The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack

by George W. Peck

  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.

  SENSE IN LITTLE BUGS.

  There is a cockroach that makes his home on our desk that has got more sense than a delinquent subscriber. He—if it is a he one; we are not clear as to that—comes out and sits on the side, of the paste-dish, and draws in a long breath. If the paste is fresh he eats it, and wiggles his polonaise as much as to thank us, and goes away refreshed. If the paste is sour, and smells bad, he looks at us with a mournful expression, and goes away looking as though it was a mighty mean trick to play on a cockroach, and he runs about as though he was offended. When a package of wedding cake is placed on the desk he is the first one to find it out, and he sits and waits till we cut the string, when he goes into it and walks all over the cake till he strikes the bridal cake, when he gets onto it, stands on his head and seems to say, “Yum, yum,” and is tickled as a girl with a fresh beau.

  There is human nature in a cockroach. When a man comes in and sits around with no business, on our busy day, and asks questions, and stays and keeps us from working, the cockroach will come out and sit on the inkstand and look across at the visitor as much as to say:

  “Why don’t you go away about your business and leave the poor man alone, so he can get out some copy, and not keep us all standing around here doing nothing?”

  But when the paper is out, and there is a look of cheerfulness about the place, and we are anxious to have friends call, the cockroach flies around over the papers and welcomes each caller as pleasantly as he can, and seems to enjoy it.

  One day the paste smelled pretty bad, and we poured about a spoonful of whisky in it, and stirred it up. The cockroach came out to breakfast, and we never saw a person that seemed to enjoy the meal any more than the cockroach did. It seemed as though he couldn’t get enough paste. Pretty soon he put one hand to his head and looked crosseyed. He tried to climb down off the paste-dish, and fell over himself and turned a flip-flap on the blotting paper. Then he looked at us in a sort of mysterious way, winked one eye as much as to say: “You think you are smart, don’t you, old baldy?”

  Then he put one hand to his forehead as if in meditation, and staggered off into a drawer, coming out presently with his arm around another cockroach, and he took him to the paste-pot, and he filled up, too, and then they locked arms and paraded up and down on the green cloth of the desk, as though singing, “We won’t go home till morning,” and they kicked over the steel pens, and acted a good deal like politicians after a caucus.

  Finally, some remark was made by one of them that didn’t suit, and they pitched in and had the worst fight that ever was, after which one rushed off as if after a policeman, and the other, staggered into his hole, and we saw no more of our cockroach till the next morning, when he came out with one hand on his head and the other on his stomach, and after smelling of the paste and looking sick, he walked off to a bottle of seltzer water and crawled up to the cork and looked around with an expression so human that we uncorked the bottle and let him in, and he drank as though he had been eating codfish. Since that day he looks at us a little suspicious, and when the paste smells a little peculiar he goes and gets another cockroach to eat some of it first, and he watches the effect.

  Now, you wouldn’t believe it, but that cockroach can tell, the minute he sees a man, whether the man has come in with a bill, or has come in to pay money. We don’t know how he does it, but when a man has a bill the cockroach begins to look solemn and mournful, and puts his hands to his eyes as though weeping. If a man comes in to pay money, the cockroach looks glad, a smile plays around his mouth, and he acts kitteny. He acts the most human when ladies come into the office. If a book agent comes in, he makes no attempt to show his disgust.

  One day an old person came in with a life of Garfield and laid it on the table, opened to the picture of the candidate, and left it. The cockroach walked through the violet ink and got his feet all covered, and then he walked all over that book, and left his mark. The woman saw the tracks, and thought we had signed our name, and she said she was sorry we had written our signature there, because she had another book for subscribers’ names.

  When a handsome lady comes in, the cockroach is in his element, and there is a good deal of proud flesh about him. He puts his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest and walks around.

  One day we put our face up to a deaf young lady to speak to her, and the cockroach looked straight the other way, and seemed to be looking over an old copy of the Christian Statesman; but when he found we only yelled at the lady, he winked as much as to say:

  “Well, how did I know?”

  O, that cockroach is a thoroughbred!

  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.

  A friend who was on the car, on the way up town, after a day’s work, with a clean shirt on, a white vest and a general look of coolness, accosted the traveler as follows:

  “Been summer resorting, I hear?”

  The dirty-looking man crossed his legs with a painful effort, as though his drawers stuck to his legs and almost peeled the bark off, and answered:

  “Yes, I have been out two weeks. I have struck ten different hotels, and if you ever hear of my leaving town again during the hot weather, you can take my head for a soft thing,” and he wiped a cinder out of his eye with what was once a clean handkerchief.

  “Had a good, cool time, I suppose, and enjoyed yourself,” said the man who had not been out of town.

  “Cool time, hell,” said the man, who has a pew in two churches, as he kicked his limp satchel of dirty clothes under the car seat. “I had rather been sentenced to the house of correction for a month.”

  “Why, what’s the trouble?”

