We are told that in the revision of the Bible the passage, “And I beheld an angel flying through the midst of heaven,” has been changed to “eagle,” and that all allusions to angels have been changed to “eagles.” This knocks the everlasting spots out of the angel business, and the poetry of wanting to be an angel, “and with the angels stand,” has become the veriest prose.
We have never had any particular desire to stand with angels, not this year, but there was a certain beauty in the idea that we would all be angels when we got through whooping it up down here and went to heaven.
Particularly was this the case with children and women, and old persons, and to have the angel business wiped out by a lot of white chokered revisers is too much. There are many of us that would never make very attractive angels, unless we were altered over a good deal, and made smaller.
Some of us, to pass current among angels, would have to wear wigs. How would a male bald-headed angel, with a red nose, and one eye gone, look flying a match through the blue ethereal space with a trim built girl angel? The other angels would just sit around on the ground, picking pin feathers out of their wings, and laugh so a fellow would want to go off somewhere and get behind a tree and condemn his luck.
There are few men who would be improved by fastening wings on their shoulder blades, and we never believed they could make the thing work, but the preachers have kept pounding it into us until we all got an idea there would be some process that could transform us into angels that would pass in a crowd.
Now, you take Long John Wentworth, of Chicago, a man seven feet high, and weighing four hundred pounds. What kind of an angel would he make? They would have to put wings on him as big as a side show tent, or he never could make any headway. Just imagine John circling around over the New Jerusalem, until he saw a twenty dollar gold piece loose in the pavement of the golden streets. He would cut loose and go down there so quick it would break him all up.
And then suppose angel Storey, of theTimes, and angel Medill, of theTribune, should have got their eyes on that loose gold piece, and got there about the same time before angel John arrived, and should be quarreling over it? John would knock Storey over onto a hydrant with one wing, and mash angel Medill in the gutter with the other, and take the gold piece in his toes and fly off to where the choir was singing, and break them all up singing, “You'll never miss the water till the well runs dry.”
We have never taken a great deal of stock in the angel doctrine, because we knew pretty well what kind of material they would have to be made of, but we had rather be an angel than an eagle. Who the deuce wants to die and be an eagle, like “Old Abe,” and eat rats? In a heaven full of eagles there would be the worst clawing that ever was, and the air would be full of feathers. Eagles won't do, and the revisers ought to have known it.
If we have got to be anything let us insist on being angels, via the Bible, and then we can have some fun. With big flocks of angels, and good weather, and nothing to do but to sing praises and browse around to pass away the time, and no rent to pay, and no bills of any kind to keep track of, it does seem as though some of us could think of some tableaux, or picnic, or something to have a good time, but let us strike on being eagles, revisers or no revisers.
A most ridiculous scene occurred at a church in Newcastle, Penn., one Sunday, a short time ago. A policeman was passing the church as a gentleman came out. The man jokingly accosted the policeman and said he was wanted inside meaning that he would be glad to have him turn from the error of his ways, and seek the truth and enjoy a peace that passeth all understanding. The stupid policeman thought there was some trouble in the church, so he went in.
The sexton, seeing a policeman, was anxious to give him a favorable seat, so he said, “Come right in here,” and he took him into a pew and waved his hand as much as to say, “Help yourself.” There was another man in the pew, a deacon with a sinister expression, as the policeman thought, and he supposed that was the man they wanted arrested, so he tapped the deacon on the arm and told him to go into the aisle. The deacon struggled, thinking the policeman was crazy, and tried to get away, but he was dragged along. Many of the congregation thought that the deacon had been doing something wrong, and some of them got behind the deacon and helped the officer fire him out.
Arriving at the lock-up, the policeman saw the man who told him he was wanted in the church and asked him what the charge was against the deacon, and he didn't know, so the sexton was appealed to, and he didn't know, and finally the prisoner was asked what it was all about, and he didn't know.
The policeman was asked what he arrested the man for, and he didn't know, and after awhile the matter was explained, and the policeman, who had to arrest somebody, took the man into custody who told him he was wanted in the church, and he was fined five dollars and costs.
