, which has kept me busy. I have examined the water by every
+process known to science, and pronounce it bully. I took it apart
+at my leisure, and find that it contains to one U.S. washtub full,
+of 741 cubic inches, the following stuff:</p>
+<table summary="chemical analysis" style="width:80%;margin:auto;">
+<tr>
+<td>Chloride, of Sodium, (common salt)</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">2</td>
+<td>sacks.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Chloride of Pilgarlic</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">40,021</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bicarbonate of erysipelas</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">11,602</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bicarbonate of pie plant</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">2,071</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Blue pills</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">21,011</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bicarbonate of soda water (vanilla.)</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">17,201</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Sulphate of Potasalager beer</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">61,399</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bicarbonate corrugated iron</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">18,020</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Mustang Liniment</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">240</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Boneset and summer savory</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">10,210</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Dow's Liver Cure, (6 bottles for $1.)</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">16,297</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Bromide of Alcock's Porous Plaster</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">22,222</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Flouride of Pain Killer (for cucumbers,)</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">055</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Paris green</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">001</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Spruce gum and Vinegar Bitters</td>
+<td style="text-align:right;">075</td>
+<td>grains.</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>In submitting this analysis permit me to say that I find traces
+of mock turtle soup, and India Rubber. I consider the La Crosse
+Nebecudnezzer water the most comprehensive water that I have ever
+analyzed, and I would recommend it for any disease that human
+beings or animals may have.</p>
+<p class="rgt">Very Respectfully,<br />
+ALONZO BROWN,<br />
+Prof. of Chemistry in Jefferson Livery stable, and late Veterinary
+Surgeon 4th Wis. Cavalry.</p>
+<hr class="short" />
+<p>We have known Mr. Brown long and well, and his statement in
+regard to the water can be relied upon. Citizens should retain a
+copy of this analysis for future reference.</p>
+<p>Mr. E.W. Keyes, of Madison, writing under date of August 1st,
+says: &ldquo;The La Crosse water you sent me has caused an entire
+new crop of hair to grow upon my head. I had been bald for years,
+and offered five hundred dollars, for any medicine that would cause
+hair to grow. Enclosed find five hundred dollars, and send me more
+water. I want to try it on Murphey, of the Sentinel. I think it
+would be a good joke on Murphey.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But wait till we get all the letters written from prominent men
+who have been cured.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Infidel_and_His_Silver_Mine" name=
+"The_Infidel_and_His_Silver_Mine">THE INFIDEL AND HIS SILVER
+MINE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>This may be all right, and we hope it is, and we don&rsquo;t
+want to give any advice on anybody else&rsquo;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 the 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.</p>
+<p>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 than hear that some infidel
+who is around the country calling God a pirate and horse thief, at
+a dollar a head, to full houses, has miraculously struck a million
+dollar silver mine.</p>
+<p>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 Ingersoll 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&rsquo;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 that is being
+played on him.</p>
+<p>Everything turns out right some time, and from what we have
+heard of God, off and on, we don&rsquo;t believe he is going to let
+no ordinary man, bald-headed and appoplectic, 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.</p>
+<p>Bob Ingersoll has got the bulge on all the Christians now, and
+draws more water than anybody, but He who knows the sparrow&rsquo;s
+fall has no doubt got an eye on the fat rascal, and some day will
+close two or three fingers around Bob&rsquo;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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Please, Mr. God, don&rsquo;t choke so, and I will take 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 biown-up bladder. O, good God, don&rsquo;t hurt me so.
+My neck is all chafed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then he will die, and God will continue business at the old
+stand.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Legend_of_the_Lake" name=
+"The_Legend_of_the_Lake">THE LEGEND OF THE LAKE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Every noted place of resort has an Indian legend, and the first
+thing I did after getting my dinner was to look up the legendist. I
+wanted to hear how it was that the Indian had ceased to frequent
+this spot. So in looking for the boss legendist I struck Judge
+Lamoreaux, of Dodge county, who had been herewith a party of
+friends, Mr. Hayes, and Mr. Van Brunt, with all their wives. They
+had been searching for ferns and legends and they had a car load.
+The Judge had heard of the legend, and he took me one side, and
+with tears in his eyes related to me the horrible story just as he
+had received it from an Indian named O&rsquo;Flanegan, who sells
+relics in the shape of rye. If I can control my emotion long enough
+to write it, it will be a big thing for history.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/248.png"><img src=
+"images/248.png" alt="A woman in Indian garb." id="img248" name=
+"img248" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>HIAWASAMANTHA, THE DUSKY DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST.</p>
+</div>
+<p>Years ago an Indian chief who lived in a dog tent and caught
+rattlesnakes for a side show, had a daughter, a beautiful maiden,
+about the color and odor of smoked bacon, and she wore a red
+blanket cut biased, and a tilter, under a polonaise made over from
+her last year&rsquo;s striped silk. She was the belliest squaw in
+the hills, and took the premium at all the county fairs, and she
+could shoot a deer equal to any buck Indian. Her name was
+Hiawasamantha, and she had two lovers, a Frenchman and a young
+Indian. In figuring up the returns there was some doubt as to who
+was elected, so the father of the girl decided to go behind the
+returns, and settle it by a commission. There was an eagle&rsquo;s
+nest half way up the rocks, with young eagles in it, and the old
+chief said that the one that got there first and brought him a
+young eagle, should have the squaw. The Frenchman climbed up the
+back stairs and got there ahead of the Indian, when the young
+Indian drew from his trousers leg a bar of railroad iron and drove
+it to the hilt in the breast of the Frenchman, not, however, till
+the Frenchman had drawn from his pistol pocket a 300 ton Krupp gun
+and sent a solid shot weighing 280 pounds crashing into the skull
+of the Indian, and both rolled to the bottom of the bluff, dead.
+Dr. Hall, of Baraboo, was called, and he probed for the ball, but
+could not find it, and neither could he get the bar of railroad
+iron out of the Frenchman, and so they were buried on the spot
+where now stands the Cliff House. The squaw looked around for
+another fellow, but they all had other engagements, the excursion
+train having arrived from La Crosse, and so she went up on a crag
+and said, &ldquo;Big Injun me,&rdquo; and jumped off and was dashed
+into 1,347 pieces, and the wedding was broke up. Pieces of the
+squaw can now be found among the rocks, petrified, but retaining
+the odor of the ancient tribe. I got a piece of her, evidently a
+piece broken off her ear, which retains its shade perfectly, and
+will long be a reminder of my visit to Devil&rsquo;s Lake.
+(P.S.&mdash;Disreputable parties are selling pieces of stuff
+purporting to be genuine remains of this beauteous maiden, but they
+are base imitations. None genuine unless the trade mark is stamped
+on them.)</p>
+<h3><a id="Geological_Survey" name="Geological_Survey">GEOLOGICAL
+SURVEY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The Geological Survey is being prosecuted as well as could be
+expected with the limited means at the hands of the searchers in
+the bowels of the earth. They have already found, I am informed,
+that the earth on which we live, and move, and have a being, is
+composed largely of dirt. The discovery of this fact is alone worth
+the price of admission. This great discovery, which will be of such
+value to the future historian, has only cost the state the
+insignificant sum of $8,280. Rather than remain in ignorance of
+this astonishing fact, I would willingly pay the money
+myself&mdash;out of the public treasury. It is rumored that parties
+employed by the State to dive down into the ground and bring up
+sand in their claws, have discovered symptoms that the world was at
+one time sick to its stomach, and threw up divers and sundry kinds
+of rocks and things, and there is a probability that lead ore may
+be discovered. This will be valuable to make bullets in case of a
+war with Oshkosh. In peace it is always best to prepare for war,
+and I trust you will lend your countenance to the able men who are
+investigating the Lower Silurian age.</p>
+<h3><a id="Fooling_with_the_Bible" name=
+"Fooling_with_the_Bible">FOOLING WITH THE BIBLE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Why, the cheeky ghouls have actually altered over the
+Lord&rsquo;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&rsquo;s sermon on the Mount
+until He couldn&rsquo;t tell it if He was to meet it in the Chicago
+<em>Times</em>.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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 &ldquo;hades&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t know a hades if we should see it dead in the road,
+but they couldn&rsquo;t fool us any on hell.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Millions of Bibles were shipped to this country by the firm that
+was &ldquo;long&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>The edition was advertised like a circus, and doors were to be
+opened at six o&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>O, the revision is a three-card monte speculation; that is all
+it is.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Black_Bear_at_Onalaska" name=
+"A_Black_Bear_at_Onalaska">A BLACK BEAR AT ONALASKA.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A black bear was brought into town for sale on Friday, having
+been killed by Tom Rand, near Onalaska. He killed it with a little
+rifle that didn&rsquo;t look big enough to hurt a hen. If bears are
+so sociable as to come within sight of La Crosse to be killed, it
+will be a good excuse for husbands to stay at home nights.</p>
+<h3><a id="Another_Dead_Failure" name=
+"Another_Dead_Failure">ANOTHER DEAD FAILURE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; worth more because we thought if that was the last
+paper we were going to get out we might as 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Glorious_Fourth_of_July" name=
+"The_Glorious_Fourth_of_July">THE GLORIOUS FOURTH OF JULY.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>On this great day we are accustomed to leave our business to
+hired men, and burn with patriotism, and ginger pop, fill ourselves
+with patriotic ferver, and beer, shout the battle cry of freedom,
+and go home when the day is over with our eye-winkers burned off,
+and to sleep with a consciousness that a great duty has been
+performed, and that we have got bank notes to pay on the morrow.
+For three hundred and sixty-four days in the year our patriotism is
+corked up and wired down, and all we can do is to work, and acquire
+age and strength. On the 4th of July we cut the wire, the cork that
+holds our patriotism flies out, and we bubble and sparkle and
+steam, and make things howl. We hold in as long as we can, but when
+we get the harness off, and are turned into the pasture, we make a
+picnic of ourselves, with music all along the line.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Uses_of_the_Paper_Bag" name=
+"The_Uses_of_the_Paper_Bag">THE USES OF THE PAPER BAG.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A First Ward man was told by his wife to bring home a quart of
+oysters on New Year&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/256.png"><img src=
+"images/256.png" alt=
+"A woman looks at a man who is searching his pockets." id="img256"
+name="img256" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>SLIPPERY OYSTERS.</p>
+</div>
+<p>We will leave the man there, gazing upon the wreck, and take the
+reader to the residence where he is expected.</p>
+<p>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 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Forgot noth(hic)ing,&rdquo; says he.</p>
+<p>He walks up to the table and asks for a plate, which is given
+him by the unsuspicious wife.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Damsaccident you ever(hic)see,&rdquo; said the truly good
+man, as he brought his hand out of his overcoat pocket, with four
+oysters, a little smoking tobacce, and a piece of cigar-stub.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Slipperysoystersev(hic)er was,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Got all my pock(hic)ets full,&rdquo; 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Six big oys(hic)ters gone down my trousers leg.
+S&rsquo;posi&rsquo;ll find them in my boot,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Universalist_Bath" name="The_Universalist_Bath">THE
+UNIVERSALIST BATH.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>Mr. E.H. Lane is canvassing the city for the Universalist Bath.
+We don&rsquo;t know why it should be called a &ldquo;Universalist
+Bath,&rdquo; as it more nearly resembles a Baptist Bath, as we
+remember it. The bath is a queer thing, consisting of an India
+rubber hop sack, fastened to an immense ox bow. The ends are placed
+on to chairs, the water put in, and you get in and hippotamus and
+take a complete bath from Dan to Beersheba in a tea cup full of
+water.</p>
+<h3><a id="Killing_Big_Game" name="Killing_Big_Game">KILLING BIG
+GAME.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The conductors on the St. Paul railroad are most all good sports
+with a shot gun. There is Howard and Clason, and Russell, who never
+tire of talking of the millions of chickens, ducks, wild turkeys
+and so forth that they have killed. They have tried to get
+Conductor Green interested in field sports, but he always said the
+game was not big enough for him. He said he had his opinion men
+that would surround a little chicken with spike tailed dogs, and
+then kill it and call it sport. What he wanted was big game.
+Nothing less than a bear would do him. Last week the owners of the
+cinnamon bear that was brought down from the Yellowstone, decided
+to have it killed, and some one told them to get Green to kill it,
+as he was an old bear hunter from the Rocky Mountains. Green said
+he was rusty on bears, not having had a tussel with a grizzly in
+several years, but if they couldn&rsquo;t get anybody else to
+chance the bear he would make hash of it. So they went down to the
+ice house where the bear was. Green said he didn&rsquo;t want
+anybody to go in with him, because they might get hurt. He put on
+Clason&rsquo;s hunting suit, took a carving knife in his teeth and
+a revolver in his hand, and went in and looked the bear in the eye.
+The bear knew Green meant business, and he began to feel around for
+his ticket. The conductor advanced to within eleven feet of the
+bear when all at once the animal sprang at him, growling and
+showing his teeth. Green&rsquo;s first impulse was to pull the bell
+rope, and order the cuss to get out of the ice house, but he saw
+the bear coming through the air towards him, and there was not four
+hours to lose, so he drew the revolver, took aim at the
+bear&rsquo;s left eye, and pulled. There was a puff of smoke, and
+the bear fell lifeless at his feet. Placing the animal in his game
+sack, he wiped the blood from his knife and said to some men who
+stood outside, their faces ashy pale: &ldquo;Always shoot bears in
+the left eye.&rdquo; The men were pleased to see him come out alive
+and they shook him warmly by the hand. The other conductors, the
+shooters, are jealous of Green, and they are telling how he killed
+the bear by going up in the loft of the ice house and falling on
+him, and one conductor says Green shot the bear with a crow bar
+through a knot hole. Another said the bear had all four of his legs
+tied and that a dose of poison was administered through a syringe,
+attached to a pole, while another says that the bear died from
+fright. All these stories are the result of jealousy. The bear was
+killed just as we say, and there are few men that would tackle
+him&mdash;that is, few men aside from conductors.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Mule_not_the_Eagle" name=
+"The_Mule_not_the_Eagle">THE MULE NOT THE EAGLE.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>The bird that should have been selected as the emblem of our
+country, the bird of patience, forbearance, perseverance, and the
+bird of terror when aroused, is the mule. There is no bird that
+combines more virtues to the square foot than the mule. With the
+mule emblazoned on our banners, we should be a terror to every foe.
+We are a nation of uncomplaining hard workers. We mean to do the
+fair thing by everybody. We plod along, doing as we would be done
+by. So does the mule. As a nation we occasionally stick our ears
+forward, and fan flies off of our forehead. So does the mule. We
+allow parties to get on and ride as long as they behave themselves.
+So do does the mule. But when any nation sticks spurs in our
+flanks, and tickles our heels with a straw, we come down
+stiff-legged in front, our ears look to the beautiful beyond, our
+voice is cut loose, and is still for war, and our subsequent end
+plays the snare drum on anything that gets in reach of us, and
+strikes terror to the hearts of all tyrants. So does the mule.</p>
+<h3><a id="Our_Blue-Coated_Dog-Poisoners" name=
+"Our_Blue-Coated_Dog-Poisoners">OUR BLUE-COATED DOG
+POISONERS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 Sheenan was the policeman any more he
+wouldn&rsquo;t poison my dog, would he, pa?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The above was the greeting the bald-headed <em>Sun</em> 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&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>If the boy slept too long after dinner, the dog went and rooted
+around him as much as to say, &ldquo;Look a here, Mr. Roy, you
+can&rsquo;t play this on your partner any longer. You get up here
+and we will have a high old time, and don&rsquo;t you forget
+it.&rdquo; And pretty soon the sound of baby feet and dog&rsquo;s
+toe nails would be heard on the stairs, and the circus would
+commence.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;Gip, too much
+sleep is what is ruining the dogs in this country. Now, brace up
+and play horse with me.&rdquo; And then there was fun.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo; spaniel
+dogs, and a door-keeper stands with a club to keep out policemen.
+And still we cannot blame policemen&mdash;it is the law that is to
+blame&mdash;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 &ldquo;dog days,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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, &ldquo;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 go around assassinating
+dogs,&rdquo; we as people, would think more of them, and perhaps
+build them a decent station house to rest in.</p>
+<h3><a id="A_Hot_Box_at_a_Picnic" name="A_Hot_Box_at_a_Picnic">A
+HOT BOX AT A PICNIC.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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 are 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, and 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, 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><a href="images/263.png"><img src=
+"images/263.png" alt=
+"A smiling woman and a man ride out in a carriage." id="img263"
+name="img263" width="80%" /></a>
+<p>THE OLD BACK NUMBER GIRL.</p>
+</div>
+<h3><a id="Camp_Meetings_in_the_Dark_of_the_Moon" name=
+"Camp_Meetings_in_the_Dark_of_the_Moon">CAMP MEETINGS IN THE DARK
+OF THE MOON.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>A Dartford man, who has been attending a camp meeting at that
+place, inquires of the Brandon <em>Times</em> why it is that camp
+meetings are always held when the moon does not shine. The
+<em>Times</em> man gives it up and refers the question to the
+<em>Sun</em>. We give it up.</p>
+<p>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
+&ldquo;catch on&rdquo; better at that time.</p>
+<p>There may be something in the atmosphere, in the dark of the
+moon, that makes a camp meeting more enjoyable. Certainly brethren
+and sisterin&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Palace_Cattle_Cars" name="Palace_Cattle_Cars">PALACE
+CATTLE CARS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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,
+&ldquo;the galoot wants to interview me, probably, and I wish he
+would keep away,&rdquo; the particular one sought for comes to the
+reception room and puts out its front foot for a shake, smiles and
+says, &ldquo;Glad you came. Was afraid you would let us go away and
+not call.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This,&rdquo; says the steer who is doing the honors,
+&ldquo;is the stateroom occupied by old Brindle, who is being
+shipped from St. Joseph, Mo. Brindle weighs 1,600 on
+foot&mdash;Brindle, get up and show yourself to the
+gentleman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;O, go on now and
+give us a rest.&rdquo; 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,
+&ldquo;Gentlemen, you will have to excuse me,&rdquo; lays down with
+her head on a pillow, pulls the coverlid over her and begins to
+snore.</p>
+<p>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 <em>Times</em> article on Oleomargarine, or Bull Butter, at
+intervals stopping the reading to curse the writer, who claims that
+oleomargarine is an unlawful preparation, containing deleterious
+substances.</p>
+<p>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, &ldquo;and make it hot,&rdquo; says
+the ox, as he counts up high, low, jack and the game.</p>
+<p>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 near 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&rsquo;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, &ldquo;Meet me in
+the slaughter house when the due bill falls,&rdquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="George_Washington" name="George_Washington">GEORGE
+WASHINGTON.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>He could not tell a lie, George couldn&rsquo;t. Washington, it
+is probable, never knew what it was to stow away a schooner of
+beer, and history makes no mention that he ever, on any pretext,
+eat limberger cheese. At least no mention was made of it in his
+farewell address. He never was President of a savings bank.
+Washington never lectured. He never edited a newspaper. He could
+not tell a lie at the rates editors charge. No he was a good man,
+with none of the small vices that are so prevalent these days.</p>
+<h3><a id="Broke_up_a_Prayer_Meeting" name=
+"Broke_up_a_Prayer_Meeting">BROKE UP A PRAYER MEETING.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="figleft"><a href="images/268.png"><img src=
+"images/268.png" alt="A woman holds her hand over her eye." id=
+"img268" name="img268" width="100%" /></a>
+<p>THE LADY OF THE SEVENTH WARD.</p>
+</div>
+<p>When we told her that a piece of beef-steak was worth two
+oysters she uncovered the eye. It looked as though painted by one
+of the old masters.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s room on
+tiptoe, to see if she was asleep. She found the girl with all her
+dolls on the floor having a dolls&rsquo; 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 the 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There, Miss, you sit down and let some of the other
+sisters get in a word edgeways. Sister Perkins, won&rsquo;t you
+relate your experience?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>After listening to this for a few moments the mother heard the
+girl say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now, Polly, you pass the collection plate, and no one
+must put in lozengers, and then we will all go to the dancing
+school.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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
+the prayer meeting, when she stubbed herself on a stair rod,
+and&mdash;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.</p>
+<h3><a id="The_Dog_Law" name="The_Dog_Law">THE DOG LAW.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a id="Lunch_on_the_Cars" name="Lunch_on_the_Cars">LUNCH ON THE
+CARS.</a></h3>
+<p class="returnTOC"><a href="#Contents">Return to Table of
+Contents</a></p>
+<p>There is nothing that so gives a man away as to open a satchel
+and take out a lunch. I have been riding on the cars and have made
+the acquaintance of people who would listen to my stories, and take
+in every word as gospel truth. They would seem to hang on my words
+with pleasure, and be apparently glad they had become acquainted
+with one who combined so many graces of mind and person, and they
+would gather around so as not to miss a single lie that I might
+tell. And yet when I took a paper parcel out of my valise and
+opened up a lunch, consisting of bread and onions, and sausage and
+sweitzer cheese, they would draw coldly away from me and sit in the
+farther part of the car, and appear never to have known me.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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@@ -0,0 +1,8005 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Peck's Compendium of Fun, by George W. Peck
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Peck's Compendium of Fun
+
+Author: George W. Peck
+
+Release Date: January 27, 2005  [eBook #14815]
+
+Language: english
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 14815-h.htm or 14815-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/8/1/14815/14815-h/14815-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/8/1/14815/14815-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN
+
+Comprising the Choicest Gems of Wit, Humor, Sarcasm and Pathos
+of America's Favorite Humorist,
+
+GEORGE W. PECK,
+
+Editor of "Peck's Sun" Milwaukee
+
+Illustrated by Eminent Artists
+
+Chicago
+
+1886
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+    About Hell
+    Another Dead Failure
+    Anna Dickinson
+    A Bald-headed Man Most Crazy
+    A Case of Paralysis
+    A Doctor of Laws
+    A Hot Box at a Picnic
+    A Lively Train Load
+    A Mad Minister
+    A Musical Critique
+    A Peck at the Cheese
+    A Plea for the Bull Head
+    A Sewing Machine Given to the Boss Girl
+    A Safe Investment
+    A Tony Slaughter-House
+    A Trying Situation
+    An Arm That is not Reliable
+    An Editor Burglarized
+    Banks and Banking
+    Bounced from Church for Dancing
+    Boys and Circuses
+    Boys will be Boys
+    Broke up a Prayer Meeting
+    Buying a Stone Crusher
+    "Cash!"
+    Camp Meetings in the Dark of the Moon
+    Church Keno
+    Colored Concert Troupes
+    Dogs and Human Beings
+    Effects of Mineral Water
+    Expedition in Search of a Doughnut
+    Failure of a Solid Institution
+    Fishing for Pieces of Women
+    Fooling with the Bible
+    George Washington
+    Granite Head Cheese
+    Internal Improvements
+    Joke on the Hat
+    Killing Big Game
+    Large Mouths are Fashionable
+    La Crosse Nebecudnezzer Water
+    Laying up Apples in Heaven
+    Mr. Peck's Sunday Lecture
+    Nearly Broke up the Ball
+    Our Blue-Coated Dog-Poisoners
+    Our Christian Neighbors Have Gone
+    Palace Cattle Cars
+
+    PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+      He Becomes a Druggist
+      He is too Healthy
+      He Quits the Drug Business
+      His Pa an Inventor
+      His Pa Dissected
+      His Pa Goes Calling
+      His Pa Goes Skating
+      His Pa Gets Boxed
+      His Pa Gets Mad
+      His Pa Joins a Temperance Society
+      His Pa Jokes Him
+      His Pa is Discouraged
+      His Pa Kills Him
+      His Pa Mortified
+
+    Religion and Fish
+    Rope Ladders
+    Sardineindianapolis
+    Seven Year Old Horses
+    Summer Resorting
+    Take Your Latin Straight
+    Terror in Church
+    The Bob-Tailed Badger
+    The Boy and the Goat
+    The Difference
+    The Difference in Horses
+    The Fire New Year's Day
+    The Giddy Girl's Quarrel
+    The Gospel Car
+    The Infidel and His Silver Mine
+    The Knight and the Bridal Chamber
+    The Legend of the Lake
+    The Man from Dubuque
+    The Mistake About It
+    The Naughty But Nice Church Choir
+    The New Coal Stove
+    The Sudden Fire-Works at Racine
+    The Uses of the Paper Bag
+    The Waters of La Crosse
+    The Way to Name Children
+    The Way Women Boss a Pillow
+    The Woodcock
+    Those Bold Bad Drummers
+    Those Step Ladders!
+    Tragedy on the Stage
+    Trains Without Conductors
+    Try to Save Two Shillings
+    Unscrewing the Top of a Fruit Jar
+    Why the Fever Did'nt Spread
+    Woman-Dozing a Democrat
+    Wonders of the Stage
+
+
+    ELECTRIC FLASHES.
+
+    Anna Dickinson as "Mazeppa"
+    A Black Bear at Onalaska
+    A Dead Sure Thing
+    A Fashion Item
+    A Good Land Enough
+    A Lecturer Should Know What He Talks About
+    A Loan Exhibition
+    A New Sparking Scheme
+    An Odorous Bohemian
+    Base Ingratitude
+    Buttermilk Bibbers
+    Cats on the Fence
+    Christmas Trees
+    Col. Ingersoll Praying
+    Comforting Compensations
+    Convenient Currency
+    Crushing Nihilism
+    Enterprising Chicago!
+    Fish Hatching in Wisconsin
+    Frozen Ears
+    Gathered Waists!
+    Geological Survey
+    Give us War
+    Good Templars on Ice
+    Hard on Fond Du Lac
+    He Would'nt Have His Father Called Names
+    How Farmers May Get Rich
+    "How Sharper Than a Hound's Tooth!"
+    How to Invest a Thousand Dollars
+    How to Reach Young Men
+    Hunting Dogs
+    Insecure Abodes
+    Lunch on the Cars
+    Mattie Mashes Minnesota
+    Merrie Christmas
+    More Dangerous Than Kerosene
+    Mrs. Langtry
+    One of Beecher's Converts
+    Preparing for War
+    Raising Elephants
+    Registry of Electors
+    Selling Clams
+    She was no Gentleman
+    Southern "Honaw"
+    Spurious Tripe
+    Sure of Heaven
+    Supreme Court Judges and U.S. Senators
+    Ten Days in Love
+    The Advent Preacher and the Balloon
+    The Day We Reached Canada
+    The Dog Law
+    The Glorious Fourth of July
+    The Mule not the Eagle
+    The Old Sweet Songs
+    The Political Outlook
+    The Power of Eloquence
+    The Thirsty Gopher
+    The Universalist Bath
+    The Universal Object
+    The Wicked Mon Kee
+    The Wrong Corpse
+    Three Inches of Leg
+    To What Vile Uses May We Come
+    Too Particular by Half
+    What the Country Needs
+    What the Democrats Will Do
+    We Will Celebrate
+    Why not Raise Wolves?
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+    A Scene in Paradise
+    "Ah, my Friends, Look Down Into That Burning Lake!"
+    An Intrusive Nigger
+    At the Telephone
+    Behind the Scenes
+    Bossing the Pillow
+    "Do not Pass me by!"
+    Drummers Trying to Pray
+    "Get Thee to a Nunnery!"
+    "Happy New Year, Mum!"
+    Hiawasamantha, the Dusky Daughter of the Golden West
+    "I Want to be an Angel"
+    It Looked Like an old Dripping Pan
+    "It is F-f-four Sizes too Big!"
+    John McCullough Killing a Texas Steer
+    "Just as I am"
+    "Keno!"
+    Martindale Climbs a Pole
+    "Me Long Lost Duke!"
+    Mystery of a Woman's Clothes
+    New Way of Taking Seidlitz Powders
+    No More Apples for the Minister
+    "Oh, That Will be all Right"
+    "Pa Grabbed Her by the Polonaise"
+    "Sard," and the Greek Slave
+    Sacred Memories
+    Slippery Oysters
+    Swallow-Tails on the Climb
+    The Lady of the Seventh Ward
+    The Old Back Number Girl
+    The Old Man Tries His Hand
+    The Resorter
+    The Rotund Urso
+    The Sexton in all His Glory
+    The Startled Cat
+    The Tenor Arrayed in all His Glory
+    The Wandering Oyster
+    "Thereby Hangs a Tail."
+    "This is too Allfired Much!"
+    "Too Late, Pa, I Die at the Hand of an Assassin!"
+    Turning the Proper Dingus
+    "Yell, or go Down!"
+
+
+
+
+PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.
+
+
+THE NEW COAL STOVE.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: TURNING THE PROPER DINGUS.]
+
+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 got to learn how to
+engineer it, or you may get roasted.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA IS DISCOURAGED.
+
+"Say, you leave here mighty quick," said the grocery man to the bad boy,
+as he came in, with his arm in a sling, and backed up against the stove to
+get warm. "Everything has gone wrong since you got to coming here, and I
+think you are a regular Jonah. I find sand in my sugar, kerosene in the
+butter, the codfish is all picked off, and there is something wrong every
+time you come here. Now you leave."
+
+"I aint no Joner," said the boy as he wiped his nose on his coat sleeve,
+and reached into a barrel for a snow apple. "I never swallered no whale.
+Say, do you believe that story about Joner being in the whale's belly, all
+night? I don't. The minister was telling about it at Sunday school last
+Sunday, and asked me what I thought Joner was doing while he was in there,
+and I told him I interpreted the story this way, that the whale was fixed
+up inside with upper and lower berths, like a sleeping car, and Joner had
+a lower berth, and the porter made up the berth as soon as Joner came in
+with his satchel, and Joner pulled off his boots and gave them to the
+porter to black, and put his watch under the pillow and turned in. The
+boys in Sunday school all laffed, and the minister said I was a bigger
+fool than Pa was, and that was useless. If you go back on me, now, I won't
+have a friend, except my chum and a dog, and I swear, by my halidom, that
+I never put no sand in your sugar, or kerosene in your butter. I admit the
+picking off of the codfish, but you can charge it to Pa, the same as you
+did the eggs that I pushed my chum over into last summer, though I thought
+you did wrong in charging Christmas prices for dog days eggs. When my
+chum's Ma scraped his pants she said there was not an egg represented on
+there that was less than two years old. The Sunday school folks
+have all gone back on me, since I put kyan pepper on the stove, when they
+were singing 'Little Drops of Water,' and they all had to go out doors and
+air themselves, but I didn't mean to let the pepper drop on the stove. I
+was just holding it over the stove to warm it, when my chum hit the funny
+bone of my elbow. Pa says I am a terror to cats. Every time Pa says
+anything, it gives me a new idea. I tell you Pa has got a great brain, but
+sometimes he don't have it with him. When he said I was a terror to cats I
+thought what fun there is in cats, and me and my chum went to stealing
+cats right off, and before night we had eleven cats caged. We had one in a
+canary bird cage, three in Pa's old hat boxes, three in Ma's band box,
+four in valises, two in a trunk, and the rest in a closet up stairs.
