The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack

by George W. Peck

  The only trouble that is liable to arise out of this is that the postmaster threatens to commence an action against Crossman for obstructing the mails.

  A MEAN TRICK.

  Probably the meanest trick that was ever played on a white man was played in Milwaukee, and the fact that there is no vigilance committee there is the only reason the perpetrators of the trick are alive. A business man had just purchased a new stiff hat, and he went into a saloon with half a dozen of his friends to fit the hat on his head. They all took beer, and passed the hat around so all could see it. One of the meanest men that ever held a county office went to the bar tender and had a thin slice of Limburger cheese cut off, and when the party were looking at the frescoed ceiling through beer glasses this wicked person slipped the cheese under the sweat leather of the hat, and the man put it on and walked out.

  The man who owned the hat is one of your nervous people, who is always complaining of being sick, and who feels as though some dreadful disease is going to take possession of him and carry him off. He went back to his place of business, took off his hat and laid it on the table, and proceeded to answer some letters. He thought he detected a smell, and, when his partner asked him if he didn’t feel sick, he said he believed he did. The man turned pale and said he guessed he would go home. He met a man on the sidewalk who said the air was full of miasma, and in the street car a man who sat next to him moved away to the end of the car, and asked him if he had just come from Chicago. The man with the hat said he had not, when the stranger said they were having a great deal of smallpox there, and he guessed he would get out and walk, and he pulled the bell and jumped off. The cold perspiration broke out on the forehead of the man with the new hat, and he took it off to wipe his forehead, when the whole piece of cheese seemed to roll over and breathe, and the man got the full benefit of it, and came near fainting away.

  He got home and his wife met him and asked him what was the matter? He said he believed mortification had set in, and she took one whiff as he took off his hat, and said she should think it had. “Where did you get into it?” said she. “Get into it?” said the man, “I have not got into anything, but some deadly disease has got hold of me, and I shall not live.” She told him if any disease that smelled like that had got hold of him and was going to be chronic, she felt as though he would be a burden to himself if he lived very long. She got his clothes off, soaked his feet in mustard water, and he slept. The man slept and dreamed that a smallpox flag was hung in front of his house and that he was riding in a butcher wagon to the pest house.

  The wife sent for a doctor, and when the man of pills arrived she told him all about the case. The doctor picked up the patient’s new hat, tried it on and got a sniff. He said the hat was picked before it was ripe. The doctor and the wife held a postmortem examination of the hat, and found the slice of Limberger. “Few and short were the prayers they said.” They woke the patient, and, to prepare his mind for the revelation that was about to be made, the doctor asked him if his worldly affairs were in a satisfactory condition. He gasped and said they were. The doctor asked him if he had made his will. He said he had not, but that he wanted a lawyer sent for at once. The doctor asked him if he felt as though he was prepared to shuffle off. The man said he had always tried to lead a different life, and had tried to be done by the same as he would do it himself, but that he might have made a misdeal some way, and he would like to have a minister sent for to take an account of stock. Then the doctor brought to the bedside the hat, opened up the sweat-leather, and showed the dying man what it was that smelled so, and told him he was as well as any man in the city.

  The patient pinched himself to see if he was alive, and jumped out of bed and called for his revolver, and the doctor couldn’t keep up with him on the way down town. The last we saw of the odoriferous citizen he was trying to bribe the bar-tender to tell him which one of those pelicans it was that put that slice of cheese in his hat-lining.

  A FEMALE KNIGHT OF PYTHIAS.

  A woman of Bay City, Michigan, disguised herself as a man and clerked in a store for a year, and then applied for membership in the Knights of Pythias and was initiated. During the work of the third degree her sex was discovered. It seems that in the third degree they have an India rubber rat and a celluloid snake, which run by clockwork inside, and which were very natural indeed. The idea is to let them run at the candidate for initiation to see if he will flinch. When the snake ran at the girl she kept her nerve all right, but when the rat tried to run up her trousers leg she grabbed her imaginary skirts in both hands and jumped onto a refrigerator that was standing near, (which is used in the work of the fourth degree) and screamed bloody murder. The girl is a member of the order, however, and there is no help for it. This affair may open the eyes of members of secret societies and cause them to investigate. One lodge here, we understand, takes precaution against the admission of women by examining carefully the feet of applicants. If the feet are cold enough to freeze ice cream the candidate is black-balled.