He says he will never try to convert a policeman again, and the policeman says he will never go into a church again if they get to knocking each other down with hymn books.
The trouble that is usually experienced by prize fighters in finding a place where they can fight unmolested must have been apparent to all, andThe Sunwould suggest a way out of the difficulty.
Let the government set apart a portion of the public domain, near some military post, and enact a law that prize fighting shall be no more unlawful than polygamy, or stealing from the government. If prize fighters can have the same immunity from arrest and punishment that polygamists and defaulters have, it is all they ask, and it seems not unreasonable to ask it.
Certainly a prize fighter in whipping a friend to raise money to support one wife and one set of children, when the other fellow is willing to take the chances of being whipped, is not as bad as a praying old cuss who marries from twenty to forty feeble minded females and raises a flock of narrow headed children to turn loose after a while, with not much more brain than goslings.
If two men want to go out and enjoy “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” by mauling each others faces, why should they be pulled, and let an official who steals half a million dollars from the government, give a New Year's reception? The thing does not look right to a man who believes that this is a free country, and that every man is endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which is the right to pay his debts.
Another thing, the government, if it decided to set apart certain ground for prize fights, might create the office of “referee,” and appoint some honest, square man, who applied for a consulship and there was no vacancy, to the position, with a good salary. What prize fighters need is a referee that can be depended on, and it would be no worse to appoint a government referee than it would to give breech loading arms and ammunition to Indians to go on the war-path with.
Prize fighting does not do any harm. If one of the principals is killed, which does not often occur, the government is so much ahead. The government would furnish the poison if Mormons would kill themselves. Why not furnish prize fighters an opportunity to climb the golden stairs? The fact of it is, as a people we oppose prize fighting because it is “brutal,” and we go to a wrestling match where men hurt themselves twice as much as they would if they stood up and knocked each other down. We cry out against prize fights, and yet a majority of the male population would walk ten miles to see a prize fight when they wouldn't ride a mile to attend church.
We wish men would not fight, but if they want to they should either be allowed to, or else all other kinds of foolishness should be suppressed. If every respectable business man in this country could box as well as Sullivan there would not be as much crime as there is to-day. Suppose all the men that have been robbed in the past year by cowardly sand baggers, could have “put up their hands,” and knocked the robbers into the middle of next week, wouldn't there be fewer headaches and heartaches, fewer widows mourning their murdered husbands, and fewer orphans?
It is against the law to carry weapons, and yet if a man opens a boxing-school to teach men to defend themselves, and fit them so they can knock the hind sights off a robber, he is frowned upon. We want to see the time when every young man has got muscle, and knows how to use it, and then there will be fewer outrages. If a respectable citizen has a daughter that is the pride of his heart, he had rather she would go to a theatre or a party with a man who can protect her with his strong arm than with an effeminate curiosity that has his brain parted in the middle, and who would be afraid to meet a dwarf in the dark.
We advise every boy who readsThe Sunto throw away the revolver he has bought to carry in his pistol pocket, or sell it to some coward, and use the money to hire somebody to teach him to box, and to strike a blow that will make any person sick to his stomach who insults the boy's sister. Just depend your muscle to get through the world. If the boy's people are truly good and want him to go to Sunday-school he should do it, and learn all that is good, but he should want a little exercise with his hands between meals, and learn the efficacy of two fists, for sometimes they come handy.
We have heard of cases in prayer meetings where deacons got to fighting, even in this State, and a fellow that could use his fists best stood up the longest, though a chair was used by the opponent. We know ministers in Wisconsin who are good boxers, and while they would not teach boxing from the pulpit, they would not object to see every boy know how. Since the tramps have been knocking people down in Indianapolis, we have been anxious to hear that one of them has tackled our old friend, Rev. Myron Reed; as we know that tramp would go to the hospital dead sure. Boys, learn to box.
