The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack

by George W. Peck

  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.

  LOOKING FOR A MOOLEY COW.

  It is painful to read the remarks made by some of the papers in regard to the wicked stories told about a minister named Atwater, up in Dunn county, who was walking in the woods with a young lady. Some editors would believe anything that was told of a minister, if they knew it was untrue.

  The truth of the matter seems to be that the elder called to visit a Miss Northrop, a member of his church, who taught school at Knapp. She seemed to have something on her mind, which she wanted to unfold to him, and as there were other people in the house where she boarded, it was suggested that they walk up a hill, into a piece of woods, where they could talk more freely.

  They started out, and a lot of saw mill hands saw them, and immediately concluded that something was wrong, and after the truly good people had got into the brush the men followed. How natural it is for bad men to think there is something wrong, where two persons of the opposite sex are congregated together. The elder and the schoolma’am went in the grubs and sat down on a log, and there she unfolded to him her tale of woe.

  It appears that she had violated one of the rules of the church by dancing, and she felt that she ought to confess, and did confess. She cried like a child, and seemed to be weak, and the elder put his arm around her to keep her from falling off the log. Everybody knows how easy it is to roll off a log, if they are not looking, and any man that wouldn’t put his arm around a girl, to keep her from falling off a log, would be a fool whom it would be base flattery to call another.

  She continued to weep—even the girl admits that—and he put his hand up to her forehead and stroked her hair, and told her to be calm, and her head may have fallen upon his breast. The number of heads that wouldn’t, under the circumstances, are mighty few. She was overcome with grief and he with pity, and he tried to show her that if she braced up and tried to lead a different life, and shook the dancing hall and the wicked people who would put their arms around her, she might yet be saved.

  One can imagine that he was displeased at her going into a giddy throng, to be hugged in plain sight, to the music of a band, and pointed out to her how much more beautiful it would be to go into the woods, on a log.

  He had, it is alleged, got through soothing her, and she was about to wipe her nose on her handkerchief, and he was about to remove his arm from about her waist, when those wicked and perverse men from the saw mill came whooping into the thicket where they sat, looking for a mooley cow with one horn broke.

  Now, the elder and the girl knew in a moment that they were not looking for a mooley cow, but that they were scoffers, and when they asked the elder if he had seen such an animal, he rose up with much dignity, buttoned up his coat, and in a pious manner said that he had not seen the cow. He did not upbraid them for breaking into the solitude of the sacred confessional, looking for a mooley cow, but seemed to act the perfect gentleman all the way through.

  Nothing had transpired that might not have transpired in a parlor, if there had not been so many people in the house, and yet these illiterate and ungodly saw mill hands went off and told a story that would make angels blush. It is possible that the elder did wrong in not offering to go with them and look for the mooley cow, but we should not chide him for that. He probably had not time to take up a collection of his thoughts, and no doubt after he thought it over he was sorry he did not offer his services to them as a herder of mooley cows, but it was then everlastingly too late.

  They had gone and told the old, old story, and nothing remained to be done but to call a church meeting, which was done, and the elder and the girl were acquitted of any wrong doing. This was right. If men are to be deposed from the ministry for sitting down on a log and consoling a female parishioner, what is to become of the world?

  We don’t believe the elder had any wrong motive, or that a thought entered his head that might not have entered any man’s head under the circumstances. And yet it was unfortunate, it is so confounded hard to explain what they walked a mile for to get into the woods where there was a log.

  THE HARMFUL HAMMOCK.

  Geo. W. Peck, of Peck’s Sun, knows more about the harmful hammock, both by experience and observation, than any other man in America. His testimony runs as follows:

  A young couple who were sitting in a hammock at one of the watering places in this State were severely injured by tipping over backwards and striking on the cheek of a head waiter. There is something about a hammock that is indescribable, and there is no rule that can be made that will insure safety while sitting in one of the queer things. There are people who believe that a hammock understands what is going on, and occasionally indulges in a joke.

  It is certain that an old person with a lame back can swing in a hammock half the day and it will never kick up. Servant girls and children can get in a hammock as thick as three in a bed and there is no danger, but let a spoony young couple sit down in a hammock ever so carefully and it seems as though the confounded thing was alive, and had taken a contract to spill them out on the ground in all sorts of embarrassing shapes. What it is that causes the commotion will, perhaps, never be known, without an investigation by some middle aged person, and if the season was not so near over we would investigate the blasted thing ourself, in the interest of our young readers who are in the full blush of hammockhood.

