The other day a business man who has one of the nicest houses in the nicest ward in the city, and who has horses and carriages in plenty, and who usually looks as clean as though just out of a band box and as happy as a schoolma'am at a vacation picnic, got on a street car near the depot, a picture of a total wreck. He had on a long linen duster, the collar tucked down under the neck band of his shirt, which had no collar on, his cuffs were sticking out of his coat pocket, his eyes looked heavy, and where the dirt had come off with the perspiration he looked pale, and he was cross as a bear.
A friend who was on the car, on the way up town, after a day's work, with a clean shirt on, a white vest and a general look of coolness, accosted the traveler as follows:
“Been summer resorting, I hear?”
The dirty-looking man crossed his legs with a painful effort, as though his drawers stuck to his legs and almost peeled the bark off, and answered:
“Yes, I have been out two weeks. I have struck ten different hotels, and if you ever hear of my leaving town again during the hot weather, you can take my head for a soft thing,” and he wiped a cinder out of his eye with what was once a clean handkerchief.
“Had a good, cool time, I suppose, and enjoyed yourself,” said the man who had not been out of town.
“Cool time, hell,” said the man, who has a pew in two churches, as he kicked his limp satchel of dirty clothes under the car seat. “I had rather been sentenced to the house of correction for a month.”
“Why, what's the trouble?”
“Well, there is no trouble, for people who like that kind of fun, but this lets me out. I do not blame people who live in Southern States for coming North, because they enjoy things as a luxury that we who live in Wisconsin have as a regular diet, but for a Chicago or Milwaukee man to go into the country to swelter and be kept awake nights is bald lunacy. Why, since I have been out I have slept in a room a size smaller than the closet my wife keeps her linen in, with one window that brought in air from a laundry, and I slept on a cot that shut up like a jack-knife and always caught me in the hinge where it hurt.
“At another hotel I had a broken-handled pitcher of water that had been used to rinse clothes in, and I can show you the indigo on my neck. I had a piece of soap that smelled like a tannery, and if the towel was not a recent damp diaper then I have never raised six children.
“At one hotel I was the first man at the table, and two families came in and were waited on before the Senegambian would look at me, and after an hour and thirty minutes I got a chance to order some roast beef and baked potatoes, but the perspiring, thick-headed pirate brought me some boiled mutton and potatoes that looked as though they had been put in a wash-tub and mashed by treading on them barefooted. I paid twenty-five cents for a lemonade made of water and vinegar, with a piece of something on top that might be lemon peel, and it might be pumpkin rind.
“The only night's rest I got was one night when I slept in a car seat. At the hotel the regular guests were kept awake till 12 o'clock by number six headed boys and girls dancing until midnight to the music of a professional piano boxer, and then for two hours the young folks sat on the stair? and yelled and laughed, and after that the girls went to bed and talked two hours more, while the boys went and got drunk and sang 'Allegezan and Kalamazoo.'
“Why, at one place I was woke up at 3 o'clock in the morning by what I thought was a chariot race in the hall outside, but it was only a lot of young bloods rolling ten pins down by the rooms, using empty wine bottles for pins and China cuspidores for balls. I would have gone out and shot enough drunken galoots for a mess, only I was afraid a cuspidore would carom on my jaw. Talk about rest, I would rather go to a boiler factory.
“Say, I don't know as you would believe it, but at one place I sent some shirts and things to be washed, and they sent to my room a lot of female underclothes, and when I kicked about it to the landlord he said I would have to wear them, as they had no time to rectify mistakes. He said the season was short and they had to get in their work, and he charged me Fifth Avenue Hotel prices with a face that was child-like and bland, when he knew I had been wiping on diapers for two days in place of towels.
“But I must get off here and see if I can find water enough to bathe all over. I will see you down town after I bury these clothes.”
And the sticky, cross man got off swearing at summer hotels and pirates. We don't see where he could have been traveling.
