An exchange has the following item which may seem all right, but it will get some young fellow's back broke yet:
“An Illinois justice has decided that courting is a public necessity, and must not be interrupted; therefore, if a young man wanted to kiss a girl he might put her father out of the room first if he liked.”
The publication of the above may cause some smart youth to do something he will regret. The lame, sickly-looking father of a girl may come into the parlor some night and find the warm-haired youth on the sofa with the girl, and when the old man speaks of it being time to stop such nonsense, the young man, with this judicial decision in his mind, will tell his prospective father-in-law to wipe off his vest and go to bed.
The old man will spit on his hands and grasp the warm-haired young man by the county seat and tie him up in a double bow knot, and pin a scarf on him, and throw him out on the path to the gate, and then he will turn and slap the girl across where the dress is plaited, and she will go up stairs with her hand on her heart, as it were, and the old man will jump up and say “Whoop?”
The young men of this country have got gall enough about visiting girls in the evening at their homes without filling their heads with any such ideas in regard to their legal rights. There are very few fathers who would quietly submit to being told to go away by a youth with a striped neck tie and pants too short at the bottom.
These sparkers are looked upon by parents generally as a nuisance, and often they are right. Nine-tenths of the sparking is done by boys who haven't got their growth, and they look so green that it is laughable for old folks to look at them. They haven't generally got a second shirt, and they are no more qualified to get married than a steer is to preach. And yet marrying is about the first thing they think of.
A green boy, without a dollar, present or prospective, sparking a girl regularly and talking of marrying is a spectacle for gods and men. He should be reasoned with, and if he will not quit it until he is able to support a wife, and to know who he loves, and the difference between love and passion, he should be quarantined or put in a convent erected on purpose for such cases.
Nine-tenths of the unhappy marriages are the result of green human calves being allowed to run at large in the society pasture without any pokes on them. They marry and have children before they do moustaches; they are fathers of twins before they are proprietors of two pairs of pants, and the little girls they marry are old women before they are twenty years old. Occasionally one of these gosling marriages turns out all right, but it is a clear case of luck.
If there was a law against young galoots sparking and marrying before they have all their teeth cut, we suppose the little cusses would evade it some way, but there ought to be a sentiment against it. It is time enough for these bantams to think of finding a pullet when they have raised money enough by their own work to buy a bundle of laths to build a hen house. But they see a girl who looks cunning, and they are afraid there is not going to be girls enough to go around, and they begin their work real spry; and before they are aware of the sanctity of the marriage relation, they are hitched for life, and before they own a cook-stove or a bedstead they have to get up in the night and go for a doctor, so frightened that they run themselves out of breath and abuse the doctor because he does not run too; and when the doctor gets there he finds that there is not enough linen in the house to wrap up a doll baby.
It is about this time that a young man begins to realize that he has been a colossal fool, as he flies around to heat water and bring in the bath tub, and as he goes whooping after his mother or her mother, he turns pale around the gills, his hair turns red in a single night, and he calls high heaven to witness that if he lives till morning, which he has doubts about, he will turn over a new leaf and never get married again until he is older. And in the morning the green-looking “father” is around before a drug store is open, with no collar on, his hair sticking every way, his eyes blood-shot and his frame nervous, waiting for the clerk to open the door so he can get some saffron to make tea of.
Less than a year ago he thought he was the greatest man there was anywhere, but he sits there in the house that morning, with his wedding coat rusty and shiny, his pants frayed at the bottom and patched in the seat, and the nurse puts in his arm a little bundle of flannel with a baby hid in it, and he holds it as he would a banana, and as he looks at his girl wife on the bed, nearly dead from pain and exhaustion, and he thinks that there are not provisions enough in the house to feed a canary, a lump comes in his throat and he says to himself that if he had it to do over again he would leave that little girl at home with her mother; and he would, till he had six dollars to buy baby flannel and ten dollars to pay the doctor.
The fashion papers, which are authority on the styles, claim that ladies with large mouths are all the fashion now, and that those whose mouths are small and rosebud-like are all out of style. It is singular the freaks that are taken by fashion. Years ago a red-headed girl, with a mouth like a slice cut out of a muskmelon, would have been laughed at, and now such a girl is worth going miles to see.