+
+"That night Pa said he wanted me to stay home because the committee that
+is going to get up a noyster supper in the church was going to meet at our
+house, and they might want to send me on errands. I asked him if my chum
+couldn't stay too, 'cause he is the healthiest infant to run after errands
+that ever was, and Pa said he could stay, but we must remember that there
+musn't be no monkey business going on. I told him there shouldn't be no
+monkey business, but I didn't promise nothing about cats. Well, sir, you'd
+a dide. The committee was in the library by the back stairs, and me and my
+chum got the cat boxes all together, at the top of the stairs, and we took
+them all out and put them in a clothes basket, and just as the minister
+was speaking, and telling what a great good was done by these oyster
+sociables, in bringing the young people together, and taking their minds
+from the wickedness of the world, and turning their thoughts into
+different channels, one of the old tom cats in the basket gave a 'purmeow'
+that sounded like the wail of a lost soul, or a challenge to battle. I
+told my chum that we couldn't hold the bread-board over the clothes basket
+much longer, when two or three cats began to yowl, and the minister
+stopped talking and Pa told Ma to open the stair door and tell the hired
+girl to see what was the matter up there. She thought our cat had got shut
+up in the storm door, and she opened the stair door to yell to the girl,
+and then I pushed the clothes basket, cats and all down the back stairs.
+Well, sir, I suppose no committee for a noyster supper, was ever more
+astonished. I heard Ma fall over a willow rocking chair, and say, 'scat,'
+and I heard Pa say, 'well. I'm dam'd,' and a girl that sings in the choir
+say, 'Heavens, I am stabbed,' then my chum and me ran to the front of the
+house and come down the front stairs looking as innocent as could be, and
+we went in the library, and I was just going to tell Pa if there was any
+errands he wanted run my chum and me was just aching to run them, when a
+yellow cat without any tail was walking over the minister, and Pa was
+throwing a hassock at two cats that were clawing each other under the
+piano, and Ma was trying to get her frizzes back on her head, and the
+choir girl was standing on the lounge with her dress pulled up, trying to
+scare cats with her striped stockings, and the minister was holding his
+hands up, and I guess he was asking a blessing on the cats, and my chum
+opened the front door and all the cats went out. Pa and Ma looked at me,
+and I said it wasn't me, and the minister wanted to know how so much cat
+hair got on my coat and vest, and I said a cat met me in the hall and
+kicked me, and Ma cried, and Pa said 'that boy beats hell,' and the
+minister said, I would be all right if I had been properly brought up, and
+then Ma was mad, and the committee broke up. Well, to tell the honest
+truth Pa basted me, and yanked me around until I had to have my arm in a
+sling, but what's the use of making such a fuss about a few cats. Ma said
+she never wanted to have my company again, 'cause I spoiled everything.
+But I got even with Pa for basting me, this morning, and I dassent go
+home. You see Ma has got a great big bath sponge as big as a chair
+cushion, and this morning I took the sponge and filled it with warm water,
+and took the feather cushion out of the chair Pa sits in at the table, and
+put the sponge in its place, and covered it over with the cushion cover,
+and when we all got set down to the table Pa came in and sat down on it to
+ask a blessing. He started in by closing his eyes and placing his hands up
+in front of him like the letter V, and then he began to ask that the food
+we were about to partake off be blessed, and then he was going on to ask
+that all of us be made to see the error of our ways, when he began to
+hitch around, and he opened one eye and looked at me, and I looked as
+pious as a boy can look when he knows the pancakes are getting cold, and
+Pa he kind of sighed and said 'Amen' sort of snappish, and he got up and
+told Ma he didn't feel well, and she would have to take his place and pass
+around the sassidge and potatoes, and he looked kind of scart and went out
+with his hand on his pistol pocket, as though he would like to shoot, and
+Ma she got up and went around and sat in Pa's chair. The sponge didn't
+hold more than half a pail full of water, and I didn't want to play no
+joke on Ma, cause the cats nearly broke her up, but she sat down and was
+just going to help me, when she rung the bell and called the hired girl,
+and said she felt as though her neuralgia was coming on, and she would go
+to her room, and told the girl to sit down and help Hennery. The girl sat
+down and poured me out some coffee, and then she said, 'Howly Saint
+Patrick, but I blave those pancakes are burning,' and she went out in the
+kitchen. I drank my coffee, and then took the big sponge out of the chair
+and put the cushion in the place of it, and then I put the sponge in the
+bath room, and I went up to Pa and Ma's room, and asked them if I should
+go after the doctor, and Pa had changed his clothes and got on his Sunday
+pants, and he said, 'never mind the doctor, I guess we will pull through,'
+and for me to get out and go to the devil, and I came over here. Say,
+there is no harm in a little warm water, is there? Well, I'd like to know
+what Pa and Ma and the hired girl thought. I am the only real healthy one
+there is in our family."
+
+
+THREE INCHES OF LEG.
+
+Blanche Williams, of Philadelphia, who met with an accident at Fairmount
+Water-works, by which one leg was broken, and rendered three inches
+shorter than the rest of her legs, has recovered $10,000 damages. It would
+seem, to the student of nature, to be a pretty good price for three inches
+of ordinary leg, but then some people will make such a fuss.
+
+
+MORE DANGEROUS THAN KEROSENE.
+
+The regular weekly murder is reported from Peshtigo. Two men named Glass
+and Penrue, got to quarreling about a girl, in a hay loft, over a barn.
+Glass stabbed Penrue quite a number of times and he died. There is nothing
+much more dangerous, unless it is kerosene, than two men and a girl, in a
+hay loft quarreling.
+
+
+TEN DAYS IN LOVE.
+
+There is a fearfully harrowing story going the rounds of the papers headed
+"Ten Days in Love." It must have been dreadful, with no Sunday, no day of
+rest, no holiday, just nothing but love, for ten long days. By the way,
+did the person live?
+
+
+BOYS WILL BE BOYS.
+
+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 trouser 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 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
+horseflesh 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
+wordly-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?"
+
+[Illustration: SACRED MEMORIES]
+
+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, you are 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."
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HE BECOMES A DRUGGIST.
+
+"Whew! What is that smells so about this store? It seems as though
+everything had turned frowy," said the grocery man to his clerk in the
+presence of the bad boy, who was standing with his back to the stove, his
+coat-tails parted with his hands, and a cigarette in his mouth.
+
+"May be it is me that smells frowy," said the boy as he put his thumbs in
+the armholes of his vest, and spit at the keyhole in the door. "I have
+gone into business."
+
+"By thunder, I believe it is you," said the grocery man, as he went up to
+the boy and snuffed a couple of times and then held his hand to his nose.
+"The board of health will kerosene you if they ever smell that smell, and
+send you to the glue factory. What business have you gone into to make you
+smell so rank?"
+
+"Well, you see Pa began to think it was time I learned a trade, or a
+profession, and he saw a sign in a drug store window 'boy wanted,' and as
+he had a boy he didn't want, he went to the druggist and got a job for me.
+This smell on me will go off in a few weeks. You know I wanted to try all
+the perfumery in the store, and after I had got about forty different
+extracts on my clothes, another boy that worked there he fixed up a bottle
+of benzine and assafety and brimstone, and a whole lot of other horrid
+stuff, and labeled it 'rose geranium,' and I guess I just wallered in it.
+It _is_ awful, aint it? It kerflummixed Ma when I went into the
+dining-room the first night that I got home from the store, and broke Pa
+all up. He said I reminded him of the time they had a litter of skunks
+under the barn. The air seemed fixed around where I am, and everybody
+seems to know who fixed it. A girl came into the store yesterday to buy a
+satchet, and there wasn't anybody there but me, and I didn't know what it
+was, and I took down everything in the store pretty near before I found
+it, and then I wouldn't have found it only the proprietor came in. The
+girl asked the proprietor if there wasn't a good deal of sewer gas in the
+store, and he told me to go out and shake myself. I think the girl was mad
+at me because I got a nursing bottle out of the show case with a rubber
+muzzle, and asked her if that was what she wanted. Well, she told me a
+sachet was something for the stummick, and I thought a nursing bottle was
+the nearest thing to it."
+
+[Illustration: NEW WAY OF TAKING SEIDLITZ POWDERS]
+
+"I should think you would drive all the customers away from the store,"
+said the groceryman as he opened the door to let the fresh air in.
+
+"I don't know but I will, but I am hired for a month on trial, and I shall
+stay. You see, I sha'n't practice on anybody but Pa for a spell. I made up
+my mind to that when I gave a woman some salts instead of powdered borax,
+and she came back mad. Pa seems to want to encourage me, and is willing to
+take anything that I ask him to. He had a sore throat and wanted something
+for it, and the boss drugger told me to put some tannin and chlorate of
+potash in a mortar and grind it, and I let Pa pound it with the mortar,
+and while he was pounding I dropped in a couple of drops of sulphuric
+acid, and it exploded and blowed Pa's hat clear across the store, and Pa
+was whiter than a sheet. He said he guessed his throat was all right, and
+he wouldn't come near me again that day. The next day Pa came in, and I
+was laying for him. I took a white seidletz powder and a blue one, and
+dissolved them in separate glasses, and when Pa came in I asked him if he
+didn't want some lemonade, and he said he did, and I gave him the sour one
+and he drank it. He said it was too sour, and then I gave him the other
+glass that looked like water, to take the taste out of his mouth, and he
+drank it. Well, sir, when those two powders got together in Pa's
+stummick, and began to siz and steam and foam, Pa pretty near choked to
+death, and the suds came out of his nostrils, and his eyes stuck out, and
+as soon as he could get his breath he yelled 'fire,' and said he was
+poisoned, and called for a doctor, but I thought as long as we had a
+doctor right in the family there was no use of hiring one, so I got a
+stomach pump and would have baled him out in no time, only the proprietor
+came in and told me to go and wash some bottles, and he gave Pa a drink of
+brandy, and Pa said he felt better. Pa has learned where we keep the
+liquor, and he comes in two or three times a day with a pain in his
+stomach. They play awful mean tricks on a boy in a drug store. The first
+day they put a chunk of something blue into a mortar, and told me to
+pulverize it and then make it up into two grain pills. Well, sir, I
+pounded that chunk all the forenoon, and it never pulverized at all, and
+the boss told me to hurry up as the woman was waiting for the pills, and I
+mauled it till I was nearly dead, and when it was time to go to supper the
+boss came and looked in the mortar, and took out the chunk and said, 'You
+dum fool, you have been pounding all day on a chunk of India rubber,
+instead of blue mass!' Well, how did I know? But I will get even with them
+if I stay there long enough, and don't you forget it. If you have a
+prescription you want filled you can come down to the store and I will put
+it up for you myself, and then you will be sure to get what you pay for."
+
+"Yes," said the grocery man, as he cut off a piece of limberg cheese and
+put it on the stove to purify the air in the room, "I should laugh to see
+myself taking any medicine you put up. You will kill some one yet, by
+giving them poison instead of quinine. But what has your Pa got his nose
+tied up for? He looks as though he had had a fight."
+
+"O, that was from my treatment. He had a wart on his nose. You
+know that wart. You remember how the minister told him if other peoples'
+business had a button hole in it, Pa could button the wart in the
+button-hole, as he always had his nose there. Well, I told Pa I could cure
+that wart with caustic, and he said he would give five dollars if I could
+cure it, so I took a stick of caustic and burned the wart off, but I guess
+I burned down into the nose a little, for it swelled up as big as a
+lobster. Pa says he would rather have a whole nest of warts than such a
+nose, but it will be all right in a year or two."
+
+
+A LOAN EXHIBITION.
+
+"What is a loan exhibition?" asks a correspondent. Well, when a fellow
+borrows ten dollars of you, to be paid next Saturday, and he lets it run a
+year and a half, and don't pay it, and he meets you on the street and asks
+for five dollars more, and you turn him around and kick him right before
+the crowd, that is a loan exhibition.
+
+
+THE WICKED MON KEE.
+
+Mon Kee, a Chinaman that was converted to regular United States religious
+doctrines, and opened a mission in New York for the purpose of converting
+more heathens and shethens, has been arrested for stealing. This is a
+terrible blow, and Mon Kee was a terrible plower. A few weeks since the
+religious papers made more blow over the coming into the fold of that
+Chinaman than they did over all the editors in the country, who went not
+astray. Now they have shut up their yawp about him, since he has proved to
+be no better than Talmage or Beecher.
+
+
+UNSCREWING THE TOP OF A FRUIT JAR.
+
+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 away 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,
+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
+when 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 the skin off the knuckle. He breathes a silent prayer and calls for
+the kerosene can, and pours a little oil into the crevice, and lets it
+soak, and then he tries again, and swears audibly.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD MAN TRIES HIS HAND.]
+
+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.
+
+
+HE WOULDN'T HAVE HIS FATHER CALLED NAMES.
+
+A man died in Oshkosh who was over eighty years of age. After the funeral
+the minister who conducted the services, said to the son of the deceased,
+"your father was an octogenarian." The young man colored up, doubled up
+his fist, and said to the minister that he would like to have him repeat
+that remark. The minister said, "I say your father was an old
+octogenarian." He had not more than got the word out of his mouth before
+the young man struck him on the nose, knocked him down, kicked him in the
+ear, and when pulled off by a policeman, he said no holyghoster could call
+his dead father names, not around him. The minister said he couldn't have
+been more surprised if some one had paid a year's pew rent, than he was
+when that young man's fist hit him.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HE QUITS THE DRUG BUSINESS.
+
+"What are you loafing around here for," says the grocery man to the bad
+boy one day this week. "It is after nine o'clock, and I should think you
+would want to be down to the drug store. How do you know but there may be
+somebody dying for a dose of pills?"
+
+"O, darn the drug store. I have got sick of that business, and I have
+dissolved with the drugger. I have resigned. The policy of the store did
+not meet with my approval, and I have stepped out and am waiting for them
+to come and tender me a better position at an increased salary," said the
+boy, as he threw a cigar stub into a barrel of prunes and lit a fresh one.
+
+"Resigned, eh?" said the grocery man as he fished out the cigar stub and
+charged the boy's father with two pounds of prunes, didn't you and the
+boss agree?"
+
+"Not exactly, I gave an old lady some gin when she asked for camphor and
+water, and she made a show of herself. I thought I would fool her, but she
+knew mighty well what it was, and she drank about half a pint of gin, and
+got to tipping over bottles and kegs of paint, and when the drug man came
+in with his wife, the old woman threw her arms around his neck and called
+him her darling, and when he pushed her away, and told her she was drunk,
+she picked up a bottle of citrate of magnesia and pointed it at him, and
+the cork came out like a pistol, and he thought he was shot, and his wife
+fainted away, and the police came and took the old gin refrigerator away,
+and then the drug man told me to face the door, and, when I wasn't looking
+he kicked me four times, and I landed in the street, and he said if I ever
+came in sight of the store again he would kill me dead. That is the way I
+resigned. I tell you, they will send for me again. They never can run that
+store without me.
+
+"I guess they will worry along without you," said the grocery
+man. "How does your Pa take your being fired out? I should think it would
+brake him all up."
+
+"O, I think Pa rather likes it. At first he thought he had a soft snap
+with me in the drug store, cause he has got to drinking again, like a
+fish, and he has gone back on the church entirely; but after I had put a
+few things in his brandy he concluded it was cheaper to buy it, and he is
+now patronizing a barrel house down by the river.
+
+"One day I put some Castile soap in a drink of drandy, and Pa leaned over
+the back fence more than an hour, with his finger down his throat. The man
+that collects the ashes from the alley asked Pa if he had lost anything,
+and Pa said he was only 'sugaring off.' I don't know what that is. When Pa
+felt better he came in and wanted a little whisky to take the taste out of
+his mouth, and I gave him some, with about a teaspoonful of pulverized
+alum in it. Well, sir, you'd a dide. Pa's mouth and throat was so puckered
+up that he couldn't talk. I don't think that drugman will make anything by
+firing me out, because I shall turn all the trade that I control to
+another store. Why, sir, sometimes there were eight and nine girls in the
+store all at wonct, on account of my being there. They came to have me put
+extracts on their handkerchiefs, and to eat gum drops--he will lose all
+that trade now. My girl that went back on me for the telegraph messenger
+boy, she came with the rest of the girls, but she found that I could be as
+'hawty as a dook.' I got even with her, though. I pretended I wasn't mad,
+and when she wanted me to put some perfumery on her handkerchief I said
+'all right,' and I put on a little geranium and white rose, and then I got
+some tincture of assafety, and sprinkled it on her dress and cloak when
+she went out. That is about the worst smelling stuff that ever was, and I
+was glad when she went out and met the telegraph boy on the corner. They
+went off together; but he came back pretty soon, about the
+homesickest boy you ever saw, and he told my chum he would never go with
+that girl again because she smelled like spoiled oysters or sewer gas. Her
+folks noticed it, and made her go and wash her feet and soak herself, and
+her brother told my chum it didn't do any good, she smelled just like a
+glue factory, and my chum--the darn fool--told her brother that it was me
+who perfumed her, and he hit me in the eye with a frozen fish, down by the
+fish store, and that's what made my eye black; but I know how to cure a
+black eye. I have not been in a drug store eight days, and not know how to
+cure a black eye; and I guess I learned that girl not to go back on a boy
+'cause he smelled like a goat.
+
+"Well, what was it about your leaving the wrong medicine at houses? The
+policeman in this ward told me you come pretty near killing several people
+by leaving the wrong medicine."
+
+"The way of it was this. There was about a dozen different kinds of
+medicine to leave at different places, and I was in a hurry to go to the
+roller skating rink, so I got my chum to help me, and we just took the
+numbers of the houses, and when we rung the bell we would hand out the
+first package we come to, and I understand there was a good deal of
+complaint. One old maid who ordered powder for her face, her ticket drew
+some worm lozengers, and she kicked awfully, and a widow who was going to
+be married, she ordered a celluloid comb and brush, and she got a nursing
+bottle with a rubber nozzle, and a toothing ring, and she made quite a
+fuss; but the woman who was weaning her baby and wanted the nursing
+bottle, she got the comb and brush and some blue pills, and she never made
+any fuss at all. It makes a good deal of difference, I notice, whether a
+person gets a better thing than they order or not. But the drug business
+is too lively for me. I have got to have a quiet place, and I guess I will
+be a cash boy in a store. Pa says he thinks I was cut out for a bunko
+steerer, and I may look for that kind of a job. Pa he is a terror since he
+got to drinking again. He came home the other day, when the minister was
+calling on Ma, and just cause the minister was sitting on the sofa with
+Ma, and had his hand on her shoulder, where she said the pain was when the
+rheumatiz came on, Pa was mad and told the minister he would kick his
+liver clear around on the other side if he caught him there again, and Ma
+felt awful about it. After the minister had gone away, Ma told Pa he had
+got no feeling at all, and Pa said he had got enough feeling for one
+family, and he didn't want no sky-sharp to help him. He said he could cure
+all the rheumatiz there was around the house, and then he went down town
+and didn't get home till most breakfast time. Ma says she thinks I am
+responsible for Pa's falling into bad ways again, and now I am going to
+cure him. You watch me, and see if I don't have Pa in the church in less
+than a week, praying and singing, and going home with the choir singers,
+just as pious as ever. I am going to get a boy that writes a woman's hand
+to write to Pa, and--but I must not give it away. But you just watch Pa,
+that's all. Well, I must go and saw some wood. It is coming down a good
+deal, from a drug clerk to sawing wood, but I will get on top yet, and
+don't you forget it."
+
+
+GIVE US WAR!
+
+We are in receipt of a circular from the American peace society,
+requesting us to leave a sum of money, in our will, to the society to be
+applied to the interest of peace. We are opposed to peace, on such terms.
+Give us war, every time.
+
+
+THE FIRE NEW YEAR'S DAY.
+
+If there is anything the young men of Rescue Hose Company pride themselves
+upon, it is in getting themselves up, regardless of expense, on New Year's
+day, and calling upon their lady friends. On Monday last these young men
+arrayed themselves in their best clothes and sat around in stores and
+waited for the time to go calling. Solomon in all his glory, was not
+arrayed like one of these firemen.
+
+[Illustration: SWALLOW-TAILS ON THE CLIMB.]
+
+Just as the young gentlemen were about throwing away their last cigar at
+noon, preparatory to calling at the first place on the list, the fire-bell
+rang, and there was a lively procession followed the steamer down Fourth
+street in a few minutes. It looked as though a wedding had been broken up
+and bridegrooms were running around loose. The party arrived at the scene
+of the fire, which was Matt. Larsen's hotel on the corner of Second and
+King streets, and such a shinning of swallow-tailed coats up blue ladders
+was never seen. The fellows that belonged in the house threw out bedsteads
+and crockery on to stove-pipe hats, and emptied beds on to
+broadcloth coats. The wedding party disappeared in the third story window
+with the hose, in the smoke, and after half an hour's work they came out
+looking as though they had been in the Ashtabula railroad accident. Young
+Mr. Smith had a stream of dirty water sent up his trousers leg, which went
+clear up to his collar, and wilted it beyond repair. Mr. Hatch entwined
+his doeskin pants around the burnt ridge-pole of the roof, hung on to a
+rafter with his teeth, and chopped shingles, and the pipemen kept him wet,
+and he looked like a bundle of damp stuff in a paper mill. Mr. Spence was
+on the top of the ladder, and Mr. Drummond was next below him. In falling,
+Mr. D. caught hold of one tail of Mr. Spence's swallow hammer coat, and
+stretched the tail about two feet longer than the other. Mr. Foote was as
+dry as a bone, until the pipeman saw him, and they nailed him up against
+the wall with a stream and Foote was damp as a wet nurse in a minute.
+
+Young Mr. Osborne, confidential adviser of Hyde, Cargill & Co., got half
+way up the ladder, and a leak in the hose struck him and froze him to the
+ladder, and Mr. Watson had to strike a match and thaw him loose. He wet
+his pants from Genesis to Revelations, and had to go calling with an
+ulster overcoat on. The most of the young men, after returning from the
+fire, stood by the stove and dried themselves, and went calling all the
+same, but the girls said they smelt like burnt shingles. The boys were all
+dry enough at the dance in the evening.
+
+
+SOUTHERN "HONAW."
+
+Bennett and May fought a duel in Maryland the other day, and as near as
+the truth can be arrived at neither party received a scratch. But their
+"honaw" was satisfied.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA KILLS HIM.
+
+"For heaven's sake dry up that whistling," said the grocery man to the bad
+boy, as he sat on a bag of peanuts, whistling and filling his pockets.
+"There is no sense in such whistling. What do you whistle for, anyway?"
+
+"I am practicing my profession," said the boy, as he got up and stretched
+himself, and cut off a slice of cheese, and took a few crackers. "I have
+always been a good whistler, and I have decided to turn my talent to
+account. I am going to hire an office and put out a sign, 'Boy furnished
+to whistle for lost dogs.' You see there are dogs lost every day, and any
+man would give half a dollar to a boy to find his dog. I can hire out to
+whistle for dogs, and can go around whistling and enjoy myself, and make
+money. Don't you think it is a good scheme?" asked the boy of the grocery
+man.
+
+"Naw," said the grocery man, as he charged the cheese to the boy's father,
+and picked up his cigar stub, which he had left on the counter, and which
+the boy had rubbed on the kerosene barrel, "No, sir, that whistle would
+scare any dog that heard it. Say, what was your Pa running after the
+doctor in his shirt sleeves for last Sunday morning? He looked scared. Was
+your Ma sick again?"
+
+"O, no; Ma is healthy enough, now she has got a new fur lined cloak. She
+played consumption on Pa, and coughed so she liked to raise her lights and
+liver, and made Pa believe she couldn't live, and got the doctor to
+prescribe a fur lined circular, and Pa went and got one, and Ma has
+improved awfully. Her cough is all gone, and she can walk ten miles. I was
+the one that was sick. You see, I wanted to get Pa into the church again,
+and get him to stop drinking, so I got a boy to write a letter to
+him, in a female hand, and sign the name of a choir singer Pa was mashed
+on, and tell him she was yearning for him to come back to the church, and
+that the church seemed a blank without his smiling face, and benevolent
+heart, and to please come back for her sake. Pa got the letters Saturday
+night and he seemed tickled, but I guess he dreamed about it all night,
+and Sunday morning he was mad, and he took me by the ear and said I
+couldn't come no 'Daisy' business on him the second time. He said he knew
+I wrote the letter, and for me to go up to the store room and prepare for
+the almightiest licking a boy ever had, and he went down stairs and broke
+up an apple barrel and got a stave to whip me with. Well, I had to think
+mighty quick, but I was enough for him. I got a dried bladder in my room,
+one that me and my chum got to the slotter house, and I blowed it partly
+up, so it would be sort of flat like, and I put it down inside the back
+part of my pants, right about where Pa hits when he punishes me. I knowed
+when the barrel stave hit the bladder it would explode. Well, Pa came up
+and found me crying. I can cry just as easy as you can turn on the water
+at a faucet, and Pa took off his coat and looked sorry. I was afraid he
+would give up whipping me when he saw me cry, and I wanted the bladder
+experiment to go on, so I looked kind of hard, as if I was defying him to
+do his worst, and then he took me by the neck and laid me across a trunk.
+I didn't dare struggle much for fear the bladder would loose itself, and
+Pa said, 'Now, Hennery, I am going to break you of this damfoolishness, or
+I will break your back,' and he spit on his hands and brought the barrel
+stave down on my best pants. Well, you'd a dide if you had heard the
+explosion. It almost knocked me off the trunk. It sounded like firing a
+firecracker away down cellar in a barrel, and Pa looked scared. I rolled
+off the trunk, on the floor, and put some flour on my face, to make me
+look pale, and then I kind of kicked my legs like a fellow who is dying on
+the stage, after being stabbed with a piece of lath, and groaned, and
+said, 'Pa you have killed me, but I forgive you,' and then rolled around,
+and frothed at the mouth, cause I had a piece of soap in my mouth to make
+foam. Well, Pa was all broke up. He said, 'Great God, what have I done? I
+have broke his spinal column. O, my poor boy, do not die!' I kept chewing
+the soap and foaming at the mouth, and I drew my legs up and kicked them
+out, and clutched my hair, and rolled my eyes, and then kicked Pa in the
+stummick as he bent over me, and knocked his breath out of him, and then
+my limbs began to get rigid, and I said, 'Too late, Pa, I die at the hand
+of an assassin. Go for a doctor.' Pa throwed his coat over me, and started
+down stairs on a run, 'I have murdered my brave boy,' and he told Ma to go
+up stairs and stay with me, cause I had fallen off a trunk and ruptured a
+blood vessel, and he went after a doctor. When he went out the front door,
+I sat up and lit a cigarette, and Ma came up and I told her all about how
+I fooled Pa, and if she would take on and cry, when Pa got back, I would
+get him to go to church again, and swear off drinking, and she said she
+would.
+
+[Illustration: "TOO LATE, PA, I DIE AT THE HAND OF AN ASSASSIN!"]
+
+"So when Pa and the doc. came back, Ma was sitting on a velocipede I used
+to ride, which was in the store-room, and she had her apron over her face,
+and she just more than bellowed. Pa he was pale, and he told the doc. he
+was just playing with me with a little piece of board, and he heard
+something crack, and he guessed my spine got broke falling off the trunk.
+The doctor wanted to feel where my spine got broke, but I opened my eyes
+and had a vacant kind of stare, like a woman who leads a dog by a string,
+and looked as though my mind was wandering, and I told the doctor there
+was no use setting my spine, as it was broke in several places,
+and I wouldn't let him feel of the dried bladder. I told Pa I was going to
+die, and I wanted him to promise me two things on my dying bed. He cried
+and said he would, and I told him to promise me he would quit drinking,
+and attend church regular, and he said he would never drink another drop,
+and would go to church every Sunday. I made him get down on his knees
+beside me and swear it, and the doc. witnessed it, and Ma said she was so
+glad, and Ma called the doctor out in the hall and told him the joke, and
+the doc. came in and told Pa he was afraid Pa's presence would excite the
+patient, and for him to put on his coat and go out and walk around the
+block, or go to church, and Ma and he would remove me to another room, and
+do all that was possible to make my last hours pleasant. Pa he cried, and
+said he would put on his plug hat and go to church, and he kissed me, and
+got flour on his nose, and I came near laughing right out, to see the
+white flour on his red nose, when I thought how the people in church would
+laugh at Pa. But he went out feeling mighty bad, and then I got up and
+pulled the bladder out of my pants, and Ma and the doc. laughed awful.
+When Pa got back from church and asked for me, Ma said that I had gone
+down town. She said the doctor found my spine was only uncoupled and he
+coupled it together, and I was all right. Pa was nervous all the
+afternoon, and Ma thinks he suspects that we played it on him. Say, you
+don't think there is any harm in playing it on an old man a little for a
+good cause, do you?"
+
+The grocery man said he supposed, in the interest of reform it was all
+right, but if it was his boy that played such tricks he would take an ax
+to him, and the boy went out, apparently encouraged, saying he hadn't seen
+the old man since the day before, and he was almost afraid to meet him.
+
+
+A MUSICAL CRITIQUE.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROTUND URSO.]