Because there are cars for the luxurious, and smoking cars for those who delight in tobacco, some of the religious people of Connecticut are petitioning the railway companies to fit up “Gospel cars.” Instead of the card tables they want an organ and piano, they want the seats arranged facing the centre of the car, so they can have a full view of whoever may conduct the services; instead of spittoons they will have a carpet, and instead of cards they want Bibles and Gospel song-books.—Chicago News.
There is an idea for you. Let some railroad company fit up a Gospel car according to the above prescription, and run it, and the porter on that car would be the most lonesome individual on the train. The Gospel hymn books would in a year appear as new as do now the Bibles that are put up in all cars. Of the millions of people who ride in the trains, many of them pious Christians, who has ever seen a man or woman take a Bible off the iron rack and read it a single minute? And yet you can often see ministers and other professing Christians in the smoking car, puffing a cigar and reading a daily paper.
Why, it is all they can do to get a congregation in a church on Sunday; and does any one suppose that when men and women are traveling for business or pleasure—and they do not travel for anything else—that they are going into a “Gospel car” to listen to some sky pirate who has been picked up for the purpose, talk about the prospects of landing the cargo in heaven?
Not much!
The women are too much engaged looking after their baggage, and keeping the cinders out of their eyes, and keeping the children's heads out of the window, and keeping their fingers from being jammed, to look out for their immortal souls. And the men are too much absorbed in the object of their trip to listen to gospel truths. They are thinking about whether they will be able to get a room at the hotel, or whether they will have to sleep on a cot.
Nobody can sing gospel songs on a car, with their throats full of cinders, and their eyes full of dust, and the chances are if anybody should strike up, “A charge to keep I have,” some pious sinner who was trying to take a nap in the corner of the gospel car would say:
“O, go and hire a hall!”
It would be necessary to make an extra charge of half a dollar to those who occupied the gospel car, the same as is charged on the parlor car, and you wouldn't get two persons on an average train full that would put up a nickel.
Why, we know a Wisconsin Christian, worth a million dollars, who, when he comes up from Chicago to the place where he lives, hangs up his overcoat in the parlor car, and then goes into the forward car and rides till the whistle blows for his town, when he goes in and gets his coat and never says thirty-five cents to the conductor, or ten cents to the porter. Do you think a gospel car would catch him for half a dollar? He would see you in Hades first.
The best way is to take a little eighteen carat religion along into the smoking car, or any other car you may happen to be in.
A man—as we understand religion from those who have had it—does not have to howl to the accompaniment of an asthmatic organ, pumped by a female with a cinder in her eye and smut on her nose, in order to enjoy religion, and he does not have to be in the exclusive company of other pious people to get the worth of his money. There is a great deal of religion in sitting in a smoking car, smoking dog-leg tobacco in a briar-wood pipe, and seeing happy faces in the smoke that curls up—faces of those you have made happy by kind words, good deeds, or half a dollar put where it will drive away hunger, instead of paying it out for a reserved seat in a gospel car. Take the half dollar you would pay for a seat in a gospel car and go into the smoker, and find some poor emigrant that is going west to grow up with the country, after having been beaten out of his money at Castle Garden, and give it to him, and see if the look of thankfulness and joy does not make you feel better than to listen to a discussion in the gospel car, as to whether the children of Israel went through the Red Sea with life-preservers, or wore rubber hunting boots.
Take your gospel-car half dollar and buy a vegetable ivory rattle of the train boy, and give it to the sick emigrant mother's pale baby, and you make four persons happy—the baby, the mother, the train boy and yourself.
We know a man who gave a dollar to a prisoner on the way to State prison, to buy tobacco with, who has enjoyed more good square religion over it than he could get out of all the chin music and saw-filing singing he could hear in a gospel car in ten years. The prisoner was a bad man from Oshkosh, who was in a caboose in charge of the sheriff, on the way to Waupun. The attention of the citizen was called to the prisoner by his repulsive appearance, and his general don't-care-a-damative appearance. The citizen asked the prisoner how he was fixed for money to buy tobacco in prison. He said he hadn't a cent, and he knew it would be the worst punishment he could have to go without tobacco. The citizen gave him the dollar and said:
“Now, every time you take a chew of tobacco in prison, just make up your mind to be square when you get out.”