It is easier to color the hair red, and be in fashion, than it is to enlarge the mouth, though a mouth that has any give to it can be helped by the constant application of a glove stretcher during the day, and by holding the cover to a tin blacking box while sleeping. What in the world the leaders of fashion wanted to declare large mouths the style for, the heavens only can tell.
Take a pretty face and mortise about a third of it for mouth, and it seems to us as though it is a great waste of raw material. There is no use that a large mouth can be put to that a small mouth would not do better, unless it is used for a pigeon hole to file away old sets of false teeth. They can't, certainly, be any better for kissing.
You all remember the traveling man who attended the church fair at Kalamazoo, where one of the sisters would give a kiss for ten cents. He went up and paid his ten cents, and was about to kiss her when he noticed that her mouth was one of those large, open face, cylinder escapement, to be continued mouths. It commenced at the chin and went about four chains and three links in a northwesterly direction, then around by her ear, across under the nose and back by the other ear to the place of beginning, and containing twelve acres, more or less.
The traveling man said he was only a poor orphan, and had a family to support, and if he never came out alive it would be a great hardship upon those dependent upon him for support, and he asked her as a special favor that she take her hand and take a reef in one side of the mouth so it would be smaller. She consented, and puckered in a handful of what would have been cheek, had it not been mouth. He looked at her again and found that the mouth had become a very one-sided affair, and he said he had just one more favor to ask.
He was not a man that was counted hard to suit when he was at home in Chicago, but he would always feel as though he had got his money's worth, and go away with pleasanter recollections of Kalamazoo, if she would kindly take her other hand and draw the other side of her mouth together, and he would be content to take his ten cents' worth out of what was left unemployed.
This was too much, and she gave him a terrible look, and returned him his ten cents, saying, “Do you think, sir, because you are a Chicago drummer, that for ten cents you can take a kiss right out of the best part of it? Go! Get thee to a nunnery,” and he went and bought a lemonade with the money.
We would not advise any lady whose mouth is small to worry about this new fashion, and try to enlarge the one nature has given her. Large mouths will have their run in a few brief months and will be much sought after by the followers of fashion, but in a short time the little ones that pout, and look cunning, will come to the front and the large ones will be for rent. The best kind of a mouth to have is a middling sized one, that has a dimple by its sides, which is always in style.
It is painful to read the remarks made by some of the papers in regard to the wicked stories told about a minister named Atwater, up in Dunn county, who was walking in the woods with a young lady. Some editors would believe anything that was told of a minister, if they knew it was untrue.
The truth of the matter seems to be that the elder called to visit a Miss Northrop, a member of his church, who taught school at Knapp. She seemed to have something on her mind, which she wanted to unfold to him, and as there were other people in the house where she boarded, it was suggested that they walk up a hill, into a piece of woods, where they could talk more freely.
They started out, and a lot of saw mill hands saw them, and immediately concluded that something was wrong, and after the truly good people had got into the brush the men followed. How natural it is for bad men to think there is something wrong, where two persons of the opposite sex are congregated together. The elder and the schoolma'am went in the grubs and sat down on a log, and there she unfolded to him her tale of woe.
It appears that she had violated one of the rules of the church by dancing, and she felt that she ought to confess, and did confess. She cried like a child, and seemed to be weak, and the elder put his arm around her to keep her from falling off the log. Everybody knows how easy it is to roll off a log, if they are not looking, and any man that wouldn't put his arm around a girl, to keep her from falling off a log, would be a fool whom it would be base flattery to call another.
She continued to weep—even the girl admits that—and he put his hand up to her forehead and stroked her hair, and told her to be calm, and her head may have fallen upon his breast. The number of heads that wouldn't, under the circumstances, are mighty few. She was overcome with grief and he with pity, and he tried to show her that if she braced up and tried to lead a different life, and shook the dancing hall and the wicked people who would put their arms around her, she might yet be saved.
One can imagine that he was displeased at her going into a giddy throng, to be hugged in plain sight, to the music of a band, and pointed out to her how much more beautiful it would be to go into the woods, on a log.
He had, it is alleged, got through soothing her, and she was about to wipe her nose on her handkerchief, and he was about to remove his arm from about her waist, when those wicked and perverse men from the saw mill came whooping into the thicket where they sat, looking for a mooley cow with one horn broke.