+
+The second lecture of the Library Association course was delivered on
+Tuesday evening by a female lecturer named Camilla Urso, on a fiddle. The
+lecturer was supported by a female singer, two male clamsellers, and a
+piano masher, all of them decidedly talented in their particular lines.
+The lecture on the fiddle gave the most unbounded satisfaction, and the
+Association in taking this new departure, has struck a popular chord.
+Scarcely a person in the vast audience but would prefer such an
+entertainment to a dry lecture by some dictionary sharp. Of the
+performance, it is unnecessary to go into details, as all our readers were
+there, with few exceptions. The fat female, Urso, more than carved the
+fiddle. She dug sweet morsels of music out of it, all the way from the
+wish-bone to the part that goes over the fence last. She made it talk
+Norwegian, and squeezed little notes out of it not bigger than a cambric
+needle, and as smooth as a book agent. The female singer was fair, though
+nothing to brag on, while the male grasshopper sufferers sang as well as
+was necessary. But the most agile flea-catcher that has been here since
+Anna Dickinson's time, was sixteen-fingered Jack, the sandhill
+crane that had the disturbance with the piano. We never knew what the row
+was about, but when he walked up to the piano smiling, and shied his
+castor into the ring, everybody could see there was going to be trouble.
+He spit on his hands, sparred a little, and suddenly landed a stunning
+blow right on the ivory, which staggered the piano, and caused an
+exclamation of agony. First knock down for Jack. He paused a moment and
+then began putting in blows right and left, in such a cruel manner that
+the spectators came near breaking into the ring. Whenever a key showed its
+head he mauled it. We never saw a piano stand so much punishment, and
+live, and Jack never got a scratch. The whole concert was a success, and
+the troupe can always get a good house here.
+
+
+A DEAD SURE THING.
+
+The only persons that are real sure that their calling and election is
+sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots, are the men who are
+hung for murder. They always announce that they have got a dead thing on
+it, just before the drop falls. How encouraging it must be to children to
+listen to the prayers of our ministers in churches, who admit that they
+are miserable sinners living on God's charity, and doubtful if they would
+be allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of their
+unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then let the children
+read an account of a hanging bee, and see how happy the condemned man is,
+how he shouts glory hallelujah, and confesses that, though he killed his
+man, he is going to heaven. A child will naturally ask why don't the
+ministers murder somebody and make a dead sure thing of it?
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA MORTIFIED.
+
+"What was the health officer doing over to your house this morning?" said
+the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth was firing frozen potatoes at
+the man who collects garbage in the alley.
+
+"O, they are searching for sewer gas and such things, and they have got
+plumbers and other society experts till you can't rest, and I came away
+for fear they would find the sewer gas and warm my jacket. Say, do you
+think it is right when anything smells awfully, to always lay it to a
+boy?"
+
+"Well, in nine cases out of ten they would hit it right, but what do you
+think is the trouble over to your house, honest?"
+
+"S-h-h! Now don't breathe a word of it to a living soul, or I am a dead
+boy. You see I was over to the dairy fair at the Exposition building
+Saturday night, and when they were breaking up me and my chum helped to
+carry boxes of cheese and firkins of butter, and a cheese man gave each of
+us a piece of limberger cheese, wrapped up in tin foil. Sunday morning I
+opened my piece, and it made me tired. O, it was the offulest smell I ever
+heard of, except the smell when they found a tramp who hung himself in the
+woods on the Whitefish Bay road, and had been dead three weeks. It was
+just like an old back number funeral. Pa and Ma were just getting ready to
+go to church, and I cut off a piece of cheese and put it in the inside
+pocket of Pa's vest, and I put another in the lining of Ma's muff, and
+they went to church. I went down to church too, and sat on a back seat
+with my chum, looking just as pious as though I was taking up a
+collection. The church was pretty warm, and by the time they got up to
+sing the first hymn Pa's cheese began to smell a match against
+Ma's cheese. Pa held one side of the hymn book and Ma held the other, and
+Pa he always sings for all that is out, and when he braced himself and
+sang 'Just as I am,' Ma thought Pa's voice was tinctured a little with
+biliousness, and she looked at him and hunched him, and told him to stop
+singing and breathe through his nose, cause his breath was enough to stop
+a clock. Pa stopped singing and turned around kind of cross towards Ma,
+and then he smelled Ma's cheese and he turned his head the other way and
+said, 'whew,' and they didn't sing any more, but they looked at each other
+as though they smelled frowy. When they sat down they sat as far apart as
+they could get, and Pa sat next to a woman who used to be a nurse in a
+hospital, and when she smelled Pa's cheese she looked at him as though she
+thought he had the small pox, and she held her handkerchief to her nose.
+The man in the other end of the pew, that Ma sat near, he was a stranger
+from Racine, who belongs to our church, and he looked at Ma sort of queer,
+and after the minister prayed, and they got up to sing again, the man took
+his hat and went out, and when he came by me he said something in a
+whisper about a female glue factory.
+
+[Illustration: "JUST AS I AM."]
+
+"Well, sir, before the sermon was over everybody in that part of the
+church had their handkerchiefs to their noses, and they looked at Pa and
+Ma scandalous, and the two ushers they came around in the pews looking for
+a dog, and when the minister got over his sermon, and wiped the
+prespiration off his face, he said he would like to have the trustees of
+the church stay after meeting, as there was some business of importance to
+transact. He said the question of proper ventilation and sewerage for the
+church would be brought up, and that he presumed the congregation had
+noticed this morning that the church was unusually full of sewer gas. He
+said he had spoken of the matter before, and expected it would be attended
+to before this. He said he was a meek and humble follower of the lamb, and
+was willing to cast his lot wherever the Master decided, but he would be
+blessed if he would preach any longer in a church that smelled like a bone
+boiling establishment. He said religion was a good thing, but no person
+could enjoy religion as well in a fat rendering establishment as he could
+in a flower garden, and as far as he was concerned he had got enough.
+Everybody looked at everybody else, and Pa looked at Ma as though he knew
+where the sewer gas came from, and Ma looked at Pa real mad, and me and my
+chum lit out, and I went home and distributed my cheese all around. I put
+a slice in Ma's bureau drawer, down under her underclothes, and a piece in
+the spare room, under the bed, and a piece in the bath-room in the soap
+dish, and a slice in the album on the parlor table, and a piece in the
+library in a book, and I went to the dining room and put some under the
+table, and dropped a piece under the range in the kitchen. I tell you the
+house was loaded for bear. Ma came home from church first, and when I
+asked where Pa was, she said she hoped he had gone to walk around the
+block to air hisself. Pa came home to dinner and when he got a smell of
+the house he opened all the doors, and Ma put a comfortable around her
+shoulders, and told Pa he was a disgrace to civilization. She tried to get
+Pa to drink some carbolic acid. Pa finally convinced Ma that it was not
+him, and then they decided it was the house that smelled so, as well as
+the church, and all Sunday afternoon they went visiting, and this morning
+Pa went down to the health office and got the inspector of nuisances to
+come up to the house, and when he smelled around a spell he said there was
+dead rats in the main sewer pipe, and they sent for plumbers, and Ma went
+out to a neighbors to borry some fresh air, and when the plumbers began to
+dig up the floor in the basement I came over here. If they find any of
+that limberger cheese it will go hard with me. The hired girls have both
+quit, and Ma says she is going to break up keeping house and board. That
+is just into my hand. I want to board at a hotel, where you can have a
+bill-of-fare, and tooth picks, and billiards, and everything. Well I guess
+I will go over to the house and stand in the back door and listen to the
+mocking bird. If you see me come flying out of the alley with my coat tail
+full of boots you can bet they have discovered the sewer gas."
+
+
+MRS. LANGTRY.
+
+America is to be visited by the most beautiful woman in all England, Mrs.
+Langtry. It is said that she is so sweet that when you look at her you
+feel caterpillars crawling up the small of your back, your heart begins to
+jump like a box car, and a streak of lightning goes down one trousers leg
+and up the other, and escapes up the back of your neck, causing the hair
+to raise and be filled with electricity enough to light a circus tent, and
+that when looking at her your hands clutch nervously as though you wanted
+to grasp something to hold you up, a sense of faintness comes over you,
+your eyes roll heavenward, your head falls helpless on your breast, your
+left side becomes numb, your liver quits working, your breath comes hot
+and heavy, your lips turn livid and tremble, your teeth chew on imaginary
+taffy, and you look around imploringly for somebody to take her away. If
+all this occurs to a person from looking at her, it would be sudden death
+or six months illness, to shake hands with her. If she comes to Milwaukee,
+there is one bald headed man going to the country where they are not so
+bad. You bet!
+
+
+A PECK AT THE CHEESE.
+
+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 Cremationists:_ 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 will 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.
+
+[Illustration: A SCENE IN PARADISE.]
+
+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 from 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 with 300
+oxen. This is susceptible of demonstration. If any boy showed a desire to
+become a statesman, I would say to him, "Young man, get married, buy a
+mooly 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-shaped 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.
+
+
+SELLING CLAMS.
+
+At the concert Wednesday night, the last piece sung was a trio, by Marie
+Rose, Brignoli, and Carleton. The men stood on each side of the girl and
+began to jaw at her. It was in some other language, and we could only
+understand by the motion of their mouths and their actions. It seemed as
+though the men were trying to sell clams to her. First Brignoli began to
+whoop it up, and describe the clams he had to sell, and tried to get her
+to invest. He yelled at her, and seemed really put out, and she was as
+spunky as any girl we ever saw. When Brignoli got out of breath, Carleton
+began to tell her that Brig had been lying to her, that his clams were
+made of India rubber, and that she could never digest them in the wide
+world, and he wound up by telling her that she could have his clams at ten
+per cent discount for cash. By this time she was about as mad as she could
+be, and she pitched into both of them, looking cross, and sung like
+blazes, went away up the musical ladder to zero, and wound up by telling
+them both, to their face, that she would see them in Chicago before she
+would buy a condemned clam. And then they all went off the stage as though
+they had been having a regular fight, and Brignoli acted as though he
+would like to eat her raw. That's the way it seemed to us, but we are no
+musician.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GOES SKATING.
+
+"What is that stuff on your shirt bosom, that looks like soap grease?"
+said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came into the grocery the
+morning after Christmas.
+
+The boy looked at his shirt front, put his finger on the stuff and smelled
+of his fingers, and then said, "O, that is nothing but a little of the
+turkey dressing and gravy. You see after Pa and I got back from the roller
+skating rink yesterday, Pa was all broke up and he couldn't carve the
+turkey, and I had to do it, and Pa sat in a stuffed chair with his head
+tied up, and a pillow amongst his legs, and he kept complaining that I
+didn't do it right. Gol darn a turkey any way. I should think they would
+make a turkey flat on the back, so he would lay on a greasy platter
+without skating all around the table. It looks easy to see Pa carve a
+turkey, but when I speared into the bosom of that turkey, and began to saw
+on it, the turkey rolled around as though it was on castors, and it was
+all I could do to keep it out of Ma's lap. But I rasseled with it till I
+got off enough white meat for Pa and Ma and dark meat enough for me, and I
+dug out the dressing, but most of it flew into my shirt bosom, cause the
+string that tied up the place where the dressing was concealed about the
+person of the turkey, broke prematurely, and one oyster hit Pa in the eye,
+and he said I was as awkward as a cross-eyed girl trying to kiss a man
+with a hair lip. If I ever get to be the head of a family I shall carve
+turkeys with a corn sheller.
+
+"But what broke your Pa up at the roller skating rink?" asked the grocery
+man.
+
+"O, everything broke him up. He is split up so Ma buttons the top of his
+pants to his collar button, like a bicycle rider. Well, he had no business
+to have told me and my chum that he used to be the best skater in
+North America, when he was a boy. He said he skated once from Albany to
+New York in an hour and eighty minutes. Me and my chum thought if Pa was
+such a terror on skates we would get him to put on a pair of roller skates
+and enter him as the 'great unknown,' and clean out the whole gang. We
+told Pa that he must remember that roller skates were different from ice
+skates, and that maybe he couldn't skate on them, but he said it didn't
+make any difference what they were as long as they were skates, and he
+would just paralyze the whole crowd. So we got a pair of big roller skates
+for him, and while we were strapping them on, Pa looked at the skaters
+glide around on the smooth wax floor just as though they were greased. Pa
+looked at the skates on his feet, after they were fastened, sort of
+forlorn like, the way a horse thief does when they put shackles on his
+legs, and I told him if he was afraid he couldn't skate with them we would
+take them off, but he said he would beat anybody there was there, or bust
+a suspender. Then we straightened Pa up, and pointed him towards the
+middle of the room, and he said, 'leggo,' and we just give him a little
+push to start him, and he began to go. Well, by gosh, you'd a dide to have
+seen Pa try to stop. You see, you can't stick in your heel and stop, like
+you can on ice skates, and Pa soon found that out, and he began to turn
+sideways, and then he threw his arms and walked on his heels, and he lost
+his hat, and his eyes began to stick out, cause he was going right towards
+an iron post. One arm caught the post and he circled around it a few
+times, and then he let go and began to fall, and, sir, he kept falling all
+across the room, and everybody got out of the way, except a girl, and Pa
+grabbed her by the polonaise, like a drowning man grabs at straws, though
+there wasn't any straws in her polonaise as I know of, but Pa just pulled
+her along as though she was done up in a shawl-strap, and his
+feet went out from under him and he struck on his shoulders and kept a
+going, with the girl dragging along like a bundle of clothes. If Pa had
+had another pair of roller skates on his shoulders, and castors on his
+ears, he couldn't have slid along any better. Pa is a short, big man, and
+as he was rolling along on his back, he looked like a sofa with castors on
+being pushed across a room by a girl. Finally Pa came to the wall and had
+to stop, and the girl fell right across him, with her roller skates in his
+neck, and she called him an old brute, and told him if he didn't let go of
+her polonaise she would murder him. Just then my chum and me got there and
+we amputated Pa from the girl, and lifted him up, and told him for
+heaven's sake to let us take off the skates, cause he couldn't skate any
+more than a cow, and Pa was mad and said for us to 'let him alone,' and he
+could skate all right, and we let go and he struck out again. Well, sir, I
+was ashamed. An old man like Pa ought to knonv better than to try to be a
+boy. This last time Pa said he was going to spread himself, and if I am
+any judge of a big spread, he did spread himself. Some how the skates had
+got turned around side-ways on his feet, and his feet got to going in
+different directions, and Pa's feet were getting so far apart that I was
+afraid I would have two Pa's, half the size, with one leg apiece.
+
+[Illustration: "PA GRABBED HER BY THE POLONAISE."]
+
+"I tried to get him to take up a collection of his legs, and get them in
+the same ward but his arm flew around and hit me on the nose, and I
+thought if he wanted to strike the best friend he had, he could
+run his old legs his self. When he began to separate I could hear the
+bones crack, but maybe it was his pants, but anyway he came down on the
+floor like one of these fellows in a circus who spreads hisself, and he
+kept agoing and finally he surrounded an iron post with his legs, and
+stopped and looked pale, and the proprietor of the rink told Pa if he
+wanted to give a flying trapeze performance he would have to go to the
+gymnasium, and he couldn't skate on his shoulders any more, cause other
+skaters were afraid of him. Then Pa said he would kick the liver out of
+the proprietor of the rink, and he got up and steaded himself, and then he
+tried to kick the man, but both heels went up to wonct, and Pa turned a
+back summersault and struck right on his vest in front. I guess it knocked
+the breath out of him, for he didn't speak for a few minutes, and then he
+wanted to go home, and we put him in a street car, and he laid down on the
+hay and rode home. O, the work we had to get Pa's clothes off. He had
+cricks in his back, and everywhere, and Ma was away to one of the
+neighbors, to look at the presents, and I had to put liniment on Pa, and I
+made a mistake and got a bottle of furniture polish, and put it on Pa and
+rubbed it in, and when Ma came home, Pa smelled like a coffin at a charity
+funeral, and Ma said there was no way of getting that varnish off of Pa
+till it wore off: Pa says holidays are a condemned nuisance anyway. He
+will have to stay in the house all this week.
+
+"You are pretty rough on the old man," said the grocery man, "after he has
+been so kind to you and given you nice presents."
+
+"Nice presents nothin. All I got was a 'Come to Jesus' Christmas card,
+with brindle fringe, from Ma, and Pa gave me a pair of his old suspenders,
+and a calender with mottoes for every month, some quotations from
+scripture, such as 'honor thy father and mother,' and 'evil communications
+corrupt two in the bush,' and a bird in the hand beats two pair.' Such
+things don't help a boy to be good. What a boy wants is club skates, and
+seven shot revolvers, and such things. Well, I must go and help Pa roll
+over in bed, and put on a new porous plaster. Good bye."
+
+
+TRYING TO SAVE TWO SHILLINGS.
+
+No person ever wants to tell us again how to save two shillings. When we
+started for Chippewa Falls, to attend the celebration, we only had a few
+hundred dollars along, and we felt like saving all that was possible. Just
+before arriving at Sparta, where we were to take supper, Dan McDonald got
+to telling about how to save twenty-five cents on meals at these eating
+houses, when traveling. He said that all you had to do when you come out
+from supper was to look like a bummer, or "traveling man," hand the
+door-keeper fifty cents and wink twice with the left eye, and he would
+pass you right out, as though you had paid seventy-five cents. If you
+handed out a dollar bill, and he only gave you back twenty-five cents, you
+only had to hold out your hand and wink a couple of times, and the man
+would give you the other quarter. Dan said he always did that way, and he
+had saved hundreds of dollars. He said these bummers only paid fifty cents
+a meal, and there was no use of anybody else paying more, if they had
+cheek enough to play it on the landlord.
+
+[Illustration: "OH, THAT WILL BE ALL RIGHT!"]
+
+We never had anything strike us any more reasonable than the statement of
+Mr. McDonald, and we determined to try it. To a man who was traveling a
+good deal lecturing, a saving of twenty-five cents a meal was worth
+looking into, and we made up our mind to begin to economize that very
+night. The train stopped and we walked across the platform as near like a
+bummer as possible. With our hat on one side, we threw a cigar stub into
+the parlor window, said "Hello, old tapeworm," to the landlord in a
+familiar sort of way, chucked our hat into a chair; rushed into the
+dining-room, took a seat at the head of the table, and told a girl to cart
+out all she had got. The landlord looked at us as though he thought we
+were one of Field, Leiter & Co.'s bummers, his good wife looked
+frightened, as though she feared we would kick a leg off the table and
+spill things. However, there is no use of describing the meal, and how we
+went through brook trout and strawberry shortcake, and things. We couldn't
+help feeling sorry for the man that was destined to furnish all that for
+fifty cents. Finally we went out. We felt a sort of palpitation of the
+heart when we approached the hungry-looking man at the door, taking the
+money. He looked as though he was a sick orphan trying to save money
+enough to get to a water cure. Picking our teeth with our finger, like a
+Chicago bummer, and pulling our handkerchief out of our pistol pocket and
+blowing our nose like a thirty-two pounder, just as we had heard a Chicago
+fellow do, we handed the man fifty cents, winked a couple of times and
+started to go by. The tobacco sign standing there said, "twenty-five cents
+more, please." We looked at him, winked, and said, "O, that will be all
+right." "Two shillings more, my friend," said the summer resort. We winked
+some more, and punched him in the ribs with our thumb, and said, "O, now,
+old tapeworm, don't try to play it on us boys." And we laughed a sickly
+sort of laugh. The fact of it was, we began to have doubts about the thing
+working, and had a suspicion that the twinkle in Dan McDonald's eye meant
+that he had been playing it on us. The landlord said he should have to
+have two shillings more, and that we were blocking up the thoroughfare,
+and we fumbled around and found it and paid him, and went out, probably
+the most disgusted excursionist that ever was. Dan, who had watched the
+whole business, slapped us on the shoulder, and said, "How did it work?"
+Though not particularly hungry, we could have eaten him raw. When we go
+east now, we take a lunch along, and when the other passengers are in to
+supper, we sit on the woodpile at Sparta, eat our lunch and gaze at the
+fountains, talk with the brakemen, and wonder if the landlord would know
+us if we should go in and take a toothpick off the counter. Not any more
+bummer for us, and no man must ever tell us how to save two shillings on a
+meal.
+
+
+HOW TO REACH YOUNG MEN.
+
+"How to reach young men," was the topic at the young men's prayer meeting
+on Thursday. An old gentleman on the East Side who broke a toe nail by
+kicking the gate post just as the young man went down the sidewalk, would
+also like to know. Bait your hook with a mighty good looking girl that
+wears a sealskin cloak, and you can reach the young men.
+
+
+CRUSHING NIHILISM.
+
+The Russian government is making an average of four thousand arrests a day
+of persons charged with nihilism. At this rate it is only a question of
+time when the last of the conspirators will be in prison, and the emperor
+can walk out without fear of assassination from his wife and children, as
+these will probably be all the people that will be left.
+
+
+WOMAN-DOZING A DEMOCRAT.
+
+A fearful tale conies 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,
+"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.
+
+[Illustration: "YELL, OR GO DOWN!"]
+
+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 folks 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. Chapin'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 be 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-wood Democrat hurrahed for Garfield.
+
+
+THE WRONG CORPSE.
+
+A corpse got a good joke on the people of Quebec the other day. It came
+there by express, and was only an ordinary, every-day man, but the Kanucks
+were looking for a military corpse, and supposing our ordinary corpse to
+be he, they got up a Fifth avenue funeral, and buried it with military
+honors. The corpse, who didn't know a thing about military matters, must
+have many a good laugh over the mistake. And how the military corpse must
+have felt, when HE came!
+
+
+THE DAY WE REACHED CANADA.
+
+D.H. Pulcifer, of Shawano, announces that he is about to prepare a
+biography of all the members of the territorial legislature and subsequent
+legislatures, state officers, members of congress, etc., and desires all
+men who may have been great or may be so now, to send in the particulars.
+Well, you can get our record at the adjutant general's office, though
+there is one mistake in that record. It was in June, 1862 that we arrived
+in Canada, the day before the draft.
+
+
+A LIVELY TRAIN LOAD.
+
+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 into 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 never have 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 popcorn 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 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.
+
+[Illustration: ME LONG LOST DUKE.]
+
+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.
+
+
+CATS ON THE FENCE.
+
+Some idiot has invented a "cat teaser" to put on fences to keep cats from
+sitting there and singing. It consists of a three-cornered piece of tin,
+nailed on the top of the fence. We hope none of our friends will invest in
+the patent, for statistics show that while cats very often sit on fences
+to meditate, yet when they get it all mediated and get ready to sing a
+duet, they get down off the fence and get under a currant bush. We
+challenge any cat scientist to disprove the assertion.
+
+
+HOW SHARPER THAN A HOUND'S TOOTH.
+
+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 till last week. One day we met Pierce, the Watertown
+Junction hotel man, and he told us that he had a greyhound pup that was
+the finest bread dog--we think he said bread dog, though it might have
+been 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.
+
+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, the dog will reach from here to the Soldier's home.
+
+[Illustration: 'THEREBY HANGS A TAIL'.]
+
+His head is about as big as a graham gem, and runs down to a point no
+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 fall off a wagon track we
+tie a knot in his tail.
+
+
+A SAFE INVESTMENT.
+
+Up to the present time the _Sun_ has struggled along from infancy to
+middle age without a safe in its office. It has never needed one. It does
+not need one now, but custom has to do with these things. The associations
+that surround one, go far towards making these changes. When we look at
+the immense safes in the office of out neighbor, filled with bonds and
+mortgages, we feel that a safe will look well. So we purchased a sort of
+an iron range, with a nickle plated knob, and a lock with as many figures
+on it as a tax list or a lottery advertisement, and placed it where it
+will strike the visitor on his first entrance. Ah, what an imposing affair
+it is! As we lean back in a chair and 1ook at it, and close our eyes, we
+can see millions in it, in our mind. It is a cross between Alex.
+Mitchell's safe and a child's bank. It is not full, but it has evidently
+been taking something. It is a grand feeling to walk along the streets and
+feel that your head contains the secret which opens the safe. No one but
+yourself and your maker, and the maker of the safe knows the three numbers
+which will cause it to open. The numbers are safe with you, and the All
+Seeing Eye you have confidence will not give it away, so that the only
+show a burglar has is to get solid with the maker of the safe.
+
+What a piece of mechanism is the lock of a safe! The man we bought it of
+gave us the programme that opens it. You go to the dial turn the knob, put
+your finger by your nose and wink. If you leave out the wink, the safe
+will not open, but we never leave out the wink. The trouble is, if there
+is a lady customer in with a bill, and we go to open the safe, we wink too
+many times and have to go all over it again. Then we place the numbers in
+their order, 4-11-44, and when the "four" is exactly opposite the
+dipthong, we turn the knob back three revolutions, light a cigar,
+and walk three times around the room. That is to give the mechanism in the
+Inside time to coalesce. Then we put the "eleven" in its place, turn the
+knob forward one revolution, and put on our hat and go out and take a
+drink. That is in the programme, and we sometimes think the inventor of
+the lock is interested in a brewery. Then we come back, wipe our mustache
+on the tail of a linen coat, place the figures "44" directly over the
+pointer, whistle "There's a land that is fairer than this," place the
+right foot forward, then turn the knob, the door swings on its hinges, and
+the untold wealth of the Indies lies before us, in our alleged mind.
+
+O, safe, are you honest? Are you true to us? You look pure and chaste, and
+your new overskirt of varnish, and your puffed ruching of gold and blue
+sets you off to good advantage, but you may not be impregnable. You have
+always gone in good society, and no scandal has ever been attached to your
+name. Your purity and innocence has been remarked by all who have met you,
+and there are none who would dare to intimate but that you would maintain
+your reputation against any attack, but sometimes we think we should
+hesitate to leave you all alone, with the light turned down all night and
+over Sunday, in the company of an eloquent, persuasive, good-looking
+burglar armed with a jimmy, and we fear that his warm hearted can of
+powder would strike a responsive chord in your impulsive nature, and that
+you would yield up the jewels confined to you, and your honor, your
+reputation, your standing among safes would be forever ruined. And yet we
+may be wrong.
+
+But what would it profit a burglar to gain the whole contents and wear out
+his soles. If he got in that safe, he would find a package of bills that
+we tried for a year to collect, and we would give him the bills if he
+asked for them, and he could save his powder. He would find one bill of
+sixteen dollars, with an indorsement that one dollar is paid,
+after thirteen dollars worth of shoe leather had been worn out. And yet
+the burglar would have a soft thing on cigars with that bill, for every
+time he visited the doctor he would tell him when to come again, and give
+him a cigar. Another thing the burglar would find would be a protested
+draft from a great Philadelphia patent medicine advertiser. The burglar
+could take a tie pass that is in the safe, and walk to Philadelphia, and
+trade out the twenty-five dollar draft by taking buchu on account.
+
+But no burglar that has any respect for himself, we feel sure, will ever
+do us the injury to scrape the paint off of that safe.
+
+
+A FASHION ITEM.
+
+A fashion item says, "The drawers this year are made very short, and some
+have lace ruffles." Some fashion reporter has evidently been looking over
+our back fence at the clothes line. But they got awfully fooled. The
+shortness of those drawers was caused by the flannel shrinking and the
+"lace ruffles" the reporter noticed is where a calf chewed them when they
+were hanging out to dry last fall on Black Hawk Island, when a gun kicked
+us out of a boat. Some of these fashion reporters think they are smart.
+
+
+A LECTURER SHOULD KNOW WHAT HE TALKS ABOUT.
+
+A man down east is lecturing on "Hell, Ingersoll, and Whisky." If the
+lecturer is at all familiar with his subjects, we wouldn't believe him
+under oath.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GOES CALLING.
+
+"Say, you are getting too alfired smart," said the grocery man to the bad
+boy as he pushed him into a corner by the molasses barrel, and took him by
+the neck and choked him so his eyes stuck out. "You have driven away
+several of my best customers, and now, confound you, I am going to have
+your life," and he took up a cheese knife and began to sharpen it on his
+boot.
+
+"What's the--gurgle--matter?" asked the choking boy, as the grocery man's
+finger let up on his throat a little, so he could speak. "I haint done
+nothing."
+
+"Didn't you hang up that gray torn cat by the heels, in front of my store,
+with the rabbits I had for sale? I didn't notice it until the minister
+called me out in front of the store, and pointing to the rabbits, asked
+what good fat cats were selling for. By crimus, this thing has got to
+stop. You have got to move out of this ward or I will."
+
+The boy got his breath and said it wasn't him that put the cat up there.
+He said it was the policeman, and he and his chum saw him do it, and he
+just come in to tell the grocery man about it, and before he could speak
+he had his neck nearly pulled off. The boy began to cry, and the grocery
+man said he was only joking, and gave him a box of sardines, and they made
+up. Then he asked the boy how his Pa put in his New Years, and the boy
+sighed and said:
+
+"We had a sad time at our house New Years. Pa insisted on making calls,
+and Ma and me tried to prevent it, but he said he was of age, and guessed
+he could make calls if he wanted to, so he looked at the morning paper and
+got the names of all the places where they were going to receive, and he
+turned his paper collar, and changed ends with his cuffs, and put some
+arnica on his handkerchief, and started out. Ma told him not to
+drink anything, and he said he wouldn't, but he did. He was full the third
+place he went to. O, so full. Some men can get full and not show it, but
+when Pa gets full, he gets so full his back teeth float, and the liquor
+crowds his eyes out, and his mouth gets loose and wiggles all over his
+face, and he laughs all the time, and the perspiration just oozes out of
+him, and his face gets red, and he walks so wide. O, he disgraced us all.