The prisoner reached out his hand-cuffed hands to take the dollar, the hands trembling so that the chains rattled, and a great tear as big as a shirt-button appeared in one eye—the other eye had been gouged out while “having some fun with the boys” at Oshkosh—and his lips trembled as he said:
“So help me God, I will!”
That man has been boss of a gang of hands in the pinery for two winters, and has a farm paid for on the Central Railroad, and is “squar.”
That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can occasionally practice without having a gospel car.
There were a great many ludicrous scenes about the Newhall House during the fire of last Saturday morning. When people were notified that there was a fire in the house, but that the danger was not great, though it was thought best to give them all plenty of time to prepare for the worst, many jumped right out of bed and started down stairs.
When we arrived on the scene, our first inquiry was for the safety of the lady members of the Rice Surprise Party, the young women who had been cutting up on the stage all the week with so little apparel. We did not expect to find them in a greater state of barefootedness than they were when we saw them last, but in some instances they were.
We were kindly yet firmly informed by Mr. Rankin that the ladies had been rescued. It seemed that everybody wanted to save the girls. Mr. Rankin knew this, and knew that if the young and thoughtless gentlemen were allowed to rescue the girls it would cause remark. He said he was an old line democrat, and that his days of kittenhood were over, and that it was proper that he should superintend the removal of the girls.
Mr. McKittrick, the conductor, argued the matter with him. He said he had been running a train a good many years, and had seen all phases of humanity, and that he was inured to a life of hardship, and had seen many sad sights, in the sleeping cars, and he insisted that he be allowed to superintend the removal of the girls.
The discussion became warm, and finally they compromised by agreeing that McKittrick should rush into the rooms and drag them out of the fire and smoke and hand them to Mr. Rankin at the foot of the first pair of stairs, who would dispose of them in safety. They both agreed that the first outside vandal who laid a hand on them should die.
The first trouble they had was with Prof. Haskins.
He came out of his room with nothing on but his glasses, an ascension robe and one boot. He rushed through the hall, and while in front of the room of the girl who wore the black tights with the crochet work on the limbs he ventured a joke. He is the telegraph manager and he said, “There is a line down here,” as a two inch stream struck him about the alleged pistol pocket. The girl, who was tying her wardrobe up in a napkin, heard him and said, “There is nolying downhere, not much.” Prof. Haskins was shocked that any female should thus mistake him for a democrat, and falling over a zinc trunk head first, he went back to his room to send his son Harry out to help.
Mr. McKittrick rushed into a room and grabbed a corset in his arms and handed it down stairs to Rankin There is no person who can fool Rankin. He didn't want to be rescued.
Just at this point a girl with a waterproof on came along the hall and Mr. Cole asked her if she didn't want to be rescued. She said she had been carried down stairs six times already by a big granger, and she would shoot the next man that attempted to rescue ner. She said there was no danger, and wanted to know why the big galoots did not go and help put the fire out.
On inquiry it was found that the girl had been carried down stairs six times and left on the sidewalk. She described the man who carried her out, and said he was excited, and no sooner would she get up stairs than he would grab her and carry her down again, until she was almost froze. He told her the last time that he had saved six girls from a fiery grave.
Among the recent inventions is a pillow holder. It is explained that the pillow holder is for the purpose of holding a pillow while the case is being put on. We trust this new invention will not come into general use, as there is no sight more beautiful to the eyes of man than to see a woman hold a pillow in her teeth while she gently manipulates the pillow case over it.
We do not say that a woman is beautiful with her mouth full of pillows. No one can ever accuse us of saying that, but there is something home-like and old-fashioned about it that can not be replaced by any invention.