Now, the elder and the girl knew in a moment that they were not looking for a mooley cow, but that they were scoffers, and when they asked the elder if he had seen such an animal, he rose up with much dignity, buttoned up his coat, and in a pious manner said that he had not seen the cow. He did not upbraid them for breaking into the solitude of the sacred confessional, looking for a mooley cow, but seemed to act the perfect gentleman all the way through.
Nothing had transpired that might not have transpired in a parlor, if there had not been so many people in the house, and yet these illiterate and ungodly saw mill hands went off and told a story that would make angels blush. It is possible that the elder did wrong in not offering to go with them and look for the mooley cow, but we should not chide him for that. He probably had not time to take up a collection of his thoughts, and no doubt after he thought it over he was sorry he did not offer his services to them as a herder of mooley cows, but it was then everlastingly too late.
They had gone and told the old, old story, and nothing remained to be done but to call a church meeting, which was done, and the elder and the girl were acquitted of any wrong doing. This was right. If men are to be deposed from the ministry for sitting down on a log and consoling a female parishioner, what is to become of the world?
We don't believe the elder had any wrong motive, or that a thought entered his head that might not have entered any man's head under the circumstances. And yet it was unfortunate, it is so confounded hard to explain what they walked a mile for to get into the woods where there was a log.
Geo. W. Peck, of Peck'sSun, knows more about the harmful hammock, both by experience and observation, than any other man in America. His testimony runs as follows:
A young couple who were sitting in a hammock at one of the watering places in this State were severely injured by tipping over backwards and striking on the cheek of a head waiter. There is something about a hammock that is indescribable, and there is no rule that can be made that will insure safety while sitting in one of the queer things. There are people who believe that a hammock understands what is going on, and occasionally indulges in a joke.
It is certain that an old person with a lame back can swing in a hammock half the day and it will never kick up. Servant girls and children can get in a hammock as thick as three in a bed and there is no danger, but let a spoony young couple sit down in a hammock ever so carefully and it seems as though the confounded thing was alive, and had taken a contract to spill them out on the ground in all sorts of embarrassing shapes. What it is that causes the commotion will, perhaps, never be known, without an investigation by some middle aged person, and if the season was not so near over we would investigate the blasted thing ourself, in the interest of our young readers who are in the full blush of hammockhood.
There can be nothing much more annoying to a young couple than to be sitting side by side or facing each other in a hammock, looking into each other's eyes, and allowing the love they dare not speak to show itself in those orbs, and just as they are feeling as though they couldn't live a minute unless they clasped each other to each other's heaving bosoms, or at least one heaving bosom and one boiled shirt, and then have the hammock turn bottom side up and land them on the back of their necks, on the ground, with legs pointed towards the crab apples on the trees to which the hammock is hitched, arms flinging wildly to pull down pantaloon legs, and hands convulsively clawing gravel and muslin and delaine, while blushes suffuse faces that but a moment before were a background for the picture of love's young dream, and a crowd of spectators on the hotel verandah laughing and saying, “Set 'em up again.” The hammock shakes itself and turns right side up for other victims, as though it knew what it had been doing, and enjoyed it.
There are young men all over the land who have been through such experiences, and had to walk backwards all the way to the house, owing to fissure veins being discovered in the wearing apparel below the suspenders, while the number of girls that have been mortified by having to go to the house with their back hair in one hand, their skirts in the other, while six places between the polonaise and the ear-rings were aching like the toothache from contact with the gravel path, are legion, and we call upon the authorities to suppress the hammock as a nuisance.
More matches have been broken up by hammocks than by all the Sunday schools in the world, and no girl who is bow-legged, or has an ankle like a rutabaga, should ever trust herself in a hammock, even though it is held by half a dozen friends, as the hammock will shy at a piece of paper as quick as a skittish horse, and in such a moment as ye think not you are on all fours, your head dizzy, and if there is a hole in your stocking as small as a Democrat's hope of election, it will look to outsiders as big as the gate to a fair ground. O, a hammock is worse than a bicycle.