There is one thing about sleeping cars that should be changed, and that is the number of the berth should be on the curtain, so when a man gets up in the night to go out to the back end of the car and look out into the night to see if the stars are shining, and he gets through seeing if the stars are shining, and goes back, he will not get into the wrong berth.
Since the other night we have not wondered that on a similar occasion, at the dead hour of night, as it is reported, the truly good Mr. Beecher, who left his berth to see the porter, and ask him about how long it would be before they got there, returned to what he supposed was his own berth, and sat down on the side of it to remove his trouserloons, and by a scream was notified that he was in the wrong pew. We attach no blame to Mr. Beecher, and would defend him to the last breath, because to a man whose mind is occupied with great thoughts, the berths all look alike. Neither do we blame Miss Anthony for screaming. She could not know in the imperfect light that was vouchsafed her in a sleeping car, that it was a mistake. She had no time to argue; it was a case where immediate decision was necessary, and she did right to scream—she could not do otherwise. But when vile men tell us, as they draw down their eyelids and wink, that it was “a mistake the way the woman kept tavern in Michigan,” they do an injustice to a noble preacher who has been lied about, and who has better judgment than to do so knowingly.
So we say that anybody is liable to err; but if anybody had told us, when that woman from Pere Marquette, with a hare lip, and a foot like a fiddle box, got into the berth next to ours, that in the dead hour of night we should be sitting down on the selvage of her berth, we should have killed him.
We are more than ever struck by the old adage that the ways of Providence are inscrutable, and past finding the right berth. We had gone out to the back part of the car, and stood in our stocking feet on the cold zinc floor for a couple or three minutes, looking out upon the beautiful Michigan landscape and waterscape, as the train passed Michigan City, and had asked the porter if there was any bar on the train, and had returned up the aisle to find our berth.
Pulling aside the curtains we sat down, and were about to throw our hind leg up into the sheets, when a cold, hard hand, calloused like a horn spoon, grabbed hold of the small of our back, and two piercing eyes shot sharp glances at our human frame.
One look was enough to show that we had opened the wrong curtains. Every second we expected that a female scream would split the air wide open, that the passengers would tumble out of the berths, and that the conductor would have us arrested for coalition with intent to deceive. It seemed years that we sat there with that cold hand grasping the situation, and we would have given half our fortune to have been in the bunk just one remove towards Canada.
All things have an end, and just as we were imagining that the woman with the hare lip was feeling around with her disengaged hand to draw from its concealment in her corset, a carving knife, with which to cut a couple of slices off our liver, a voice said, “Well, what in Kalamazoo are you doing in this berth, anyway?”
The porter came along with a lantern, and we looked at the woman with a hare lip and a bass voice, and it was not a woman at all, but a Detroit drummer for a stove house. Finding that we were not a midnight assassin, nor a woman, the drummer let go of the small of our back, and we got into our own berth; but it was a narrow escape; the woman with the hare lip was in the upper berth. We found that out in the morning when she talked through her nose at the porter about fetching a step ladder for her to climb down on.
Inasmuch as there seems to be no other business before the house, we desire, Mr. Speaker, to arise to a personal explanation. There was something occurred at the Opera House, the last night that the Rice Surprise Party played “Revels,” that placed us in a wrong position before the public.
Mr. Gunning, the scene painter, had prided himself that the transformation scene that he had fixed up for the play was about as nice as could be, and as we confessed that we had only got an imperfect view of it, the night before, from one side of the house, he insisted that we take a seat right in front of the stage, in the parquette, and get a good view of it.
There were a good many legs in the show, and we didn't want to sit right down in front all the evening, so we compromised the matter by agreeing to sit in the dress circle until it was about time for the transformation scene, and then, after the giddy girls had all been behind the scenes, we would go down and take a front seat, right back of the orchestra, and take in the transformation scene.