  “Well, there is no trouble, for people who like that kind of fun, but this lets me out. I do not blame people who live in Southern States for coming North, because they enjoy things as a luxury that we who live in Wisconsin have as a regular diet, but for a Chicago or Milwaukee man to go into the country to swelter and be kept awake nights is bald lunacy. Why, since I have been out I have slept in a room a size smaller than the closet my wife keeps her linen in, with one window that brought in air from a laundry, and I slept on a cot that shut up like a jack-knife and always caught me in the hinge where it hurt.

  “At another hotel I had a broken-handled pitcher of water that had been used to rinse clothes in, and I can show you the indigo on my neck. I had a piece of soap that smelled like a tannery, and if the towel was not a recent damp diaper then I have never raised six children.

  “At one hotel I was the first man at the table, and two families came in and were waited on before the Senegambian would look at me, and after an hour and thirty minutes I got a chance to order some roast beef and baked potatoes, but the perspiring, thick-headed pirate brought me some boiled mutton and potatoes that looked as though they had been put in a wash-tub and mashed by treading on them barefooted. I paid twenty-five cents for a lemonade made of water and vinegar, with a piece of something on top that might be lemon peel, and it might be pumpkin rind.

/>   “The only night’s rest I got was one night when I slept in a car seat. At the hotel the regular guests were kept awake till 12 o’clock by number six headed boys and girls dancing until midnight to the music of a professional piano boxer, and then for two hours the young folks sat on the stair? and yelled and laughed, and after that the girls went to bed and talked two hours more, while the boys went and got drunk and sang ‘Allegezan and Kalamazoo.’

  “Why, at one place I was woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning by what I thought was a chariot race in the hall outside, but it was only a lot of young bloods rolling ten pins down by the rooms, using empty wine bottles for pins and China cuspidores for balls. I would have gone out and shot enough drunken galoots for a mess, only I was afraid a cuspidore would carom on my jaw. Talk about rest, I would rather go to a boiler factory.

  “Say, I don’t know as you would believe it, but at one place I sent some shirts and things to be washed, and they sent to my room a lot of female underclothes, and when I kicked about it to the landlord he said I would have to wear them, as they had no time to rectify mistakes. He said the season was short and they had to get in their work, and he charged me Fifth Avenue Hotel prices with a face that was child-like and bland, when he knew I had been wiping on diapers for two days in place of towels.

  “But I must get off here and see if I can find water enough to bathe all over. I will see you down town after I bury these clothes.”

  And the sticky, cross man got off swearing at summer hotels and pirates. We don’t see where he could have been traveling.

  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 railway companies to fit up “Gospel cars.” Instead of the card tables they want an organ and piano, they want the seats arranged facing the centre of the car, so they can have a full view of whoever may conduct the services; instead of spittoons they will have a carpet, and instead of cards they want Bibles and Gospel song-books.—Chicago News.

  There is an idea for you. Let some railroad company fit up a Gospel car according to the above prescription, and run it, and the porter on that car would be the most lonesome individual on the train. The Gospel hymn books would in a year appear as new as do now the Bibles that are put up in all cars. Of the millions of people who ride in the trains, many of them pious Christians, who has ever seen a man or woman take a Bible off the iron rack and read it a single minute? And yet you can often see ministers and other professing Christians in the smoking car, puffing a cigar and reading a daily paper.

  Why, it is all they can do to get a congregation in a church on Sunday; and does any one suppose that when men and women are traveling for business or pleasure—and they do not travel for anything else—that they are going into a “Gospel car” to listen to some sky pirate who has been picked up for the purpose, talk about the prospects of landing the cargo in heaven?

  Not much!

  The women are too much engaged looking after their baggage, and keeping the cinders out of their eyes, and keeping the children’s heads out of the window, and keeping their fingers from being jammed, to look out for their immortal souls. And the men are too much absorbed in the object of their trip to listen to gospel truths. They are thinking about whether they will be able to get a room at the hotel, or whether they will have to sleep on a cot.

  Nobody can sing gospel songs on a car, with their throats full of cinders, and their eyes full of dust, and the chances are if anybody should strike up, “A charge to keep I have,” some pious sinner who was trying to take a nap in the corner of the gospel car would say:

  “O, go and hire a hall!”

  It would be necessary to make an extra charge of half a dollar to those who occupied the gospel car, the same as is charged on the parlor car, and you wouldn’t get two persons on an average train full that would put up a nickel.

  Why, we know a Wisconsin Christian, worth a million dollars, who, when he comes up from Chicago to the place where he lives, hangs up his overcoat in the parlor car, and then goes into the forward car and rides till the whistle blows for his town, when he goes in and gets his coat and never says thirty-five cents to the conductor, or ten cents to the porter. Do you think a gospel car would catch him for half a dollar? He would see you in Hades first.

  The best way is to take a little eighteen carat religion along into the smoking car, or any other car you may happen to be in.