+At one place he wished the hired girl 'a happy new year' more than twenty
+times, and hung his hat on her elbow, and tried to put on a rubber hall
+mat for his over shoes. At another place he walked up a lady's train, and
+carried away a card basket full of bananas and oranges. Ma wanted my chum
+and me to follow Pa and bring him home, and about dark we found him in the
+door yard of a house where they have statues in front of the house, and he
+grabbed me by the arm, and mistook me for another caller, and insisted on
+introducing me to a marble statue without any clothes on. He said it was a
+friend of his, and it was a winter picnic. He hung his hat on an
+evergreen, and put his overcoat on the iron fence, and I was so mortified
+I almost cried. My chum said if his Pa made such a circus of himself he
+would sand bag him. That gave me an idea, and when we got Pa most home I
+went and got a paper box covered with red paper, so it looked just like a
+brick, and a bottle of tomato ketchup, and when we got Pa up on the steps
+at home I hit him with the paper brick, and my chum squirted the ketchup
+on his head, and we demanded his money, and then he yelled murder, and we
+lit out, and Ma and the minister, who was making a call on her, all the
+afternoon, they came to the door and pulled Pa in. He said he had been
+attacked by a band of robbers, and they knocked his brains out, but he
+whipped them, and then Ma saw the ketchup brains oozing out of his head,
+and she screamed, and the minister said. 'Good heavens, he is murdered!'
+and just then I came in the back door and they sent after the
+doctor, and they put Pa on the lounge, and tied up his head with a towel
+to keep the brains in, and Pa began to snore, and when the doctor came in
+it took them half an hour to wake him, and then he was awful sick to his
+stummick, and then Ma asked the doctor if he would live, and the doc.
+analyzed the ketchup and smelled of it and told Ma he would be all right
+if he had a little Worcester sauce to put on with the ketchup, and when he
+said Pa would pull through, Ma looked awful sad. Then Pa opened his eyes
+and saw the minister and said that was one of the robbers that jumped on
+him, and he wanted to whip the minister, but the doc. held Pa's arms and
+Ma sat on his legs, and the minister said he had got some other calls to
+make, and he wished Ma a happy new year in the hall, much as fifteen
+minutes. His happy new year to Ma is most as long as his prayers. Well, we
+got Pa to bed, and when we undressed him we found nine napkins in the
+bosom of his vest, that he had picked up at the places where he had
+called. He is all right this morning, but he says it is the last time he
+will drink coffee when he makes New Years calls.
+
+"Well, then you didn't have much fun yourself on New Years. That's too
+bad," said the grocery man, as he looked at the sad eyed youth. "But you
+look hard. If you were old enough I should say you had been drunk, your
+eyes are red."
+
+[Illustration: HAPPY NEW YEAR, MUM!]
+
+"Didn't have any fun eh? Well, I wish I had as many dollars as I had fun.
+You see, after Pa got to sleep Ma wanted me and my chum to go to the
+houses that Pa had called at and return the napkins he had kleptomaniaced,
+so we dressed up and went. The first house we called at the girls were
+sort of demoralized. I don't know as I ever saw a girl drunk, but those
+girls acted queer. The callers had stopped coming, and the girls were
+drinking something out of shaving cups that looked like lather, and they
+said it was 'aignogg.' They laffed and kicked up their heels wuss nor a
+circus, and their collars got unpinned, and their faces was red, and they
+put their arms around me and my chum and hugged us and asked us if we
+didn't want some of the custard. You'd a dide to see me and my chum drink
+that lather. It looked just like soap suds with nutmaig in it, but by gosh
+it got in its work sudden. At first I was afraid when the girls hugged me,
+but after I had drank a couple of shaving cups full of the 'aignogg' I
+wasn't afraid no more, and I hugged a girl so hard she catched her breath
+and panted and said, 'O, don't.' Then I kissed her, and she is a great big
+girl, bigger'n me, but she didn't care. Say, did you ever kiss a girl full
+of aignogg? If you did it would break up your grocery business. You would
+want to waller in bliss instead of selling mackerel. My chum ain't no
+slouch either. He was sitting in a stuffed chair holding another New
+Year's girl, and I could hear him kiss her so it sounded like a cutter
+scraping on bare ground. But the girl's Pa came in and said he guessed it
+was time to close the place, unless they had a license for an all night
+house, and me and my chum went out. But _wasn't_ we sick when we got out
+doors. O, it seemed as though the pegs in my boots was the only thing that
+kept them down, and my chum he like to dide. He had been to dinner and
+supper and I had only been skating all day, so he had more to contend with
+than I did. O, my, but that lets me out on aignogg. I don't know how I got
+home, but I got in bed with Pa, cause Ma was called away to attend a baby
+matinee in the night. I don't know how it is, but there never is anybody
+in our part of town that has a baby but they have it in the night, and
+they send for Ma. I don't know what she has to be sent for every time for.
+Ma ain't to blame for all the young ones in this town, but she has got up
+a reputashun, and when we hear the bell ring in the night Ma gets up and
+begins to put on her clothes, and the next morning she comes in the dining
+room with a shawl over her head, and says, 'its a girl and weighs ten
+pounds,' or 'a boy,' if it's a boy baby. Ma was out on one of her
+professional engagements, and I got in bed with Pa. I had heard Pa blame
+Ma about her cold feet, so I got a piece of ice about as big as a raisin
+box, just zactly like one of Ma's feet, and laid it right against the
+small of Pa's back. I couldn't help laffing, but pretty soon Pa began to
+squirm and he said, 'Why'n 'ell don't you warm them feet before you come
+to bed,' and then he hauled back his leg and kicked me clear out in the
+middle of the floor, and said if he married again he would marry a woman
+who had lost both her feet in a railroad accident. Then I put the ice back
+in the bed with Pa and went to my room, and in the morning Pa said he
+sweat more'n a pail full in the night. Well, you must excuse me. I have an
+engagement to shovel snow off the sidewalk. But before I go, let me advise
+you not to drink aignogg, and don't sell tom cats for rabbits," and he got
+out of the door just in time to miss the rutabaga that the grocery man
+threw at him.
+
+
+WHAT THE DEMOCRATS WILL DO.
+
+The _Wisconsin_ asks, "What will the Democrats do?" We trust it is not
+betraying a confidence reposed in us by the manager of a party, but we can
+not allow our neighbor to remain in such dense ignorance, as long as we
+are possessed of the desired information. "What will the Democrats do?"
+The Democrats will prove an _alibi!_
+
+
+A SEWING MACHINE GIVEN TO THE BOSS GIRL.
+
+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 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 follow 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.
+
+[Illustration: I WANT TO BE AN ANGEL.]
+
+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 open 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 for 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.
+
+
+SHE WAS NO GENTLEMAN.
+
+From an article in the _Leader_ we gather that Frank Drake, editor of the
+Rushford _Star_, was horsewhipped by a woman who was dissatisfied with
+some article of his that appeared against her, in the _Star_. A woman that
+cowhides an editor is no gentleman.
+
+
+JOKE ON THE HAT.
+
+Somehow, during the election excitement, Frank Hatch happened to bet right
+just once. He bet a hat, and on Monday he went to Putnam & Philbrick and
+selected one of the finest silk ones. When he went out in the street every
+body noticed it, and a reception was held. They all congratulated Frank,
+except Ike Usher. Ike's hat was a year old, and the contrast was so
+remarkable that Ike would not walk on the street with Hatch. Frank said
+that Ike's hat used to be a very fine looking hat, but at present it was a
+disgrace to the force. Mr. Usher was offended, and he swore revenge. He
+went to a professional drunkard on Division street, and said that if he
+should happen to get drunk Monday night and Hatch should happen to arrest
+him, he would give the drunkard five dollars if the drunkard would mash
+Frank's new hat. The fellow said he would flatten it flatter than flatness
+itself. Just after dark Mr. Hatch was walking down Third street, "Whoop,
+hurrah for Tilden, (hic) 'endrix." The remark seemed so out of place that
+Frank went down there. The man was lying on the sidewalk, and telling the
+barrel to roll over and not take up all the bed. Mr. Hatch accosted the
+man gently, telling him he would catch cold there, and that he had better
+go with him to the city hotel. The man said he would--be counted in if he
+did, and Hatch bent over him to take him by the lily white hand, when a
+drunken boot came down on the top of that hat, and drove it clean down to
+Frank's nose. Of course it could go no further. Then the man pulled Frank
+down, and the hat struck the end of a salt barrel, knocked it off, and the
+man raised up and sat down on it, and kicked it into the street. Frank got
+the man away, and a boy brought his hat to the police station, just as
+Usher and Littlejohn and Knutson, and all the policeman entered. It is
+said that all stood on the corner over by Kevin's watching the
+arrest. The hat was a sight to behold, as it laid in state on the safe,
+and all the boys making comments on it. It looked like a six-inch stove
+pipe elbow that a profane man had been attempting to fit to a five-inch
+stove pipe. It looked like some old dripping pan that had been thrown out
+in the street, and had been run over by wagons. It looked like the very
+dickens. And yet we have no doubt Hatch will say this is a lie, because he
+now wears a good hat, but we know the hat he now wears he got by trading a
+flannel shirt to a grasshopper sufferer, and it no more resembles the
+beautiful new hat he won on election than nothing. After Hatch went out of
+the office, Usher let the man "escape," and he is five dollars ahead, and
+Ike has got even with Hatch.
+
+[Illustration: IT LOOKED LIKE AN OLD DRIPPING PAN.]
+
+
+THE THIRSTY GOPHER.
+
+A Minnesota town got a fire steamer on trial, and tested it by trying to
+drown out a gopher. After working it six hours, the gopher came out to get
+a drink. He would have died of thirst if they had kept the hole closed
+much longer.
+
+
+COLORED CONCERT TROUPES.
+
+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 Rose, 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 her red
+trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage looking as though she
+would have to be carried on a dust pan, 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
+the 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
+Wilhelmj or 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 out, 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.
+
+
+MATTIE MASHES MINNESOTA.
+
+Mrs. Mattie A. Bridge is meeting with great success in Minnesota. In some
+places she is retained until she lectures four times. She says the heart
+of Minnesota is warm towards her. We shall feel inclined to put a head on
+Minnesota, if it don't quit allowing its heart to get warm.
+
+
+WHY THE FEVER DIDN'T SPREAD.
+
+Portage City has had a sensation which, though at one time it looked
+serious, turned out to be a farce. A girl was taken sick, and a physician
+was called who pronounced it a case of yellow fever, and he made out a
+prescription for that disease. Mr. Brannan, editor of the Portage
+Register, who lives near, got the news, and imparted it to all whom he
+met, and they in turn told it to others, and a stampede was looked for.
+Fox turned the Fox House over to Bunker, and had his trunks checked for
+the Hot Springs. Corning and Jack Turner hired a wagon to take them to
+Briggsville. Haertel, the brewery man, offered to sell out his brewery and
+all his property for eight hundred dollars, and he bought a ticket for
+Germany. Bunker left the Fox House to run itself, and went to Devil's
+Lake. Sam. Branuan, telegraphed to George Clinton, at Denver, not
+to come home, as the yellow fever was raging, and people were dying off
+like rotton sheep. And Sam got vaccinated and went to Beaver Dam. The
+excitement was intense. Men became perfectly wild, and were going to rush
+off and leave the women and children to the mercies of the dead plague.
+Chicago and Milwaukee bummers could be seen at the hotels, kneeling beside
+their sample cases trying to pray, but they couldn't. Just before the
+train started that was to carry away the frightened populace, the doctor
+came up town and said that the girl with the yellow fever was better, and
+that she was the mother of a fine nine pound boy. The authorities took
+every precaution to prevent the spread of the yellow fever, by arresting
+the brakemen whom the girl said was the cause of all the trouble. All is
+quiet on the Wisconse now.
+
+[Illustration: DRUMMERS TRYING TO PRAY.]
+
+
+TOO PARTICULAR BY HALF.
+
+It is one of the mottoes of THE SUN never to publish anything that would
+cause a blush to mantle the cheek of innocence, or anybody. And yet,
+occasionally, a person finds fault. Not long since a man said he liked THE
+SUN well enough, only it had too much to say about patched breeches, which
+was offensive to some. Well, some people are so confounded high toned that
+if they were going to have a patch put on they would have it way up on the
+small of their back. Some of the best women in the world have sat up
+nights to sew a patch on their husband's pants. Martha Washington used to
+do it. But, G. Lordy, a family newspaper must not speak of a patch. When
+you take patches away from the people you strike a blow at their
+liberties. Don't be too nice.
+
+
+THE WAY TO NAME CHILDREN.
+
+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 to 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 to the door
+when the grocery delivery wagon was there, he would name the child "Boy
+from Dickson'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 Soltaire 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.
+
+
+AN EDITOR BURGLARIZED.
+
+The residence of John Turner, of the Mauston _Star_, was entered by
+burglars a few nights since, and his clothes were stolen, containing all
+his money and his railroad pass. We can imagine an editor around bare as
+to legs, etcetery, and out of money, but to be without a railroad pass
+must indeed be a sad state of affairs. When burglars burgle an editor it
+is a sign that confidence is restored under Hayes' administration. We
+trust that editors throughout the State who are blessed with this world's
+goods to the extent of more than one pair of pants, will send one pair at
+least to John Turner, Mauston, Wis., by express. We are probably as poor
+as any editor, but we have sent him those alligator pants that have
+created such a sensation in years gone by. It is true they are a little
+bit fringy about the bottoms, and the knees are worn through, and
+concealment, like a worm in the bud, has gnawed the foundation all out of
+them, but in a little town like Mauston, such things will not be noticed.
+John, take them, in welcome, and when the cold winds--but you better carry
+bricks in your coat tail pockets. That is the way we wore them the last
+three or four years.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA DISSECTED.
+
+"I understand your Pa has got to drinking again like a fish," says the
+grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth came in the grocery and took a
+handful of dried apples. The boy ate a dried apple and then made up a
+terrible face, and the grocery man asked him what he was trying to do with
+his face. The boy caught his breath and then said:
+
+"Say, don't you know any better than to keep dried apples where a boy can
+get hold of them when he has got the mumps? You will kill some boy yet by
+such dum carelessness. I thought these were sweet dried apples, but they
+are sour as a boarding house keeper, and they make me tired. Didn't you
+ever have the mumps? Gosh, but don't it hurt though? You have got to be
+darn careful when you have the mumps, and not go out bob-sledding, or
+skating, or you will have your neck swell up biggern a milk pail. Pa says
+he had the mumps once when he was a boy and it broke him all up."
+
+"Well, never mind the mumps, how about your Pa spreeing it. Try one of
+those pickles in the jar there, won't you. I always like to have a boy
+enjoy himself when he comes to see me," said the grocery man, winking to a
+man who was filling an old fashioned tin box with tobacco out of the pail,
+who winked back as much as to say, "if that boy eats a pickle on top of
+them mumps we will have a circus, sure."
+
+"You can't play no pickle on me, not when I have the mumps. Ma passed the
+pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the
+lockjaw. But Ma didn't do it on purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps
+and didn't know how discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn't feel as
+though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But
+about Pa. He has been fuller'n a goose ever since New Year's day. I think
+its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New
+Year's. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone. We
+have got brain, and know when we have got enough, but Pa, when he gets to
+going don't ever stop until he gets so sick that he can't keep his
+stummick inside of hisself. It is getting so they look to me to brace Pa
+up every time he gets on a tear, and I guess I fixed him this time so he
+will never touch liquor again. I scared him so his bald head turned gray
+in a single night."
+
+"What under the heavens have you done to him now?" says the grocery man,
+in astonishment. "I hope you haven't done anything you will regret in
+after years."
+
+"Regret nothing," said the boy, as he turned the lid of the cheese box
+back and took the knife and sliced off a piece of cheese, and took a few
+crackers out of a barrel, and sat down on a soap box by the stove, "You
+see Ma was annoyed to death with Pa. He would come home full, when she had
+company, and lay down on the sofa and snore, and he would smell like a
+distillery. It hurt me to see Ma cry, and I told her I would break Pa of
+drinking if she would let me, and she said if I would promise not to hurt
+Pa to go ahead, and I promised not to. Then I got my chum and another boy,
+to help, and Pa is all right. We went down to the place where they sell
+arms and legs, to folks who have served in the army, or a saw mill, or a
+threshing machine, and lose their limbs, and we borrowed some arms and
+legs, and fixed up a dissecting room. We fixed a long table in the
+basement, big enough to lay Pa out on you know, and then we got false
+whiskers and moustaches, and when Pa came in the house drunk and lay down
+on the sofa, and got to sleep, we took him and laid him out on the table,
+and took some trunk straps, and a circingle and strapped him down
+to the table. He slept right along all through it, and we had another
+table with the false arms and legs on, and we rolled up our sleeves, and
+smoked pipes, just like I read that medical students do when they cut up a
+man.
+
+"Well, you'd a dide to see Pa look at us when he woke up. I saw him open
+his eyes, and then we began to talk about cutting up dead men. We put
+hickery nuts in our mouths so our voices would sound different, so he
+wouldn't know us, and was telling the other boys about what a time we had
+cutting up the last man we bought. I said he was awful tough, and when we
+had got his legs off and had taken out his brain, his friends came to the
+dissecting room and claimed the body, and we had to give it up, but I
+saved the legs. I looked at Pa on the table and he began to turn pale, and
+he squirmed around to get up, but found he was fast. I had pulled his
+shirt up under his arms, while he was asleep, and as he began to move I
+took an icicle, and in the dim light of the candles, that were sitting on
+the table in beer botles, I drew the icicle across Pa's stummick and I
+said to my chum, 'Doc, I guess we had better cut open this old duffer and
+see if he died from inflamation of the stummick, from hard drinking, as
+the coroner said he did.' Pa shuddered all over when he felt the icicle
+going over his bare stummick, and he said, 'For God's sake, gentlemen,
+what does this mean? I am not dead.'
+
+"The other boys looked at Pa with astonishment, and I said 'Well, we
+bought you for dead, and the coroner's jury said you were dead, and by the
+eternal we ain't going to be fooled out of a corpse when we buy one, are
+we Doc?' My chum said not if he knowed his self, and the other students
+said, 'Of course he is dead. He thinks he is alive, but he died day before
+yesterday, fell dead on the street, and his folks said he had been a
+nuisance and they wouldn't claim the corpse, and we bought it at the
+morgue.' Then I drew the icicle across him again, and I said, 'I don't
+know about this, doctor. I find that blood follows the scalpel as I cut
+through the cuticle. Hand me the blood sponge please.' Pa began to wiggle
+around, and we looked at him, and my chum raised his eye-lid, and looked
+solemn, and Pa said, 'Hold on gentlemen. Don't cut into me any more, and I
+can explain this matter. This is all a mistake. I was only drunk.' We went
+in a corner and whispered, and Pa kept talking all the time. He said if we
+would postpone the hog killing he could send and get witnesses to prove
+that he was not dead, but that he was a respectable citizen, and had a
+family. After we held a consultation I went to Pa and told him that what
+he said about being alive might possibly be true, though we had our
+doubts. We had found such cases before in our practice east, where men
+seemed to be alive, but it was only temporary. Before we had got them cut
+up they were dead enough for all practical purposes. Then I laid the
+icicle across Pa's abdomen, and went on to tell him that even if he _was_
+alive it would be better for him to play that he _was_ dead, because he
+was such a nuisance to his family that they did not want him, and I was
+telling him that I had heard that in his lifetime he was very cruel to his
+boy, a bright little fellow who was at the head of his class in Sunday
+school and a pet wherever he was known, when Pa interrupted me and said,
+'Doctor, please take that carving knife off my stomach, for it makes me
+nervous. As for that boy of mine, he is the condemndest little whelp in
+town, and he isn't no pet anywhere. Now, you let up on this dissectin'
+business, and I will make it all right with you.' We held another
+consultation and then I told Pa that we did not feel that it was doing
+justice to society to give up the body of a notorious drunkard, after we
+had paid twenty dollars for the corpse. If there was any hopes that he
+would reform and try and lead a different life, it would be different, and
+I said to the boys, 'gentlemen, we must do our duty. Doc, you dismember
+that leg, and I will attend to the stomach and the upper part of body. He
+will be dead before we are done with him. We must remember that society
+has some claim on us, and not let our better natures be worked upon by the
+_post mortem_ promises of a dead drunkard.' Then I took my icicle and
+began fumbling around the abdomen portion of Pa's remains, and my chum
+took a rough piece of ice and began to saw his leg off, while the other
+boy took hold of the leg and said he would catch it when it dropped off.
+Well, Pa kicked like a steer. He said he wanted to make one more appeal to
+us, and we acted sort of impatent but we let up to hear what he had to
+say. He said if we would turn him loose he would give us ten dollars more
+than we paid for his body, and that he would never drink another drop as
+long as he lived. Then we whispered some more and then told him we thought
+favorably of his last proposition, but he must swear, with his hand on the
+leg of a corpse we were then dissecting that he would never drink again,
+and then he must be blindfolded and be conducted several blocks away from
+the dissecting room, before we could turn him loose. He said that was all
+right, and so we blindfolded him, and made him take a bloody oath, with
+his hand on a piece of ice that we told him was a piece of another corpse,
+and then we took him out of the house and walked him around the block four
+times, and left him on a corner, after he had promised to send the money
+to an address that I gave him. We told him to stand still five minutes
+after we left him, then remove the blindfold, and go home. We watched him,
+from behind a board fence, and he took off the handkerchief, looked at the
+name on a street lamp, and found he was not far from home. He started off
+saying 'That's a pretty narrow escape old man. No more whisky for you.' I
+did not see him again until this morning, and when I asked him where he
+was last night he shuddered and said 'none of your darn business. But I
+never drink any more, you remember that.' Ma was tickled and she told me I
+was worth my weight in gold. Well, good day. That cheese is musty." And
+the boy went and caught on a passing sleigh.
+
+
+COL. INGERSOLL PRAYING.
+
+Bob. Ingersoll is taking a rest from his persecutions of the Creator, and
+is traveling in the Yo Semite region of California. Bob does not believe
+there is a God, but if he was riding a kicking mule, down the precipice
+near the big trees, and the saddle should turn over with him, and his foot
+should be caught in the stirrup, after the mule had kicked him a few times
+in the judgement seat, which is the bowels, in his case, he would be very
+apt to bellow like a calf, and say "O, Lord, please unbuckle that cussed
+strap." We should like to hear Bob had met with some such accident, just
+so he would recognize the foreign government of the Lord, which at present
+he totally ignores. Not that we have anything against Ingersoll.
+
+
+HOW TO INVEST A THOUSAND DOLLARS.
+
+A young man advertises in a Milwaukee paper for a partnership. He wants to
+invest one thousand dollars in some established business. Go to La Crosse
+and go to betting on election. It pays, and is an established business.
+There's millions in it.
+
+
+BOYS AND CIRCUSES.
+
+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 circusses, 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 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 faith in the 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 wont 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 the 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 to 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 shot
+gun, 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.
+
+
+THE WATERS OF LA CROSSE.
+
+We have heretofore entirely overlooked the magnetic qualities of the La
+Crosse water. It will be remembered that the Fond du Lac water is
+advertised as magnetic water, and it has been said that a knife blade,
+after being soaked in the water will take up a watch key or a steel pen.
+That is nothing compared to the La Crosse water. Last week a man who had
+been soaked in La Crosse water, took up a watch, key and all, and a
+policeman who had been using the water took up the man, with the watch. A
+pair of ice tongs, made of steel, on being soaked in water, took up a
+piece of ice weighing over a hundred pounds, and a farmer named Dawson,
+after drinking the water took up a stray colt. A young couple stopped the
+other evening and took a drink of water and up Fourth street, and before
+they got to Seymour's corner they were walking so close together that you
+couldn't tell which the bustle was on. We have never seen water that had
+so much magnetism in as this. A pot of it on a house is better than a
+lightning rod.
+
+
+SARDINEINDIANAPOLIS.
+
+In company with a couple of hundred others who were firm in the belief
+that the Sardinapalus troupe were under the auspices of the Young Men's
+Christian Association, we attended the performance on Monday evening. It
+was heralded as coming from Booth's theater, N.Y., where it had a run of
+four months. Most of them got away while on the trip here, and only a few
+appeared. The scenery, which was also extensively advertised, was no more
+than could have been fixed up with a whitewash brush in half a day, by
+home talent. The play, what there was of it was well rendered, though many
+doubted the propriety of the king calling around him a lot of La Crosse
+soldiers, to hear him tell the Greek slave how he loved her. There was
+much dissatisfaction about the Greek slave. All marble statues of the
+Greek slave represent her with nothing on but a trace chain around one arm
+and one leg. But the party who got up this play went behind the returns
+and invested her with a white night gown, which detracted very much from
+history. The "soldiers" were picked up among the La Crosse boys, and they
+got tangled up, and couldn't form a line to save themselves, and when they
+stood against the wall it was a melancholy fact that they tickled the
+ballet girls in the ribs as they passed by. This was highly wrong. It
+takes the romance out of the affair to gaze upon an Assyrian soldier,
+covered with armor, and carrying a cover to a wash boiler in his hand, and
+to think that he is covered with scars won in battle, and then look at him
+through a glass and have him wink at you, and you find that you have seen
+him thousands of times standing on the postoffice corner, spitting tobacco
+juice across the sidewalk at the hydrant. Mrs. Sardinapalus did not
+appear, having gone to visit her uncle, but "Sard." stuck to the Greek
+slave like a sand burr to a boy's trousers. They laid down
+together on a bale of paper rags and looked at the dance. The dance was
+pretty good. First there came out about a dozen girls in tights, with
+skirts as short as pie crust. Their legs were all round and well got up,
+showing that the sawdust was evenly distributed, with no chance for
+dissatisfaction. They capered around, and smiled at the reflection of the
+red lights in the gallery upon the bald heads before them, and kicked up
+like all possessed, and then they backed up against the wings and fooled
+with the La Cross Assyrians, who came down like a wolf on the fold. Then
+there came out two first-class dancers, one short, fat, plump, but mighty
+small, so small that she didn't look as though she was big enough for a
+cork to a jug. But she could dance. Well, she ought to, as she had no
+clothes to bother her. Next came a brunette, evidently of French
+extraction, with a face that was a protection against assault with intent
+to kill, and legs of the Gothic style. Smith said she was spavined, but
+that's a lie. She danced better than all of them, and walked on her big
+toes till the audience yelled. Then the dancers all got tangled up
+together, the brunette fell over on the little blonde, stuck her hind foot
+right in the air as straight as a liberty pole struck by lightning,
+somebody said "Tableau," and the curtain went down, and the audience
+looked at each other as much as to say, "Let's go home." The boys in the
+gallery cheered, and the curtain was rung up again, but her flag was still
+there. Then they had a fighting scene, where everybody gets mad and goes
+out into the dressing room and clashes old swords together, and come back
+wounded. The king, after killing up a lot ahead, got a furlough and came
+in and lallygaged with the Greek slave a spell, and then the battle was
+lost, and "Sardine." said he might as well die for an old sheep as a lamb.
+So he ordered a funeral pile built of red fire, and he got on it to be
+burned up. The Greek slave said if that was the game she wanted a hand
+dealt to her, as wherever "Sard." went she was going, as she had
+an insurance policy against fire in the Northwestern Mutual. So he invited
+her on to the kindling wood, and after hugging enough to last them through
+perdition--and mighty good hugging it was too--the pile of slabs was
+touched off, the flames rolled, and "Sard." and the Greek slave went down
+to hell clasped in each other's embrace, and we went to the People's store
+and bought a mackerel and went home and told our wife we had been to a
+democratic caucus. We don't know what all the other fellows told their
+wives, but there has been a heap of lying, we know that much.
+
+[Illustration: "SARD." AND THE GREEK SLAVE.]
+
+
+INSECURE ABODES.
+
+Four men fell out of the Oshkosh jail the other day. If Oshkosh would only
+imitate Fond du lac, and paper the county jail with wall paper, it might
+become safe.
+
+
+THE KNIGHT AND THE BRIDAL CHAMBER.
+
+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 backwoods, 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, 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 swow 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 book-keeper 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 in 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.
+
+[Illustration: "THIS IS TOO ALLFIRED MUCH!"]
+
+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.
+
+
+SEVEN YEAR OLD HORSES.
+
+An old farmer once said, "What a year it must have been for colts seven
+years ago this spring." No person who has never attempted to buy a horse
+can appreciate the remark, but if he will let it be known that he wants to
+buy a good horse, he will be struck with the circumstance that all the
+horses that are of any particular account were born seven years ago.
+Occasionally there is one that is six years old, but they are not plenty,
+Now, those of us who lived around here seven years ago did not have our
+attention called to the fact that the country was flooded with colts.
+There were very few twin colts, and it was seldom that a mother had half a
+dozen colts following her. Farmers and stock raisers did not go round
+worrying about what they were going to do with so many colts. The papers,
+if we recollect right, were not filled with accounts of the extraordinary
+number of colts born. And yet it must have been a terrible year for colts,
+because there are only six horses in Milwaukee that are over seven years
+old, but one of them was found to have been pretty well along in years
+when he worked in Burnham's brick yard in 1848, and finally the owner
+owned up that he was mistaken twenty-six years. What a mortality there
+must have been among horses that would now be eight, nine or ten years
+old. There are none of them left. And a year from now, when our present
+stock of horses would naturally be eight years old they will all be dead,
+and a new lot of seven years old horses will take their places. It is
+singular, but it is true. That is, it is true unless horse dealers lie,
+and THE SUN would be slow to charge so grave a crime upon a useful and
+enterprising class of citizens. No, it cannot be, and yet, don't it seem
+peculiar that all the horses in this broad land are seven years old this
+spring? We leave the suject for the youth of the land to wonder over,
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA JOINS A TEMPERANCE SOCIETY.
+
+"Don't you think my Pa is showing his age a good deal more than usual?"
+asked the bad boy of the grocery man, as he took a smoked herring out of a
+box, and peeled off the skin with a broken bladed jack-knife, and split it
+open and ripped off the bone, threw the head at a cat, took some crackers
+and began to eat.
+
+"Well, I don't know but he does look as though he was getting old," said
+the grocery man, as he took a piece of yellow wrapping paper and charged
+the boy's poor old father with a dozen herrings and a pound of crackers;
+"But there is no wonder he is getting old. I wouldn't go through what your
+father has, the last year, for a million dollars. I tell you, boy, when
+your father is dead, and you get a step-father, and he makes you walk the
+chalk mark, you will realize what a bonanza you have fooled yourself out
+of by killing off your father. The way I figure it, your father will last
+about six months, and you ought to treat him right, the little time he has
+to live."