There is one thing the American people have got to learn, and that is to give scholars in schools a half holiday when there is a circus in town. We know that we are in advance of many of the prominent educators of the country when we advocate such a policy, but sooner or later the people whose duty it is to superintend schools will learn that we are right, and they will have to catch up with us or resign.
In the first place, a boy is going to attend a circus, if there is one in town, and the question before teachers and superintendents should be, not how to prevent him from going to the circus, but how to keep his mind on his books the day before the circus and the day after. There have been several million boys made into liars by school officials attempting to prevent their going to circuses, and we contend that it is the duty of teachers to place as few temptations to lie as possible in the way of boys.
If a boy knows that there will be no school on the afternoon of circus day, he will study like a whitehead all the forenoon, and learn twice as much as he will in all day if he can't go. If he knows that there is a conspiracy on foot between his parents and the teachers to keep him from the circus, he begins to think of some lie to get out of school. He will be sick, or run away, or something.
He will get there, if possible. And after the first lie succeeds in getting him out of school, he is a liar from the word go. There is something, some sort of electricity that runs from a boy to a circus, and all the teachers in the world cannot break the connection. A circus is the boys' heaven.
You may talk to him about the beautiful gates ajar, and the angel band in heaven that plays around the great white throne, and he can't understand it, but the least hint about the circus tent, with the flap pulled to one side to get in, and the band wagon, and the girls jumping through hoops, and the clown, and he is onto your racket at a jump.
You may try to paralyze him by the story of Daniel in the den of lions, and how he was saved by his faith in a power above, and the boy's mind will revert to the circus, where a man in tights and spangles goes in and bosses the lions and tigers around, and he will wonder if Daniel had a rawhide, and backed out of the cage with his eye on the boss lion.
At a certain age a circus can hold over heaven or anything else, in a boy's mind, and as long as the circus does not hurt him, why not shut up shop a half a day and let him go? If you keep him in school he won't learn anything, and he will go to the circus in the evening, and be up half the night seeing the canvas men tear down the tent and load up, and the next day he is all played out and not worth a continental. To some it would look foolish to dismiss school for a circus, but it will cement a friendship between teachers and scholars that nothing else could.
Suppose, a day or two before a circus arrives, the teacher should say to the school: “Now I want you kids to go through your studies like a tramp through a boiled dinner, and when the circus comes we will close up this ranch and all go the circus, and if any of you can't raise the money to go, leave your names on my desk and I will see you inside the tent if I have to pawn my shirt.”
Of course it is a male teacher we are supposing said this. Well, don't you suppose those boys and girls would study? They would fairly whoop it up. And then suppose the teacher found forty boys that hadn't any money to go, and he had no school funds to be used for such a purpose.
How long would it take him to collect the money by going around among business men who had been boys themselves? He would go into a store and say he was trying to raise money to take some of the poor children to the circus, and a dozen hands would go down into a dozen pockets in two jerks of a continued story, and they would all chip in.
O, we are too smart. We are trying to fire education into boys with a shotgun, when we ought to get it into them inside of sugar coated pills. Let us turn over a new leaf now, and show these boys that we have got souls in us, and that we want them to have a good time if we don't lay up a cent.
It was along in the winter, and the prominent church members were having a business meeting in the basement of the church to devise ways and means to pay for the pulpit furniture. The question of an oyster sociable had been decided, and they got to talking about oysters, and one old deaconess asked a deacon if he didn't think raw oysters would go further, at a sociable, than stewed oysters.
He said he thought raw oysters would go further but they wouldn't be as satisfying. And then he went on to tell how far a raw oyster went once with him. He said he was at a swell dinner party, with a lady on each side of him, and he was trying to talk to both of them, or carry on two conversations, on two different subjects, at the same time.
They had some shell oysters, and he took up one on a fork—a large, fat one—and was about to put it in his mouth, when the lady on his left called his attention, and when the cold fork struck his teeth, and no oyster on it, he felt as though it had escaped, but he made no sign. He went on talking with the lady as though nothing had happened. He glanced down at his shirt bosom, and was at once on the trail of the oyster, though the insect had got about two minutes start of him. It had gone down his vest, under the waistband of his clothing, and he was powerless to arrest its progress.
He said he never felt how powerless he was until he tried to grab that oyster by placing his hand on his person, outside his clothes; then, as the oyster slipped around from one place to another, he felt that man was only a poor, weak creature.