  There can be nothing much more annoying to a young couple than to be sitting side by side or facing each other in a hammock, looking into each other’s eyes, and allowing the love they dare not speak to show itself in those orbs, and just as they are feeling as though they couldn’t live a minute unless they clasped each other to each other’s heaving bosoms, or at least one heaving bosom and one boiled shirt, and then have the hammock turn bottom side up and land them on the back of their necks, on the ground, with legs pointed towards the crab apples on the trees to which the hammock is hitched, arms flinging wildly to pull down pantaloon legs, and hands convulsively clawing gravel and muslin and delaine, while blushes suffuse faces that but a moment before were a background for the picture of love’s young dream, and a crowd of spectators on the hotel verandah laughing and saying, “Set ’em up again.” The hammock shakes itself and turns right side up for other victims, as though it knew what it had been doing, and enjoyed it.

  There are young men all over the land who have been through such experiences, and had to walk backwards all the way to the house, owing to fissure veins being discovered in the wearing apparel below the suspenders, while the number of girls that have been mortified by having to go to the house with their back hair in one hand, their skirts in the other, while six places between the polonaise and the ear-rings were aching like the toothache from contact with the gravel path, are legion, and we call upon the authorities to suppress the hammock as a nuisance.

  More matches have been broken up by hammocks than by all the Sunday schools in the world, and no girl who is bow-legged, or has an ankle like a rutabaga, should ever trust herself in a hammock, even though it is held by half a dozen friends, as the hammock will shy at a piece of paper as quick as a skittish horse, and in such a moment as ye think not you are on all fours, your head dizzy, and if there is a hole in your stocking as small as a Democrat’s hope of election, it will look to outsiders as big as the gate to a fair ground. O, a hammock is worse than a bicycle.

  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 circuses, and we contend that it is the duty of teachers to place as few temptations to lie as possible in the way of boys.

  If a boy knows that there will be no school on the afternoon of circus day, he will study like a whitehead all the forenoon, and learn twice as much as he will in all day if he can’t go. If he knows that there is a conspiracy on foot between his parents and the teachers to keep him from the circus, he begins to think of some lie to get out of school. He will be sick, or run away, or something.

  He will get there, if possible. And after the first lie succeeds in getting him out of school, he is a liar from the word go. There is something, some sort of electricity that runs from a boy to a circus, and all the teachers in the world cannot break the connection. A circus is the boys’ heaven.

  You may talk to him about the beautiful gates ajar, and the angel band in heaven that plays around the great white throne, and he can’t understand it, but the least hint about the circus tent, with the flap pulled to one side to get in, and the band wagon, and the girls jumping through hoops, and the clown, and he is onto your racket at a jump.

  You may try to paralyze him by the story of Daniel in the den of lions, and how he was saved by his faith in a power above, and the boy’s mind will revert to the circus, where a man in tights and spangles goes in and bosses the lions and tigers around, and he will wonder if Daniel had a rawhide, and backed out of the cage with his eye on the boss lion.

  At a certain age a circus can hold over heaven or anything else, in a boy’s mind, and as long as the circus does not hurt him, why not shut up shop a half a day and let him go? If you keep him in school he won’t learn anything, and he will go to the circus in the evening, and be up half the night seeing the canvas men tear down the tent and load up, and the next day he is all played out and not worth a continental. To some it would look foolish to dismiss school for a circus, but it will cement a friendship between teachers and scholars that nothing else could.

  Suppose, a day or two before a circus arrives, the teacher should say to the school: “Now I want you kids to go through your studies like a tramp through a boiled dinner, and when the circus comes we will close up this ranch and all go the circus, and if any of you can’t raise the money to go, leave your names on my desk and I will see you inside the tent if I have to pawn my shirt.”

  Of course it is a male teacher we are supposing said this. Well, don’t you suppose those boys and girls would study? They would fairly whoop it up. And then suppose the teacher found forty boys that hadn’t any money to go, and he had no school funds to be used for such a purpose.

  How long would it take him to collect the money by going around among business men who had been boys themselves? He would go into a store and say he was trying to raise money to take some of the poor children to the circus, and a dozen hands would go down into a dozen pockets in two jerks of a continued story, and they would all chip in.

  O, we are too smart. We are trying to fire education into boys with a shotgun, when we ought to get it into them inside of sugar coated pills. Let us turn over a new leaf now, and show these boys that we have got souls in us, and that we want them to have a good time if we don’t lay up a cent.

  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.

  He said he thought raw oysters would go further but they wouldn’t be as satisfying. And then he went on to tell how far a raw oyster went once with him. He said he was at a swell dinner party, with a lady on each side of him, and he was trying to talk to both of them, or carry on two conversations, on two different subjects, at the same time.

  They had some shell oysters, and he took up one on a fork—a large, fat one—and was about to put it in his mouth, when the lady on his left called his attention, and when the cold fork struck his teeth, and no oyster on it, he felt as though it had escaped, but he made no sign. He went on talking with the lady as though nothing had happened. He glanced down at his shirt bosom, and was at once on the trail of the oyster, though the insect had got about two minutes start of him. It had gone down his vest, under the waistband of his clothing, and he was powerless to arrest its progress.

