CHAPTER I.
The Bad Boy Wants to Be an Orphan—The Bad Boy Goes to an Orphan Asylum—The Government Gives the Bad Boy’s Pa an Appointment to Travel Over the World and Get Information About Airships, Dirigible Balloons and Everything to Help Our Government Know What Other Governments Are Doing in Case of War.
I have always wanted to be an orphan and I guess now I have got my wish.
I have watched orphans a whole lot and they have seemed to me to have the easiest job outside of politics.
To see a good mess of orphans at an Orphan Asylum, with no parents to butt in and interfere with your enjoyment has seemed to me to be an ideal existence.
When a boy has a father that he has to watch constantly to keep him from going wrong he has no time to have any fun, but to belong to a syndicate of orphans, with an easy old maid matron to look after the whole bunch, an individual orphan who has ginger in him can have the time of his young life. At least that is the way it has always seemed to me.
They set on the food at an orphanage, and if you have a pretty good reach, you can get enough corralled around your plate to keep the wolf from the door, and when it comes to clothes, you don’t have to go to a tailor, or a hand me down store, and take something you don’t want because it is cheap, but you take any clothes that are sent in by charitable people, which have been worn enough so there is no style about them, and no newness to wear off by rolling in the grass, and you put them on and let it go at that, if they do smell of moth balls.
Pa has skipped and I am left alone and Ishall enter as a freshman in an Orphan Asylum, and later go out into the world and travel on my shape.
Pa took me to Washington and for a week he was visiting the different Departments, and nights he would talk in his sleep about air ships and balloons, and forts and battleships, and about going abroad, until I thought he was getting nutty.
One day he called me up to our room in the hotel and after locking the door, and plugging up the keyhole with chewed paper he said: “Now, Hennery, I want you to listen right out loud. The government has given me an appointment to travel over the world and get information about air ships, divagable balloons, and everything that will help our government to know what other governments are doing in inventing things to be used in case of war. I am to be the Billy Pinkerton of the War Department and shall have to spy in other governments, and I am to be the traveling diplomat ofthe government, and jolly all nations, and find out how things are running everywhere.
“You will have to stay home this time because you would be a dead give away, so I will send you to a nice orphan home where you will be taught to work, and where guards will keep you on the inside of the fence, and put you to bed in a straight jacket if you play any of your jokes, see?” and Pa gave me a ticket to an orphans’ home, and a letter of introduction to the matron and the next day I was an inmate, with all the degrees coming to me. What do you think of that, and Pa on the ocean, with a government commission in his pocket?
Gee, but my ideas of an orphans’ home got a shock when I arrived at the station where the orphans’ home was located. I thought there would be a carriage at the train to meet me, and a nice lady dressed in white with a cap on her head, to take mein her arms and hug me, and say, “Poor little boy, I will be a sister to you,” but therewas no reception committee, and I had to walk a mile with my telescope valise, and when I found the place and went in the door, to present my letter to the matron, a man with a scar on his face, and one eye gone, met me and looked over my papers, and went, one eye on me, and called an assistant private and told him to take me and give me the first or entered apprentice degree.
Gee, My Ideas of an Orphan Home Got a Shock.
Gee, My Ideas of an Orphan Home Got a Shock.
Gee, My Ideas of an Orphan Home Got a Shock.
The private took me by the wrist and gave me a jerk and landed me in the laundry, and told me to strip off, and when I had removed my clothes and folded them and laid them on a table, he took the clothes away from me, and then told me to climb into a laundry tub, and he turned cold water on me and gave me a bar of yellow laundry soap, and after I had lathered myself he took a scrubbing brush, such as floors are scrubbed with, and proceeded in one full swoop to peel the hide off of me with arough crash towel till you could see my veins and arteries, and inside works as well as though you had used X-rays, and when I was ready to die and wanted to, I yelled murder, and he put his hand over my mouth so hard that he loosened my front teeth, and I guess I died right there or fainted, for when I came to, and thought the resurrection morning, that they used to tell me about in the Sunday School, had come. I found myself dressed in a sort of combination shirt and drawers, like a bunny nightie, made of old saddle blankets, and he told me that was the uniform of the orphanage and that I could go out and play for fifteen minutes, after which the bell would ring and I could go from play to work. Gosh, but I was glad to get out doors, but when I began to breathe the fresh air, and scratch myself where the saddle blanket clothes pricked me, about fifty boys, who were evidently sophomores in the orphanage, came along,and made a rush for me, to haze me as a freshman.