The oyster, he observed, had very cold feet, and the more he tried to be calm and collected, the more the oyster seemed to walk around among his vitals.
He says he does not know whether the ladies noticed the oyster when it started on its travels, or not, but he thought as he leaned back and tried to loosen up his clothing, so it would hurry down towards his shoes, that they winked at each other, though they might have been winking at something else.
The oyster seemed to be real spry until it got out of reach, and then it got to going slow, as the slickery covering wore off, and by the time it had worked into his trousers leg, it was going very slow, though it remained cold to the last, and he hailed the arrival of that oyster into the heel of his stocking with more delight than he did the raising of the American flag over Vicksburg, after the long siege.
The sleeping car companies are discussing the idea advanced by theSun, of placing safes in the cars, or iron drawers with locks, into which passengers can place their watches and money. We trust the iron drawers will be adopted, as the flannel drawers now used are not safe by any means. It is true they are sometimes tied with a string in the small of the back, but the combination is not difficult for even a stranger to unlock, unless it is tied in a hard knot. Give us iron drawers in a sleeping car by all means. To be sure they will be cold; but everything is cold in a sleeping car except the colored porter.
Several proprietors of eastern resorts have announced that only adults will be entertained, and that no children will be admitted as guests on any terms. At first we would be inclined to say that a hotel proprietor who would make such a distinction could have no soul, but when we reflect that the proprietor is catering to the pleasure of a majority of his guests, then we conclude that the guests are devoid of souls.
What kind of a place would a summer resort be without happy children? It would be a hospital for decayed roues, very old maids, women who hated children, smart Alecks who were mashers, dead beats and sour curmudgeons. The day would be put in in gossiping, exercising old flirts with stiff joints, drinking at somebody's expense, and fishing for rich husbands with graveyard coughs, and angling for women who wanted to be caught and didn't care a continental who caught them.
The atmosphere about such a place would be a blizzard of heat and cold, filled with fine sand, and would make a person with a heart, who loved children, think he or she was in hell looking for an artesian well.
A hotel proprietor who will thus insult the better part of the human race, should be ignored entirely by all who love children, and he should be compelled to stand on his deserted verandah all the season and see his rival across the way, who entertains children, surrounded by the richest and best guests, and the soulless creature, and the few soulless, dyspeptic boarders that he has, should be obliged to listen to the laughter of thousands of happy children running races and playing tag up and down the lawn of the man who has a soul.
No one who would patronize a summer hotel that refuses little children a breath of God's fresh air should enjoy a moment's pleasure. Mosquitoes should bore them, and country dogs should bark all night and keep them awake. Be they male or female resorters, we pray for ants to crawl up them, for bugs and worms to go down them, for snakes to frighten them out of their boots or gaiters, for country cows to run them out of pastures, and fleas to get inside their night gowns and practice the lancers all night. May their food disagree with them, their clothes fail to come back from the laundry, and their bandoline lose its staying qualities.
And may those at the house where children are welcome have health and happiness, and may they get to heaven, eventually, with the children, and while on the way up there may they throw a bundle of prepared kindling wood into the pit below where the child haters are sighing for zinc ulsters.
A dispatch from Long Branch announces that “Dr. Bliss goes to New York for a few hours today.” That is encouraging. If the doctors had kept away from the President more he would have been better. He has had from one to six doctors in sight, night and day, for over ten weeks. Take a man here at home that is sick, and let a doctor go and stay with him night and day, and how long do you suppose the man would live?
What a sick man wants is to have a doctor go around practicing on other people, and come in once or twice a day, blow off a little steam, slap the patient on the leg and say, “Well, boss, how's your liver?” A sick man wants to have a doctor forget to come some time when he is expected, and get nervous about it, instead of getting nervous because the pill-bags is there all the time, smelling of everything.
Let a doctor that is due at the bedside at 4 o'clock, say, stay away till 6, and then come in and tell about being down on the South Side to see about somebody's having a sick baby, or to sew up a man that has been to a circus, and the cross patient that has been waiting for the doctor till he got mad, is better at once. It cheers him to know that somebody else has a baby or had a gash cut in him in a fight, and changes his mind about swearing at the doctor, and feels better.