We know that certain over-fastidious women have long clamored for some new method of putting on a pillow case, but these people have either lost their teeth, or the new ones do not grasp the situation. They have tried several new methods, such as blowing the pillow case up, and trying to get the pillow in before the wind got out, and they have tried to get the pillow in by rolling up the pillow case until the bottom is reached, and then placing 'the pillow on end and gently unrolling the pillow case, but all these schemes have their drawbacks.
The old style of chewing one end of the pillow, and holding it the way a retriever dog holds a duck, till the pillow case is on, and then spanking the pillow a couple of times on each side, is the best, and it gives the woman's jaws about the only rest they get during the day.
If any invention drives this old custom away from us, and we no more see the matrons of our land with their hair full of feathers and their mouths full of striped bed-ticking, we shall feel that one of the dearest of our institutions has been ruthlessly torn from us, and the fabric of our national supremacy has received a sad blow, and that our liberties are in danger.
There is a woman on the West Side who has learned a lesson that will last her a lifetime. She has been for years wearing these paper bags, such as the green grocers use, for bustles. The paper is stiff, and sticks out splendid, and makes the dress look well. Last Sunday morning while she was dressing, her young son got in the room and blew the paper bag full of wind and tied a string around the mouth of it, and left it in a chair. The good lady took it and tied it on and dressed herself for church. She bribed her husband to go to church with her, though he is a sort of Bob Ingersoll christian.
As they went down the aisle the minister was reading a hymn about “Sounding the Loud Hosan-na,” and the lady went into the pew first, and sat down while her husband was putting his hat on the floor. There was a report like distant thunder. You have heard how those confounded paper bags explode when boys blow them up, and crush them between their hands.
Well, it was worse than that, and everybody looked at the innocent husband, who was standing there a perfect picture of astonishment. He looked at his wife as much as to say: “Now, this is the last time you will catch me in church, if you are going to play any of your tricks on me. You think you can scare me into getting religion?”
The minister stopped reading the hymn and looked over his spectacles at the new comers as though it would not surprise him if that bad man should blow the church up. The poor lady blushed and looked around as much as to say, “I did not know it was loaded,” and she looked the hymn book through for the hymn, and as the choir rose to sing she offered one side of the book to her husband, but he looked mad and pious, and stood at the other end of the pew and looked out of the stained glass window.
After the service they started home together, and as they turned the first corner he said to his wife, “Well, you played hell on your watch, didn't you?” She told him there was no such thing as hell in the Bible now, but that she would make that boy think there had been no revision of the Bible that left hell out, when she got home. We only get the story from the husband.
He said he didn't know what it was that made the noise until they got home, and after a little skirmishing around his wife held up a bursted paper bag, and asked the boy if he blew that bag up. He said he did, but he did not know there was anything wrong about it. The boy and his mother and a press board paid a visit to the back kitchen, and there was a sound of revelry. Boys will be boys.
The proposed duel between Senator Mahone and Jubal Early did not come off, for reasons that have not been made public. It is well known that Mahone is the thinnest man in Virginia. We do not allude to his politics, or his ability, in speaking of his being thin, but to his frame. He does not make a shadow. He could hide behind a wire fence. Gen. Early, after challenging Mahone, went to practicing at a piece of white wire clothes line, hung to the limb of a tree, but he could not hit it, and he felt that all the advantage would be on Mr. Mahone's side, so he asked Mahone to do the only thing in his power that would make the thing even, and that was to eat a quantity of dried apples the day before the duel, in order to swell his stomach out so that a gentleman could stand some show of hitting him.
Gen. Early pledged himself, on the honor of a Virginia gentleman, that he would not shoot at Mahone's stomach, but would aim at it, and then make a line shot either above or below.