+
+"Well, I am going to," said the boy, as he picked the herring bones out of
+his teeth with a piece of a match that he sharpened with his knife. "But I
+don't believe in borrowing trouble about a step-father so long before
+hand. I don't think Ma could get a man to step into Pa's shoes, as long as
+I lived, not if she was inlaid with diamonds, and owned a brewery. There
+are brave men, I know, that are on the marry, but none of them would want
+to be brevet father to a cherubim like me, except he got pretty good
+wages. And then, since Pa was dissected he is going to lead a different
+life, and I guess I will make a man of him, if he holds out. We got him to
+join the Good Templars last night."
+
+"No, you don't tell me," said the grocery man, as he thought that
+his trade in cider for mince pies would be cut off. "So you got him into
+the Good Templars, eh?"
+
+"Well, he thinks he has joined the Good Templars, so it is all the same.
+You see my chum and me have been going to a private gymnasium, on the west
+side, kept by a Dutchman, and in the back room he has all the tools for
+getting up muscle. There, look at my arm," said the boy, as he rolled up
+his sleeve and showed a muscle about as big as an oyster. "That is the
+result of training at the gymnasium. Before I took lessons I hadn't any
+more muscle than you have got. Well, the Dutchman was going to a dance on
+the south side the other night, and he asked my chum to tend the
+gymnasium, and I told Pa if he would join the Good Templars that night
+there wouldn't be many at the lodge, and he wouldn't be so embarrassed,
+and as I was one of the officers of the lodge I would put it to him light,
+and he said he would go, so my chum got five other boys to help us put him
+through. So we steered him down to the gymnasium and made him rap on the
+storm door outside, and I said 'who comes there?' and he said it was a
+pilgrim who wanted to jine our sublime order. I asked him if he had made
+up his mind to turn from the ways of a hyena, and adopt the customs of the
+truly good, and he said if he knew his own heart he had, and then I told
+him to come in out of the snow and take off his pants. He kicked a little
+at taking off his pants, because it was cold out there in the storm door
+dog house, but I told him they all had to do it. The princes, potentates
+and paupers all had to come to it. He asked me how it was when we
+initiated women, and I told him women never took that degree. He pulled
+off his pants and wanted a check for them, but I told him the Grand Mogul
+would hold his clothes, and then I blind-folded him, and with a base ball
+club I pounded on the floor as I walked around the gymnasium, while the
+lodge, headed by my chum, sung, 'We won't go home till morning' I
+stopped in front of the ice water tank, and said, 'Grand Worthy Duke, I
+bring before you a pilgrim who has drank of the dregs until his stomach
+won't hold water, and who desires to swear off.' The Grand Mogul asked me
+if he was worthy and well qualified, and I told him that he had been drunk
+more or less since the reunion last summer, which ought to qualify him.
+Then the Grand Mogul made Pa repeat the most blood-curdling oath, in which
+Pa agreed, if he ever drank another drop, to allow anybody to pull his
+toe-nails out with tweezers, to have his liver dug out and fed to dogs,
+his head chopped off, and his eyes removed. Then the Mogul said he would
+brand the candidate on the bare back with the initial letters of our
+order, 'G.T.,' that all might read how a brand had been snatched from the
+burning. You'd a dide to see Pa flinch when I pulled up his shirt, and got
+ready to brand him.
+
+"My chum got a piece of ice out of the water cooler, and just as he
+clapped it on Pa's back I burned a piece of horses hoof in the candle, and
+held it to Pa's nose, and I guess Pa actually thought it was his burning
+skin that he smelled. He jumped about six feet and said, 'Great heavens,
+what you dewin,' and then he began to roll over a barrel which I had
+arranged for him. Pa thought he was going down cellar, and he hung to the
+barrel, but he was on top half the time. When Pa and the barrel got
+through fighting I was beside him, and I said, 'Calm yourself, and be
+prepared for the ordeal that is to follow.' Pa asked how much of this dum
+fooling there was, and said he was sorry he joined. He said he could let
+licker alone without having the skin all burned off his back. I told Pa to
+be brave and not weaken, and all would-be well. He wiped the prespiration
+off his face on the end of his shirt, and we put a belt around his body
+and hitched it to a tackle, and pulled him up so his feet just
+off the floor, and then we talked as though we were away off, and I told
+my chum to look out that Pa did not hit the gas fixtures, and Pa actually
+thought he was being hauled clear up to the roof. I could see he was
+scared by the complexion of his hands and feet, as they clawed the air. He
+actually sweat so the drops fell on the floor. Bime-by we let him down,
+and he was awfully relieved though his feet were not more than two inches
+from the floor any of the time. We were just going to slip Pa down a board
+with slivers in to give him a realizing sense of the rough road a reformed
+man has to travel, and got him straddle of the board, when the Dutchman
+came home from the dance fullern a goose, and he drove us boys out, and we
+left Pa, and the Dutchman said, 'Vot you vas doing here mit dose boys, you
+old duffer, and vere vas your pants?' and Pa pulled off the handkerchief
+from his eyes, and the Dutchman said if he didn't get out in a holy minute
+he would kick the stuffing out of him, and Pa got out. He took his pants
+and put them, on in the alley, and then we came up to Pa and told him that
+was the third time the drunken Dutchman had broke up our lodge, but we
+should keep on doing good until we had reformed every drunkard in
+Milwaukee, and Pa said that was right, and he would see us through, if it
+cost every dollar he had. Then we took him home, and when Ma asked if she
+couldn't join the lodge, too, Pa said, 'Now you take my advice, and don't
+you ever join no Good Templars. Your system could not stand the racket.
+Say, I want you to put some cold cream on my back.' I think Pa will be a
+different man now, don't you?"
+
+The grocery man said if he was that boy's pa for fifteen minutes he would
+be a different boy or there would be a funeral, and the boy took a handful
+of soft-shelled almonds and a few layer raisins and skipped out.
+
+
+THE WAY WOMEN BOSS A PILLOW.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: BOSSING THE PILLOW.]
+
+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 cannot 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
+it 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.
+
+
+HUNTING DOGS.
+
+They are making everything out of rubber now. A man has invented a hunting
+dog that can be carried in the pocket. When you get in the field, all you
+have to do is to blow the dog up, and start it to going. This will be a
+great saving, as hunters will not have to pay baggage men a dollar for
+tying their dogs to a trunk, when they go off hunting.
+
+
+ENTERPRISING CHICAGO!
+
+Chicago is to have a hotel built exclusively for men. Under no
+circumstances will a woman be admitted into it. There are so many men who
+go to Chicago, who are liable to wink at women at the table of the hotel,
+before they know their own heart, to lead a different life, that this new
+hotel, without temptation, has been decided upon. There will only be a few
+old bald headed roosters and persons with red noses and sore eyes stopping
+at the new hotel. A hotel without women would be almost as cheerful as a
+reform school.
+
+
+A MAD MINISTER.
+
+There is probably the maddest minister living at Black River Falls, that
+can be found in America to-day. He is a real nice man, and his name is
+Burt Wheeler. He preaches good sound sense, and everybody likes him. He
+has got friends at Neillsville, and all around there. At Black River Falls
+there is no license, and liquor is unknown, while at Neillsville there is
+license, and one can have benzine at every meal. The other day the express
+took a jug from Neillsville to the Falls, directed to the reverend
+gentleman, and on the card attached to the jug handle was the following
+notice:
+
+"Old Bourbon--We have license here, and knowing you have none in your town
+we thought it but kindness to remember your wants."
+
+When a jug, or a keg arrives at the Falls by express, every citizen
+notices it, and they investigate, and when the jug came into the express
+office the expressman winked, and in a few minutes half the population of
+the darling little village was there. They read the note on the card and
+winked at each other. One man as he took a piece of cut sugar out of a
+barrel, said he had long suspected that Burt liked his toddy. Another
+fellow, picking a mouthful off a codfish, remarked that you couldn't
+always tell about these confounded ministers. Frank Cooper, the editor of
+the _Banner_, though he looked pained when he saw the name "Old Bourbon"
+on the jug, and noticed the immense size of the jug remarked that it was
+the best way not to condemn a man till the returns were all in. The
+reverened gentleman was interrupted in his preparation of his sermon by a
+neighboring lady who just dropped in to tell the news, and when she sighed
+and told him that his jug of whisky which he had ordered from Neillsville,
+was in the express office, he could hardly believe his ears. He had
+always, to the best of his knowledge and belief, tried to lead a
+different life, and this was too much--too much bourbon. Scratching out
+the last line that he had written, which was something about something
+biting like an anaconda, and stinging like a ready reckoner, he put on his
+coat and started down town, resolved to face the multitude, conscious of
+his innocence. He approached the express office a little nervous. The
+crowd filled the street, and as he passed a raftsman with red breeches on,
+said he wouldn't have such a nose as that on him for a hundred dollars.
+"He is full now," said another, as the Reverend gentleman put his hand on
+an awning post to steady himself in the trying emergency. A man who was
+sitting on a salt barrel, whittling a shingle, and who had one trousers
+leg tucked in his boot, and a red sash around him, said if it could be
+proved that Wheeler was a drinking man it would be a hard blow at
+religion, but he didn't know as he cared a blank anyway. The elder went in
+the express office and the crowd fell back to give the chief mourner a
+chance to look at the late lamented. There was a different expression on
+every face. Some looked as though they were glad he had been caught in the
+act, while others wore a mournful expression, as though they had been
+suddenly bereaved. He was pale, yet determined, and as he read the
+inscription he said, so help him John Rogers, he had never ordered any
+whisky, and never drank any, and didn't know anything about this jug.
+Turning to those present he said: "This is some horrid nightmare." The
+expressman said it was no nightmare, it was whisky. Wheeler said if the
+charges were paid he would take it, and taking the jug out doors he raised
+it high in the air and dashed it upon the pavement, amid the applause of
+his friends. At this point Hon. Wm. T. Price come along, and was told what
+had happened. He looked at the amber liquid oozing down between the stones
+on the pavement, put his finger in some of it, smelled of it,
+touched it to his tongue, and turning to the yet pale and excited
+Reverend, he said:
+
+"Wheeler, you have maintained a noble principle, but you have destroyed
+four gallons of the d--dest finest maple syrup that was ever brewed in
+Clark county."
+
+It was true, Doc. French and Tom Reed, of Neillsville, two good friends of
+the Rev. Wheeler, had sent him the syrup, knowing that he could use it in
+his family, and being jokers they had put the Bourbon card on the jug,
+just for fun, with the alleged result above stated. Temperance men should
+always smell of the cork, at least, before smashing the jug. We have
+practiced that a good many years, and never lost a gallon of maple syrup.
+
+
+ANNA DICKINSON AS MAZEPPA!
+
+Anna Dickinson is to go upon the stage, and it is said that she will open
+in San Francisco, in the play of "Mazeppa." If there is any society for
+the prevention of cruelty to animals on the Pacific coast, we trust before
+Anna is tied on the wild horse of Tartary, that some one will see to it
+that a cushion is put on the back of the horse.
+
+
+GOOD TEMPLARS ON ICE.
+
+We like to see young Good Templars have a hankering after cold water,
+bright water; but when a Juvenile Lodge about to start on a picnic,
+deliberately loads a hunk of ice belonging to _The Sun_ into an omnibus,
+we feel like reaching for the basement of their roundabouts with a piece
+of clapboard.
+
+
+BOUNCED FROM CHURCH FOR DANCING.
+
+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 intermittant 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 Dr. 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 gripsacks and
+register and ask for a room and a bath, and a fire escape. He will be apt
+to look up to 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.
+
+
+FROZEN EARS.
+
+"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, 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.
+
+
+HARD ON FOND DU LAC.
+
+Forest street, Fond du Lac, is going to be a great place for sparking, one
+of these days. For three years all the children born on that street have
+been girls. Some lay it to the artesian well water.
+
+
+THOSE BOLD BAD DRUMMERS.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE SEXTON IN ALL HIS GLORY.]
+
+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 wore a
+smile. The sexton looked up to the minister, who was picking up 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
+"renigged," 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 from 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.
+
+
+ANNA DICKINSON.
+
+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 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 this test, which we trust
+will be made at the Boston Theatre next week.
+
+
+EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF A DOUGHNUT.
+
+"'Twas midnight's holy hour, and silence was brooding like a gentle spirit
+o'er the still and pulseless world." Not a sound was heard, except
+Robert's dog baying at a sorrel haired young man and a muchmussed girl,
+who were returning home from a suburban picnic. As they passed out of
+hearing, and the dog was peacefully cannibalizing on a link of sausage
+that had been condemned by the board of health, owing to a piece of brass
+padlock that showed through the silky nickel plating made of fiddling
+string material, a soft cry of a child was heard in an upper room of a
+mansion owned by a prosperous business man. The head of the house heard it
+and sat up in bed to still the small voice, but couldn't, when the mother
+of the child said that she had forgotten to bring up anything for the
+child to eat in the night, and she must go down cellar and get a doughnut.
+The man said he could never stay there and enjoy himself in bed and think
+of his wife, groping around in the dark below stairs after it. After
+telling him that he would probably come up with a pickle, ehe let him go.
+Carefully he got out of bed, in an angelic frame of mind and a night
+shirt, and barefooted he prepared to make the descent. As he stopped to
+hold one foot in his hand, the instep of which had struck the rocker of
+the baby crib, she told him the doughnuts were in the third crock in the
+pantry on the floor. He said it was one evidence of a clear headed man,
+that he could walk all over his own house in the dark. At the head of the
+first pair of stairs he tripped on a baby cart and the tongue flew up and
+struck him on the knee, but by hanging to the bannisters he saved himself.
+At the foot of the stairs he tumbled over a block house and broke off a
+toe nail. He said it was a mean man that wouldn't sacrifice a few toe
+nails for his little baby, and he laughed. He fell over a dining room
+chair, and sat down in another, and when he got up he felt that
+though he was not proud, he was stuck up, for on his night shirt was a
+sticky fly paper that had been placed in readiness to catch the unwary
+early fly. After peeling off the sticky paper, and subterraneously
+swearing a neat, delicate little female swear, he groped to the cellar
+door, and began to go down.
+
+[Illustration: THE STARTLED CAT.]
+
+Now, if there is anything a boy ought to be punished for, it is for
+surreptitiously eating a large slice of musk melon and leaving the rind on
+the top stair. It tends to make a boy disliked. The head of the family
+stepped with his bare feet on the piece of melon, and sat down so quick
+that it made his head swim. It made him swim all over, and under, and
+everywhere. But if he sat down soon, he got up sooner. If there is one
+thing that a house cat should be taught, it is to sleep elsewhere than on
+the top stair. When he fell and struck the sleeping cat there was a
+crisis. He took in the situation at once. An occasional disengaged feline
+toe nail, and a squall, told him in burning words that, while his title to
+the seat was contested, it would be impolitic to wait for a commission of
+unbiased judges to decide which was entitled to it. His opponent was
+armed, and had possession, and he felt that it would tend to prevent riot
+and bloodshed if he quietly gave up. But he felt that while in his present
+position the cat was comparatively harmless, if he attempted to rise she
+would bring the whole army and navy into action, and perhaps cripple his
+resources. So he decided to jump up in a hurry before the cat had time to
+think of her toe nails much. His position was not pleasant, to say the
+least, but he jumped up in a hurry, hoping the cat would remain and
+continue her nap. She was not a remaining cat and as soon as his weight
+was removed from her person, she gave a yell as though frightened, and
+began to walk up and down his legs, inside of his night shirt.
+The question as to how many toe nails a cat has got, has never been
+decided, but he says they have a million, and he can show the documents to
+prove it. She went up him as though he was a fence post, and a dog after
+her, and he flew around as though his linen was on fire, and yelled until
+his wife came down to see what was the matter. By unbuttoning the top
+button the cat was coaxed out, under protest however, and after a light
+was lit there was seen about the maddest man in the world. He took a
+candle and went down after the doughnuts, and after running his hand into
+a jar of preserved peaches, and another of pickled pig's feet, he struck
+the right one, and after hot grease from the candle had run down his
+fingers he came up with a doughnut, and then the baby wouldn't eat it,
+then he sat down side-ways in a cushioned chair, applied arnica and swore
+till daylight. A single shot was heard in the cellar that
+morning, and the young life of that cat went out. As he rode down on the
+street car the next morning, people marvelled that he should stand up on
+the back platform, when there were so many vacant seats, and when a
+neighbor asked him to be seated he said, with a yawn, "No thank you, I
+have been sitting down a good deal during the night," and he looked mad.
+It is such things that drive men to commit crimes.
+
+
+TAKE YOUR LATIN STRAIGHT.
+
+The school board, at its last session adopted the following rule: "The
+continental system of pronounciation shall be taught in the high schools
+of La Crosse, and no other allowed except by direction of board of
+education." We are glad the rule has been adopted, as there is no doubt
+that the continental system is the best. We have been pained beyond
+measure, as no doubt all of the school board have, at hearing the scholars
+pronounce Latin by 'tother system. No longer ago than last Saturday, when
+we were in Mons. Anderson's, a girl came in and asked for a pair of Latin
+corsets, by the Onalaska system of pronounciation. The clerk, not
+understanding, went and got a pair of those undershirts and drawers,
+complete in one number, with no tale to be continued. The girl blushed,
+the clerk did not understand, and we had to explain by the continental
+system, and the girl got her corsets, but suppose there had not been a
+Latin scholar standing around there waiting for his wife to buy a package
+of safty pins, what a predicament the girl would have been in. On behalf
+of the people, THE SUN thanks the board of education for adopting the
+continental system of pronounciation, only they ought to go further, and
+make it a crime punishable with suicide for anybody to pronounce it in any
+other way. There has been suffering enough by pronouncing it the old way.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HE IS TOO HEALTHY.
+
+"There, I knew you would get into trouble," said the grocery man to the
+bad boy, as a policeman came along leading him by the ear, the boy having
+an empty champagne bottle in one hand, and a black eye. "What has he been
+doing Mr. Policeman?" asked the grocery man, as the policeman halted with
+the boy in front of the store.
+
+"Well, I was going by a house up here when this kid opened the door with a
+quart bottle of champagne, and he cut the wire and fired the cork at
+another boy, and the champagne went all over the sidewalk, and some of it
+went on me, and I knew there was something wrong, cause champagne is too
+expensive to waste that way, and he said he was running the shebang and if
+I would bring him here you would say he was all right. If you say so I
+will let him go."
+
+The grocery man said he had better let the boy go, as his parents would
+not like to have their little pet locked up. So the policeman let go his
+ear, and he throwed the empty bottle at a coal wagon, and after the
+policeman had brushed the champagne off his coat, and smelled of his
+fingers, and started off, the grocery man turned to the boy, who was
+peeling a cucumber, and said:
+
+"Now, what kind of a circus have you been having, and what do you mean by
+destroying wine that way! and, where are your folks?"
+
+"Well, I'll tell you. Ma she has got the hay fever and has gone to Lake
+Superior to see if she can't stop sneezing, and Saturday Pa said he and me
+would go out to Oconomowoc and stay over Sunday, and try and recuperate
+our health. Pa said it would be a good joke for me not to call him Pa, but
+to act as though I was his younger brother, and we would have a
+real nice time. I knowed what he wanted. He is an old masher, that's
+what's the matter with him, and he was going to play himself for a
+batchelor. O, thunder, I got on to his racket in a minute. He was
+introduced to some of the girls and Saturday evening he danced till the
+cows came home. At home he is awful fraid of rheumatiz, and he never
+sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured off'n him, and he
+stood in the door and let a girl fan him till I was afraid he would
+freeze, and just as he was telling a girl from Tennessee, who was joking
+him about being 'a nold batch,' that he was not sure as he could always
+hold out a woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with the
+charming ladies of the Sunny South. I pulled his coat and said, 'Pa how do
+you spose Ma's hay fever is to-night, I'll bet she is just sneezing the
+top of her head off.' Wall, sir, you just oughten seen that girl and Pa.
+Pa looked at me as if I was a total stranger, and told the porter if that
+freckled faced boot-black belonged around the house he had better be fired
+out of the ball room, and the girl said 'the disgustin' thing!' and just
+before they fired me I told Pa he had better look out or he would sweat
+through his liver pad.
+
+"I went to bed and Pa staid up till the lights were put out. He was mad
+when he came to bed, but he didn't kick me, cause the people in the next
+room would hear him, but the next morning he talked to me. He said I might
+go back home Sunday night, and he would stay a day or two. He sat around
+on the veranda all the afternoon, talking with the girls, and when he
+would see me coming along he would look cross. He took a girl out boat
+riding, and when I asked him if I couldn't go along, he said he was afraid
+I would get drowned, and he said if I went home there was nothing there
+too good for me, and so my chum and me got to firing bottles of champagne,
+and he hit me in the eye with a cork, and I drove him out doors
+and was just going to shell his earth works, when the policeman collared
+me. Say, what's good for a black eye?"
+
+The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home. "What do
+you think your Pa's object was in passing himself off for a single man at
+Oconomowoc?" asked the grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the
+boy's father.
+
+"That's what beats me. Aside from Ma's hay fever she is one of the
+healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose he does it for his health, the
+way they all do when they go to a summer resort, but it leaves a boy an
+orphan, don't it, to have such kitteny parents?"
+
+
+SURE OF HEAVEN.
+
+The only persons that are real sure that their calling and election is
+sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots, are the men who are
+hung for murder. They always announce that they have got a dead thing on
+it, just before the drop falls. How encouraging it must be to children to
+listen to the prayers of our ministers in churches, who admit that they
+are miserable sinners, living on God's charity, and doubtful if they would
+be allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of their
+own unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then let the
+children read an account of a hanging bee, and see how happy the condemned
+man is, how he shouts glory hallelujah, and confesses that, though he
+killed his man, he is going to heaven. A child will naturally ask, why
+don't the ministers murder somebody, and make a dead sure thing of it?
+
+
+THE NAUGHTY BUT NICE CHURCH CHOIR.
+
+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 bookmark 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 the 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 that came in with the old lady, and while he was up
+the soprano put the shoemaker's 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
+shoemaker's wax melts at ninety eight degrees Fahrenheit.
+
+[Illustration: THE TENOR ARRAYED IN ALL HIS GLORY.]
+
+The minister finally got to the amen, and read a hymn, the choir then
+coughed and all rose up. The chair that the tenor sat 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, 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.
+
+
+SUPREME COURT JUDGES AND U.S. SENATORS.
+
+I would call your attention to a change that it seems to me should be made
+in the method of selecting U.S. Senators and Supreme Judges. Heretofore it
+has been noticeable that the men who carried the longest pole knocked down
+the senatorial persimmons. In the matter of the election of Judges of the
+Supreme Court, it has been the practice to secure men for those places at
+an enormous salary, when other men would be willing to do the work and
+board themselves. The suggestion I would make is that you pass a law
+letting the offices of United States Senator and Judges of the Supreme
+Court to the lowest bidder. This method will be economical and will secure
+to the state men who can legislate and judge things well enough for all
+practical purposes. The way times are now we must get things at panic
+prices or go without.
+
+
+OUR CHRISTIAN NEIGHBORS HAVE GONE.
+
+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 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
+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 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 centre
+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 toward
+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 crossed 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 backtalk, 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_.
+
+
+BUTTERMILK BIBBERS.
+
+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 assumes 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.
+
+
+FISHING FOR PIECES OF WOMEN.
+
+There are lots of ludicrous scenes to be observed on the railroads and
+conductors are loaded with stories that would cause a marble monument to
+keep its sides a laughing. Some day we are going to borrow a conductor,
+and take him out in the woods, and place a revolver to his head and make
+him deliver a lot of stories. The other day as conductor Fred Underwood's
+train from Chicago, arrived on the trestle work on the south side, the
+whistle blew, the air break was touched off, and the train came up
+standing so quick that a woman lost her false teeth in the sleeper, and
+everybody's hair stood up like a mule's ears. Every window had a head out,
+and when the conductor got out on the platform he saw the engineer and
+fireman on the ends of the ties looking down into the mud and water,
+shading their eyes as though looking for the eclipse.
+
+There, sticking out of the mud were two human legs, and as one leg had a
+piece of listing around it, just above the veal, the conductor knew,
+instinctively, that the surface indications showed that there was a woman
+in there. Then he thought that the engine had probably struck a female,
+and tore her all to pieces, and of course he knew that the company would
+expect him to bring home enough for a mess, or a funeral. Spitting on his
+hands he called a brakeman with a transom hook out of the sleeper, to fish
+with, they rolled up their trousers and waded in, after telling a porter
+to bring a blanket to put the pieces in. The brakeman got there first and
+took hold of one foot, when the conductor got hold of the brakeman's coat
+tail and pulled. The passengers turned away sick, expecting to see the
+mangled remains brought to the surface. They pulled, and directly the
+balance of the deceased came up. It was an Irish lady, with a tin pail,
+who had been on the way to take her husband's dinner to him, and
+she stood on one side to let the train pass, and had lost her balance and
+fallen into the mud. As her head came out of the mud, she squirted water
+out of her mouth, kicked the brakeman in the ear and said,
+
+"Lave go of me, I am a dacent woman!"
+
+The conductor asked her if she was hurt.
+
+"Hurted is it," said she, "Ivery bone in my body is kilt intirely, and I
+have lost me tay cup," and she looked in her tin pail in distress.
+
+After vainly trying to get the conductor to wade in and search for her
+"tay cup," she permitted them to assist her into the car, where an old
+doctor from Racine volunteered to examine her to see if she was mortally
+injured. He put his hand on her shoulder and asked her if she was in any
+pain.
+
+"Divil the pain, except the loss of me tay cup," said she, "and kape yer
+owld hands off me, for I am a dacent woman."
+
+She shook herself in the car and got mud all over everybody, and finally
+took her pail and jumped off at a crossing before arriving at the depot.
+As the train came into the depot ten minutes late, and the conductor
+jumped off, all mud from head to foot, as though he had been playing
+spaniel and retrieving a wounded duck, Supt. Atkins looked at his clothes
+and said, "Where in ---- have you been all the time?" The conductor took a
+wisp of straw to wipe himself off, and as he threw it under a car he said
+he had been in the artificial propagation of the human race. In fact he
+had been engaged in the noble work of raising woman to a higher sphere. He
+was allowed to go on probation and wash himself. The brakeman went down
+there the next day and was fishing in the same hole. He said he didn't
+know but there might be more woman in there, but they say he was after the
+"tay cup."
+
+
+NEARLY BROKE UP THE BALL.
+
+A party of well meaning young people from Ripon nearly broke up a dance at
+Hazen's cheese factory, out in the country a spell ago. The people around
+there are quiet, sober country people, who confine themselves in dancing,
+to plain quadrilles and country dances, with an occasional monnie musk, or
+a plain waltz. These young Ripon people are on the dance bigger than a
+wolf, and they have learned all the Boston dips, and Saratoga bends, and
+Newport colic dances, and everything new. There is one dance they have
+learned which is peculiar to say the least. It is a species of waltz, but
+the couple get together so odd that a person who sees it for the first
+time just leans against something and fans himself. When the music strikes
+up a waltz the young man opens his arms and doubles himself up like a boy
+with the cholera infantum, his hind leg cramps and his head lops over on
+one side, and he looks sick, his back humps up like a case of chronic
+inflammatory rheumatism, and he is ready. The girl who is with him, when
+he begins to have spasms, at once seems to go into a trance. Her back gets
+up like a cat, she bends over towards him, her forward leg gets out of
+joint at the knee, her neck takes a cramp, her mouth opens and she lolls,
+her eyes roll like a steer that has turned the yoke, and just before she
+dies she falls into the arms of the deceased and they are ready. For a
+moment they stand and squirm like angle-worms on a hook, and froth at the
+mouth, and look, as they stand there, like a pile driver that has been run
+into by an engine. They teeter up and down a little, and then fly off on a
+tangent, and they flop around in unexpected places among the other
+dancers, jump like a box car, bump against other couples, and at every
+bump they are driven closer together, until they are so near that it does
+seem as though they will have to be pried apart with a handspike;
+they look into each other's eyes as though they would bite, and they keep
+going around till their backs are broke. Well, a party of these kind of
+dancers went to the cheese factory where the country people were gathered,
+and after dancing a few quadrilles, the fiddlers struck up an old
+fashioned waltz. While the visiting dancers were going into spasms to get
+ready to wade in, the floor filled with the country couples, who were
+waltzing around old fashioned, when all of a sudden those Ripon people
+began to work. They flopped across the cheese factory, knocked down a
+couple from Pickett's Corners, caromed on a fellow and his girl from
+Brandon and sent them against a barrel of lemonade, glanced across the
+hall and struck an old lady amidships that had just started to call her
+girl off the floor because she was afraid the girl would catch those Ripon
+cramps, knocked her under a bench, where she lay and called for her
+husband Isaiah, to come and pick her up in a basket. In less than two
+minutes all the other dancers hauled off, and stood on benches and looked
+at them. Some of the country girls hid their heads and said they wanted to
+go home. The visitors slid around the hall, caught each other on the fly,
+run the bases, and come under the wire neck and neck, just as the man who
+played second fiddle fell over the base viol in a dead faint, and the man
+that played the piccalo rolled under the music stand, striken with
+apoplexy. The manager of the dance called a constable who was present, and
+told him to arrest the party, and handcuff them and take them to the
+Oshkosh insane asylum, where they had escaped. The young men explained
+that they were not crazy, and that it was only a new kind of dance, and
+they were reluctantly allowed to remain, on condition that they "wouldn't
+cut up any more of them city monkey shines, not afore folks."
+
+
+SUMMER RESORTING.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE RESORTER.]
+
+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 back 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 lunancy. 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 than 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 stairs 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.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA JOKES HIM.
+
+"What on earth is that you have got on your upper lip?" said the grocery
+man to the bad boy, as he came in and began to peel a rutabaga, and his
+upper lip hung down over his teeth, and was covered with something that
+looked like shoemaker's wax, "You look as though you had been digging
+potatoes with your nose."