Well, they had got through with the high kicking, and all gone off, except one girl, a gipsy, who was going to sing a song, and then a bell would ring and the whole stage effects would change as if by magic. When she had got to the end of her song and had waltzed off to the left, we got up and walked down in front, and took one of a whole row of vacant seats, put on our spectacles, and were ready. Do you know, every cuss in that audience saw us go down there? They all thought we had gone there to be nearer the dizzy tights, and they began to clap their hands and cheer. We think Chapin, the lawyer, who doesn't like us very well, started it, and every kid in the gallery took it up, and the house fairly rung with applause at the sight of our bald head well down in front. We never felt so mean since we quit stealing sheep.
The crowd laughed and hi-hi'd, and the stage manager took the applause for anencore, and ordered the girl to go out and sing some more. She knew better, knew they were guying the bald-headed man in front, and all the troupe knew it, and the girls put their heads out from the wings and laughed; but the girl came out and sung again. If she didn't wink at us when she came out, then we don't know what a wink is, and we have been around some, too.
She sang some confounded love song, such as “Darling, Kiss My Eye Winkers Down,” or “Hold the Fort,” or something, and kept looking at us every moment, and smiling like a church sociable. The crowd took it all in, too. Her dress was cut decolette, or low necked at the bottom, and we were nearer to the angelic choir than a bald headed man of family ever ought to be, but there was no help for it. She was the only girl in the troupe that wore black tights, and we thanked our stars for that, but even with all those mitigating circumstances in our favor the affair had a bad look, and we admit it. Of course any one would know that we wouldn't go out of our way to see any black stockings, but it looked as though we had, to the crowd.
We have faced death on many a field of carnage, but we never knew what it was to want to be away from a place quite so much as then. If you know how a man feels when he is stricken with paralysis, or a piece of a brick house, you can imagine something about it. We tried to put on a pious look, a deaconish sort of expression, like a man who is passing a collection plate in church, but the blushes on our face did not look deaconish at all. We tried to look far away, and think of the hereafter, or the heretofore, but that Gipsy warbling “Darling Eyes of Marine Blue,” and forty girls in the wings making up faces, and five hundred people back of us having fun at our expense was too much, and we just wanted to die. If there had been a trap door to let us down into the beer saloon below, we would have taken passage on it in a minute.
But she finally got through singing, the transformation scene came on, and we went back to our seat in the dress circle, a changed man, and we never looked at a person in the audience after that, but when the performance was over and we came out, and Chapin said, “Hello, old man, guess we got even with you that time,” we felt like murdering somebody in cold blood and feathers. Hereafter if anybody ever catches us taking a front seat at a leg drama, they can take it out of our wages. Mr. Speaker, we have spoken.
There is a case in Chicago where a young man is going to apply to have his name changed. The man's name is Easus, and he is now about eighteen years old, and just beginning to go into society. It is alleged that he was engaged to be married to an heiress, but she has broken off the engagement until he can get his name changed. She was not very much mashed on the name, anyway, and Monday night, as she was with him coming out of Haverly's Theatre, something happened that broke her all up.
The young man's father was a pious man, and he named his son Abijah. His companion nicknamed him “Bige.” Coming out of the theatre with his intended on his arm, an old friend, a drummer for a Chicago grocery house, happened to see him, and he went up to him and said, “Why, Bije Easus, how are you?” Young Mr. Easus shook hands with his friend, and introduced him to his girl, and she looked at the profane drummer out of one corner of her eye and trembled for his soul as she thought how he would be sure to go to hell when he died.
Mr. Easus explained to his friend as they walked out of the building, that he was engaged to the girl, and when they parted at the platform of the street car the drummer grabbed her by the hand and shook it as a terrier would a rat and said, “Well, Mrs. Bije Easus, that is to be, let me wish you many happy returns.”
Mr. Easus colored up, the girl was as mad as a wet hen when she pried her fingers apart, and they rode home in silence. At the gate she said to him, “Bije Easus, I never till to-night knew what a horrid name I was going to take upon myself, and I have made up my mind that I cannot go through the remainder of my natural life in Chicago, being alluded to as a 'little female Bije Easus.' Mr. Easus, I trust we part friends. If you can come to me by any other name, you would be sweet, but Bije Easus I will never have on my calling cards.” The young man has employed a lawyer and will have his name changed. The girl had a narrow escape, and she may thank the drummer for calling her attention to it.
