The captain said we had better go to the other end of the boiler and lay down with the dogs where it was warm. We tried to pass it off as a joke, and turned to Hatch and tried to get into conversation with him about a goose he had killed the day before, but he wouldn’t have it. He said we could get the smell out of our clothes by burying them, and then he went on to tell how he shot a skunk once, and spoiled a suit of clothes.
We spoke to Colonel Wood, one of our party, as a last resort, and all he said was to draw in his breath with a “Whoosh,” and put his handkerchief to his nose. We never felt so mean in the world. The whole gang had combined against us, and we got up to leave them, meditating revenge, when Walt Webb said, “Let’s throw the cuss overboard.” We went and laid down on the valises, and tried to think of some way to get even with the boys, when Root told the captain that they had got some valuables in those valises, and they didn’t want any tramp laying down on them, and he came along and actually drove us off of our own valise. 4
To make the matter still worse, a homely looking Norwegian dog that we had borrowed to take on the hunt, and which was the worst looking brute that ever was, and which had been the laughing stock of the camp for a week, at this point came up to us, wagged his tail and followed us, and the boys said, “Look at the dog the muskrat trapper owns.” That was the worst give away.
We walked around on deck, and would occasionally stop and speak to one of the boys, hoping they had given us enough and would relent, but all the way to La Crosse not one of them would speak to us, and when the boat arrived at the landing Root handed us a quarter, in the presence of the passengers, and asked if we wouldn’t help Mike Doyle, the cook, carry the baggage ashore.
It was the worst joke we ever had perpetrated on us, and even after we got ashore, and Hatch said, “Come, old sorrel top, let’s go and get a glass of beer,” we could hardly smile. Since then when we go hunting we wear the best clothes we have got.
For years afterwards when fellows were joking, some of the party would ask us “if the trapping was good this season.” We got so we could not look a myskrat in the face. So we say that practical joking is splendid if it is on the other fellow. Always quit when they get it on to you.
A TEMPERANCE LECTURE THAT HURT.
There was probably the most astonished temperance man up above Stevens Point the other day that ever was. The name of the temperance man is Sutherland.
He is a nice gentleman, but, like many another man, he can never see a person with his keg full of bug juice without giving him a talking to.
The other day Sutherland was driving along the road when he overtook an Indian who asked for a ride. He was allowed to get in the wagon, when Sutherland discovered that the Indian had a breath that would stop a temperance clock. He smelled like a sidewalk in front of a wholesale liquor store. The Indian was comfortably full, so full that his back teeth were floating.
Sutherland thought it was a good time to get in his work, so he began talking to the Indian about the wickedness of looking upon the whisky when it was bay, and when it giveth its color in the nose. He told the Indian of the wrecked homes, the poverty, the disgrace and death that followed the use of liquor, and wound up by pleading with him to give up his cups and join the angel band and shout hosannas in a temperance lodge. The Indian did not understand a word that Suthland was saying, but supposing by the looks of his nose and pleading eyes that he wanted a drink, the Indian drew a large black bottle from under his blanket and handed it to Sutherland, remarking: “Ugh! Dam firewater.”
Sutherland thought that he had made a convert, and telling the Indian that he was glad he had resolved to lead a different life, took the bottle and dashed it upon the ground, smashing it into a thousand pieces.
Well, the air seemed full of Indians. If Sutherland had torn out the Indian’s heart he could not have hurt the red man worse.
With a war whoop the Indian jumped on the seat, took Sutherland by the hair and yanked him out on the ground. Sutherland yelled and the Indian galloped over him. The team ran away, and the Indian mauled Sutherland. He cut open his face, italicised his nose, put a roof over his eye and felt for his knife to stab him.
Sutherland got away and run to Stevens Point, where his wounds were bound up. He says if any gentleman wants to take the job of reforming Indians he will give up his situation. He meant well, but lacked judgment.
* * * *
An item in the La Crosse Chronicle says: “Two cats and a dog were killed at the high school yesterday for inspection by the class in physiology.”
In preparing the youth of the land for a business career there is nothing that tends more to ripen the mind and to prepare it for overcoming the obstacles that will naturally be found in after life than to learn to cut a dog in two.
The ignorance of some of the business men of the present day is largely to be attributed to the fact that the instructors of the youth in the olden time never taught them how to carve a dog. How many times have we been in positions since arriving at man’s estate, when poring over some great problem of science, where we would have given ten years of the front end of our life if we knew how to make both ends meat, even if it was dog meat?
The knowledge that the students of the present day obtain in their study of the dog will be valuable to them if ever they are caught in a melon patch, and a dog fastens his teeth into their garments. They will know how to go to work scientifically to unhinge the jaws of a dog, instead of pulling one way, while the dog pulls the other, until the cloth or the skin tears out.
It will be a great thing to know all about how a dog is put together. And if these students are taught how to kill cats they will more than get their money back when they grow up.
Ignorant people who have never had the advantages of studying the cat when it is dead, attempt to kill them with boot-jacks and empty ale bottles and tomato cans, but the next generation will know how to do it scientifically, and not hurt the cat.
