As a general thing railroad men are “pretty fly,” as the saying is, and not very apt to be scared. But a case occurred up on the La Crosse division of the St. Paul road last week that caused a good deal of hair to stand.
The train from St. Paul east runs to La Crosse, where all hands are changed, and the new gang run to Chicago. On the trip of which we speak there was placed in the baggage car at St. Paul a coffin, and at Lake City a parrot in a cage was put in. Before the train got to Winona other baggage was piled on top, so the coffin only showed one end, and the parrot cage was behind a trunk, next to the barrel of drinking water, out of sight, and where the cage would not get jammed. At La Crosse the hands were changed, and conductor Fred Cornes, as 6:35 arrived, shouted his cheery “All aboard,” and the train moved off. The coffin was seen by all the men in the baggage car, and a solemnity took possession of everybody. Railroad men never feel 'entirely happy when a corpse is on the train.
The run to Sparta was made, and Fred went to the baggage car, and noticing the coffin and the mournful appearance of the boys, he told them to brace up and have some style about them He said it was what we had all to come to, sooner or later, and for his part a corpse or two, more or less, in a car made no difference to him. He said he had rather have a car load of dead people than go into an emigrant train when some were eating cheese and others were taking off their shoes and feeding infants.
He sat down in a chair and was counting over his tickets, and wondering where all the passes come from, when the Legislature is not in session. The train was just going through the tunnel near Greenfield, and Fred says.
“Boys, we are now in the bowels of the earth, way down deeper than a grave. Whew! how close it smells.”
Just then the baggagemaster had taken a dipper of water from the barrel, and was drinking it, when a sepulchral voice, that seemed to come from the coffin, said:
“Dammit, let me out!”
The baggage man had his mouth fall of water, and when he heard the voice from the tombs, he squirted the water clear across the car, onto the express messenger, turned pale, and leaned against a trunk.
Fred Cornes heard the noise, and, chucking the tickets into his pocket and grabbing his lantern, he said, as he looked at the coffin:
“Who said that! Now, no ventriloquism on me, boys. I'm an old traveler, and don't you fool with me.”
The baggage man had by this time got his breath, and he swore upon his sacred honor that the corpse in there was alive, and asked to be let out.
Fred went out of the car to register at Greenfield, and the express messenger opened the door to put out some egg cases, and the baggage man pulled out a trunk. He was so weak he couldn't lift it. They were all as pale as a whitewashed fence.
After the train left Greenfield they all gathered in the car and listened at a respectful distance from the coffin. All was as still as a car can be that is running twenty-five miles an hour. They gathered a little nearer, but no noise, when Cornes said they were all off their base, and had better soak their heads.
“You fellows are overworked, and are nervous, The company ought to give you a furlough, and pay your expenses to the sea shore.”
Just then there was a rustling as if somebody had rolled over in bed and a voice said, as plainly as possible:
“O, how I suffer!”
If a nitro-glycerine bomb had exploded there could not have been more commotion. The express man rushed forward, and was going to climb over into the tender of the engine, the baggage man started for the emigrant car to see if there was anybody from the place in Germany that his hired girl came from, and Cornes happened to think that he had not collected fare from an Indian that got on at Greenfield with a lot of muskrat skins. In less than four seconds the corpse and parrot were the sole occupants of the car. The three train men and a brakeman met in the emigrant car and looked at each other.
They never said a word for about two minutes, when Fred opened the ball. He said there was no use of being scared, if the man was dead he was not dangerous, and if he was alive the four of them could whip him, if he undertook to run things. What they were in duty bound to do was to let him out. No man could enjoy life screwed down in a sarcophagus like that.
“Now,” says Cornes, “there is a doctor from Milwaukee in the sleeper. I will go and ask him to come in the baggage car, and you fellows go in and pull the trunks off that coffin, and we will take a screw driver and a can-opener and give the man air. That's doing as a fellow would be done by.”
So he went and got the doctor and told him he had got a case for him. He wanted him to practice on a dead man. The doctor put on his pants and overcoat, and went with Fred. As they came into the baggage car the boys were lifting a big trunk off the coffin, when the voice said:
“Go easy. Glory hallelujah!”
Then they all turned pale again, but all took hold of the baggage and worked with a will, while the doctor held a screw driver he had fished out of a tool box.
The doctor said the man was evidently alive, but the chances were that he might die from suffocation before they could unscrew all the screws of the outside box and the coffin, and he said he didn't know but the best way would be to take an ax and break it open.
Fred said that was his idea, and he was just going for the ax when the brakeman moved the water barrel, tipped over the parrot cage, and the parrot shook himself and looked mad and said. “There, butterfingers! Polly wants a cracker.”
Cornes had just come up with the axe, and was about to tell the brakeman to chop the box, when the parrot spoke.