While the most of our traveling men, our commercial tourists, are nice Christian gentlemen, there is occasionally one that is as full of the old Nick as an egg at this time of year is full of malaria. There was one of them stopped at a country town a few nights ago where there was a church fair. He is a blonde, good-natured looking, serious talking chap, and having stopped at that town every month for a dozen years, everybody knows him. He always chips in towards a collection, a wake or a rooster fight, and the town swears by him.
He attended the fair, and a jolly little sister of the church, a married lady, took him by the hand and led him through green fields, where the girls sold him ten cent chances in saw dust dolls, and beside still waters, where a girl sold him sweetened water with a sour stomach, for lemonade, from Rebecca's well. The sister finally stood beside him while the deacon was reading off numbers. They were drawing a quilt, and as the numbers were drawn all were anxious to know who drew it. Finally, after several numbers were drawn it was announced by the deacon that number fifteen drew the quilt, and the little sister turned to the traveling man and said, “My! that is my number. I have drawn it. What shall I do?” “Hold up your ticket and shout keno,” said he.
The little deaconess did not stop to think that there might be guile lurking in the traveling man, but being full of joy at drawing the quilt, and ice cream because the traveling man bought it, she rushed into the crowd towards the deacon, holding her number, and shouted so they could hear it all over the house, “Keno!”
If a bank had burst in the building there couldn't have been so much astonishment. The deacon turned pale and looked at the poor little sister as though she had fallen from grace, and all the church people looked sadly at her, while the worldly minded people snickered. The little woman saw that she had got her foot into something, and she blushed and backed out, and asked the traveling man what keno meant. He said he didn't know exactly, but he had always seen people, when they won anything at that game, yell “keno.” She isn't exactly clear yet what keno is, but she says she has sworn off on taking advice from pious looking traveling men. They call her “Little Keno” now.
There occasionally occurs an incident in this world that will make a person laugh though the laughing may border on the sacrilegious. For instance, there is not a Christian but will smile at the ignorance of the Advent preacher up in Jackson county who, when he saw the balloon of King, the balloonist, going through the air, thought it was the second coming of Christ, and got down on his knees and shouted to King, who was throwing out a sand bag, while his companion was opening a bottle of export beer, “O, Jesus, do not pass me by.”
And yet it is wrong to laugh at the poor man, who took an advertising agent for a Chicago clothing store for the Savior, who he supposed was making his second farewell tour. The minister had been preaching the second coming of Christ until he looked for Him every minute. He would have been as apt to think, living as he did in the back woods, that a fellow riding a bicycle, with his hair and legs parted in the middle, along the country road, was the object of his search.
We should pity the poor man for his ignorance, we who believe that when Christdoescome He will come in the old fashioned way, and not in a palace car, or straddle of the basket of a balloon. But we can't help wondering what the Adventist must have thought, when he appealed to his Savior, as he supposed, and the balloonist shied a sand bag at him and the other fellow in the basket threw out a beer bottle and asked, “Where in ——— are we?”
The Adventist must have thought that the Savior of mankind was traveling in mighty queer company, or that He had taken the other fellow along as a frightful example. And what could the Adventist have thought when he saw a message thrown out of the balloon, and went with trembling limbs and beating heart to pick it up, believing that it was a command from on high to sinners, and found that it was nothing but a hand bill for a Chicago hand-me-down clothing store.
He must have come to the conclusion that the Son o Man had got pretty low down to take a job of bill posting for a reversible ulster and paper collar bazar. It must have been food for reflection for the Advent preacher, as he picked up the empty beer bottle, shied at him from the chariot that he supposed carried to earth the redeemer of man. He must have wondered if some-Milwaukee brewer ad not gone to heaven and opened a brewery.
