The steer asks the visitor if he does not want to look through the car, when he says he would like to if it is not too much trouble. The steer says it is no trouble at all, at the same time shaking his horns as though he was mad, and kicking some of the gilding off of a stateroom.
“This,” says the steer who is doing the honors, “is the stateroom occupied by old Brindle, who is being shipped from St. Joseph, Mo. Brindle weighs 1,600 on foot—Brindle, get up and show yourself to the gentleman.”
Brindle kicks off the red blanket, rolls her eyes in a lazy sort of way, bellows, and stands up in the berth, humps up her back so it raises the upper berth and causes a heifer that is trying to sleep off a debauch of bran mash, to kick like a steer, and then looks at the interviewer as much as to say, “O, go on now and give us a rest.” Brindle turns her head to a fountain that is near, in which Apollinaris water is flowing, perfumed with new mown hay, drinks, turns her head, and licks her back, and stops and thinks, and then looking around as much as to say, “Gentlemen, you will have to excuse me,” lays down with her head on a pillow, pulls the coverlid over her and begins to snore.
The attendant steer steers the visitor along the next apartment, which is a large one, filled with cattle in all positions. One is lying in a hammock, with her feet on the window, reading the Chicago Times article on “Oleomargerine, or Bull Butter,” at intervals stopping the reading to curse the writer, who claims that oleomargarine is an unlawful preparation, containing deleterious substances.
A party of four oxen are seated around a table playing seven-up for the drinks, and as the attendant steer passes along, a speckled ox with one horn broken, orders four pails full of Waukesha water with a dash of oatmeal in it, “and make it hot,” says the ox, as he counts up high, low, jack and the game.
Passing the card players the visitor notices an upright piano, and asks what that is for, and the attendant steer says they are all fond of music, and asks if he would not like to hear some of the cattle play. He says he would, and the steer calls out a white cow who is sketching, and asks her to warble a few notes. The cow seats herself on her haunches on the piano stool, after saying she has such a cold she can’t sing, and, besides, has left her notes at home in the pasture. Turning over a few leaves with her forward hoof, she finds something familiar, and proceeds to walk on the piano keys with her forward feet and bellow, “Meat me in the slaughterhouse when the due bill falls,” or something of that kind, when the visitor says he has got to go up to the stock yards and attend a reception of Colorado cattle, and he lights out.
We should think these parlor cattle cars would be a success, and that cattle would enjoy them very much. It is said that parties desiring to charter these cars for excursions for human beings, can be accommodated at any time when they are not needed to transport cattle, if they will give bonds to return them in as good order as they find them.
DUCK OR NO DINNER.
There is nothing that gives pious people more annoyance than to hear shooting on Sunday on some adjacent marsh while they are worshipping, and there is nothing much more annoying to wicked Sunday, hunters than to have ducks fly habitually in the vicinity of a church.
Winneconne, up on the Wolf river, is about evenly divided between-church going people and those who take more pleasure in standing behind a shot gun. When ducks fly about Winneconne in the Spring they follow the river up and down, and the bridge in town is a favorite place for hunters to stand and pepper the ducks with shot.
One Sunday about three weeks ago the ducks were flying terrible, and when the bell rung for church the bridge was pretty well covered with hunters, and many worshippers entered the church hard by with the smell of powder in their spring bonnets. The hunters were so interested in the ducks of the air that they did not notice the ducks on the way to church.
Finally the church people all got seated and the minister gave them an excellent sermon, which was only occasionally interrupted by the good man dodging down behind the pulpit to escape a stray charge of No. 4 shot which came through the open window. No complaint was made, and no sarcastic remarks were made about the wicked men who were out of meat, and were shooting up a little for dinner, though there were silent prayers offered for the Sabbath breakers.
At last the services were over, and the chair was singing, “A charge to keep I have,” as the minister was picking some duck shot out of his trousers, when there was a commotion. A wounded duck had fallen on the door step of the church and being only “winged” had fluttered into the church, and crawled under the seats, when a couple of retriever dogs belonging to a German rushed into the sacred edifice and went howling under the seats after the duck, while the owner’s voice could be heard outside yelling, “Rouse mit em!”
Well, some of them, those who had clock work stockings, held their feet up in the air to get them away from the dogs, while others jumped up on the pews and yelled bloody murder. Some went for the windows, and a brakeman tells us that the senior deacon fainted away.
The dogs retrieved the duck, and as the congregation came out of the church the German went down toward the bridge wringing the neck of the duck and kicking the dogs for not having more sense than to go right into a church during service.
The hunters of Winneconne should be talked to by the presiding elder. They do very wrong to shoot on Sunday.
THE GUINEA PIG.
Nobody knows who is to blame for bringing the first Guinea pig to this country, but certainly he didn’t do anything very creditable. A Guinea pig does not know anything, and never-learns anything. It is quite a neat little plaything for children, and if it had any sense would become a pet, but it never learns a thing.
A lady living near a theatre in this city bought a Guinea pig in Chicago recently and brought it home, and it has been in the family ever since, and it has never learned anything except when it is hungry it goes to the lady and nibbles her foot, and how it learned that nobody knows.
