Peck's Compendium of Fun Part 10

"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 b.a.l.l.s. 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 s.h.i.+rts 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 gla.s.s 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 a.s.sist you,' and he took two quick steps, and you have seen these fellows in a n.i.g.g.e.r 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 n.o.body 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 const.i.tution 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-b.u.mpity-b.u.mp, 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. .h.i.t 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 sc.r.a.ping the soap off his pants with a piece of s.h.i.+ngle, 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 was.h.i.+ng 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!_"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 INSt.i.tUTION.

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 s.h.i.+llings 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 c.o.o.n 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 h.e.l.l.

An item is going the rounds of the papers, to ill.u.s.trate how large the sun is, and how hot it is, which a.s.serts 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 pa.s.s 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 h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 a.s.sessments 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 h.e.l.l 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.