Of course we who are intelligent, and who would know a balloon if we saw it, would not have had any such thoughts, but we must remember that this poor Advent preacher thought that the day had come that had been promised so long, and that Christ was going to make a landing in a strong Republican county. We may laugh at the Adventist's disappointment that the balloon did not tie up to a stump and take him on board, but it was a serious matter to him.
He had been waiting for the wagon, full of hope, and when it came, and he saw the helmet on King's head and thought it was a crown of glory, his heart beat with joy, and he plead in piteous accents not to be passed by, and the confounded gas bag went on and landed in a cranberry marsh, and the poor, foolish, weak, short-sighted man had to get in his work mighty lively to dodge the sand bags, beer bottles, and rolls of clothing store posters.
The Adventist would have been justified in renouncing his religion and joining the Democratic party. It is sad, indeed.
One of the most remarkable things in medical science is a discovery recently made by a Philadelphia physician When so many hundreds of years pass over without any new discovery being made, and when oneismade, like vaccination, and they are not dead sure whether it amounts to anything or not, a new discovery that the discoverer will swear by is a big thing. This Philadelphia doctor has discovered that rheumatism is the direct result of cold feet.
There is no discovery that has ever been made in the human anatomy that stands to reason any more than this. Many thousands of men are going around crippled and bent with rheumatism, and suffering untold agonies, and they have never known what caused their bones to ache. Of course they knew that their wives had cold feet, but they had no idea that every time those No. 2 icicles were placed in the small of the back to get warm that they were sowing the seeds of rheumatism.
We presume there is a hundred pounds of male rheumatism to every square inch of cold female foot, and the Philadelphia doctor should be thanked by men of rheumatic tendencies as well as by women of arctic pedal extremities for this timely discovery. There is no woman who enjoys seeing her husband in the throes of rheumatic pains, and now that they know that their cold feet have brought about so much suffering, we trust they will try and lead a different life.
Of course we do not expect any woman is going to bed and leave her feet out on the floor, or under a coal stove. This could not be expected. But they can adopt some method to soften the rigors of a hard winter. They can paint their feet a nice warm color or have a summer sunset painted on the instep, or a fire-place on the bottom of their feet. Anything that will make their feet seem warm will be a relief to their rheumatic husbands. A pair of zinc overshoes to wear in bed would help some very cold feet several degrees.
Men are too valuable to be crippled up with rheumatism just for the temporary comfort they can confer upon their wives by allowing the small of their backs to be used in lieu of a grate fire. We trust that the cold footed portion of our female population will look at this matter in its true light, and if necessary leave their feet in the porter's room at bed time and get a check for them.
The shooting of the grocery man at Appleton, by the man to whom he presented a bill, reminds us of the only grocery man we ever maimed for presenting a bill. His name was Smith, and he lived at La Crosse. We presume there have been meaner men built than this man Smith was at that time, though how it could be possible we cannot see. We had run up quite a bill at his grocery, and were willing to keep trading right along, but somehow he got wormy, and said that this thing had to stop.
We told him we never traded with him because we wanted his goods, but just to give him the benefit of our society, and we pointed out to him the injury it would be to his business to have us quit trading at his store. We told him that people would think that he had cheated us, and they would not come there any more. He said he knew it would be pretty tough, but he would try and struggle along under it.
Well, there was no use arguing, and finally by helping him do his chores we got the bill all paid but a dollar and a half, and then he began his persecutions. He called us a baldheaded old catamaran. He would follow us into a saloon, when some one treated, and take our glass of beer, and say he would give us credit on account. He would catch our dog and propose to cut a piece of his tail off, and give us credit at so much an inch.
He would meet us coming out of church, and right before folks he would ask us to go down to the brewery and play pedro. He would say he would come up to our house for dinner some time, and everything wicked. One day we stopped at his store to enjoy his society, and eat crackers and cheese—for be it known we never took offence at him, in fact we sort of liked the old cuss—when he told us to take a seat and talk it over.