  He said he never felt how powerless he was until he tried to grab that oyster by placing his hand on his person, outside his clothes; then, as the oyster slipped around from one place to another, he felt that man was only a poor, weak creature.

  The oyster, he observed, had very cold feet, and the more he tried to be calm and collected, the more the oyster seemed to walk around among his vitals.

  He says he does not know whether the ladies noticed the oyster when it started on its travels, or not, but he thought as he leaned back and tried to loosen up his clothing, so it would hurry down towards his shoes, that they winked at each other, though they might have been winking at something else.

  The oyster seemed to be real spry until it got out of reach, and then it got to going slow, as the slickery covering wore off, and by the time it had worked into his trousers leg, it was going very slow, though it remained cold to the last, and he hailed the arrival of that oyster into the heel of his stocking with more delight than he did the raising of the American flag over Vicksburg, after the long siege.

  * * * *

  The sleeping car companies are discussing the idea advanced by the Sun, of placing safes in the cars, or iron drawers with locks, into which passengers can place their watches and money. We trust the iron drawers will be adopted, as the flannel drawers now used are not safe by any means. It is true they are sometimes tied with a string in the small of the back, but the combination is not difficult for even a stranger to unlock, unless it is tied in a hard knot. Give us iron drawers in a sleeping car by all means. To be sure they will be cold; but everything is cold in a sleeping car except the colored porter.

  * * * *

  Several proprietors of eastern resorts have announced that only adults will be entertained, and that no children will be admitted as guests on any terms. At first we would be inclined to say that a hotel proprietor who would make such a distinction could have no soul, but when we reflect that the proprietor is catering to the pleasure of a majority of his guests, then we conclude that the guests are devoid of souls.

  What kind of a place would a summer resort be without happy children? It would be a hospital for decayed roues, very old maids, women who hated children, smart Alecks who were mashers, dead beats and sour curmudgeons. The day would be put in in gossiping, exercising old flirts with stiff joints, drinking at somebody’s expense, and fishing for rich husbands with graveyard coughs, and angling for women who wanted to be caught and didn’t care a continental who caught them.

  The atmosphere about such a place would be a blizzard of heat and cold, filled with fine sand, and would make a person with a heart, who loved children, think he or she was in hell looking for an artesian well.

  A hotel proprietor who will thus insult the better part of the human race, should be ignored entirely by all who love children, and he should be compelled to stand on his deserted verandah all the season and see his rival across the way, who entertains children, surrounded by the richest and best guests, and t
he soulless creature, and the few soulless, dyspeptic boarders that he has, should be obliged to listen to the laughter of thousands of happy children running races and playing tag up and down the lawn of the man who has a soul.

  No one who would patronize a summer hotel that refuses little children a breath of God’s fresh air should enjoy a moment’s pleasure. Mosquitoes should bore them, and country dogs should bark all night and keep them awake. Be they male or female resorters, we pray for ants to crawl up them, for bugs and worms to go down them, for snakes to frighten them out of their boots or gaiters, for country cows to run them out of pastures, and fleas to get inside their night gowns and practice the lancers all night. May their food disagree with them, their clothes fail to come back from the laundry, and their bandoline lose its staying qualities.

  And may those at the house where children are welcome have health and happiness, and may they get to heaven, eventually, with the children, and while on the way up there may they throw a bundle of prepared kindling wood into the pit below where the child haters are sighing for zinc ulsters.

  THE KIND OF A DOCTOR TO HAVE.

  A dispatch from Long Branch announces that “Dr. Bliss goes to New York for a few hours today.” That is encouraging. If the doctors had kept away from the President more he would have been better. He has had from one to six doctors in sight, night and day, for over ten weeks. Take a man here at home that is sick, and let a doctor go and stay with him night and day, and how long do you suppose the man would live?

  What a sick man wants is to have a doctor go around practicing on other people, and come in once or twice a day, blow off a little steam, slap the patient on the leg and say, “Well, boss, how’s your liver?” A sick man wants to have a doctor forget to come some time when he is expected, and get nervous about it, instead of getting nervous because the pill-bags is there all the time, smelling of everything.

  Let a doctor that is due at the bedside at 4 o’clock, say, stay away till 6, and then come in and tell about being down on the South Side to see about somebody’s having a sick baby, or to sew up a man that has been to a circus, and the cross patient that has been waiting for the doctor till he got mad, is better at once. It cheers him to know that somebody else has a baby or had a gash cut in him in a fight, and changes his mind about swearing at the doctor, and feels better.