This is certainly an age of improvement, and the Sun desires that school children shall know all about the anatomy of the festive dog and the nocturnal cat, if they don’t even know how to spell their own names.
BRAVERY OF MRS. GARFIELD
The newspaper correspondents about the White House, echoing the remarks made by the doctors, are continually talking of Mrs. Garfield’s bravery, and we frequently see the statement made that she is “the bravest woman in the world,” and all that. While expressing great admiration for the gifted lady, in the trying ordeal through which she has passed, and admitting that she is brave as an American woman ought to be, and that by her conduct she greatly braced up her beloved husband when his liver was knocked around into the small of his back by the assassin’s bullet, and he didn’t know whether he was going to live till morning, we must say that Mrs. Garfield is no braver than thousands of other good women.
She simply took the chances on his dying, as thousands of other wives do every day, and for his good she put on the best face possible, and kept her tears back. But how many obscure women have done the same thing, as they sat by the side of their dying husbands, and made the patient believe that he was getting better, and smiled while their hearts were breaking? Was Mrs. Garfield braver than the sister of charity, God bless her, who goes from the North to nurse total strangers in a stricken southern city, when she knows that within a week the deadly fever will kill her?
Compare the President’s wife for a moment with the wife of a drunken husband, who points a revolver at her heart, and his nervous finger on the trigger, while he announces that he will kill her. The wife looks him in the eye and says, “Kill me, John, but kiss me first,” and the drunken brute breaks down and cries, and she takes the revolver from him, puts him to bed, soaks his feet and brings him a good supper. That is bravery.
Think of a frail little woman whose life has been one bed of thorns, and whose happy hours have been so few that if an hour seems to open to her with happiness she dare not enjoy it for fear there is a mistake, a
nd it is not hers to enjoy. In the wreck of her life’s ambitions and hopes she has saved only a dear little girl and her heart is so bound up in her that it ceases to beat when she thinks that God may forget that the little one is all she has, and call her home.
One day the little one comes home with fever, takes to her bed, and for weeks is just on the line between earth and heaven. The little mother, hardly able to be upon her feet, believes as firmly as she believes that she lives, that her darling will die, and that two hearts will be buried in the coffin, and yet she watches beside her night and day with smiles on her face, sings to her as though her heart were filled with happiness, and occasionally gives expression to a jolly laugh, just to brace up her little darling, and make her believe there is no danger, and when the doctor says “she will live,” the brave little mother goes to her room and cries for the first time, and faints away.
Ah, gentlemen correspondents, you do well to speak of the bravery of the President’s wife, but you know that these incidents we have related, and incidents you have seen in your own experiences, show as great, if not greater bravery and heroism than that of the first woman of the land. O, the country is full of women who are braver than the bravest man that ever walked.
ILLUSTRATING THE ASSASSINATION.
It is singular how a great calamity like the attempted assassination of the President will bring people together on terms of familiarity, and cause them to discuss things that they never knew anything about before. People who never thought of such things before, except during the cucumber season, have become familiar with their livers and internal improvements, and talk as glibly of the abdomen, the umbilicus—as well as the cuss who shot him—the peritonitis, the colon, the ilium, the diaphragm, the alacumbumbletop and the diaphaneous cholagogue as though they had been attending a Chicago meat cutting match at a students’ dissecting room. Men talk of little else, and this is noticeable more particularly among men who have nothing to do.
There were two old men who loaf a good deal around a grocery, discussing the wound of the President, and one was trying to illustrate to the other how it was. He put on his glasses and took up a butter tryer and walked up to a lady customer who was leaning over the counter smelling of some boarding-house prunes. She was a large lady, and perhaps as good a subject as could have been found. The first old man called the other up behind the woman, and said:
“There, the assassin stood about as you do, and looked, probably, the same as you do. Now, you take this spigot and point to the woman, about here—” and he put the butter tryer on her back, near the belt.
“Yes, I see,” said the second old man, as he nibbled a piece off a soda cracker, and pointed the wooden spigot at the woman, with his finger on the trigger. The woman was busy looking to see if there were any worms in the prunes, and she didn’t notice what was going on.
“There,” said the first old man, as he pushed the end of the butter tryer a little harder against the woman. “The bullet went in here, and went around here close to the liver, though probably it didn’t touch the liver, passed through the thin membrane, and is probably lodged in here,” and he reached around the woman with his left hand to where her apron was tied on. “Now, if they cannot extract the ball the great danger is from peritonitis—”
At this point the woman observed what was going on, and she was about as mad as a woman can be. Seizing a codfish that was on the head of a sugar barrel by the tail she whacked the first old gent, who held the butter tryer, over the head, and said:
“Peritonitis is beginning to set in, you bald-headed old villain, and general prostration will be the result. I will teach you to put your arm around me. I am no manikin. Do you take me for a dissecting room? Put down that gun, you idiot,” said she, as she wafted the codfish toward the second old man, who still held up the spigot.