We sat down on a cracker box that had bees wax on it, and after a heated discussion on finances, found that we had melted about two pounds of wax on our trousers, and Smith insisted on charging it up to us. This was the last hair, and when he called us a diabolical, hot-headed guthoogen our warm southern blood began to boil. We seized a codfish that had been hanging in front of the store until it had become as hard and sharp as a cleaver, and we struck him.
The sharp edge of the codfish struck him on the second joint of the forefinger, and cut the finger off as clean as it could have been done with a razor.
He said that settled it, and he gave us a receipt in full, and ever afterwards we were firm friends.
One thing he insists on, even now, and that is in telling people who ask him how he lost his finger, that he wore it off rubbing out seven-up marks on a table while playing pedro.
He is now trying to lead a different life, being city clerk of La Crosse, but this article will remind him of old times, and he can remember with what an air of injured innocence we wiped the blood off that codfish and hung it up for a sign, and how Smith sold it the next day to Frank Hatch for a liver pad. No, thank you, we don't drink.
A Dartford man, who has been attending a camp meeting at that place, inquires of the BrandonTimeswhy it is that camp meetings are always held when the moon does not shine. TheTimesman gives it up, and refers the question toThe Sun. We give it up.
It does not seem as though managers of camp meetings deliberately consult the almanac in order to pick out a week for camp meeting in the dark of the moon, though such meetings are always held when the moon is of no account. If they do, then there is a reason for it. It is well known that pickerel bite best in the dark of the moon, and it is barely possible that sinners “catch on” better at that time.
There may be something in the atmosphere, in the dark of the moon, that makes a camp meeting more enjoyable. Certainly brethren and sisterin' can mingle as well if not better when there is no glaring moon to molest and make them afraid, and they can relate their experience as well as though it was too light.
The prayers of the righteous avail as much in the darkness of the closet as they do in an exposition building, with an electric light, and as long as sinners will do many things which they ought not to do, and undo many, things that they never ought to have done, the dark of the moon is probably the most healthy.
People don't want to be sunburnt in the night. It seems to us as though the work of converting could be done as well in a full moon, but statistics show that such is not the case, and we are willing to give the camp meeting attendants the benefit of the doubt.
Again, it may be that the moon is to blame. No one would blame the moon, if it was full, and looked down on an ordinary camp meeting, if it got sick at the stomach, staggered behind a cloud, turned pale and refused to come out until the camp meeting was pulled by the police.
A new face has been put on the killing of old Mr. Utley, in Green Lake county, by his son, since the son has made his statement. At the time the first news was received we felt inclined to lay it up against young Mr. Utley, as there is nothing that hurts our feelings worse than to hear that a boy in the first flush of manhood, when the pin feathers are just appearing on his upper jaw and when the world is all before him to conquer and lay at his feet, has deliberately shot six No. 40 calibre bullets into various places in the person of his venerable father, who has nurtured him from childhood, stored his mind with useful knowledge, or perchance played mumblety peg with a shingle across the place where in later years another father may plant oblong pieces of leather, because of his habit of leaning his youthful stomach across the gate whereon swings a gentle maiden belonging to this other father, the while giving her glucose in regard to a beautiful castle that he will rear with his own hands on a commanding eminence, surrounded with vines and roses, into the golden portals of which he will usher her and empty into her lap the precious treasures of the orient, when the cuss knows that he will never be able to earn more than twelve shillings a day on a farm the longest day he lives, and that if she marries him she will have to take in stairs to scrub and cook liver over an oil stove, and wear the same dress she is married in till it will stand alone. We say that we are opposed to young men killing their fathers. It has never seemed right to us. But since the supplemental returns in this case are all in, and we learn that old Mr. Utley was a drunken bulldozer who would take the farm horses and go off to town on a three days' drunk, leaving the young man to do all the work, and come back complaining because the work was not done, and if the boy attempted to explain, he would be knocked down with a stick of cord wood, and that on this occasion he was engaged in trying to dissect young Utley with a butcher knife, claiming that he was going to hang his hide on the fence, and cut out his liver and stomach, and other things that Dr. Tanner has given a furlough, and that the young man shot his father just to keep peace in the family, and to save his own life, and that there were four quarts of raw whisky in the old man's panjandrum when he turned up his toes, we feel like apologizing to the young man and telling him that he did his country a great service in wiping out his sire, baby mine. When an old man gets so he can't enjoy himself without filling up with whisky and cutting slices off the livers of live people, the sooner he climbs the golden stair the better.