  A man—as we understand religion from those who have had it—does not have to howl to the accompaniment of an asthmatic organ, pumped by a female with a cinder in her eye and smut on her nose, in order to enjoy religion, and he does not have to be in the exclusive company of other pious people to get the worth of his money. There is a great deal of religion in sitting in a smoking car, smoking dog-leg tobacco in a briar-wood pipe, and seeing happy faces in the smoke that curls up—faces of those you have made happy by kind words, good deeds, or half a dollar put where it will drive away hunger, instead of paying it out for a reserved seat in a gospel car. Take the half dollar you would pay for a seat in a gospel car and go into the smoker, and find some poor emigrant that is going west to grow up with the country, after having been beaten out of his money at Castle Garden, and give it to him, and see if the look of thankfulness and joy does not make you feel better than to listen to a discussion in the gospel car, as to whether the children of Israel went through the Red Sea with life-preservers, or wore rubber hunting boots.

  Take your gospel-car half dollar and buy a vegetable ivory rattle of the train boy, and give it to the sick emigrant mother’s pale baby, and you make four persons happy—the baby, the mother, the train boy and yourself.

  We know a man who gave a dollar to a prisoner on the way to State prison, to buy tobacco with, who has enjoyed more good square religion over it than he could get out of all the chin music and saw-filing singing he could hear in a gospel car in ten years. The prisoner was a bad man from Oshkosh, who was in a caboose in charge of the sheriff, on the way to Waupun. The attention of the citizen was called to the prisoner by his repulsive appearance, and his general don’t-care-a-damative appearance. The citizen asked the prisoner how he was fixed for money to buy tobacco in prison. He said he hadn’t a cent, and he knew it would be the worst punishment he could have to go without tobacco. The citizen gave him the dollar and said:

  “Now, every time you take a chew of tobacco in prison, just make up your mind to be square when you get out.”

  The prisoner reached out his hand-cuffed hands to take the dollar, the hands trembling so that the chains rattled, and a great tear as big as a shirt-button appeared in one eye—the other eye had been gouged out while “having some fun with the boys” at Oshkosh—and his lips trembled as he said:

  “So help me God, I will!”

  That man has been boss of a gang of hands in the pinery for two winters, and has a farm paid for on the Central Railroad, and is “squar.”

  That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can occasionally practice without having a gospel car.

  INCIDENTS AT THE NEWHALL HOUSE FIRE.

  There were a great many ludicrous scenes about the Newhall House during the fire of last Saturday morning. When people were notified that there was a fire in the house, but that the danger was not great, though it was thought best to give them all plenty of time to prepare for the worst, many jumped right out of bed and started down stairs.

  When we arrived on the scene, our first inquiry was for the safety of the lady members of the Rice Surprise Party, the young women who had been cutting up on the stage all the week with so little apparel. We did not expect to find them in a greater state of barefootedness than they were when we saw them last, but in some instances they were.

  We were kindly yet firmly informed by Mr. Rankin that the ladies had been rescued. It seemed that everybody wanted to save the girls. Mr. Rankin knew this, and knew that if the young and thou
ghtless gentlemen were allowed to rescue the girls it would cause remark. He said he was an old line democrat, and that his days of kittenhood were over, and that it was proper that he should superintend the removal of the girls.

  Mr. McKittrick, the conductor, argued the matter with him. He said he had been running a train a good many years, and had seen all phases of humanity, and that he was inured to a life of hardship, and had seen many sad sights, in the sleeping cars, and he insisted that he be allowed to superintend the removal of the girls.

  The discussion became warm, and finally they compromised by agreeing that McKittrick should rush into the rooms and drag them out of the fire and smoke and hand them to Mr. Rankin at the foot of the first pair of stairs, who would dispose of them in safety. They both agreed that the first outside vandal who laid a hand on them should die.

  The first trouble they had was with Prof. Haskins.

  He came out of his room with nothing on but his glasses, an ascension robe and one boot. He rushed through the hall, and while in front of the room of the girl who wore the black tights with the crochet work on the limbs he ventured a joke. He is the telegraph manager and he said, “There is a line down here,” as a two inch stream struck him about the alleged pistol pocket. The girl, who was tying her wardrobe up in a napkin, heard him and said, “There is no lying down here, not much.” Prof. Haskins was shocked that any female should thus mistake him for a democrat, and falling over a zinc trunk head first, he went back to his room to send his son Harry out to help.

  Mr. McKittrick rushed into a room and grabbed a corset in his arms and handed it down stairs to Rankin There is no person who can fool Rankin. He didn’t want to be rescued.

  Just at this point a girl with a waterproof on came along the hall and Mr. Cole asked her if she didn’t want to be rescued. She said she had been carried down stairs six times already by a big granger, and she would shoot the next man that attempted to rescue ner. She said there was no danger, and wanted to know why the big galoots did not go and help put the fire out.