One day it got away and strayed into the theatre, where it ran around until the audience got seated for the evening performance, when the pig began to fool around under the seats, probably looking for the lady that owned it. On the front row in the dress circle was a young man and woman from Waukesha. Whether the Guinea pig mistook the girl for its owner or not is not positively known, but the animal was seen to go under the seat occupied by the young woman.
Her attendant was leaning over her shoulder whispering in her ear, when suddenly she jumped about two feet high, and grabbed her dress with both hands. Her feller had his chin scratched by a pin that held a bow on her shoulder, and as he wiped it off he asked her, as she came down into the seat again, if she had them often.
A bald-headed citizen who sat next to her looked around at the woman in astonishment, and took up his overcoat and moved to another seat. She looked sassy at the bald-headed man, and told her escort the man had insulted her. He said he would attend to the man after the show was out.
About three seats further down toward the stage there was a girl from the West Side, with a young fellow, and they were very sociable. Suddenly he leaned over to pick up a programme he had dropped, just as the Guinea pig nibbled her instep. She drew herself away from her escort, blushing, and indignation depicted on every feature, looked the other way, and would not speak to him again during the whole evening. He thought she was flirting with somebody else, and he was mad, and they sat there all the evening looking as though they were married.
The Guinea pig went on down the row, and presently another woman hopped up clear out of the seat, said, “For heaven’s sake what was that?” and looked around at a man who sat in the seat behind her as though she could eat him raw.
Just before the curtain rose the pig got into a lady’s rubber and went to sleep, and when the performance was over and she went to put on the shoe, she screamed a little and jumped up on the seat, and said something about rats, which brought an usher to her assistance, and he took the Guinea pig and sent it to its owner. For a few minutes
there was almost as much commotion as there would be at a picnic if a boy should break up a nest of hornets.
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 think we are on the right track to ferret out the failure, it may be that the canning of Boston baked beans is what caused the stoppage.
We had read of Boston baked beans since school days, and had never seen any till four years ago, when we went to a picnic and bought a can to take along. We new how baked beans ought to be cooked from years’ experience, but supposed the Boston bean must hold over every other bean, so when the can was opened and we found that every bean was separate from every other bean, and seemed to be out on its own recognizance, and that they were as hard as a flint, we gave them to the children to play marbles with, and soured on Boston baked beans. Probably it was canning Boston beans that broke up the canning establishment.
* * * *
The Decoration Day exercises at Appleton were somewhat marred by a discussion as to whether the graves of Confederate soldiers should be decorated, and one man—Prof. Sawyer—a soldier who lost a leg in the army, said that if anybody should attempt to decorate a rebel soldier’s grave in his vicinity, it would have to be done over his—Sawyer’s—dead body.
Notwithstanding this heartrending recital, the graves of rebel soldiers in many places in this state and throughout the north, were decorated by Union soldiers. What hurt does it do to throw a few flowers on the clay that covers one who was once your enemy? Nobody thinks less of the Union soldier for it, and it would make the southern mother or sister of the dead boy feel so much better to know that kind hands at the north had done a noble act.
Suppose this Professor Sawyer had been killed and buried down south, and the Confederate people should be decorating the graves of their own dead, and they should throw a few flowers on his grave, and some hot-headed vindictive rebel should get on his ear and say that the man who laid that bouquet on the Yankee’s grave would have to take it off or fight. The professor, if he laid there and heard it, would feel like getting out of the grave, and taking a crutch and mauling the liver out of the bigoted rebel.
It is not the rebel’s cause that we decorate, but we put a few flowers above his remains to show the people who loved him at home, that there is nothing so confounded mean about us after all, and that we do as we would be done by, and that while we were mad, and sassy, and full of fight, eighteen years ago, we want to be friends, and shake hands over the respective graves of our loved ones, and quit making fools of ourselves.
* * * *
A Ridiculous scene occurred a Palmyra, the other day. The furnace in the basement of the church is reached by a trap door, which is right beside the pulpit. There was a new preacher there from abroad, and he did not know anything about the trap door, and the sexton went down there to fix the fire, before the new minister arrived. The minister had just got warmed up in his sermon, and was picturing to his hearers hell in all its heat. He had got excited and told of the lake of burning brimstone below, where the devil was the stoker, and where the heat was ten thousand times hotter than a political campaign, and where the souls of the wicked would roast, and fry, and stew until the place froze over.
Wiping the perspiration from his face, he said, pointing to the floor, “Ah, my friends, look down into that seething, burning lake, and—” Just at this point the trap door raised a little, and the sexton’s face, with coal smut all over it, appeared. He wanted to come up and hear the sermon.
If hell had broke loose, the new minister could not have been more astonished. He stepped back, grasped his manuscript, and was just about to jump from the pulpit, when a deacon on the front seat said, “It’s all right, brother, he has only been down below to see about the fire.” The sexton came up and shut down the trap door, the color came back to the face of the minister, and he went on, though the incident seemed to take the tuck all out of him.
A traveling man who happened to be at the church tells us that he knows the minister was scared, for he sweat so that the perspiration run right down on the carpet and made a puddle as though a dipper of water had been tipped over there. The minister says he was not scared, but we don’t see how he could help it.
PECK’S COMPENDIUM OF FUN
COMPRISING THE CHOICEST GEMS OF WIT, HUMOR, SARCASM AND PATHOS
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.
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.
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:
The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack Page 102