Mahone replied that, while he appreciated the advantage he had over his opponent, and was willing to do anything reasonable to make the thing even, he could not consistently eat dried apples, as they would certainly kill him. He was willing to take his chances on the bullets of his opponent, because statistics showed that dueling was the most healthy business a man could engage in; and he pointed to the number of duellists that were now living at a ripe old age, who had fought hundreds of duels and never received a scratch or scratched an opponent, but on the other hand he could produce proof to show that many people had been injured, if not killed, by an over-indulgence in dried apples.
Mr. Mahone said he thought it was late in the day for him to produce any proof as to his own bravery, but in the face of the fact that he would be pointed at as one who had not sand, he should have to decline to eat dried apples in order to make himself a target.
Gen. Early said he appreciated the delicacy of his honorable and high-toned opponent, and respected his feelings, and would not insist on the dried apple act, but that he would go into training to reduce himself in flesh to the size of Mahone, and hoped that the affair might be declared off until he could diet himself. He said he should at once begin a course of treatment to reduce his flesh, by boarding at a summer resort hotel that he had heard of, where the desired effect might be produced.
So the duel is postponed for the present. Both Mahone and Early are high-toned gentlemen, and they will do nothing rash.
One of the great female writers on dress reform, in trying to illustrate how terrible the female dress is, says:
“Take a man and pin three or four table-cloths about him, fastened back with elastic and looped up with ribbons, draw all his hair to the middle of his head and tie it tight, and hairpin on five pounds of other hair and a big bow of ribbon. Keep the front locks on pins all night, and let them tickle his eyes all day, pinch his waist into a corset, and give him gloves a size too small and shoes the same, and a hat that will not stay on without torturing elastic, and a little lace veil to blind his eyes whenever he goes out to walk, and he will know what a woman's dress is.”
Now you think you have done it, don't you, sis? Why, bless you, that toggery would be heaven compared to what a man has to contend with. Take a woman and put a pair of men's four-shilling drawers on her that are so tight that when they get damp, from perspiration, sis; they stick so you can't cross your legs without an abrasion of the skin, the buckle in the back turning a somersault and sticking its points into your spinal menengitis; put on an undershirt that draws across the chest so you feel as though you must cut a hole in it, or two, and which is so short that it works up under your arms, and allows the starched upper shirt to sand paper around and file off the skin until you wish it was night, the tail of which will not stay tucked more than half a block, though you tuck, and tuck, and tuck; and then fasten a collar made of sheet zinc, two sizes too small for you, around your neck; put on vest and coat, and liver pad and lung pad and stomach pad, and a porous plaster, and a chemise shirt between the two others, and rub on some liniment, and put a bunch of keys and a jack-knife and a button-hook and a pocket-book and a pistol and a plug of tobacco in your pockets, so they will chafe your person, and then go and drink a few whisky cocktails, and walk around in the sun with tight boots on, sis, and then you will know what a man's dress is.
Come to figure it up, it is about an even thing, sis,—isn't it?
Another thing that is being largely counterfeited is tripe. Parties who buy tripe cannot be too careful. There is a manufactory that can make tripe so natural that no person on earth can detect the deception. They take a large sheet of rubber about a sixteenth of an inch thick for a background, and by a process only known to themselves veneer it with a Turkish towel, and put it in brine to soak. The unsuspecting boarding-house keeper, or restaurant man, buys it and cooks it, and the boarder or transient guest calls for tripe. A piece is cut off the damnable tripe with a pair of shears used in a tin shop for cutting sheet iron, and it is handed to the victim. He tries to cut it, and fails; he tries to gnaw it off, and if he succeeds in getting a mouthful, that settles him. He leaves his tripe on his plate, and it is gathered up and sewed on the original piece, and is kept for another banquet.
The tripe is expensive, owing to the royalty that has to be paid to the rubber company, and often the boarder succeeds in eating off some of the towel, so it has to be veneered over again; but take it the year round, and the tripe pays its way in a boarding-house.