Why, some of our best doctors never think of curing a man until they get him mad a few times. It braces a man up to get mad and think, “Now that confounded old pill-bags has forgotten all about me, and I'll bet he is in a saloon somewhere shaking the dice for the drinks.” A sick man gains strength, actually, lying in bed and thinking how he would like to kick the stuffin' out of a doctor.
A doctor who has only one patient is a damage to the patient, and Garfield has suffered more by having those doctors around when he ought to have been left alone till he yearned for them, than anybody imagines. Why, the feeling of a man's pulse for half an hour, and timing it as you would a trotting horse, is enough to make a well man sick. What a doctor wants to do is to feel of a man's pulse about one second, and then throw the patient's hand down and say: “O, you are all right. We will have you entered in a walking match next week.”
He wants to say something of this kind if the man is dying. A doctor has got to be a good deal of a liar, to succeed. We do not mean to say Bliss is not a liar, but somehow he does not seem to display judgment. He is too much of a stayer. Bliss is too frequent.
A celebrated writer on the state of the country, has an article in a magazine, in which occurs the following paragraph:
“The defects of the New England girl may be done away with by giving less prominence to the purely intellectual or purely practical side of her education.”
In the first place, we do not admit that there are any defects in the Boston girl, but if therearedefects, as is alleged by the writer above, and by other scientific persons, we do not see how giving less prominence to her intellectuality is going to do away with them. For instance, there is a defect in the girl whereby she has a shin on both sides of her lower limb, or an indentation where there should be the customary calf—we say calf advisedly, because itisa calf, and no person need be ashamed of it, even if itisterrible slim—we don't see how that defect can be done away with by giving less prominence to the purely practical side of her education. It does not stand to reason. Sawdust, or bran would be worth two of it.
Or, again, suppose the New England girl has no hips to speak of, or her stomach is caved in where there should be a fullness, is the giving of less prominence to the purely intellectual side of her education going to do away with these defects, or fill up the waste places and make them glad? Not much! A sack of canary seed, or a rubber air cushion, or a bale of cotton, beats the Boston idea all hollow, and we will leave it to anybody that knows anything.
Now, as to hair. Suppose the Boston girl has no more natural hair than one of these Mexican dogs, is education going to raise a crop of hair? Not by any means—she has got to buy it.
No, you Boston magazine critters can theoretically take a plain, unvarnished New England girl with these defects, and give all the prominence you want to to the practical side of her education, and you may imagine you can do away with these defects and make her pass muster in a crowd, but when you get all through she will be homely as a stone fence, and some western girl, with no defects at all, just a natural born jolly girl, with not too much education and intellectuality, will come along there, and all Boston will go crazy after her.
You fellows don't seem to know what you are talking about. Well, we don't know what we are talking about either, but we had to write something to fill up with, and girls are the easiest things in the world to write about.
The little town of Clyde, Kansas, is mighty full of vinegar for a place of its size. The principal amusement the boys have is to scare the daylights out of visitors from the States by telling big stories about cyclones.
There are two young fellows in business there named Will May and Charley Armstrong. They have a store where they buy butter, and eggs, and things, and pack them for the Eastern market. Last June, Uncle Armstrong, father of Charley, and a young fellow named Charley Farmer, were out there visiting. The hosts entertained the guests to the most hair-standing stories about cyclones, until they were so nervous they couldn't sleep at night.
One night the guests had retired, and the zephyr was pretty loud. Will and Charley got into the room adjoining that occupied by the guests, and began to talk about funnel-shaped clouds, trees torn up by the roots, horses flying through the air, and wagons being taken up bodily and carried away—talking so the guests could hear them. Then they prayed for strength to pull them through the fearful ordeal; and, pretending that a cyclone was upon them, they started down stairs head over appetite, to get into the refrigerator, in the cellar, for safety, yelling to the guests to fly for their lives.
Uncle Armstrong is getting pretty well along in years, but he got down to the cellar about ten stairs ahead of young Farmer, and asked to be allowed to get into the refrigerator first. It seemed a little cruel to the boys to let the guests get in there with nothing on but their undershirts, but they were going to have some fun, so they put them in among the cakes of ice, and Uncle Armstrong sat down on the zinc floor and allowed that if his life was spared till morning, he would never set foot in Kansas again.