One of those incidents that cause a pious man to damn the whole animal creation occurred at Janesville last week. A business man that we all know, got up last Tuesday morning and took a walk down by Monterey, to view the beauties of nature and get up an appetite for breakfast. He is a man who weighs close onto 150 pounds, though he is as kitteny as anybody when occasion calls for kittenishness.
Gazing into the crystal waters of Rock River, it occurred to him that he would take a bath, so he disrobed himself, laid his clothes upon the ground and plunged in. He had been sporting with the wavelets, and waving with the sportlets for some minutes, when he heard a bellowing on shore, and he looked up to see a cow pawing the ground and running her horns into his clothes. You know how the smell of blood or carrion will cause the mildest mannered cow to get on her ear and paw the ground and bellow. Not that there was any blood or carrion there, but the cow acted that way. She may have got the smell of a Democrat from his clothes. Anyway she made Monterey howl, and the large man in the water dove down for stones to throw at the cow. She had run one horn through one leg of his pants, and the other horn through the broad part, and was engaged in chewing his shirt, when a rock struck her on the rump and she started off with those two garments for the blind asylum, where she evidently belonged, shaking her head to get the pants off her horns, and chewing the shirt as though it was a bran mash..
The pious man rushed out of the water towards the cow and said “co-boss, co-boss,” but she took one look at his shape and turned away and didn't co-boss very much. A war map of the thoughts of this Janesville business man, as he saw the cow go away, would sell well, if it was illustrated by a picture of a native Zulu picking buchu leaves. He said he was a pious man, and had always tried to lead a different life, and do the fair thing, but hereafter he would be blanked if he wouldn't kill every blanked cow that he came across.
The only things the cow had left were his hat, vest and shoes and stockings. He put them on and started after the cow. The vest was one of these grandfather's clock vests, that stop short, never to go again, a sort of emigrant vest, that comes high. It was not a long, lingering, emotional vest; it was not what would be called a charitable vest, because charity begins at home, and covers a multitude of back pay into the treasury. He tried to remember some of the ten commandments, to repeat, but the only one he could call to mind was “Pull down Thy Vest.”
His eyes swept the horizon to see if anybody was looking, and he could see that the grounds about the blind asylum were alive with people of both sexes. He thanked heaven that by the inscrutable ways of Providence, people were made blind, but his joy at the calamity was mingled with sorrow when he thought that the teachers at the asylum were endowed with the most perfect eyesight.
As the cow neared the gate of the grounds he made one effort to head her off, but she run by him, and then he attempted to take his pistol from the hind pocket of his pants to kill himself, when he realized again that he was indeed barefooted from his vest to his stockings, and he sat down under a tree to die of slow starvation, but before he began to starve he got up again and resumed an upright attitude, on account of ants. It is a picnic for a nest of ants to partake of a human being who has lost his or her trousers, as the case may be, and he followed the cow, saying “co-boss” in the most pitiful accents that were ever used by a Janesville man.
The cow looked around, and as she did so the pants caught on a sapling and were pulled off her horns and dropped upon the ground. The pious man looked upon this as a direct interposition of Providence, and he was sorry he swore. He got into his trousers so quick that it made his head swim, and just as the crowd at the asylum had come down to the gate to see what strange looking calf was following the cow home, the man started on a run for town, leaving the shirt with the cow.
The people at the asylum have the shirt, and it has the initials of the man worked in the neck band, but he will never call for it. One sleeve is chewed off, and the bosom is rent with conflicting emotions and cow's teeth. The man sells nails and skimmers with a far off expression, and don't want cows to run at large any more.