About as mean a trick as we ever heard of was perpetrated by a doctor at Hudson last Sunday. The victim was a justice of the peace named Evans. Mr. Evans is a man who has the alfiredest biggest feet east of St. Paul, and when he gets a new pair of shoes it is an event that has its effect on the leather market.
Last winter he advertised for sealed proposals to erect a pair of shoes for him, and when the bids were opened it was found that a local architect in leather had secured the contract, and after mortgaging his house to a Milwaukee tannery, and borrowing some money on his diamonds of his “uncle,” John Comstock, who keeps a pawnbrokery there, he broke ground for the shoes.
Owing to the snow blockade and the freshets, and the trouble to get hands who would work on the dome, there were several delays, and Judge Evans was at one time inclined to cancel the contract, and put some strings in box cars and wear them in place of shoes, but sympathy for the contractor, who had his little awl invested in the material and labor, induced him to put up with the delay.
On Saturday the shoes were completed, all except laying the floor and putting on a couple of bay windows for corns, and conservatories for bunions, and the judge concluded to wear them on Sunday. He put them on, but got the right one on the left foot, and the left one on the right foot. As he walked down town the right foot was continually getting on the left side, and he stumbled over himself, and he felt pains in his feet. The judge was frightened in a minute. He is afraid of paralysis, all the boys know it, and when he told a wicked republican named Spencer how his feet felt, that degraded man told the judge that it was one of the surest symptoms of paralysis in the world, and advised him to hunt a doctor.
The judge pranced off, interfering at every step, skinning his shins, and found Dr. Hoyt. The doctor is one of the worst men in the world, and when he saw how the shoes were put on he told the judge that his case was hopeless unless something was done immediately. The judge turned pale, the sweat poured out of him, and taking out his purse he gave the doctor five dollars and asked him what he should do. The doctor felt his pulse, looked at his tongue, listened at his heart, shook his head, and then told the judge that he would be a dead man in less than sixty years if he didn't change his shoes.
The judge looked down at the vast expanse of leather, both sections pointing inwardly, and said, “Well, dam a fool,” and “changed cars” at the junction. As he got them on the right feet, and hired a raftsman to tie them up for him, he said he would get even with the doctor if he had to catch the smallpox. O, we suppose they have more fun in some of these country towns than you can shake a stick at.
There has been a great deal of talk in the papers about arresting “mashers,” that is, young men who stand on the corners and pulverize women, and a great many good people got the idea that it was unsafe to travel the streets. This is not the case. A woman might travel all day and half the night and not be insulted. Of course, once in a great while, a woman will be insulted by a man, the same as a man will be by a woman.
No woman, unless she throws out one eye, kind of cunning, is in danger of having a male man throw out his other eye the same way. There has got to be two parties to a mashing match, and one must be a woman. Too many women act sort of queer just for fun, and the poor male man gets to acting improper before he realizes the enormity of the crime, and then it is everlastingly too late.
But a female masher, one who is thoroughly bad, like the male loafers that have been driven from the corners, is a terror. She will insult a respectable man and laugh at his blushes. One of them was arrested the other day for playing her act on a policeman who was disguised as a respectable granger from Stevens Point. These female mashers are a tornado.
Why, one of them met a respectable church member the other night, and asked him how his liver complaint was. He was a man who had been troubled with the liver complaint, and supposing she was some acquaintance, he stopped on the corner and talked with the pullet for about ten minutes, explaining to her the course of treatment he had used to cure him, and dozens of people passing by that knew him, and knew that she was clear off.
Finally she asked him if he wouldn't take her to a restaurant and buy her a spring chicken and a small bottle. He told her if she would come up to his house she should have a hen, and there were lots of bottles, both large and small, that she was welcome to. She told him to go to Hades, and he went in a drug store and asked a clerk who that lady was he had been talking with, and when the clerk, who knew her, told him she was a road agent, a street walker, a female masher, the old man had to sit down on a box of drugs and fan himself with his hat.