Well, they didn’t do a thing to me. They tied a rope around one ankle, and threw the rope over a limb, and pulled me off the ground, and danced a war dance around me and run thistles up my trouser’s legs, and spanked me with a board with slivers in it, and let me down and walked over me in a procession, singing “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night.” I laughed all the time, because that is the way freshmen do in college when they are being murdered, and I thought my new associates would like me better if I died game. Just before I died game the bell rang, and the one eyed pirate and his chief of staff came out and said we would go to work, and the boys were divided into squads and put to work, some husking corn, others sweeping up dead leaves, others milking cows, and doingeverything necessary around a farm.
Before I was set to work I had a few minutes of silent reflection, and I thoughtof my changed condition from my porcelain lined bath tub with warm water and soft towels, to that bath in the laundry, and the skinning process of preparing a boy for a better life.
The Way Freshmen Do in College When They’re Being Murdered.
The Way Freshmen Do in College When They’re Being Murdered.
The Way Freshmen Do in College When They’re Being Murdered.
Then what do you suppose they set me to work at? Skinning bull heads and taking out the insides. It seems the boys catch bull heads in a pond, and the bull heads are used for human food, and the freshest boys were to dress them. Well, I wasn’t going to kick on anything they gave me for a stunt, so I put on an apron, and for four hours I skinned and cut open bull heads in a crude sort of way, until I was so sick I couldn’t protect myself from the assaults of the live bull heads, and the cook said I done the job so well that she would ask to have me skin all the bull heads after that. I said I would rather milk cows so the pirate gave me a milk pail and told me to go and milk the freckled cow, and I went up to the cow as Ihad seen farmers do, and sat down on a wooden camp stool and put the pail under the cow, and began to squeeze the Summer Sausages she wore under her stomach, four of ’em, and the more I squeezed the more there didn’t any milk come, and the cow looked around at me in a pitying sort of way, but the milk did not arrive on schedule time, and then I thought of a farmer I once saw kick a cow in the slats, and I thought maybe that was the best way to cause the milk to hurry and flow, so I got up off the stool and hauled off my hind leg and gave that cow a swift kick that sent her toes clear in to her liver and lights and sausage covers.
Well I thought it was a car of dynamite running into an elevator and exploding, but the boys that picked me up and poured milk on my face to bring me to, said it was not an explosion, but that the cow had reared up in front and kicked up behind, and struck me with all four feet, and had hooked mewith her horns, and switched me with her tail, and pawed me with her forward feet, and licked my hair with her tongue, and laid down and rolled on me. Well, I certainly looked it. Gee, but I don’t want any more farmer’s life in mine.
I certainly thought that was the way to cause a cow to give milk. Maybe I ought to have sworn at her the way the farmer did. I remember now, that he used language not fit to print, but I have not taken the swearing degree yet.
Well, they got me braced up so I could go to dinner, and it was surely a sumptuous repast, fried bull heads and bread. I have eaten fish at home and at hotels, where you had ketchup, and celery, and vegetables, and gravy, and pie, and good things, but to sit down with fifty boys and eat just bull heads, and stale bread, and try to look pleasant like you were at a banquet, was one on your little Hennery that made him feel thatthe pleasures of being an orphan had been over drawn.
Gosh, but the boys tell me we have bull heads here six times a week, because they don’t cost anything, and that the bones stick through your skin so they hold your clothes on.
I am organizing a union among the boys and we are going to call a strike, and if the pirate with one eye does not grant all we ask, we are going to walk out in a body, and jump a freight train, and go out in the wide world to make our fortunes. I shall go look for pa. There can’t no man give me such a dirty shake. I feel like I had been left on a door step, with a note on the basket asking the finder to take good care of me “’cause I was raised a pet.”