+
+"O, that is some of Pa's darn smartness. I asked him if he knew anything
+that would make a boy's moustache grow, and he told me the best thing he
+ever tried was tar, and for me to rub it on thick when I went to bed, and
+wash it off in the morning. I put it on last night, and by gosh I can't
+wash it off. Pa told me all I had to do was to use a scouring brick, and
+it would come off, and I used the brick, and it took the skin off, and the
+tar is there yet, and say, does my lip look very bad?"
+
+The grocery man told him it was the worst looking lip he ever saw, but he
+could cure it by rubbing a little cayenne pepper in the tar. He said the
+tar would neutralize the pepper, and the pepper would loosen the tar, and
+act as a cooling lotion to the lacerated lip. The boy went to a can of
+pepper behind the counter, and stuck his finger in and rubbed a lot of it
+on his lip, and then his hair began to raise, and he began to cry, and
+rushed to the water-pail and ran his face into the water to wash off the
+pepper. The grocery man laughed, and when the boy had got the pepper
+washed off, and had resumed his rutabaga, he said:
+
+"That seals your fate. No man ever trifles with the feelings of the bold
+buccanner of the Spanish main, without living to rue it. I will lay for
+you, old man, and don't you forget it. Pa thought he was smart when he got
+me to put tar on my lip, to bring my moustache out, and to-day he
+lays on a bed of pain, and to-morrow your turn will come. You will regret
+that you did not get down on your knees and beg my pardon. You will be
+sorry that you did not prescribe cold cream for my bruised lip, instead of
+cayenne pepper. Beware, you base twelve ounces to the pound huckster, you
+gimlet-eyed seller of dog sausage, you sanded sugar idiot, you small
+potato three card monte sleight of hand rotten egg fiend, you villain that
+sells smoked sturgeon and dogfish for smoked halibut. The avenger is on
+your track."
+
+"Look here, young man, don't you threaten me, or I will take you by the
+ear and walk you through green fields, and beside still waters to the
+front door and kick your pistol pocket clear around so you can wear it for
+a watch pocket in your vest. No boy can frighten me by crimus. But tell
+me, how did you get even with your Pa?"
+
+"Well, give me a glass of cider and we will be friends and I will tell
+you. Thanks! Gosh, but that cider is made out of mouldy dried apples and
+sewer water," and he took a handful of layer raisins off the top of a box
+to take the taste out of his mouth, and while the grocer charged a peck of
+rutabagas, a gallon of cider and two pounds of raisins to the boy's Pa,
+the boy proceeded:
+
+"You see, Pa likes a joke the best of anybody you ever saw, if it is on
+somebody else, but he kicks like a steer when it is on him. I asked him
+this morning if it wouldn't be a good joke to put some soft soap on the
+front step, so the letter-carrier would slip up and spill hisself, and Pa
+said it would be elegant. Pa is a Democrat, and he thinks that anything
+that will make it unpleasant for Republican office holders, is legitimate,
+and he encouraged me to paralyze the letter-carrier. The letter-carrier is
+as old a man as Pa, and I didn't want to humiliate him, but I just wanted
+Pa to give his consent, so he couldn't kick if he got caught in his own
+trap. You see? Well, this morning the minister and two of the
+deacons called on Pa, to have a talk with him about his actions in church,
+on two or three occasions, when he pulled out the pack of cards with his
+handkerchief, and played the music box, and they had a pretty hot time in
+the back parlor, and finally they settled it, and were going to sing a
+hymn, when Pa handed them a little hymn book, and the minister opened it
+and turned pale and said, 'what's this?' and they looked at it, and it was
+a book of Hoyle's games instead of a hymn book. Gosh, wasn't the minister
+mad! He had started to read a hymn and he quit after he had read two lines
+where it said, 'In a game of four-handed euchre, never trump your
+partner's ace, but rely on the ace to take the trick on suit.' Pa was
+trying to explain how the book came to be there, when the minister and the
+deacons started out, and then I poured the two quart tin pail full of soft
+soap on the front step. It was this white soap, just the color of the
+step, and when I got it spread I went down in the basement. The visitors
+came out and Pa was trying to explain to them, about Hoyle, when one of
+the deacons stepped on the soap and his feet flew up and he struck on his
+pants and slid down the steps. The minister said 'great heavens, deacon,
+are you hurt? let me assist you,' and he took two quick steps, and you
+have seen these fellows in a nigger show that kick each other head over
+heels and fall on their ears, and stand on their heads and turn around
+like a top. The minister's feet slipped and the next I saw he was standing
+on his head in his hat, and his legs were sort of wilted and fell limp by
+his side, and he fell over on his stomach. You talk about spreading the
+gospel in heathen lands. It is nothing to the way you can spread it with
+two quarts of soft soap. The minister didn't look pious a bit, when he was
+trying to catch the railing he looked as though he wanted to
+murder every man on earth, but it may be he was tired.
+
+"Well, Pa he was paralyzed, and he and the other deacon rushed out to pick
+up the minister and the first old man, and when they struck the steps they
+went kiting. Pa's feet somehow slipped backwards, and he turned a
+summersault and struck full length on his back, and one heel was across
+the minister's neck, and he slid down the steps, and the other deacon fell
+all over the other three, and Pa swore at them, and it was the worst
+looking lot of pious people I ever saw. I think if the minister had been
+in the woods somewhere, where nobody could have heard him, he would have
+used language. They all seemed mad at each other. The hired girl told Ma
+there was three tramps out on the sidewalk fighting Pa, and Ma she took
+the broom and started to help Pa, and I tried to stop Ma, 'cause her
+constitution is not very strong and I didn't want her to do any flying
+trapeze business, but I couldn't stop her, and she went out with the broom
+and a towel tied around her head. Well, I don't know where Ma did strike,
+but when she came in she said she had palpitation of the heart, but that
+was not the place where she put the arnica. O, but she _did_ go through
+the air like a bullet through cheese, and when she went down the steps
+a-bumpity-bump, I felt sorry for Ma. The minister had got so he could set
+up on the sidewalk, with his back against the lower step, when Ma came
+sliding down, and one of the heels of her gaiters hit the minister in the
+hair, and the other foot went right through between his arm and his side,
+and the broom liked to pushed his teeth down his throat. But he was not
+mad at Ma. As soon as he see it was Ma he said, 'Why, sister, the wicked
+stand in slippery places, don't they?' and Ma she was mad and said for him
+to let go her stocking, and then Pa was mad and he said, 'look-a-here you
+sky-pilot, this thing has gone far enough,' and then a policeman
+came along and first he thought they were all drunk, but he found they
+were respectable, and he got a chip and scraped the soap off of them, and
+they went home, and Pa and Ma they got in the house some way, and just
+then the letter-carrier came along, but he didn't have any letters for us,
+and he didn't come onto the steps, and then I went up stairs and I said,
+'Pa, don't you think it is real mean, after you and I fixed the soap on
+the steps for the letter-carrier, he didn't come on the step at all,' and
+Pa was scraping the soap off his pants with a piece of shingle, and the
+hired girl was putting liniment on Ma, and heating it in for palpitation
+of the heart, and Pa said, 'You dam idjut, no more of this, or I'll maul
+the liver out of you,' and I asked him if he didn't think soft soap would
+help a moustache to grow, and he picked up Ma's work-basket and threw it
+at my head, as I went down stairs, and I came over here. Don't you think
+my Pa is unreasonable to get mad at a little joke that he planned
+himself?"
+
+The grocery man said he didn't know, and the boy went out with a pair of
+skates over his shoulder, and the grocery man is wondering what joke the
+boy will play on him to get even for the cayenne pepper.
+
+
+GATHERED WAISTS!
+
+Andrews' _Bazar_ says: "Gathered waists are very much worn." If the men
+would gather the waists carefully 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.
+
+
+CHURCH KENO.
+
+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
+nineteen 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!_"
+
+[Illustration: "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 taking advice from pious looking traveling men.
+They call her "Little Keno" now.
+
+
+THE OLD SWEET SONGS.
+
+A Boston girl sings: "What is home without a mother," while the old lady
+is mending her daughter's stockings. There is something sweet about those
+old songs.
+
+
+FAILURE OF A SOLID INSTITUTION.
+
+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 thing 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 knew how baked beans ought to be cooked from years of
+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.
+
+
+REGISTRY OF ELECTORS.
+
+The registry law has proved a conspicuous failure, inasmuch as it has
+taken ten years of persistent efforts by its use to make a change in the
+admistration. I would suggest that you amend the registry law by providing
+that all qualified voters have their ears punched, immediately after
+voting, by the inspectors of elections, the same as conductors punch
+tickets. This method will obviate the difficulties heretofore experienced,
+and check illegal voting and prevent repeating.
+
+
+ABOUT HELL.
+
+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 the 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.
+
+
+PREPARING FOR WAR.
+
+The _Sun_ is no alarmist, but it can see in recent events what it believes
+to be a preparation for war. All of the manufactories of fire arms and
+cartridges are working night and day, and the Oneida community have just
+received an order to immediately can 24,000 cans of baked beans. When the
+war will break out we do not know, but all this fixed amunition is not
+being fixed for no 4th of July. It is trouble.
+
+
+A TONY SLAUGHTER HOUSE.
+
+A Milwaukee paper copies what THE SUN said about killing hogs while under
+the influence of chloroform, at Keine & Wilson's packing house, and
+intimates that it is all a lie. Have we lived to this age to have our word
+doubted by a Milwaukee editor? This is too much. Why, bless the dear man,
+the half has not been told. The firm we speak of is desirous of building
+up a trade for gilt edged pork and hams, so every improvement known to the
+trade is inaugurated. We did not think it necessary to describe the whole
+process, but now that our word is doubted, it is necessary to do so. When
+the late lamented hog is transferred from the parlor where he was
+chloroformed, his body is gently, yet firmly placed in a gold lined tank,
+filled with boiling Florida water and cologne, where the body remains
+until the bristles become loose, when it is transferred to a table covered
+with purple velvet, and the bristles are removed by the gentlemanly
+ushers, dressed in the fashions of the time of George III, armed with gold
+candle sticks, studded with diamonds. Then the body is taken by easy
+stages, into the presence of the intestine transporter, who reclines upon
+a downy couch. He raises up, brushes a particle of dust from his sleeve,
+and with a silver knife cuts the hog from Dan to Beersheba, and the patent
+insides are received on a silver salver, and divided among attendant
+maidens. The inside of the hog is washed with bay rum, and sweet majorum
+is put in. Then the hog is removed and cut up. The portions salted are
+salted for keeps, and the hams and bacon are smoked in a room filled with
+incense, and when the smoked meat comes out it is good enough for a king,
+or a queen, or a Milwaukee editor. Lie, indeed! We should like to see
+ourselves lying for one hog.
+
+
+AN ARM THAT IS NOT RELIABLE.
+
+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
+bald-headed 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 but
+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 eight? You are
+silent, you cannot answer, enough?"
+
+[Illustration: "IT IS F-F-FOUR SIZES TOO B-B-BIG."]
+
+They instinctively found their way to the sofa; mutual explanation
+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 BOY AND THE GOAT.
+
+A man on King Street gave a boy a goat the other day, and he tied a rope
+around its neck to lead it home. The boy wanted to go through the gate,
+but as the goat concluded to jump over the fence and pull the boy through
+between the pickets, he let the goat have its own way. The boy got through
+the fence in instalments, leaving his shirt collar and one pants leg on
+the pickets, the goat dragged him out into the middle of the street, and
+then there occurred a sanguinary encounter to see whether the boy or the
+goat should boss the moving. At one time the spectators thought the goat
+would take the boy home. The animal used the boy for a cultivator, and
+they tore up the street like hands working on the road, till the goat
+slipped the rope over his head, and then the boy gathered himself up by
+the armful, and went and told his mother that he got his rope back anyway.
+She combed him with a piece of barrel.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GETS MAD!
+
+"I was down to the drug store this morning and saw your Ma buying a lot of
+court-plaster, enough to make a shirt I should think. What's she doing
+with so much court-plaster?" asked the grocery man of the bad boy, as he
+came in and pulled off his boots by the stove and emptied out a lot of
+snow that had collected as he walked through a drift, which melted and
+made a bad smell.
+
+"O, I guess she was going to patch Pa up so he will hold water. Pa's
+temper got him into the worst muss you ever see, last night. If that
+museum was here now they would hire Pa and exhibit him as the tattooed
+man. I tell you, I have got too old to be mauled as though I was a kid,
+and any man who attacks me from this out, wants to have his peace made
+with the insurance companies, and know that his calling and election is
+sure, because I am a bad man and don't you forget it." And the boy pulled
+on his boots and looked so cross and desperate that the grocer-man asked
+him if he wouldn't try a little new cider.
+
+"Good heavens!" said the grocery man, as the boy swallowed the cider, and
+his face resumed its natural look, and the piratical frown disappeared
+with the cider. "You have not stabbed your father have you? I have feared
+that one thing would bring on another, with you, and that you would yet be
+hung."
+
+"Naw, I haven't stabbed him. It was another cat that stabbed him. You see,
+Pa wants me to do all the work around the house. The other day he bought a
+load of kindling wood, and told me to carry it into the basement. I had
+not been educated up to kindling wood, and I didn't do it. When supper
+time came, and Pa found that I had not carried in the kindling wood, he
+had a hot box, and told me if that wood was not in when he came
+back from the lodge, that he would warm my jacket. Well, I tried to hire
+some one to carry it in, and got a man to promise to come in the morning
+and carry it in and take his pay in groceries, and I was going to buy the
+groceries here and have them charged to Pa. But that wouldn't help me out
+that night. I knew when Pa came home he would search for me. So I slept in
+the back hall on a cot. But I didn't want Pa to have all his trouble for
+nothing, so I borrowed an old torn cat that my chum's old maid aunt owns,
+and put the cat in my bed. I thought if Pa came into my room after me, and
+found that by his unkindness I had changed to a torn cat, he would be
+sorry. That is the biggest cat you ever see, and the worst fighter in our
+ward. It isn't afraid of anything, and can whip a New Foundland dog
+quicker than you could put sand in a barrel of sugar. Well, about eleven
+o'clock I heard Pa tumbing over the kindling wood, and I knew by the
+remark he made as the wood slid around under him, that there was going to
+be a cat fight real quick. He came up to Ma's room, and sounded Ma as to
+whether Hennery had retired to his virtuous couch. Pa is awful sarcastic
+when he tries to be. I could hear him take off his clothes, and hear him
+say, as he picked up a trunk strap, 'I guess I will go up to his room and
+watch the smile on his face, as he dreams of angels. I yearn to press him
+to my aching bosom.' I thought to myself, mebbe you won't yearn so much
+directly. He come up stairs, and I could hear him breathing hard. I looked
+around the corner and could see he just had on his shirt and pants, and
+his suspenders were hanging down, and his bald head shown like a calcium
+light just before it explodes. Pa went into my room, and up to the bed,
+and I could hear him say, 'Come out here and bring in that kindling wood
+or I will start a fire on your base burner with this strap.' And then
+there was a yowling such as I never heard before, and Pa said,
+'Helen Blazes,' and the furniture in my room began to fall around and
+break. O, _my_! I think Pa took the torn cat right by the neck, the way he
+does me, and that left the cat's feet free to get in their work. By the
+way the cat squawled as though it was being choked I know Pa had him by
+the neck. I suppose the cat thought Pa was a whole flock of New Foundland
+dogs, and the cat had a record on dogs, and it kicked awful. Pa's shirt
+was no protection at all in a cat fight, and the cat just walked all
+around Pa's stomach, and Pa yelled 'police,' and 'fire,' and 'turn on the
+hose,' and he called Ma, and the cat yowled. If Pa had had presence of
+mind enough to have dropped the cat, or rolled it up in the mattrass, it
+would have been all right, but a man always gets rattled in time of
+danger, and he held on to the cat and started down stairs yelling murder,
+and he met Ma coming up.
+
+"I guess Ma's night cap or something frightened the cat more, cause he
+stabbed Ma on the night-shirt with one hind foot, and Ma said 'mercy on
+us,' and she went back, and Pa stumbled on a hand-sled that was on the
+stairs, and they all fell down, and the cat got away and went down in the
+coal bin and yowled all night. Pa and Ma went into their room, and I guess
+they annointed themselves with vasaline, and Pond's extract, and I went
+and got into my bed, cause it was cold out in the hall, and the cat had
+warmed my bed as well as it had warmed Pa. It was all I could do to go to
+sleep, with Pa and Ma talking all night, and this morning I came down the
+back stairs, and haven't been to breakfast, cause I don't want to see Pa
+when he is vexed. You let the man that carries in the kindling wood have
+six shillings worth of groceries, and charge them to Pa. I have passed the
+kindling wood period in a boy's life, and have arrived at the coal period.
+I will carry in coal, but I draw the line at kindling wood."
+
+"Well, you are a cruel, bad boy," said the grocery man, as he
+went to the book and charged the six shillings.
+
+"O, I don't know. I think Pa is cruel. A man who will take a poor kitty by
+the neck, that hasn't done any harm, and tries to chastise the poor thing
+with a trunk strap, ought to be looked after by the humane society. And if
+it is cruel to take a cat by the neck, how much more cruel is it to take a
+boy by the neck, that had diphtheria only a few years ago, and whose
+throat is tender? Say, I guess I will accept your invitation to take
+breakfast with you," and the boy cut off a piece of bologna and helped
+himself to the crackers, and while the grocery man was out shoveling off
+the snow from the sidewalk, the boy filled his pockets with raisins and
+loaf sugar, and then went out to watch the man carry in his kindling wood.
+
+
+SPURIOUS TRIPE.
+
+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.
+
+
+"CASH."
+
+On circus day W.H.H. Cash, the great railroad monopolist of New Lisbon,
+was in the city. He had just made a few hundred thousand dollars on a
+railroad contract, and he decided to expend large sums of money in buying
+dry goods. He went into one of our stores and was passing along up the
+floor, when a black-eyed girl with a dimple in her chin, pearly teeth, red
+pouting lips, who was behind the counter, shouted, "_cash, here!_" Mr.
+Cash turned to her, a smile illuminating his face as big as a horse
+collar. He is one of the most modest men in the world, and as he extended
+his great big horny hand to the girl, a blush covered his face, and the
+perspiration stood in great beads on his forehead. "How do yeu dew?" said
+Cash, as she seemed to shrink back in a frightened manner. They gazed at
+each other a moment, in astonishment, when another girl, perhaps a little
+better looking, further on, said, "Here, Cash, quick!" He at once made up
+his mind that she was the one that had spoken to him the first time, so he
+said, "Beg your pardon, miss," to the black-eyed girl, and went on to
+where the other girl was wrapping up a corset in a base ball undershirt.
+As he approached her she smiled, supposing he wanted to buy something. He
+thought she knew him, and he sat down on a stool and put out his hand and
+said, "How have you been?" She didn't seem to shake very much, but asked
+him if there was anything she could show him. He thought may be it was
+against the rules for the clerks to speak to anybody, unless they were
+buying something, so he said, "Yes, of course. Show me corsets, stockings,
+anything, gaul dumbed if I care what." She was just beginning to look upon
+him as though she thought he had escaped, when a little blonde on the
+other side of the store, as sweet as honey, shouted, "Cash, Cash, I need
+thee every hour. Come a running." To say that Cash was astonished, is
+drawing it mild. He knew that they all wanted him, but he couldn't make
+out how they seemed to know his name. He looked at the little blonde a
+minute, trying to think where he had met her, when he decided to go over
+and ask her. On the way over he thought she resembled a girl that used to
+live in Portage. He went up to her, and with a smile that was childlike
+and bland, he said, "Why, how are you, Samantha?" The little blonde looked
+daggers at him. "Didn't you use to wait on tables there at the Fox House,
+at Portage?" The girl picked up a roll of paper cambric, and was about to
+brain him, when the floor walker came along, and asked what was the
+matter. Cash explained that since he came into the store, three or four
+girls had yelled to him, and he couldn't place them. "There," says he, as
+another girl yelled "Cash," "there's another of 'em wants me," and he was
+going to where she was, when the floor walker asked him if his name was
+Cash. "You bet your liver it is," said Cash. It was then explained to him
+that the girls were calling cash boys. He thought it over a minute and
+said, "Sold, by the great baldheaded Elijah. Won't you go down and take
+something? Invite all of them. The girls can take soda. I'll be gaul
+blasted if I ever had such a rig played on me." And he went out into the
+glare of the sunlight, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and just
+then the circus procession came along, and he followed off the elephants.
+There are lots of worse men than Cash.
+
+
+TO WHAT VILE USES MAY WE COME.
+
+A dispatch from Chicago, says that three men were shot on "a boat used for
+the vilest purposes." We never knew that the newspapers were printed on
+boats there in Chicago.
+
+
+THE ADVENT PREACHER AND THE BALLOON.
+
+There occasionally occurs an accident 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."
+
+[Illustration: "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 of 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 had not gone to heaven and opened a
+brewery.
+
+Of course we who are intelligent, and 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.
+
+
+MR. PECK'S SUNDAY LECTURE.
+
+The papers all around here are saying that I have a new Sunday Lecture,
+with a bad title. The way of it was this. A man in a neighboring city
+telegraphed me to know if I would deliver a "Sunday Lecture," and telling
+me to choose my subject, and answer by telegraph. I thought it was some
+joke of the boys. The idea of me delivering a Sunday lecture was
+ridiculous, so, in a moment of thoughtlessness I telegraphed back, "What
+in the d---- do you take me for?" I supposed that that would be enough to
+inform the man that I was not in the business. What do you suppose he did?
+He telegraphed back to me as follows: "All right. We have advertised you
+for Sunday. Subject, 'What the d---- do you take me for.'" You can judge
+something of my surprise and indignation.
+
+That is how it was.
+
+
+RELIGION AND FISH.
+
+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 the way they should go are
+broken into by a deacon with his nose peeled coining 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.
+
+
+THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK.
+
+When you see an article in the editorial columns of a paper headed, "The
+Political Outlook," look at the bottom line, and if it says "sold by all
+druggists," don't read it. There is such an article going the rounds,
+which is an advertisement of a patent medicine. It is a counterfeit well
+calculated to deceive. Don't read a political article unless the owner's
+name is blown in the bottle.
+
+
+ROPE LADDERS.
+
+The law to compel hotel keepers to provide rope ladders for every room
+above the second floor, is said not to be enforced, though it should be by
+all means. The law ought to be amended so as to compel guests to get up
+once or twice during the night and run up or down the rope ladder, outside
+the window, in their night clothes, so as to be in practice in case of
+fire. When every room is provided with rope ladders there will be lots of
+fun. Those men who invariably blow out the gas, will probably think they
+have got to come down stairs on the rope ladder in the morning, and it
+will take an extra clerk to stand in the alleys around a hotel, with a
+shot gun, to keep impecunious guests from going away from the tavern via
+rope ladder. And then imagine an Oshkosh man in a Milwaukee hotel, his
+head full of big schemes, and his skin full of beer. He has been on a
+"bum," and is nervous, and on being shown to his room he sees the rope
+ladder coiled up under the window, ready to spring upon him. He stares at
+it, and the cold sweat stands all over him. The rope ladder returns his
+gaze, and seems to move and to crawl towards his feet. For a moment he is
+powerless to move. His hair stands on end, his heart ceases to beat, cold
+and warm chills follow each other down his trousers legs and he clutches
+at the air, his eyes start from their sockets, and just as the rope ladder
+is about to wind around him, and crush his life out, he regains strength
+enough to rush down stairs head over appetite, and tell the clerk about
+the menagerie up stairs. O, there is going to be fun with these rope
+ladders, sure.
+
+
+A DOCTOR OF LAWS.
+
+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 plaster 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.
+
+
+COMFORTING COMPENSATIONS.
+
+If a farmer's wheat is killed by rain, he is consoled by the fact that
+rain is just what his corn needs. If his cattle die of disease, his
+consolation lies in the hope that pork will bring a good price. If boys
+steal his watermelons, he knows by experience that they will have the
+cholera morbus. So everything that is unpleasant has its compensation.
+
+
+LAY UP APPLES IN HEAVEN.
+
+[Illustration: NO MORE APPLES FOR THE MINISTER.]
+
+They tell a good story at Portage City, at the expense of Senator Barden,
+or a minister, we don't know which. Barden had a lot of apples sent him
+last fall, and he was anxious to sell them, before winter set in. One day
+he thought of a new minister that had settled in Portage, so he made up
+his mind to take him up a couple of barrels, supposing that when he went
+to heaven and saw the big ledger opened, there would be a credit about as
+follows:
+
+                  L.W. BARDEN,
+                      in acc't with Providence,
+
+        1876.
+    Oct. 21. By two bbls. apples, @ $3    $6.00
+     "    "  "  drayage                     .30
+                                          -----
+                              Total       $6.30
+
+Barden loaded them on a dray, and got on it, with his pants in
+his boots, and went up to deliver them himself. He stopped at the
+minister's gate, and hurried the apples off and rolled them inside the
+gate, and tried to get away before the minister had time to thank him.
+Just as he was about to drive away the door opened and the man of God came
+out, and says he:
+
+"Look here! You put them apples in the cellar!"
+
+Barden told him he was in something of a hurry, and really he could not
+spare the time. The minister raised his voice to a sort of "auction
+pitch," and said:
+
+"Here, now. You don't know your business, Mr. Drayman. You roll them
+apples into the cellar, or I won't accept them."
+
+The senator was by this time as mad as senators usually get. He jumped off
+the dray, threw the two barrels of apples on, and drove off, saying he
+didn't care a continental dam if the minister eat dried apples all winter.
+And he took them back to his store, and it is safe to say that he will not
+give many more apples to that minister.
+
+MORAL:--Never despise a man because he wears a ragged coat, for he may be
+a senatorial granger angel in the disguise of a drayman. And you may have
+to fill up on turnips instead of apples.
+
+
+ONE OF BEECHER'S CONVERTS.
+
+Since Beecher, the great revivalist, was here, and spoke so eloquently on
+the fall of man, and the need of making arrangements for the future, I
+have become a changed man. It hurts me to lie now, and when anything
+hurts, then I quit. It is wrong to lie, and a man who follows it up will
+come to some bad end.
+
+
+BUYING A STONE CRUSHER.
+
+The proceedings of the council of the city of Milwaukee shows that the
+aldermen are about to buy a stone crusher, to be run by steam, for the
+purpose of crushing stones to be used on the streets. If the city has
+never indulged in the luxury of a stone crusher, it should interview some
+city that has owned one, before it closes a contract with any party that
+wants to sell one. Every party that owns one does want to sell it.
+Statistics show that. The first city in Wisconsin that bought one was
+Madison. The city owned it for a year or two, and after that no man that
+was in the council when it was bought could ever get in it again. The
+mayor that winked at the purchase of the stone crusher was defeated, and
+there was trouble. No person would ever say what was the matter, but you
+say "stone crusher" to a citizen of Madison, and he would reach his right
+hand around to his pistol pocket, and the conversation would cease.
+
+La Crosse heard that Madison had a stone crusher, and so she wanted one.
+La Crosse is bound to have anything that any other town has, whether it is
+a railroad, an insane asylum, or a speckled hen. La Crosse could have
+bought Madison's stone crusher at a discount, but she wanted one new, with
+the paint all on, fresh. Second-hand stone crusher? Not any for La Crosse.
+So the city ordered a brand new one, right from the mint, at an expense of
+about $5,000.
+
+The idea was that it would be about as big as a straw cutter, or a job
+press, and people were anxious to see it work.
+
+Finally the city was notified that one train of cars loaded with the stone
+crusher had arrived, with red flags on, betokening extra trains running
+wild behind, and the city was told to come down to the depot and pay the
+first installment of freight, and take the stone crusher away--that part
+of it that had arrived. The aldermen went down and took an
+inventory of the hardware, and some of them went and jumped in the river.
+At a cent a pound one can buy a good deal of cast iron for five thousand
+dollars. The city bonded itself, and paid the freight, and during the
+spring all of the trains loaded with the stone crusher arrived. It was
+argued that the only way to get the stone crusher up to the city building
+would be to give the railroad the right of way up town, right through Main
+street.
+
+Some were in favor of letting the railroad company keep it for freight,
+but the company threatened to get out an injunction on the city. Finally a
+man who took contracts to move brick buildings agreed to move it up town
+on shares, and during the summer the most of it was got up there and
+corded up on some vacant lots. If all the cast iron in it came out of one
+mine it must have been an immense mine. People would look at it and weep.
+Every alderman swore he voted against buying it. Occasionally some one in
+the council would suggest that the stone crusher be taken out to the
+bluffs, a couple of miles, and set to work, when another one would move,
+to amend by inserting a clause that the bluffs be moved into the city to
+be crushed, as it would save expense. Then the matter would drop. For
+three years that stone crusher stood there, and it never crushed a pebble.
+New mayors and aldermen were elected, and every day they passed that
+crusher, but they never spoke to it. Finally a job was put up to get rid
+of it. There was a man there who owned a stone quarry, and it occurred to
+somebody to sell it to him. He was a truly good man, and did not believe
+there were any bad men in the world, who would kanoodle him with a stone
+crusher. A committee was appointed to sell it to him. The committee was
+composed of men who had traded horses, sold lightning rods, and been
+insurance agents, and when they told the poor man that the city had
+noticed that he was a deserving man, that they had decided to
+help him along, and would sell him that stone crusher, and he could pay
+for it in crushed stone, and the city would pay him in cash half a dollar
+more than the stone was worth, he said he would take it. They got it on to
+him by buying crushed stone of him and paying cash for it.
+
+We have never heard whether the man lived or not, and have never heard
+whether the city bought any stone of him, but the city got rid of it, and
+then had a celebration. Why, they figured it up, and the thing could crush
+enough stone in twenty-four hours to pave the streets a foot thick all
+over town and thirteen miles in the country. To run it a week would
+bankrupt the State of Wisconsin, It could go up to the stone quarry and
+tunnel a hole right through the hill. It was the biggest elephant that
+ever a city drew in a legalized lottery. Milwaukee will make money if she
+does not buy a stone crusher, not as long as it can buy stone in the
+rough, and have it crushed by tramps, at nothing a day.
+
+
+MERRIE CHRISTMAS.