We mention this to show that ladies are not the only portion of the population that is liable to be accosted and insulted. The other night a respectable merchant was going to the opera with a friend from the country, when a couple of sirens met them and one said to the other, “Look at his nibs,” and she locked arms with him and asked him if he was not her own darling. He said his name was not “Nibs,” and he would have to look at his memorandum book before he could tell whether he was her darling or not, but from the smell of gin about her person he would blush to extemporize.
We do not give his exact language, but in the heat of debate he shook her and told her if she ever clawed on him again he would everlastingly go and tell her parents. And while he was talking with her the other one had seated herself beside his country friend on a salt barrel in front of a grocery and was feeling in his vest pocket to see if he had any cloves.
A female masher is much worse than a male masher as you can imagine. Who ever heard of a male masher feeling in an unprotected female's vest pocket for cloves? O, the men are simply unprotected, and at the mercy of wicked, designing women, and the police ought to protect them.
A First Ward man was told by his wife to bring home a quart of oysters on New Year's night, to fry for supper. He drank a few prescriptions of egg nog, and then took a paper bag full of selects and started for home. He stopped at two or three saloons, and the bag began to melt, and when he left the last saloon the bottom fell out of the bag and the oysters were on the sidewalk.
We will leave the man there, gazing upon the wreck, and take the reader to the residence where he is expected.
A red-faced woman is putting the finishing touches to the supper table, and wondering why her husband does not come with the oysters. Presently a noise as of a lead pencil in the key-hole salutes her ear, and she goes to the door and opens it, and finds him taking the pencil out of the key-hole. Not seeing any oysters, she asks him if he has forgotten the oysters.
“Forgot noth(hic)ing,” says he.
He walks up to the table and asks for a plate, which is given him by the unsuspicious wife.
“Damsaccident you ever(hic)see,” said the truly good man, as he brought his hand out of his overcoat pocket, with four oysters, a little smoking tobacco, and a piece of cigar-stub.
“Slipperysoystersev (hic)er was,” said he, as he run his hands down in the other pocket, bringing up five oysters, a piece of envelope, and a piece of wire that was used as a bail to the pail.
“Got all my pock(hic)ets full,” said he, as he took a large oyster out of his vest pocket. Then he began to go down in his pants pocket, and finding a hole in it, he said:
“Six big oys(hic)ters gone down my trousers leg. S'posi'll find them in my boot,” and he sat down to pull off his boot, when the lady took the plate of oysters and other stuff into the kitchen and threw them in the swill, and then she put him to bed, and all the time he was trying to tell her how the bag busted just as he was in front of All Saints Ca(hic)thedral.
Three distinct charges of heresy will be made against Rev. Dr. Thomas, of Chicago, at the trial next month. The amount of heresy that is going on in this country, and particularly among ministers, is truly alarming. The names of his partners in guilt are not mentioned, probably out of respect for their families. A minister that goes around practicing heresy ought to be watched, and when caught at it he should be bounced. There is no excuse forheresy, though a minister will occasionally meet a mighty attractiveher, but he should say: “Git thee foreninst me, Susan, and when I have a convenient season I will send the police after thee.”
There should be an amendment to the constitution of the United States making it lawful for an ex-President to walk on grass. We have no great admiration for Hayes, but when we read that at Cleveland he was ordered off the grass by a thirteen dollar a month soldier, and had to shin it-over a fence real spry to save the shoulder of his pants from assault by a cheap bayonet, it makes us feel ashamed, and we blush for America. The spectacle of a man who has occupied the White House, and been the chief attraction of county fairs, being compelled to put his stomach on a fence, and flop over, heels over appetite, like a boy playing tag, to keep from being jabbed in a vital part, makes us sick.
We never had a coal stove around the house until last Saturday. Have always used pine slabs and pieces of our neighbor's fence. They burn well, too, but the fence got all burned up, and the neighbor said he wouldn't build a new one, so we went down to Jones' and got a coal stove.