Young Farmer sat on a firkin of butter, and leaned against the zinc lined side of the refrigerator, and tried to pray, but he had forgotten the combination; and couldn't make a first payment.
Will and Charley went up stairs ostensibly to lock the safe, but really to go on with the programme. The first thing they did was to fire off a shotgun, and roll a keg of shingle-nails down the cellar stairs, and yell to the guests in the refrigerator to look out for God's sake, as the house was struck by lightning.
Young Farmer got down off the firkin, and got on his knees, and tried to repeat some Sunday school lesson, but all he could think of was, “Evil communications corrupt two in the bush.” The old gentleman, who was struck in the small of the back by a piece of ice that fell off some butter, thought he was struck by lightning; so he began to sing, “A charge to keep I have.”
The boys up stairs got a bag of buckshot, and opened it, and every little while would throw a handful onto the outside cellar door, right above the heads of the freezing occupants of the refrigerator, at the same time pounding a piece of sheet iron to make thunder. They kept this up for an hour, and then got a barrel and filled it with broken glass and pieces of crockery, and they would roll it across the floor above, while one would take an ax and pound on some bar iron that was leaning against the wall, making a most hideous noise.
Charley Farmer said he supposed he was as well prepared to die as he ever would be, but he said he would give ten dollars if he had his pants down there.
Uncle Armstrong asked him what difference it made whether he had his pants on or not, and Charley said he didn't want to be ushered into the New Jerusalem with all his sins on his head, before the angels, and nothing on but a knit undershirt.
They were discussing this question when they gave vent to a dying groan, closed their eyes, and then all was still.
The prisoners thought it was all over, and they didn't stir for about ten minutes. They thought the house had blown away, and left them alive, and they were inclined to be thankful even for that; when Charley and Will came down and opened the refrigerator, and told them the storm was over, but that it was the almightiest cyclone that ever passed over Kansas.
The accounts of the capture of Jeff Davis, in his wife's clothes, which have been published ever since the war, have caused many to laugh, and has surrounded the last days of the confederacy with a halo of ludicrousness that has caused much hard feeling between Mr. Davis and the American people. His friends would have been much better pleased if he had bared his breast to the cavalryman who captured him, and been run through with a sabre, and died with some proud last words on his lips, such as, “Who will care for mother now,” or “The cause is lost. Send out a search warrant to find it.”
It was a terribly ridiculous ending to a great struggle, the way we have been in the habit of reading the story, but now we have a new light on the subject. Mr. Davis has written a book on the war, and in it he gives the following particulars of his capture and the bravery he displayed. Instead of sneaking off in his wife's petticoat, after a pail of spring water, Mr. Davis describes that escape as being almost a bloody encounter. He says:
“I had gone perhaps fifteen or twenty yards when a trooper galloped up and ordered me to halt and surrender, to which I gave a defiant answer, and, dropping the shawl and raglan from my shoulders, advanced toward him. He leveled his carbine at me, but I expected if he fired he would miss me, and my intention was, in that event, to put my hand under his foot, tumble him off on the other side, spring into his saddle and attempt to escape. My wife, who had been watching, when she saw the soldier aim his carbine at me, ran forward and threw her arms around me. Success depended on instantaneous action, and, recognizing that the opportunity had been lost, I turned back, and, the morning being damp and chilly, passed on to a fire beyond the tent.”
This puts an entirely different face on the affair, and instead of being a childish coward, he represents himself to have been an arch conspirator, who disguised himself as a female to get a good chance to throw a boy off his horse and steal the horse. We can only admire the calm determination of the man, as he stood there waiting for the boy to shoot, so he could rush up, unarmed, put his hand under the soldier's foot, tip him off the horse, get on himself, without receipting to the government for the horse, and skedaddle.
It is not necessary to inquire what the boy would have been doing all the time Jeff was pulling him off the horse. We all know how easy it is for an unarmed old man to spill a healthy soldier off a horse. We can readily see that the soldier could not have whacked the old fellow over the head with the empty carbine, or drawn his sabre and run him through, or given him a few shots out of a revolver.