+
+What proportion of the people who wish each other merry Christmas, do you
+suppose think of the reason that the day is a holiday? Not one in a
+thousand. Do the young fellows who put on a clean shirt and go down town
+and play pool all day, and drink yellow stuff out of a shaving cup, and
+get chalk on their fingers, and eat liver sausage, think that Christ died
+to save them? No! All they think of is the prospect of sticking some other
+fellow for the game. Do the hundreds of thousands of people who get up a
+big feed, and gormandize, think of Christ, or the poor all about them who
+have little to eat to-day, and little prospect of more to eat to-morrow?
+Many of them do not think of the poor, or of anything else except to
+prospect upon how much they will hold and not get sick.
+
+
+THE DIFFERENCE IN HORSES.
+
+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 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 someone 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 the
+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.
+
+
+BASE INGRATITUDE.
+
+I remember once of offering a lady from Eau Claire a slice of bread and a
+half of a red onion in a railroad car. She looked hungry, and yet she said
+she didn't care to eat. Thinking she had a delicacy about accepting food
+at the hands of one who was almost a stranger to her, I turned the bread
+and onion into her lap, and said she was entirely welcome to it. What did
+she do? Instead of eating it, and thanking me, she threw it out of the
+window, and went and sat by the stove. I was never so offended in my life.
+That woman may see the time she will want that onion, and I would see her
+almost perish of starvation before she could have any more of my onion.
+
+
+THE DIFFERENCE.
+
+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
+meningitis; 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 whiskey 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?
+
+
+THOSE STEP LADDERS!
+
+There has got to be a law passed to punish the hardware dealers for
+selling those step ladders that shut up like a jack-knife. A Ninth Street
+woman got onto one the other afternoon when it looked as though there was
+going to be a frost, to take her ivies down and carry them in the house.
+We don't care how handsome a woman is naturally, you put a towel around
+her head and put her up on a step ladder about seven feet high, with a
+tomahawk in her left hand, trying to draw a big nail out of a post on a
+veranda, and she looks like thunder. This woman did. Her husband tried to
+get her to let him do the work, but she said a man never knew how to do
+anything, anyway. So he sat down on the steps to see how it would turn
+out. She said afterwards that he kicked the ladder, but however that may
+be, there was an earthquake, and when he looked up the air was filled with
+calico, toweling, striped stockings, polonaise, trailing arbutus, red
+petticoats, store hair and step ladder. He said the step ladder struck the
+veranda last, but as he picked her off of it, it seemed as though it must
+have lit first. He said the step ladder must have kicked up. In coming
+down she run one leg through the baby wagon, and the other through some
+flower pots, and a boy who was passing along said he guess she had been to
+the turning school.
+
+
+WONDERS OF THE STAGE.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: BEHIND THE SCENES.]
+
+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.
+
+
+HOW FARMERS MAY GET RICH.
+
+The artificial propagation of fish has attracted much attention of late
+years, and the success of experiments has shown that every farmer that has
+a stream of water on his land can raise fish enough to get rich in five
+years, four months and twenty-one days.
+
+
+A CASE OF PARALYSIS.
+
+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 small pox. O, we suppose they have more fun in some of these
+country towns than you can shake a stick at.
+
+
+WE WILL CELEBRATE.
+
+With so many new holidays, and so many new people, it is hardly to be
+wondered at that the day of all days, the day that should be dearest to
+the heart of every American, is in danger of being passed over in silence,
+and were it not for the fire cracker, that begins to get in its work about
+the first of June, in many instances this Anniversary of American
+Independence would be passed without the customary mouth shootzen-fest
+from alleged orators, but when the small boy begins to stir around and
+clandestinely look down the muzzle of the always loaded fire cracker, the
+patriotism of the boys still begins to assert itself, the old man's eyes
+begin to snap, and he talks to his neighbor about how they used to
+celebrate when he was a boy, the stuff begins to work over the
+neighborhood, the village catches it, the country begins.
+
+
+DOGS AND HUMAN BEINGS!
+
+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
+girl's 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.
+
+
+AN ODOROUS BOHEMIAN.
+
+A Bohemian on the train last night had some cheese in his vest pocket that
+was too ripe, and the conductor had to disinfect the car, and order the
+Bohemian to be quarantined before the train would be allowed to enter the
+city. Cheese is all right in its place, but it don't want to be allowed to
+lay above ground too long after it has departed this life. If farmers will
+pay a little attention to cheese in its different stages, much trouble can
+be avoided. In union there is strength. So there is in a smoking car.
+
+
+TRAGEDY ON THE STAGE.
+
+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 drowned 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 unrequitted 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.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN MCCULLOUGH KILLING A TEXAS STEER.]
+
+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.
+
+
+GRANITE HEAD CHEESE.
+
+A few years ago there was some excitement at Grand Rapids over the
+discovery of a bed or quarry of granite. Some of it was taken out, from
+the top of the quarry, and polished, and proved to be as fine as any that
+is imported. Further working of the quarry, however, has developed a
+strange thing. The further they go down the softer it is, and it has been
+learned that the quarry is all head cheese, such as is sold by butchers.
+On top it is petrified, and polishes very nicely, but a little below it is
+nice and fresh, and can be cut out with a knife, all ready for the table.
+A friend in Milwaukee, who has an uncle living at Grand Rapids, has
+furnished us with a quantity of it, some of which we have eaten, and were
+it not for the fact that we know it came from the quarry, it would be hard
+to convince us that it was not concocted out of the remains of a butcher
+shop. The people up there talk of running Hon. J.N. Brundage for Congress,
+on the head cheese ticket, in order that he may use his influence to get
+head cheese adopted as an army ration, and also as currency with which to
+wipe out the national debt.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA AN INVENTOR.
+
+"Ha! Ha! Now I have got you," said the grocery man to the had boy, the
+other morning, as he came in and jumped upon the counter and tied the end
+of a ball of twine to the tail of a dog, and "sicked" the dog on another
+dog that was following a passing sleigh, causing the twine to pay out
+until the whole ball was scattered along the block. "Condemn you, I've a
+notion to choke the liver out of you. Who tied that twine to the dog's
+tail?"
+
+The boy choked up with emotion, and the tears came into his eyes, and he
+said he didn't know anything about the twine or the dog. He said he
+noticed the dog come in, and wag his tail around the twine, but he
+supposed the dog was a friend of the family, and did not disturb him.
+"Everybody lays everything that is done to me," said the boy, as he put
+his handkerchief to his nose, "and, they will be sorry for it when I die.
+I have a good notion to poison myself by eating some of your glucose
+sugar."
+
+"Yes, and you do about everything that is mean. The other day a lady came
+in and told me to send up to her house, some of my country sausage, done
+up in muslin bags, and while she was examining it she noticed something
+hard inside the bags, and asked me what it was, and I opened it, and I
+hope to die if there wasn't a little brass padlock and a piece of red
+morocco dog collar imbedded in the sausage. Now how do you suppose that
+got in there?" and the grocery man looked savage.
+
+The boy looked interested, and put on an expression as though in deep
+thought, and finally said, "I suppose the farmer that put up the sausage
+did not strain the dog meat. Sausage meat ought to be strained."
+
+The grocery man pulled in about half a block of twine, after the
+dog had run against a fence and broke it, and told the boy he knew
+perfectly well how the brass padlock came to be in the sausage, but
+thinking it was safer to have the good will of the boy than the ill will,
+he offered him a handful of prunes.
+
+"No," said the boy, "I have swore off on mouldy prunes. I am no
+kinder-garden any more. For years I have eaten rotten peaches around this
+store, and everything you couldn't sell, but I have turned over a new leaf
+now, and after this nothing is too good for me. Since Pa has got to be an
+inventor, we are going to live high."
+
+"What's your Pa invented? I saw a hearse and three hacks go up on your
+street the other day and I thought may be you had killed your Pa."
+
+"Not much. There will be more than three hacks when I kill Pa, and don't
+you forget it. Well, sir, Pa has struck a fortune, if he can make the
+thing work. He has got an idea about coal stoves that will bring him
+several million dollars, if he gets a royalty of five dollars on every
+cook stove in the world. His idea is to have a coal stove on castors with
+the pipe made to telescope out and in, and rubber hose for one joint, so
+you can pull the stove all around the room and warm any particular place.
+Well, sir, to hear Pa tell about it, you would think it would
+revolutionize the country, and maybe it will when he gets it perfected,
+but he came near burning the house up, and scared us half to death this
+morning, and burned his shirt off, and he is all covered with cotton with
+sweet oil on, and he smells like salad dressing.
+
+"You see Pa had a pipe made and some castors put on our coal stove, and he
+tied a rope to the hearth of the stove, and had me put in some kindling
+wood and coal last night, so he could draw the stove up to the bed and
+light the fire without getting up. Ma told him he would put his foot in
+it, and he told her to dry up, and let him run the stove
+business. He said it took a man with brain to run a patent right, and Ma
+she pulled the clothes over her head and let Pa do the fire act. She has
+been building the fires for twenty years, and thought she would let Pa see
+how good it was. Well, Pa pulled the stove to the bed, and touched off the
+kindling wood. I guess maybe I got a bundle of kindling wood that the
+hired girl had put kerosene on, cause it blazed up awful and smoked, and
+the blaze bursted out the doors and windows of the stove, and Pa yelled
+fire, and I jumped out of bed and rushed in and he was the scartest man
+you ever see, and you'd a dide to see how he kicked when I threw a pail of
+water on his legs and put his shirt out. Ma did not get burned, but she
+was pretty wet, and she told Pa she would pay five dollars royalty on that
+stove and take the castors off and let it remain stationary. Pa says he
+will make it work if he burns the house down. I think it was real mean in
+Pa to get mad at me because I threw cold water on him instead of warm
+water, to put his shirt out. If I had waited till I could heat water to
+the right temperature I would have been an orphan and Pa would have been a
+burnt offering. But some men always kick at everything. Pa has given up
+business entirely and says he shall devote the remainder of his life
+curing himself of the different troubles that I get him into. He has
+retained a doctor by the year, and he buys liniment by the gallon.
+
+"What was it about your folks getting up in the middle of the night to
+eat? The hired girl was over here after some soap the other morning, and
+she said she was going to leave your house."
+
+"Well, that was a picnic. Pa said he wanted breakfast earlier than we was
+in the habit of having it, and he said I might see to it that the house
+was awake early enough. The other night I awoke with the awfulest pain you
+ever heard of. It was that night that you give me and my chum the
+bottle of pickled oysters that had begun to work. Well, I could't sleep,
+and I thought I would call the hired girls, and they got up and got
+breakfast to going, and then I rapped on Pa's and Ma's door and told them
+the breakfast was getting cold, and they got up and came down. We ate
+breakfast by gas light, and Pa yawned and said it made a man feel good to
+get up and get ready for work before daylight, the way he used to on the
+farm, and Ma she yawned and agreed with Pa, 'cause she has to, or have a
+row. After breakfast we sat around for an hour, and Pa said it was a long
+time getting daylight, and bimeby Pa looked at his watch. When he began to
+pull out his watch I lit out and hid in the storeroom, and pretty soon I
+heard Pa and Ma come up stairs and go to bed, and then the hired girls,
+they went to bed, and when it was all still, and the pain had stopped
+inside of my clothes, I went to bed, and I looked to see what time it was
+and it was two o'clock in the morning. We got dinner at eight o'clock in
+the morning, and Pa said he guessed he would call up the house after this,
+so I have lost another job, and it was all on account of that bottle of
+pickled oysters you gave me. My chum says he had colic too, but he didn't
+call up his folks. It was all he could do to get up himself. Why don't you
+give away something that is not spiled?"
+
+The groceryman said he guessed he knew what to give away, and the boy went
+out and hung up a sign in front of the grocery, that he had made on
+wrapping paper with red chalk, which read, "Rotten eggs, good enough for
+custard pies, for 18 cents a dozen."
+
+
+A GOOD LAND ENOUGH.
+
+This land of the free is good enough, if we make it good, and if we make
+it bad, it is just as bad as any country under the sun. It all depends on
+how the people act.
+
+
+THE WOODCOCK.
+
+It is a rainy day, and nothing has occurred of a local nature, that is,
+nothing of a hair standing nature, so we will just spoil a few sheets of
+paper relating, in a Sunday School book style, the circumstances of an
+excursion after woodcock, the other day, indulged in by W.C. Root, the
+Wisconsin amateur Bogardus, Jennings McDonald, Captain of a breech-loading
+steamboat, and the subscriber. In the first place, it may be well to state
+that the woodcock, or "Timber Doodle," as Prof. Agassiz calls it, is a
+game bird. We know it is a game bird, because they charge a dollar apiece
+for them in New York. The meat is about as sweet as deceased cow's liver,
+but they are worth a dollar apiece. The "Timber Doodle" is a patriotic
+bird, because he gets ripe on the 4th of July. He is about the size of a
+doughnut, with a long bill, like a lawyer.
+
+We took passage per skiff at twelve o'clock. If there was one drawback, it
+was the fact that the oar-locks of the boat had been mislaid. After
+consuming an hour in not finding them, Frank Hatch became discouraged at
+seeing us lay around the levee, so he tied the oars on with tarred rope
+and we got off, three of us besides the other dogs. The water was so high
+that we crossed Barron's island, only having to get out and pull the boat
+over two or three sand-bars and a raft or two. Every time we got out to
+pull the boat, the dogs would get out to look for woodcock, around the
+stumps, and when they got in the boat would be full of water and mud, and
+of course we had our best clothes on. Did it ever occur to you how much
+water a dog could carry in his hair? A dog is worse than a sponge. An
+ordinary dog, with luck, can fill a skiff with water at two jumps. Not,
+however, with us in the boat to bail out the water. The woodcock's tail
+sticks up like a sore thumb. We are thus particular to describe
+the woodcock, so if you ever see one you can go right away from him.
+Woodcock and mosquitoes are in "cahoots." While the woodcock bores in the
+ground for snakes and other feed that makes him fat and worth a dollar in
+New York, the mosquito stands on the ramparts and talks to the boys.
+
+Well, speaking about woodcock, after riding five miles, through bushes,
+brambles and things, we got out of the boat and only had to walk a couple
+of miles to get where the birds were. Right here we wish to state that we
+shouldn't have gone after the woodcock at all, only everybody said it was
+such fun. Root showed us a picture of a woodcock in a book, and if that
+didn't convince us, the fact that a small boy came in town and sold three
+dozen, did. Then we wanted to go. There never has been a year when
+woodcock were so plenty at places we didn't visit. The most fun was at a
+ditch which was about a foot wider than any of us could jump. Root gave
+his gun to McDonald and plunged in. Then McDonald threw a gun to Root. It
+hit him on the thumb-nail and dropped in the ditch out of sight. Mc.
+thought it was Root's gun, and he apologized to Root for throwing it so
+carelessly. Root supposed it was Mc.'s gun, and he apologized for not
+catching it. We never saw men more polite in the world. Mc. started to
+jump across, when a dog got between his legs, and both went in up to their
+knees. You never can jump as well with a dog tangled up amongst your legs.
+The dog looked at Jennings as though he wanted to swear. We waded through
+the ditch and only got two feet wet. The rest of them had more than that
+wet.
+
+But about the woodcock. This is, kind reader, purely a woodcock story, and
+more or less must be said about the dollar bird. But this is neither here
+nor there. It was over in the Root river bottoms. Finally we got on the
+woodcock ground and went to work. Talk about mosquitoes! There was no end
+to them. We ought not to say that, either, because there are spots on our
+person that just fit the end of a mosquito. There was an end to them. If
+you never saw mosquitoes in convention, you want to go over there. And
+right here we will give a recipe for keeping mosquitoes from biting. You
+take some cedar oil and put on your coat collar, if you are a man, and if
+you are a woman put it on that gingerbread work around your neck, and a
+mosquito will come up and sing to you and get all ready to take toll, when
+she will smell that oil. She is the sickest mosquito you ever saw. She
+turns over on her back and sends her husband for the nearest doctor. We
+had a bottle of cedar oil, and if Jennings hadn't left it hanging up in
+Hogan's store in his coat, we should have made those mosquitoes sick. As
+it was they did it to us. There isn't a spot on us as big as a billiard
+table but what you can find artesian wells made by mosquitoes.
+
+Woodcock sell higher in the market than any other bird. Lots of people
+that never saw them eat snakes, eat them. When they get up to fly they
+talk Bohemian, and get behind a bush. You shoot right into the bush, and
+if you kill one you think you are a good shot. Talk about getting tired.
+You walk around in the woods several miles, with mosquitoes getting
+acquainted with you, and all the time your nerves strung up in
+anticipation of seeing a dollar bill fly up, and if you don't sleep
+without rocking, we are no prophet. The sport, however, is exhilerating,
+and we are glad we went. We are glad because it learned us one thing, and
+that is, if we ever want a woodcock real bad, it will be cheaper, easier,
+and better to buy it. It will be inferred that we did not see a woodcock.
+Such is the case.
+
+But we made the blackbirds sick.
+
+
+A BALD-HEADED MAN MOST CRAZY.
+
+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 rang 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.
+
+[Illustration: AT THE TELEPHONE.]
+
+If we have done wrong in talking with a total strangers 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.
+
+
+CONVENIENT CURRENCY.
+
+What we want is a currency that every farmer can issue for himself. A law
+should be passed making the products of the farm a legal tender for all
+debts, public and private, including duties on imports, interest on the
+public debt, and contributions for charitable purposes. Then we shall have
+a new money table about as follows:
+
+  Ten ears of corn make one cent.
+  Ten cucumbers make one dime.
+  Ten watermelons make one dollar.
+  Ten bushels of wheat make one eagle.
+
+
+THE GOSPEL CAR.
+
+    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 railroad 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 wheiher 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
+with 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 "square."
+
+That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can occasionally
+practice without having a gospel car.
+
+
+BANKS AND BANKING.
+
+The subject of banking has engrossed the attention of your excellent
+Governor for, lo! these many weeks, and he is constrained to say that some
+radical changes must be made in the method of receiving deposits by banks,
+where an equivalent is not rendered, of His Excellency will be compelled
+to emerge from his present aristocratic quarters and take up his abode in
+the poor-house. I would call your attention to the practice certain banks
+have of issuing checks in lieu of cash. If these checks were available at
+the groceries it would be better than it is. Banks have got in a habit of
+issuing a species of ivory button in receipt for the green coin of the
+realm which is only good at the counter of the bank. These checks are not
+issued by the National Banks, but by the State Banks, denominated "Keno"
+and "Faro." I would not charge that there is "skullduggery" or
+"shenanagen" going on in these institutions, as the president of one of
+them informed me, confidentially, that he dealt on the "square," but it is
+a noticeable fact that the dividends received by those who do business
+with the banks, are almost, as it were, imperceptible. I trust that you
+will cause this branch of industry to be thoroughly investigated, and
+report by bill or otherwise. Our finances should be beyond suspicion of
+dishonesty.
+
+
+LARGE MOUTHS ABE FASHIONABLE.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: "GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!"]
+
+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.
+
+
+INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.
+
+Under this heading I can think of nothing that appears more appropriate
+than the subject of the artificial propagation of fish. It is a subject
+that has arrested the attention of many of the ablest minds of the
+country, and the results of experiments have been thus far so satisfactory
+that it is almost safe to predict that within the next ten centuries every
+man, however poor, may pick bull-heads off of his crab apple vines and
+gather his winter supply of fresh shad from his sweet potato trees at less
+than fifty cents a pound. The experiments that have been made in our own
+state warrant us in going largely into the fish business. A year ago a
+quantity of fish seeds were sub soil plowed into the ice of Lake Mendota,
+and to-day I am informed that boarders at the hotels there have all the
+fish to eat that any reasonable man could desire. The expense is small and
+the returns are enormous. It is estimated that from the six quarts of fish
+seeds that were planted in the lake there are now ready for the market at
+least 11,000,000 car loads of brain-producing food, if you spit on your
+bait when you go fishing.
+
+
+PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
+
+
+HIS PA GETS BOXED.
+
+"You don't want to buy a good parrot, do you?" said the bad boy to the
+grocery man as he put his wet mittens on the top of the stove to dry, and
+kept his back to the stove so he could watch the grocery man, and be
+prepared for a kick, if the man should remember the rotten egg sign that
+the boy put up in front of the grocery last week.
+
+"Naw, I don't want no parrot. I had rather have a fool boy around than a
+parrot. But what's the matter with your Ma's parrot? I thought she
+wouldn't part with him for anything."
+
+"Well, she wouldn't until Wednesday night, but now she says she will not
+have him around, and I may have half I can get for him. She told me to go
+to some saloon or some disreputable place and sell him, and I thought
+maybe he would about suit you," and the boy broke into a bunch of celery,
+and took out a few tender stalks and rubbed them on a codfish to salt
+them, and began to bite the stalks, while he held the sole of one wet boot
+up against the stove to dry it, making a smell of burned leather that came
+near turning the stomach of the cigar sign.
+
+"Look-a-here boy, don't you call this a disreputable place. Some of the
+best people in this town come here," said the grocery man as he held up
+the cheese knife and grated his teeth as though he would like to jab it
+into the youth.
+
+"O, that's all right, they come here 'cause you trust; but you make up
+what you lose by charging it to other people. Pa will make it hot for you
+the last of the week. He has been looking over your bill, and comparing it
+with the hired girl, and she says we haven't ever had a prune, or
+a dried apple, or a raisin, or any cinnamon, or crackers and cheese out of
+your store, and he says you are worse than the James brothers, and that
+you used to be a three card monte man, and he will have you arrested for
+highway robbery, but you can settle that with Pa. I like you, because you
+are no ordinary sneak thief, you are a high-toned, gentlemanly sort of a
+bilk, and wouldn't take anything you couldn't lift. O, keep your seat, and
+don't get excited. It does a man good to hear the truth from one who has
+got the nerve to tell it.
+
+"But about the parrot. Ma has been away from home for a week, having a
+high old time in Chicago, going to theatres and things, and while she was
+gone, I guess the hired girl or somebody learned the parrot some new
+things to say. A parrot that can only say 'Polly wants a cracker,' don't
+amount to anything--what we need is new style parrots that can converse on
+the topics of the day, and say things original. Well, when Ma got back I
+guess her conscience hurt her for the way she had been carrying on in
+Chicago, and so when she heard the basement of the church was being
+frescoed, she invited the committee to hold the Wednesday evening prayer
+meeting at our house. First, there were four people came, and Ma asked Pa
+to stay to make up a quorum, and Pa said seeing he had two pair, he
+guessed he would stay in, and if Ma would deal him a queen he would have a
+full hand. I don't know what Pa meant, but he plays draw poker sometimes.
+Anyway there was eleven people came including the minister, and after they
+had talked about the neighbors a spell, and Ma had showed the women a new
+tidy she had worked for the heathen, with a motto on it which Pa had
+taught her: 'A contrite heart beats a bob-tailed flush,'--and Pa had
+talked to the men about a religious silver mine he was selling stock in,
+which he advised them as a friend to buy for the glory of the church, they
+all went in the back parlor and the minister lead in prayer. He
+got down on his knees right under the parrot's cage, and you'd a dide to
+see Polly hang on to the wires of the cage with one foot, and drop an
+apple core on the minister's head. Ma shook her handkerchief at Polly, and
+looked sassy, and Polly got up on the perch, and as the minister got
+warmed up and began to raise the roof, Polly said, 'O, dry up.' The
+minister had his eyes shut, but he opened one of them a little and looked
+at Pa. Pa was tickled at the parrot, but when the minister looked at Pa as
+though it was him that was making irreverent remarks, Pa was mad.
+
+"The minister got to the 'amen,' and Polly shook hisself and said 'What
+you giving us?' and the minister got up and brushed the bird seed off his
+knees, and he looked mad. I thought Ma would sink with mortification, and
+I was sitting on a piano stool looking as pious as a Sunday school
+superintendent the Sunday before he skips out with the bank's funds; and
+Ma looked at me as though she thought it was me that had been tampering
+with the parrot. Gosh, I never said a word to that parrot, and I can prove
+it by my chum.
+
+"Well, the minister asked one of the sisters if she wouldn't pray, and she
+wasn't engaged, so she said with pleasure, and she kneeled down, but she
+corked herself, cause she got one knee on a cast-iron dumb bell that I had
+been practising with. She said 'O my,' in a disgusted sort of a way, and
+then she began to pray for the reformation of the youth of the land, and
+asked for the spirit to descend on the household, and particularly on the
+boy that was such a care and anxiety to his parents, and just then Polly
+said 'O, pull down your vest.' Well, you'd a dide to see that woman look
+at me. The parrot cage was partly behind the window curtin, and they
+couldn't see it, and she thought it was me. She looked at Ma as though she
+was wondering why she didn't hit me with a poker, but she went on, and
+Polly said 'wipe off your chin,' and then the lady got through
+and got up, and told Ma it must be a great trial to have an idiotic child,
+and then Ma she was mad, and said it wasn't half so bad as it was to be a
+kleptomaniac, and then the woman got up and said she wouldn't stay no
+longer, and Pa said to me to take that parrot outdoors, and that seemed to
+make them all good natured again. Ma said to take the parrot and give it
+to the poor. I took the cage and pointed my finger at the parrot and it
+looked at the woman and said 'old catamaran,' and the woman tried to look
+pious and resigned, but she couldn't. As I was going out the door the
+parrot ruffed up his feathers and said 'Dammit, set 'em up,' and I hurried
+out with the cage for fear he would say something bad, and the folks all
+held up their hands and said it was scandalous. Say, I wonder if a parrot
+can go to hell with the rest of the community. Well, I put the parrot in
+the woodshed, and after they all had their innings, except Pa, who acted
+as umpire, the meeting broke up, and Ma says it is the last time she will
+have that gang at her house.
+
+"That must have been where your Pa got his black eye," said the grocery
+man, as he charged the bunch of celery to the boy's Pa. "Did the minister
+hit him, or was it one of the sisters?"
+
+"O, he didn't get his black eye at prayer meeting!" said the boy, as he
+took his mittens off the stove, and rubbed them to take the stiffening
+out. "It was from boxing. Pa told my chum and me that it was no harm to
+learn to box, cause we could defend ourselves, and he said he used to be a
+holy terror with the boxing gloves when he was a boy, and he has been
+giving us lessons. Well, he is no slouch, now I tell you, and handles
+himself pretty well for a church member. I read in the paper how Zack
+Chandler played it on Conkling by getting Jem Mace, the prize fighter, to
+knock him silly, and I asked Pa if he wouldn't let me bring a
+poor boy who had no father to teach him boxing, to our house to learn to
+box, and Pa said certainly, fetch him along. He said he would be glad to
+do anything for a poor orphan. So I went down in the Third ward and got an
+Irish boy by the name of Duffy, who can knock the socks off any boy in the
+ward. He fit a prize fight once. It would have made you laugh to see Pa
+telling him how to hold his hands and how to guard his face. He told Duffy
+not to be afraid, but strike right out and hit for keeps. Duffy said he
+was afraid Pa would get mad if he hit him, and Pa said, 'nonsense, boy,
+knock me down if you can, and I will laugh ha! ha!' Well, Duffy he hauled
+back and gave Pa one on the nose, and another in both eyes, and cuffed him
+on the ear and punched him in the stomach, and lammed him in the mouth and
+made his teeth bleed, and then he gave him a side winder in both eyes, and
+Pa pulled off his boxing gloves and grabbed a chair, and we adjourned and
+went down stairs as though there was a panic. I haven't seen Pa since. Was
+his eye very black?"
+
+"Black, I should say so," said the grocery man. "And his nose seemed to be
+trying to look into his left ear. He was at the market buying
+beefsteak to put on it."
+
+"O, beefsteak is no account. I must go and see him and tell him that an
+oyster is the best thing for a black eye. Well, I must go. A boy has a
+pretty hard time running a house the way it should be run," and the boy
+went out and hung up a sign in front of the grocery: "_Frowy Butter a
+Speshulty_."
+
+
+CHRISTMAS TREES.
+
+There is too much dress parade about Christmas. Too many Christmas trees
+where rich children get club skates, and gold napkin rings, and poor
+children get pop corn strung on a string, and cornucopias full of
+peppermint candy.
+
+
+THE BOB-TAILED BADGER.
+
+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 a
+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.
+
+
+TERROR IN CHURCH.
+
+A ridiculous scene occurred at 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.
+
+[Illustration: "AH, MY FRIENDS, LOOK DOWN INTO THAT BURNING LAKE!"]
+
+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.
+
+
+FISH HATCHING IN WISCONSIN.
+
+I would suggest that you permit the subject of the artificial hatching of
+fish to engage your attention, and that you appropriate several dollars to
+purchase whale's eggs, vegetable oysters and mock turtle seeds. The
+hatching of fish is easy, and any man can soon learn it; and it is a
+branch of industry that many who are now out of employment, owing to
+circumstances beyond their control, will be glad to avail themselves of.
+How, I ask you, could means better be adapted to the ends than for the
+retiring officers of our State to go to setting on fish eggs?
+
+
+TRAINS WITHOUT CONDUCTORS.
+
+Since the introduction of the patent air brake on passenger trains, by
+which brakemen have been dispensed with, a number of patent right men have
+been studying up some contrivance to do away with conductors. All have
+failed except one, and that fortunate inventor is Col. Johnson, of the
+Railroad Eating House, Milwaukee. He has been engaged for two years on
+this patent, and has got it so near completed that he has filed a caveat
+at the Patent Office, and as his rights are secured, it can do no harm to
+describe the invention, as it is destined to work quite a revolution in
+the railroad business. It has been Col. Johnson's idea that an arrangement
+could be made so that an engineer of a train could have the whole train
+under his charge, to stop it, start it, collect fares, and bounce
+impecunious passengers, from his position on the engine, and do it all by
+steam, wind and water. A series of pneumatic tubes run from the door of
+each car to the engine, with speaking tubes. A passenger gets on the
+platform, and through the speaking tube asks the engineer what the fare is
+to such a place. The answer is returned, the fare is put in the hopper of
+the pneumatic tube, it goes to the engineer, he pulls a string, the door
+flies open and the passenger enters. Not the least important part of the
+machinery is the patent "aeolian bouncer," as it is called. A pair of ice
+tongs are placed so as to grasp the passenger by the seat of the pants or
+the polonaise, as the case may be, when he or she gets on the platform.