You see, we didn't know anything about coal stoves. We filled the stove about half full of pine fence, and, when the stuff got well to going, we filled the artesian well on the top with coal. It simmered and sputtered about five or ten minutes, and all went out, and we put on an overcoat and a pair of buckskin mittens and “went out too”—to supper. We remarked, in the course of the frugal meal, that Jones was a “froad” for recommending such a confounded refrigerator to a man to get warm by.
After supper we took a piece of ice and rubbed our hands warm, and went in where that stove was, resolved to make her draw and burn if it took all the pine fence in the First Ward. Our better-half threw a quilt over her, and shiveringly remarked that she never knew what real solid comfort was until she got a coal stove.
Stung by the sarcasm in her remark, we turned every dingus on the stove that was movable, or looked like it had anything to do with the draft, and pretty soon the stove began to heave up heat. It was not long before she stuttered like the new Silsby steamer. Talk about your heat! In ten minutes that room was as much worse than a Turkish bath as Hades is hotter than Liverman's ice-house. The perspiration fairly fried out of a tin water cooler in the next room. We opened the doors, and snow began to melt as far up Vine street as Hanscombe's house, and people all round the neighborhood put on linen clothes. And we couldn't stop the confounded thing.
We forgot what Jones told us about the dampers, and she kept a biling. The only thing we could do was to go to bed, and leave the thing to burn the house up if it wanted to. We stood off with a pole and turned the damper every way, and at every turn she just sent out heat enough to roast an ox. We went to bed, supposing that the coal would eventually burn out, but about 12 o'clock the whole family had to get up and sit on the fence.
Finally a man came along who had been brought up among coal stoves, and he put a wet blanket over him and crept up to the stove and turned the proper dingus, and she cooled off, and since that time has been just as comfortable as possible. If you buy a coal stove you want to learn how to engineer it, or you may get roasted.
Probably the most cold-blooded affair that ever occurred took place at a certain summer resort a couple of weeks ago. There was going to be a picnic, and a young man and the girl he was engaged to be married to started in a row-boat to cross the lake, taking an ice cream freezer full of frozen ice cream for the picnic. Just before arriving at the picnic the boat capsized. The boat was bottom side up, and the young man helped the girl on to the ice cream freezer, and he got on the boat, and after floating for half an hour they were rescued.
The girl did not complain at the time she was put on the freezer, as she was glad enough to get on anything that would float, but after they got ashore, and she had a chance to reflect on the matter, and talk with the other girls, she concluded that his getting on the boat, which was nice and warm, and putting her aboard the ice cream freezer, which was so cold and cheerless, was a breach of etiquette that would stamp any man as being a selfish, heartless villain, and she refuses to speak to him, and has declared the engagement off.
He is very much mortified over the affair, and tries to explain that he was more accustomed to a boat than she was, while he reasoned that she would naturally be more familiar with an ice cream freezer. It certainly looks to us to have been a cold-blooded transaction, and while the young man might have been rattled, and powerless to grasp the situation as he would if he had it to do over again, the girl is certainly justified in being indignant.
An ice cream freezer is a cold and cheerless companion even when empty, but filled with congealed cream and pounded ice, and in water, it cannot but have been an Arctic exploration on a small scale. Besides the ice, it is a notorious fact that ice cream freezers are made of zinc, the coldest metal in the world, if we bar women's feet.
“Sheridan's Ride” has been spoken of in poetry and in song, but it pales into insignificance by the side of this girl's ride on the ice cream freezer. If the young man had exhibited foresight, and had a side saddle buckled on to the ice cream freezer, the experience would have been robbed of much of its frigidity, or if there had been a thick blanket under the saddle, but he failed to take even that precaution.
As it is we do not blame the girl for breaking off the engagement. In addition, we think any court would decide that he should pay for the ginger tea and cough lozenges that she had to take to cure her cold.