Jeff had, no doubt, arranged in his own mind to chloroform the bold Michigan cavalryman, but his wife broke it all up by throwing her arms around him at an inopportune moment, thus pinioning the President of the Confederacy so he could not whip the Union army. And so, like Adam, Jeff lays the whole business to the woman. What would we do without women to lay everything to?
And while Jeff must ever doubt the judgment of his wife in breaking up his plans at that trying moment, when so much was at stake, how that soldier, whose life was saved by her act, must revere her, memory! Had the woman not held Jeff the soldier must have been pitched off his horse, and striking on his head, he must have been killed.
Mr. Davis does not say so, but we have no doubt his plan was to have the soldier strike on his head on a projecting root or stone, so he would be killed. If there should be another war, we should never join the cavalry branch of the service unless there was an understanding that no old men, armed with petticoats and tin water pails, should be allowed to charge on cavalrymen and throw them off their horses.
It is said that during the late war no man ever saw a dead cavalryman, but if the tactics of Mr. Davis had been adopted early in the war, the mortality must have been fearful, and perhaps the result of the war would have been different. We cannot be too thankful that Jeff didn't think of that way of demoralizing cavalry before.
About seventy-five traveling men were snowed in at Green Bay during a late blockade, and they were pretty lively around the hotels, having quiet fun Friday and Saturday, and passing away the time the best they could, some playing seven up, others playing billiards, and others looking on. Some of the truly good people in town thought the boys were pretty tough, and they wore long faces and prayed for the blockade to raise so the spruce looking chaps could go away.
The boys noticed that occasionally a lantern-jawed fellow would look pious at them, as though afraid he would be contaminated, so Sunday morning they decided to go to church in a body. Seventy-five of them slicked up and marched to the Rev. Dr. Morgan's church, where the reverend gentleman was going to deliver a sermon on temperance. No minister ever had a more attentive audience, or a more intelligent one, and when the collection plate was passed every last one of the travelers chipped in a silver dollar.
When the sexton had received the first ten dollars the perspiration stood out on his forehead as though he had been caught in something. It was getting heavy, something that never occurred before in the history of church collections at the Bay. As he passed by the boys, and dollar after dollar was added to his burden, he felt like he was at a picnic, and when twenty-five dollars had accumulated on the plate he had to hold it with both hands, and finally the plate was full, and he had to go and empty it on the table in front of the pulpit, though he was careful to remember where he left off, so he wouldn't go twice to the same drummer.
As he poured the shekels out on the table, as still as he could, every person in the audience almost raised up to look at the pile, and there was a smile on every face, and every eye turned to the part of the church where sat the seventy-five solemn looking traveling men, who never smole a smile. The sexton looked up to the minister, who was picking out a hymn, as much as to say, “Boss, we have struck it rich, and I am going back to work the lead some more.” The minister looked at the boys, and then at the sexton as though saying, “Verily, I would rather preach to seventy-five Milwaukee and Chicago drummers than to own a brewery. Go, thou, and reap some more trade dollars in my vineyard.”
The sexton went back and commenced where he left off. He had his misgivings, thinking maybe some of the boys would glide out in his absence, or think better of the affair and only put in nickels on the second heat, but the first man the sexton held out the platter to planked down his dollar, and all the boys followed suit, not a man “passed” or “ra nigged,” and when the last drummer had been interviewed the sexton carried the biggest load of silver back to the table that he ever saw.
Some of the silver dollars rolled off on the floor, and he had to put some in his coat pockets, but he got them all, and looked around at the congregation with a smile and wiped the perspiration off his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief and winked, as much as to say, “The first man that speaks disrespectfully of a traveling man in my presence will get thumped, and don't you forget it.”
The minister rose up in the pulpit, looked at the wealth on the table, and read the hymn, “A charge to keep I have,” and the congregation joined, the travelers swelling the glad anthem as though they belonged to a Pinafore chorus. They all bowed their heads while the minister, with one eye on the dollars, pronounced the benediction, and the services were over.
The traveling men filed out through the smiles of the ladies and went to the hotel, while half the congregation went forward to the anxious seat, to “view the remains.” It is safe to say that it will be unsafe, in the future, to speak disparagingly of traveling men in Green Bay, as long as the memory of that blockade Sunday remains green with the good people there.