“Well, by——-,” said the baggageman. The doctor laughed, the brakeman looked out the door to see how the weather was, and the conductor said, “I knew it was a parrot all the time, but you fellows were so anxious to chop into the box that I was going to let you. I never saw a lot of men with so much curiosity.” Then they all united in trying to bribe the doctor not to tell the story in Milwaukee.
When the Young Men's Christian Association left our bed and board, without just cause or provocation, and took up its abode in Bon Accord Hall, we felt as though we had been bereaved of a fruitful source of items, and at first we were inclined to advertise the association, and warn dealers not to trust them on our account, as their credit was as good as ours, but almost every day we hear of something that will do to write up.
The new hall of the association was formerly used by Prof. Sherman as a dancing academy, and the other night when young Mr. Collingbourne agreed to go around to the dancing school and escort a lady friend home, about half past nine, he did not know of the change. At the appointed time he went to the place he had always found the dancing school, and at the bottom of the stairs he met a solemn looking sort of person who handed him a circular and said, “Come in, brother, and partake freely of the waters of life.”
“You bet your boots,” says Collingbourne, as he threw his cigar into the street, “but don't we get anything but water?”
Mr. Collingbourne is the last man in the world who would appear irreverent, but he thought it was a dancing school, and when a mournful looking man on the first landing took him by the arm and said, “Come all ye who are weary and heavy laden,” he felt that there was an effort being made to snatch his watch, so he jerked away from the brother and told him he didn't want any taffy, and if he wasn't careful he would get kicked so his head would ache.
The good brother thought Collingbourne was a brand that it would be creditable to pluck from the burning, so he followed him up stairs, telling him there was salvation for all, only to meet with the reply that he better mind his own business or he would get salivated so his folks would not know him.
At the top of the stairs he met two men that he had never seen at the dancing school, and he felt as though he was being cornered for no good, as the other fellow had closed in on his rear. The two new brothers each took hold of one of his hands, and were telling him how glad they were that he had shown a disposition to turn over a new leaf and try to lead a different life, and they began to picture to him the beauty of faith, when he backed up against the railing and said, “I don't know who you fellows are, but you have tackled the wrong boy. I have been brought up in this town, and I know all the games, and you can't get me on any racket,” and then he looked at the door, as the piano sounded the beautiful tune, “From Greenland's Icy Mountains,” and asked, “What time does the cotillion break up?” The good brother told him it was early yet, and “while the lamp holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return.”
The visitor said he would go in, he guessed, and shake his foot once, just for luck, and he opened the door. Such a sight met his eyes as he never saw in a dancing school before. The whole congregation nearly, was on its knees, and a good man was offering up a prayer that was indeed beautiful. Collingborne began to sweat in three different languages, but being a gentleman who had the most unbounded respect for religion in all its forms, he uncovered his head and bowed reverently while the prayer was being uttered.
When it was through he turned to one of the truly good people in the hall, that had watched his devotion, and said, “Say, boss, this is evidently a new scheme. I thought this was Sherman's dancing school. You must excuse my seeming irreverence. If you will kick me down stairs I will consider it a special dispensation of providence,” and he went down into the wicked world and asked a policeman where the dancing school was. All the way home the lady friend asked him what made him so solemn, but he only said his boots fit him too quick. He never goes to a dancing school now without finding out if it is there yet.
The papers are publishing accounts of the arrival east of a train of palace cattle cars, and illustrating how much better the cattle feel after a trip in one of these cars, than cattle did when they made the journey in the ordinary cattle cars.
As we understand it the cars are fitted up in the most gorgeous manner, in mahogany and rosewood, and the upholstering is something perfectly grand, and never before undertaken except in the palaces of the old world.
As you enter the car there is a reception room, with a few chairs, a lounge and an ottoman, and a Texas steer gently waves you to a seat with his horns, while he switches off your hat with his tail. If there is any particular cow, or steer, or ox, that you wish to see, you give your card to the attendant steer, and he excuses himself and trots off to find the one you desire to see. You do not have long to wait, for the animal courteously rises, humps up his or her back, stretches, yawns, and with the remark, “the galoot wants to interview me, probably, and I wish he would keep away,” the particular one sought for comes to the reception room and puts out its front foot for a shake, smiles and says, “Glad you came. Was afraid you would let us go away and not call.”
Then the cow or steer sits down on its haunches and the conversation flows in easy channels. You ask how they like the country, and if they have good times, and if they are not hard worked, and all that; and they yawn and say the country is splendid at this season of the year, and that when passing along the road they feel as though they would like to get out in some meadow, and eat grass and switch flies.
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 ChicagoTimesarticle 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.
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.
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.
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 onlybeen 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.