PECK’S COMPENDIUM OF FUN. (continued 3)

ENTERPRISING CHICAGO!

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Chicago is to have a hotel built exclusively for men. Under no circumstances will a woman be admitted into it. There are so many men who go to Chicago, who are liable to wink at women at the table of the hotel, before they know their own heart, to lead a different life, that this new hotel, without temptation, has been decided upon. There will only be a few old bald headed roosters and persons with red noses and sore eyes stopping at the new hotel. A hotel without women would be almost as cheerful as a reform school.

A MAD MINISTER.

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There is probably the maddest minister living at Black River Falls, that can be found in America to-day. He is a real nice man, and his name is Burt Wheeler. He preaches good sound sense, and everybody likes him. He has got friends at Neillsville, and all around there. At Black River Falls there is no license, and liquor is unknown, while at Neillsville there is license, and one can have benzine at every meal. The other day the express took a jug from Neillsville to the Falls, directed to the reverend gentleman, and on the card attached to the jug handle was the following notice:

“Old Bourbon—We have license here, and knowing you have none in your town we thought it but kindness to remember your wants.”

When a jug, or a keg arrives at the Falls by express, every citizen notices it, and they investigate, and when the jug came into the express office the expressman winked, and in a few minutes half the population of the darling little village was there. They read the note on the card and winked at each other. One man as he took a piece of cut sugar out of a barrel, said he had long suspected that Burt liked his toddy. Another fellow, picking a mouthful off a codfish, remarked that you couldn’t always tell about these confounded ministers. Frank Cooper, the editor of the Banner, though he looked pained when he saw the name “Old Bourbon” on the jug, and noticed the immense size of the jug remarked that it was the best way not to condemn a man till the returns were all in. The reverened gentleman was interrupted in his preparation of his sermon by a neighboring lady who just dropped in to tell the news, and when she sighed and told him that his jug of whisky which he had ordered from Neillsville, was in the express office, he could hardly believe his ears. He had always, to the best of his knowledge and belief, tried to lead a different life, and this was too much—too much bourbon. Scratching out the last line that he had written, which was something about something biting like an anaconda, and stinging like a ready reckoner, he put on his coat and started down town, resolved to face the multitude, conscious of his innocence. He approached the express office a little nervous. The crowd filled the street, and as he passed a raftsman with red breeches on, said he wouldn’t have such a nose as that on him for a hundred dollars. “He is full now,” said another, as the Reverend gentleman put his hand on an awning post to steady himself in the trying emergency. A man who was sitting on a salt barrel, whittling a shingle, and who had one trousers leg tucked in his boot, and a red sash around him, said if it could be proved that Wheeler was a drinking man it would be a hard blow at religion, but he didn’t know as he cared a blank anyway. The elder went in the express office and the crowd fell back to give the chief mourner a chance to look at the late lamented. There was a different expression on every face. Some looked as though they were glad he had been caught in the act, while others wore a mournful expression, as though they had been suddenly bereaved. He was pale, yet determined, and as he read the inscription he said, so help him John Rogers, he had never ordered any whisky, and never drank any, and didn’t know anything about this jug. Turning to those present he said: “This is some horrid nightmare.” The expressman said it was no nightmare, it was whisky. Wheeler said if the charges were paid he would take it, and taking the jug out doors he raised it high in the air and dashed it upon the pavement, amid the applause of his friends. At this point Hon. Wm. T. Price come along, and was told what had happened. He looked at the amber liquid oozing down between the stones on the pavement, put his finger in some of it, smelled of it, touched it to his tongue, and turning to the yet pale and excited Reverend, he said:

“Wheeler, you have maintained a noble principle, but you have destroyed four gallons of the d—dest finest maple syrup that was ever brewed in Clark county.”

It was true, Doc. French and Tom Reed, of Neillsville, two good friends of the Rev. Wheeler, had sent him the syrup, knowing that he could use it in his family, and being jokers they had put the Bourbon card on the jug, just for fun, with the alleged result above stated. Temperance men should always smell of the cork, at least, before smashing the jug. We have practiced that a good many years, and never lost a gallon of maple syrup.

ANNA DICKINSON AS MAZEPPA!

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Anna Dickinson is to go upon the stage, and it is said that she will open in San Francisco, in the play of “Mazeppa.” If there is any society for the prevention of cruelty to animals on the Pacific coast, we trust before Anna is tied on the wild horse of Tartary, that some one will see to it that a cushion is put on the back of the horse.