The grocery man, who was cutting a cheese, came around the counter with the cheese knife in his hand, and said he hoped there would be no more bloodshed, and asked the old man to put down the butter tryer and go out. The two old men went out on the sidewalk, when the woman told the grocery man that no woman was safe a moment when those old reprobates were allowed to run at large, and when she got so low down as to allow people to practice assassination on her with wooden faucets and butter tryers she would join a circus. When the two old men got out on the walk the second one said to the first:
“Didn’t you know the woman?”
“Know her? No. I didn’t think it was necessary for a formal introduction in a trying time like this, when we all want all the information we can get about the great tragedy. There is no accommodation about some people. But she has gone out now, so let us carry back the spigot and butter tryer, and may be the grocery man will treat to the cider.”
And the two old setters went in and sat down on the barrels and talked about how they had known people along in 1837 to be shot all to pieces and recover.
THE INFIDEL AND HIS SILVER MINE.
It is announced in the papers that Colonel Ingersoll, the dollar a ticket infidel, has struck it rich in a silver mine, and is now worth a million dollars. Here is another evidence of the goodness of God. Ingersoll has treated God with the greatest contempt, called Him all the names he could think of, called Him a liar, a heartless wretch, and stood on a stump and dared God to knock a chip off his shoulder, and instead of God’s letting him have one below the belt and knocking seven kinds of cold victuals out of him, God gives him a pointer on a silver mine, and the infidel rakes in a cool million, and laughs in his sleeve, while thousands of poor workers in the vineyard are depending for a livelihood on collections that pan out more gun wads and brass pants buttons to the ton of ore than they do silver. This may be all right, and we hope it is, and we don’t want to give any advice on anybody else’s business, but it would please Christians a good deal better to see that bold man taken by the slack of the pants and lifted into a poor house, while the silver he has had fall to him was distributed among the charitable societies, mission schools and churches, so a minister could get his salary and buy a new pair of trousers to replace those that he has worn the knees out of kneeling down on the rough floor to pray.
It is mighty poor consolation to the ladies of a church society, to give sociables, ice creameries, strawberry festivals and all kinds of things to raise money to buy a carpet for a church or lecture room, and wash their own dishes, and then hear that some infidel who is around the country calling God a pirate and a horse thief, at a dollar a head, to full houses, has miraculously struck a million dollar silver mine.
To the toiling minister who prays without ceasing, and eats codfish and buys clothes at a second hand store, it looks pretty rough to see Bob Inger-soll steered onto a million dollar silver mine. But it may be all right, and we presume it is. Maybe God has got the hook in Bob’s mouth, and is letting him play around the way a fisherman does a black bass, and when he thinks he is running the whole business, and flops around and scares the other fish, it is possible Bob may be reeled in, and he will find himself on the bottom of the boat with a finger and thumb in his gills and a big boot on his paunch, and he will be compelled to disgorge the hook and the bait and all, and he will lay there and try to flop out of the boat, and wonder what kind of a game this is that is being played on him.
Everything turns out right some time, and from what we have heard of God, off and on, we don’t believe He is going to let no ordinary man, bald headed and apoplectic, carry off all the persimmons, and put his fingers to his nose and dare the ruler of the universe to tread on the tail of his coat.
Bob Ingersoll has got the bulge on all the Christians now, and draws more water than anybody, but He who notes the sparrow’s fall has no doubt got an eye on the fat rascal, and some day will close two or three fingers around Bob’s throat, when his eyes will stick out so you can hang your hat on them, and he will blat like a calf and get down on his knees and say:
“Please, Mr. God, don’t choke so, and I will give it all back and go ar
ound and tell the boys that I am the almightiest liar that ever charged a dollar a head to listen to the escaping wind from a blown up bladder. O, good God, don’t hurt so. My neck is all chafed.”
And then he will die, and God will continue business at the old stand.
THE GREAT MONOPOLIES.
There is an association of old fossils at New York calling themselves the “Anti-Monopoly League,” that has taken the job on their hands of saving the country from eternal and everlasting ruin at the hands of the gigantic monopolies, the railroads, and this league, through its President, L. E. Chittenden, is sending editorials and extracts from speeches delivered by great men who have been refused passes, or who have not been retained by railroads to conduct law suits as much as they think they ought to be, to newspapers all over the country requesting their publication.
The Sun gets its regular share of these documents each week, which go into the waste basket with a regularity that is truly remarkable, considering that we are not a railroad monopoly. But there is something so ridiculous about these articles that one cannot help laughing. They claim that the country is in the grasp of the gigantic monopolies, and that they will choke the country to death and ruin everybody, though what the object can be in running the country and everybody in it, is not stated.
These monopolies have taken the country when it was as weak as gruel, and hoisted it by the slack of the pants to the leading position among nations. The monopolies have built their track all over God’s creation, where land could not be given away, have hauled emigrants out there and set them up in business, and made the waste land of the government valuable. They have made transportation so cheap that the emigrant from Germany of last year can send wheat from Dakota to the Fatherland, and Bismarck and King William can get it cheaper than they can wheat grown within a mile of their castles.
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