+These tongs are connected with the air brakes, in such a manner that by
+the engineer's touching a spring the whole force of the compressed air
+takes possession of the tongs, and the passenger is snatched bald-headed,
+metaphorically speaking. For instance, a passenger gets on the platform at
+Portage, and the ice tongs grasp him or her securely. If he or she pays
+the fare, the door is opened, the tongs release their hold, and
+the person is allowed to enter. But if the engineer should find that they
+had no money, or that their pass had run out, and they were trying to beat
+their way, he would pull the string and they would be lifted back on the
+depot steps and stood on their heads, raised in the air and made to see
+stars. Col. Johnson has been offered a fabulous sum for his patent, but he
+has not decided whether to sell or lease it. A trial trip was made at
+Milwaukee, the other day, and though the machine was not perfect, the
+experiment was not altogether a failure. A car was arranged with the
+apparatus, and went out to the Soldier's Home. Col. Johnson and a number
+of prominent railroad men were on board. They got a veteran soldier and a
+Polack waman to allow the machine to experiment on them. The machine took
+hold of the soldier and the engineer jerked. The man had one leg torn off,
+and the seat of his overcoat was ruined. He wouldn't try again, so they
+let the woman step on the platform. The engineer turned it the wrong way,
+and the car seemed full of compressed air, and a smell of limberger cheese
+pervaded the premises. When the smoke cleared off the woman was not to be
+found. After voting the machine a success the party started for Milwaukee.
+On nearing the city a pair of wooden shoes were seen in the air coming
+down, and they lit in the the canal by the tannery. A pair of corsets
+struck on Plankinton's packing house, and sections of spinal cord, and one
+leg of a pair of red drawers came down on the Soldier's home, and hair was
+found on the top of the car. It is thought the engineer loaded the air
+bouncer too heavy, and that it kicked. However, Col. Johnson was not
+discouraged, and will soon have his patent on all cars. The husband of the
+Polack woman wanted Johnson to pay him three dollars, but he said he
+didn't want to buy the woman. All he wanted was to hire her, anyway. Col.
+Johnson is a great inventor. It was he that invented the stomach
+pump, and the automatic candle enunciator, for awakening guests in the
+night to take early trains. The latter he sold to Mr. Williams, of Prairie
+du Chien, for a large amount and took his pay in trade.
+
+
+RAISING ELEPHANTS.
+
+Why not go to raising elephants? A good elephant will sell for eight
+thousand dollars. A pair of elephants can be bought by a community of
+farmers pooling their issues and getting a start, and in a few years every
+farm can be a menagerie of it own, and every year we can rake in from
+eight to twenty-four thousand dollars from the sale of surplus elephants.
+It may be said that elephants are hearty feeders, and that they would go
+through an ordinary farmer in a short time. Well, they can be turned out
+into the highway to browse, and earn their own living. This elephant
+theory is a good one, and any man that is good on figures can sit down and
+figure up a profit in a year sufficient to go into bankruptcy.
+
+
+THE POWER OF ELOQUENCE.
+
+A justice of the peace at Menasha, wanted to kill Pratt, the editor of the
+_Press_. The matter has been compromised, however. Pratt got the justice
+cornered up, and delivered one of the speeches to him that he delivered
+during the campaign last fall, and the justice got on his knees and said,
+"Pratt, this thing is all right, I surrender."
+
+
+A TRYING SITUATION.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE WANDERING OYSTER.]
+
+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 toward 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 slikery 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 GIDDY GIRLS QUARREL.
+
+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 enough 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.
+
+
+THE UNIVERSAL OBJECT.
+
+The object that every man has in view, whether he be farmer, mechanic,
+preacher, editor, or tramp, is to make money.
+
+
+THE MISTAKE ABOUT IT.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: MYSTERY OF A WOMAN'S CLOTHES!]
+
+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 expressman 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 greyhound 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.
+
+
+A NEW SPARKING SCHEME.
+
+A number of fathers who have daughters, have formed a society, the object
+of which is to charge young men who visit the girls, for meals, gas, wear
+and tear of furniture, etc. There has been so much sparking going on which
+did not mean business, that the organization has seemed necessary.
+
+
+EFFECTS OF MINERAL WATER.
+
+A woman from Milwaukee, stopping at Sparta for the summer, had a serious
+accident the other day. She had her dress pinned back so tight that the
+exclamation point where she was vaccinated on the left arm was plainly
+visible, and as she stooped over at the artesian well to dip up a cup full
+of physic, a little dog belonging to a lady from Pilot Knob took hold of
+her striped stocking and shook it, thinking it was a blue racer. The lady
+was overcome with heat and sank down on the damp ground, and the result
+was congestion of the dog, for when she got up she kicked that dog over
+the Court house and sprained her stocking. It is said that beautiful and
+healthful summer resort is fast filling up and everybody swears it is the
+most enjoyable place on the continent. It is certainly the cheapest for us
+La Crosse folks to go. We don't know of a place where, for the money
+invested, one can have so much fun and get so much health. You can leave
+La Crosse at 5:45, and arrive at Sparta at 6:20, after a delightful ride
+of thirty miles, and you will enjoy a race, your train beating the
+Northwestern train, and running like lightning. If you have a pass, or sit
+on the hind platform, it will cost you nothing. You can walk down town, at
+small expense. You want to take supper before leaving home, if economy is
+what you are seeking in addition to health. Go to Condit, at the Warner
+House, and talk as though you were looking for a place to send your
+family, and he will hitch up and drive you all over town. Tell Doc.
+Nichols you never tried a Turkish bath, but that you are troubled with
+hypochondria and often wish you were dead, and that if you were sure the
+baths would help you, you would come down and take them regular. He will
+put you through for nothing, and give you a cigar. Then you can get a
+tooth pick at Condit's and put your thumb under your vest and go to the
+springs and talk loud about railroad stocks and bonds and speculating in
+wheat. (It takes two to do it up right. Frank Hatch and the writer are
+going down some night to "do" the watering place). Then you can swell
+around till half past ten, and sneak off to the depot on foot and come
+home, and your pocket book will be just as empty as when you started,
+unless you get a subscriber, and you will have added bloom to your cheek,
+and had a high old time, and next winter you can talk about the delightful
+time you passed at Sparta last summer during the heated term.
+
+Let's get up a party and go down some night.
+
+
+WHAT THE COUNTRY NEEDS.
+
+What the country needs is a melon from which the incendiary ingredients
+have been removed. It seems to me that by proper care, when the melon is
+growing on the vines, the cholera morbus can be decreased, at least, the
+same as the cranberry has been improved, by cultivation. The experiment of
+planting homeopathic pills in the hill with the melon has been tried, but
+homeopathy, while perhaps good in certain cases, does not seem to reach
+the seat of disease in the watermelon. What I would advise, and the advice
+is free to all, is that a porous plaster be placed upon watermelons, just
+as they are begining to ripen, with a view to draw out the cholera morbus.
+A mustard plaster might have the same effect, but the porous plaster seems
+to me to be the article to fill a want long felt. If, by this means, a
+breed of watermelon can be raised that will not strike terror to the heart
+of the consumer, this agricultural address will not have been delivered in
+vain.
+
+
+THE MAN FROM DUBUQUE.
+
+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 forehead 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.
+
+[Illustration: AN INTRUSIVE NIGGER.]
+
+"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 brakemen 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 PLEA FOR THE BULL HEAD.
+
+The late meeting of the State Fish Commissioners at Milwaukee was an
+important event, and the discussions the wise men indulged in will be
+valuable additions to the literature of the country, and future readers of
+profane history will rise up and call them blessed. It seems that the
+action of the Milwaukee common council in withdrawing the use of the water
+works from the commissioners, will put a stop to the hatching of
+whitefish. This is as it should be. The white fish is an aristocratic
+bird, that will not bite a hook, and the propagation of this species of
+fish is wholly in the interest of wealthy owners of fishing tugs, who have
+nets. By strict attention to business they can catch all the whitefish out
+of the lake a little faster than the State machine can put them in. Poor
+people cannot get a smell of whitefish. The same may be said of brook
+trout. While they will bite a hook, it requires more machinery to catch
+them than ordinary people can possess without mortgaging a house. A man
+has got to have a morocco book of expensive flies, a fifteen dollar bamboo
+jointed rod, a three dollar trout basket with a hole mortised in the top,
+a corduroy suit made in the latest style, top boots of the Wellington
+pattern, with red tassels in the straps, and a flask of Otard brandy in a
+side pocket. Unless a man is got up in that style, a speckled trout will
+see him in Chicago, first, and then it won't bite. The brook trout is even
+more aristocratic than the whitefish, and should not be propagated at
+public expense.
+
+But there are fish that should be propagated in the interest of the
+people. There is a species of fish that never looks at the clothes of the
+man who throws in the bait, a fish that takes whatever is thrown to it,
+and when once hold of the hook never tries to shake a friend, but submits
+to the inevitable, crosses its legs and says "Now I lay me," and
+comes out on the bank and seems to enjoy being taken. It is a fish that is
+a friend of the poor, and one that will sacrifice itself in the interest
+of humanity. This is the fish that the State should adopt as its trade
+mark, and cultivate friendly relations with, and stand by. We allude to
+the bullhead.
+
+The bullhead never went back on a friend. To catch the bullhead it is not
+necessary to tempt his appetite with porter house steak, or to display an
+expensive lot of fishing tackle. A pin hook, a piece of liver, and a
+cistern pole, is all the capital required to catch a bullhead. He lays
+upon the bottom of a stream or pond in the mud, thinking. There is no fish
+that does more thinking or has a better head for grasping great questions,
+or chunks of liver than the bullhead. His brain is large, his heart beats
+for humanity, and if he can't get liver, a piece of a tin tomato can will
+make a meal for him. It is an interesting study to watch a boy catch a
+bullhead. The boy knows where the bullhead congregates, and when he throws
+in his hook it is dollars to buttons that "in the near future" he will get
+a bite. The bullhead is democratic in all its instincts. If the boy's
+shirt is sleeveless, his hat crownless, and his pants a bottomless pit,
+the bullhead will bite just as well as though the boy is dressed in purple
+and fine linen, with knee breeches and plaid stockings. The bull head
+seems to be dozing--bulldozing we might say--on the muddy bottom, and a
+stranger might say that he would not bite. But wait. There is a movement
+of his continuation, and his cow-catcher moves gently toward the piece of
+liver. He does not wait to smell of it, and canvas in his mind whether the
+liver is fresh. It makes no difference to him. He argues that here is a
+family out of meat. "My country calls and I must go," says the bullhead to
+himself, and he opens his mouth and the liver disappears.
+
+It is not certain that the boy will think of his bait for half an
+hour, but the bullhead is in no hurry. He lays in the mud and proceeds to
+digest the liver. He realizes that his days will not be long in the land,
+or water, more properly speaking, and he argues if he swallows the bait
+and digests it before the boy pulls him out, he will be just so much
+ahead. Finally the boy thinks of his bait, and pulls it out, and the
+bullhead is landed on the bank, and the boy cuts him open to get the hook
+out. Some fish only take the bait gingerly, and are only caught around the
+selvage of the mouth, and they are comparatively easy to dislodge. Not so
+with the bullhead. He says if liver is a good thing you can't have too
+much of it, and it tastes good all the way down. The boy gets down on his
+knees to dissect the bullhead, and get his hook, and it may be that the
+boy swears. It would not be astonishing, though he must feel, when he gets
+his hook out of the hidden recesses of the bullhead, like the minister
+that took up a collection and didn't get a cent, though he expressed his
+thanks at getting his hat back. There is one drawback to the bullhead, and
+that is his horns. We doubt if a boy ever descended into the patent
+insides of a bullhead, to mine for Limerick hooks, that did not, before
+his work was done, run a horn into his vital parts. But the boy seems to
+expect it, and the bullhead enjoys it. We have seen a bullhead lay on the
+bank and become dry, and to all appearances dead to all that was going on,
+and when the boy sat down on him and got a horn in his elbow, and yelled
+murder, the bullhead would grin from ear to ear, and wag his tail as
+though applauding for an _end core_.
+
+The bullhead never complains. We have seen a boy take a dull knife and
+proceed to follow a fish line down a bullhead from his head to the end of
+his subsequent anatomy, and all the time there would be an expression of
+sweet peace on the countenance of the bullhead, as though he
+enjoyed it. If we were preparing a picture representing "Resignation," for
+a chromo to give to subscribers, and wished to represent a scene of
+suffering in which the sufferer was light hearted, and seemed to recognize
+that all was for the best, we should take for the subject a bullhead, with
+a boy searching with a knife for a long lost fish hook.
+
+The bullhead is a fish that has no scales, but in lieu thereof is a fine
+India rubber skin, that is as far ahead of fiddle string material for
+strength and durability as possible. The meat of the bullhead is not as
+choice as that of the mackerel, but it fills up a stomach just as well,
+and the _Sun_ insists that the fish commissioners shall drop the hatching
+of aristocratic fish and give the bullhead a chance. There's millions in
+it.
+
+
+WHY NOT RAISE WOLVES?
+
+You devote a good deal of time and labor to the raising of sheep, and what
+do you get for it. The best sheep cannot lay more than eight pounds of
+wool in a season, and even if you get fifty cents a pound for it, you have
+not got any great bonanza. Now, the state encourages the raising of
+wolves, by offering a bounty of ten dollars for a piece of skin off the
+head of each wolf. It does not cost any more to raise a wolf than it does
+to raise a sheep, and while sheep rarely raise more than two lambs a year,
+a pair of good wolves are liable to raise twenty young ones in the course
+of a year, if it is a good year for wolves. In addition to the
+encouragement offered by the state, many counties give as much more, so
+that one wolf scalp will bring more money than five sheep. You will
+readily see that our wise legislators are offering inducements to you that
+you should be thankful for. You can establish a wolf orchard on any farm,
+and with a pair of good wolves to start on, there is millions in it.
+
+
+THE SUDDEN FIRE-WORKS AT RACINE.
+
+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 enterprizing 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 here 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.
+
+[Illustration: MARTINDALE CLIMBS A POLE.]
+
+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 the
+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 an 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 assembly man, 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.
+
+
+LA CROSSE NEBECUDNEZZER WATER.
+
+It is the great ambition of our life to bring to the notice of the people
+of the world the curative powers of the La Crosse water, that all who may
+be suffering from any disease, however complicated, may be cured, and all
+men may become healthy, and women too, and doctors will have to go out
+harvesting. The La Crosse artesian well, was begun last fall, and
+completed as soon as the contractor found he couldn't make any money at
+it. It was rumored that he struck granite, and in fact several little
+specks of granite were found in the stuff that come from the hole, but it
+is pretty generally believed now that the granite particles got in from
+the top, unknown to the contractor. The water came to within ten feet of
+the surface, and struck. It never would come any further, and the world
+would have remained in ignorance of its curative powers, only for Powers,
+who put in a hydraulic ram, and the blockade was broken, the water now
+flows to the surface, and all is well.
+
+Attention was first called to the curative powers of the water, by a
+singular incident. A teamster whose duty it was to haul stone, was in the
+habit of stopping at the well to water his mules. One of the mules was in
+a sad state. He was blind in one eye, had a spavin, a ringbone, the
+heaves, his liver was torpid, his lungs were badly affected, and his
+friends feared that he was not long for the stone quarry. He had no
+family. Soon after the mule began to drink the water, the driver noticed a
+great change come over him. Previously he had seemed resigned to his fate,
+but latterly he was ambitious. One day while playfully mashing the mule
+over the head with a sled stake, the driver noticed that a new eye had
+grown in the place of the former cavity, and as the mule kicked him with
+more than his accustomed vigor, he noticed that the spavin and ring bone
+were gone, and the former plaintive melody of his voice gave
+place to a bray that resembled the whistle of the Alex. Mitchell. When it
+was known that the mule had been cured, others tried the water, men who
+had never drank it before, until to-day there are thousands who will
+testify to the benefits arising from its use. We could give the names of
+many who have been snatched from the grave--the La Crosse water is a
+regular body snatcher--but we will first give an analysis of the water.
+
+Believing that the water was destined to play a prominent part in solving
+the great question of how to euchre death, we sent a quantity of it to the
+eminent Prof. Alonzo Brown, M.D.V.S. of Jefferson, Wis., with a letter of
+transmittal authorizing him to analyze it thoroughly, and give us the
+result, at our expense. The following is Prof. Brown's analysis:
+
+LABRATORY JEFFERSON LIVERY STABLE,
+August 3, 1877.
+
+Lieut. GEO. W. PECK,
+4th Wis. Cavalry,
+
+Dear Sir:
+
+Yours of July 25th, received. I should have attended to the water before,
+but have had several cases of blind staggers in my barn, which has kept me
+busy. I have examined the water by every process known to science, and
+pronounce it bully. I took it apart at my leisure, and find that it
+contains to one U.S. washtub full, of 741 cubic inches, the following
+stuff:
+
+  Chloride, of Sodium, (common salt).............2 sacks.
+  Chloride of Pilgarlic.....................40,021 grains.
+  Bicarbonate of erysipelas.................11,602   "
+  Bicarbonate of pie plant...................2,071   "
+  Blue pills................................21,011   "
+  Bicarbonate of soda water (vanilla.)......17,201   "
+  Sulphate of Potasalager beer..............61,399   "
+  Bicarbonate corrugated iron...............18,020 grains.
+  Mustang Liniment.............................240   "
+  Boneset and summer savory.................10,210   "
+  Dow's Liver Cure, (6 bottles for $1.).....16,297   "
+  Bromide of Alcock's Porous Plaster........22,222   "
+  Flouride of Pain Killer (for cucumbers,).....055   "
+  Paris green..................................001   "
+  Spruce gum and Vinegar Bitters...............075   "
+
+In submitting this analysis permit me to say that I find traces of mock
+turtle soup, and India Rubber. I consider the La Crosse Nebecudnezzer
+water the most comprehensive water that I have ever analyzed, and I would
+recommend it for any disease that human beings or animals may have.
+
+Very Respectfully,
+
+ALONZO BROWN,
+
+Prof. of Chemistry in Jefferson Livery stable, and late Veterinary Surgeon
+4th Wis. Cavalry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have known Mr. Brown long and well, and his statement in regard to the
+water can be relied upon. Citizens should retain a copy of this analysis
+for future reference.
+
+Mr. E.W. Keyes, of Madison, writing under date of August 1st, says: "The
+La Crosse water you sent me has caused an entire new crop of hair to grow
+upon my head. I had been bald for years, and offered five hundred dollars,
+for any medicine that would cause hair to grow. Enclosed find five hundred
+dollars, and send me more water. I want to try it on Murphey, of the
+Sentinel. I think it would be a good joke on Murphey."
+
+But wait till we get all the letters written from prominent men who have
+been cured.
+
+
+THE INFIDEL AND HIS SILVER MINE.
+
+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 the 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 than hear that some infidel who is around the country calling
+God a pirate and 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 Ingersoll 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 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 appoplectic, 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 knows 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 take 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 biown-up bladder. O,
+good God, don't hurt me so. My neck is all chafed."
+
+And then he will die, and God will continue business at the old stand.
+
+
+THE LEGEND OF THE LAKE.
+
+Every noted place of resort has an Indian legend, and the first thing I
+did after getting my dinner was to look up the legendist. I wanted to hear
+how it was that the Indian had ceased to frequent this spot. So in looking
+for the boss legendist I struck Judge Lamoreaux, of Dodge county, who had
+been herewith a party of friends, Mr. Hayes, and Mr. Van Brunt, with all
+their wives. They had been searching for ferns and legends and they had a
+car load. The Judge had heard of the legend, and he took me one side, and
+with tears in his eyes related to me the horrible story just as he had
+received it from an Indian named O'Flanegan, who sells relics in the shape
+of rye. If I can control my emotion long enough to write it, it will be a
+big thing for history.
+
+[Illustration: HIAWASAMANTHA, THE DUSKY DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST.]
+
+Years ago an Indian chief who lived in a dog tent and caught
+rattlesnakes for a side show, had a daughter, a beautiful maiden, about
+the color and odor of smoked bacon, and she wore a red blanket cut biased,
+and a tilter, under a polonaise made over from her last year's striped
+silk. She was the belliest squaw in the hills, and took the premium at all
+the county fairs, and she could shoot a deer equal to any buck Indian. Her
+name was Hiawasamantha, and she had two lovers, a Frenchman and a young
+Indian. In figuring up the returns there was some doubt as to who was
+elected, so the father of the girl decided to go behind the returns, and
+settle it by a commission. There was an eagle's nest half way up the
+rocks, with young eagles in it, and the old chief said that the one that
+got there first and brought him a young eagle, should have the squaw. The
+Frenchman climbed up the back stairs and got there ahead of the Indian,
+when the young Indian drew from his trousers leg a bar of railroad iron
+and drove it to the hilt in the breast of the Frenchman, not, however,
+till the Frenchman had drawn from his pistol pocket a 300 ton Krupp gun
+and sent a solid shot weighing 280 pounds crashing into the skull of the
+Indian, and both rolled to the bottom of the bluff, dead. Dr. Hall, of
+Baraboo, was called, and he probed for the ball, but could not find it,
+and neither could he get the bar of railroad iron out of the Frenchman,
+and so they were buried on the spot where now stands the Cliff House. The
+squaw looked around for another fellow, but they all had other
+engagements, the excursion train having arrived from La Crosse, and so she
+went up on a crag and said, "Big Injun me," and jumped off and was dashed
+into 1,347 pieces, and the wedding was broke up. Pieces of the squaw can
+now be found among the rocks, petrified, but retaining the odor of the
+ancient tribe. I got a piece of her, evidently a piece broken off her ear,
+which retains its shade perfectly, and will long be a reminder of
+my visit to Devil's Lake. (P.S.--Disreputable parties are selling pieces
+of stuff purporting to be genuine remains of this beauteous maiden, but
+they are base imitations. None genuine unless the trade mark is stamped on
+them.)
+
+
+GEOLOGICAL SURVEY.
+
+The Geological Survey is being prosecuted as well as could be expected
+with the limited means at the hands of the searchers in the bowels of the
+earth. They have already found, I am informed, that the earth on which we
+live, and move, and have a being, is composed largely of dirt. The
+discovery of this fact is alone worth the price of admission. This great
+discovery, which will be of such value to the future historian, has only
+cost the state the insignificant sum of $8,280. Rather than remain in
+ignorance of this astonishing fact, I would willingly pay the money
+myself--out of the public treasury. It is rumored that parties employed by
+the State to dive down into the ground and bring up sand in their claws,
+have discovered symptoms that the world was at one time sick to its
+stomach, and threw up divers and sundry kinds of rocks and things, and
+there is a probability that lead ore may be discovered. This will be
+valuable to make bullets in case of a war with Oshkosh. In peace it is
+always best to prepare for war, and I trust you will lend your countenance
+to the able men who are investigating the Lower Silurian age.
+
+
+FOOLING WITH THE BIBLE.
+
+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.
+
+
+A BLACK BEAR AT ONALASKA.
+
+A black bear was brought into town for sale on Friday, having been killed
+by Tom Rand, near Onalaska. He killed it with a little rifle that didn't
+look big enough to hurt a hen. If bears are so sociable as to come within
+sight of La Crosse to be killed, it will be a good excuse for husbands to
+stay at home nights.
+
+
+ANOTHER DEAD FAILURE.
+
+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 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.
+
+
+THE GLORIOUS FOURTH OF JULY.
+
+On this great day we are accustomed to leave our business to hired men,
+and burn with patriotism, and ginger pop, fill ourselves with patriotic
+ferver, and beer, shout the battle cry of freedom, and go home when the
+day is over with our eye-winkers burned off, and to sleep with a
+consciousness that a great duty has been performed, and that we have got
+bank notes to pay on the morrow. For three hundred and sixty-four days in
+the year our patriotism is corked up and wired down, and all we can do is
+to work, and acquire age and strength. On the 4th of July we cut the wire,
+the cork that holds our patriotism flies out, and we bubble and sparkle
+and steam, and make things howl. We hold in as long as we can, but when we
+get the harness off, and are turned into the pasture, we make a picnic of
+ourselves, with music all along the line.
+
+
+THE USES OF THE PAPER BAG.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: SLIPPERY OYSTERS.]
+
+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 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
+tobacce, 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.
+
+
+THE UNIVERSALIST BATH.
+
+Mr. E.H. Lane is canvassing the city for the Universalist Bath. We don't
+know why it should be called a "Universalist Bath," as it more nearly
+resembles a Baptist Bath, as we remember it. The bath is a queer thing,
+consisting of an India rubber hop sack, fastened to an immense ox bow. The
+ends are placed on to chairs, the water put in, and you get in and
+hippotamus and take a complete bath from Dan to Beersheba in a tea cup
+full of water.
+
+
+KILLING BIG GAME.
+
+The conductors on the St. Paul railroad are most all good sports with a
+shot gun. There is Howard and Clason, and Russell, who never tire of
+talking of the millions of chickens, ducks, wild turkeys and so forth that
+they have killed. They have tried to get Conductor Green interested in
+field sports, but he always said the game was not big enough for him. He
+said he had his opinion men that would surround a little chicken with
+spike tailed dogs, and then kill it and call it sport. What he wanted was
+big game. Nothing less than a bear would do him. Last week the owners of
+the cinnamon bear that was brought down from the Yellowstone, decided to
+have it killed, and some one told them to get Green to kill it, as he was
+an old bear hunter from the Rocky Mountains. Green said he was rusty on
+bears, not having had a tussel with a grizzly in several years, but if
+they couldn't get anybody else to chance the bear he would make hash of
+it. So they went down to the ice house where the bear was. Green said he
+didn't want anybody to go in with him, because they might get hurt. He put
+on Clason's hunting suit, took a carving knife in his teeth and a revolver
+in his hand, and went in and looked the bear in the eye. The bear knew
+Green meant business, and he began to feel around for his ticket. The
+conductor advanced to within eleven feet of the bear when all at once the
+animal sprang at him, growling and showing his teeth. Green's first
+impulse was to pull the bell rope, and order the cuss to get out of the
+ice house, but he saw the bear coming through the air towards him, and
+there was not four hours to lose, so he drew the revolver, took aim at the
+bear's left eye, and pulled. There was a puff of smoke, and the bear fell
+lifeless at his feet. Placing the animal in his game sack, he wiped the
+blood from his knife and said to some men who stood outside, their faces
+ashy pale: "Always shoot bears in the left eye." The men were
+pleased to see him come out alive and they shook him warmly by the hand.
+The other conductors, the shooters, are jealous of Green, and they are
+telling how he killed the bear by going up in the loft of the ice house
+and falling on him, and one conductor says Green shot the bear with a crow
+bar through a knot hole. Another said the bear had all four of his legs
+tied and that a dose of poison was administered through a syringe,
+attached to a pole, while another says that the bear died from fright. All
+these stories are the result of jealousy. The bear was killed just as we
+say, and there are few men that would tackle him--that is, few men aside
+from conductors.
+
+
+THE MULE NOT THE EAGLE.
+
+The bird that should have been selected as the emblem of our country, the
+bird of patience, forbearance, perseverance, and the bird of terror when
+aroused, is the mule. There is no bird that combines more virtues to the
+square foot than the mule. With the mule emblazoned on our banners, we
+should be a terror to every foe. We are a nation of uncomplaining hard
+workers. We mean to do the fair thing by everybody. We plod along, doing
+as we would be done by. So does the mule. As a nation we occasionally
+stick our ears forward, and fan flies off of our forehead. So does the
+mule. We allow parties to get on and ride as long as they behave
+themselves. So do does the mule. But when any nation sticks spurs in our
+flanks, and tickles our heels with a straw, we come down stiff-legged in
+front, our ears look to the beautiful beyond, our voice is cut loose, and
+is still for war, and our subsequent end plays the snare drum on anything
+that gets in reach of us, and strikes terror to the hearts of all tyrants.
+So does the mule.
+
+
+OUR BLUE-COATED DOG POISONERS.
+
+"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 Sheenan 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 door-keeper 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 go around assassinating dogs," we as
+people, would think more of them, and perhaps build them a decent station
+house to rest in.
+
+
+A HOT BOX AT A PICNIC.
+
+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 are 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, and 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, 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.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD BACK NUMBER GIRL.]
+
+
+CAMP MEETINGS IN THE DARK OF THE MOON.
+
+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.
+
+
+PALACE CATTLE CARS.
+
+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 Oleomargarine, 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 near 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, "Meet me in
+the slaughter house 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.
+
+
+GEORGE WASHINGTON.
+
+He could not tell a lie, George couldn't. Washington, it is probable,
+never knew what it was to stow away a schooner of beer, and history makes
+no mention that he ever, on any pretext, eat limberger cheese. At least no
+mention was made of it in his farewell address. He never was President of
+a savings bank. Washington never lectured. He never edited a newspaper. He
+could not tell a lie at the rates editors charge. No he was a good man,
+with none of the small vices that are so prevalent these days.
+
+
+BROKE UP A PRAYER MEETING.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE LADY OF THE SEVENTH WARD.]
+
+When we told her that a piece of beef-steak 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 tiptoe, to see if she was
+asleep. She found the girl with all her dolls on the floor having a dolls'
+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 the 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 no one 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 the 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.
+
+
+THE DOG LAW.
+
+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.
+
+
+LUNCH ON THE CARS.
+
+There is nothing that so gives a man away as to open a satchel and take
+out a lunch. I have been riding on the cars and have made the acquaintance
+of people who would listen to my stories, and take in every word as gospel
+truth. They would seem to hang on my words with pleasure, and be
+apparently glad they had become acquainted with one who combined so many
+graces of mind and person, and they would gather around so as not to miss
+a single lie that I might tell. And yet when I took a paper parcel out of
+my valise and opened up a lunch, consisting of bread and onions, and
+sausage and sweitzer cheese, they would draw coldly away from me and sit
+in the farther part of the car, and appear never to have known me.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PECK'S COMPENDIUM OF FUN***
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