  THE TELESCOPE FISH-POLE CANE.

  There is one thing we want to set our face against and try and break up, and that is the habit of young and middle aged persons going fishing on Sunday, when going on the Summer excursions to the country. The devil, or some other inventor, has originated a walking-stick that looks as innocent as a Sunday school teacher, but within it is a roaring lion, in the shape of a fish-pole. We have watched young fellows, and know their tricks. Sunday morning they say to their parents that they have agreed to go over on the West Side and attend early mass with a companion, just to hear the exquisite music, and, by the way, they may not be home to dinner. And they go from that home, with their new cane, looking as pious as though they were passing the collection plate. When they get around the corner they whoop it up for the depot, and shortly they are steaming out into the country. They have a lot of angleworms in an envelope in their vest pockets, and a restaurant colored man, who has been seen the night before, meets them at the depot and hands them a basket of sandwiches with a bottle sticking out.

  Arriving at the summer resort, they go to the bank of the lake and take a boat ride, and when well out in the lake they begin to unbosom the cane. Taking a plug out of the end of it, they pull out a dingus and three joints of fish-pole come out, and they tie a line on the end, put an angle worm on the hook, and catch fish. That is the kind of “mass” they are attending.

  At night the train comes back to town, and the sunburnt young men, with their noses peeled, hand a basket to the waiting colored man, which smells of fish, and they go home and tell their parents they went out to Forest Home Cemetery in the afternoon, and the sun was awful hot. The good mother knows she smells fish on her son’s clothes, but she thinks it is some new kind of perfumery, and she is silent.

  An honest up-and-up fish-pole is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, if the fishing is good, but one of these deceptive, three carde monte, political fish-poles, that shoves in and appears to be a cane, is incendiary, and ought to be suppressed. There ought to be a law passed to suppress a fish-pole that passes in polite society for a cane, and in such a moment as ye think not is pulled out to catch fish. There is nothing square about it, and the invention of that blasted stem winding fish-pole is doing more to ruin this country than all the political parties can overcome. If there was a law to compel the owners of those wailking-sticks to put a sign on their canes, “This is a fish-pole,” there would be less canes taken on these Sunday excursions in summer.

  Look not upon the walking-stick when it is hollow, and pulls out, for at last it giveth thee away, young fellow.

  * * * *

  The Sun is in receipt of an invitation to attend the opening of a new hotel in an Iowa city, but it will be impossible to attend. We remember one Iowa hotel which we visited in 1869, when the Wisconsin editors stopped there on the way back from Omaha,—the time when a couple of bed bugs took Uncle David Atwood up on the roof and were going to throw him off, and they would have done it, on
ly a party of cockroaches took his part and killed the bed bugs.

  Sam Ryan will remember how there was a crop of new potatoes growing on the billiard room floor in the dirt, that were all blossomed out; and Charley Seymour can tell how he had to argue for an hour to convince the colored cook that the peculiar smell of the scrambled eggs was owing to some of them being rotten. There were four waiters to a hundred guests, and it was a sight long to be remembered to see Mrs. Seymour and Mrs. Atwood carry their broiled chicken back to the kitchen and pick the feathers off, while good Uncle McBride, of Sparta, got into an altercation over his fried fish because the fish had not been scaled; where it was said the only thing that was not sour was the vinegar, and where the only thing that was not too small was the bill, and where every room smelled like a morgue, and the towels in the rooms had not taken a bath since 1827.

  At this hotel the proprietor would take a guest’s napkin to wipe his nose, and the barefooted, waiter girl would slip up on the rare-done fried egg spilled on the dining-room floor, and wipe the yolk off her dress on a guest’s linen coat tail. That is all we want of a hotel in that place.

  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 trousers 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 now 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 horse flesh 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 worldly-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?”

  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, are you 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.”

  After they had gone the host looked at his cigar box, and came to the conclusion that somebody must have carried off some cigars in his pocket.

  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 baldheaded 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 as a corset, but if she felt insulted he would take his leave, give the corset to some poor family, and go drown himself.