GOOD TEMPLARS ON ICE.

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We like to see young Good Templars have a hankering after cold water, bright water; but when a Juvenile Lodge about to start on a picnic, deliberately loads a hunk of ice belonging to The Sun into an omnibus, we feel like reaching for the basement of their roundabouts with a piece of clapboard.

BOUNCED FROM CHURCH FOR DANCING.

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The Presbyterian synod at Erie, Pa., has turned a lawyer named Donaldson out of the church. The charge against him was not that he was a lawyer, as might be supposed, but that he had danced a quadrille. It does not seem to us as though there could be anything more harmless than dancing a cold blooded quadrille. It is a simple walk around, and is not even exercise. Of course a man can, if he chooses, get in extra steps enough to keep his feet warm, but we contend that no quadrille, where they only touch hands, go down in the middle, and alamand left, can work upon a man’s religion enough to cause him to backslide.

If it was this new “waltz quadrille” that Donaldson indulged in, where there is intermittant hugging, and where the head gets to whirling, and a man has to hang on to his partner quite considerable, to keep from falling all over himself, and where she looks up fondly into his eyes and as though telling him to squeeze just as hard as it seemed necessary for his convenience, we should not wonder so much at the synod hauling him over the coals for cruelty to himself, but a cold quadrille has no deviltry in it.

We presume the wicked and perverse Dr. Donaldson will join another church that allows dancing judiciously administered, and may yet get to heaven ahead of the Presbyterian synod, and he may be elected to some high position there, as Arthur was here, after the synod of Hayes and Sherman had bounced him from the Custom House for dancing the great spoils walk around.

It is often the case here, and we do not know why it may not be in heaven, that the ones that are turned over and shook up, and the dust knocked out of them, and their metaphorical coat tail filled with boots, find that the whirligig of time has placed them above the parties who smote them, and we can readily believe that if Donaldson gets a first-class position of power, above the skies, he will make it decidedly warm for his persecutors when they come up to the desk with their gripsacks and register and ask for a room and a bath, and a fire escape. He will be apt to look up to the key rack and tell them everything is full, but they can find pretty fair accommodations at the other house, down at the Hot Springs, on the European plan, by Mr. Devil, formerly of Chicago.

FROZEN EARS.

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“A young fellow and his girl went out sleighing yesterday, and the lad returned with a frozen ear. There is nothing very startling in the simple fact of a frozen ear, but the idea is that it was the ear next to the girl that he was foolish enough to let freeze.” A girl that will go out sleigh-riding with a young man and allow his ears to freeze is no gentleman, and ought to be arrested. Why, here in Milwaukee, on the coldest days, we have seen a young man out riding with a girl, and his ears were so hot they would fairly “sis,” and there was not a man driving on the avenue but would have changed places with the young man, and allowed his ears to cool. Girls cannot sit too close during this weather. The climate is rigorous.

HARD ON FOND DU LAC.

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Forest street, Fond du Lac, is going to be a great place for sparking, one of these days. For three years all the children born on that street have been girls. Some lay it to the artesian well water.

THOSE BOLD BAD DRUMMERS.

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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.

THE SEXTON IN ALL HIS GLORY.

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 wore a smile. The sexton looked up to the minister, who was picking up 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 “renigged,” 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 from 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.

ANNA DICKINSON.

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Anna Dickinson is going upon the stage again and is to play male characters, such as “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and “Claude Melnotte.” We have insisted for years that Anna Dickinson was a man, and we dare anybody to prove to the contrary. There is one way to settle this matter, and that is when she plays Hamlet. Let the stage manager put a large spider in the skull of Yorick, and when Hamlet takes up the skull and says, “Alas, poor Yorick, I was pretty solid with him,” let the spider crawl out of one of the eye holes onto Hamlet’s hand, and proceed to walk up Miss Dickinson’s sleeve. If Hamlet simply shakes the spider off, and goes on with the funeral unconcerned, then Miss Dickinson is a man. But if Hamlet screams bloody murder, throws the skull at the grave digger, falls over into the grave, tears his shirt, jumps out of the grave and shakes his imaginary skirts, gathers them up in his hands and begins to climb up the scenes like a Samantha cat chased by a dog, and gets on top of the first fly and raises Hamlet’s back and spits, then Miss Dickinson is a woman. The country will watch eagerly for the result of this test, which we trust will be made at the Boston Theatre next week.

EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF A DOUGHNUT.

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“’Twas midnight’s holy hour, and silence was brooding like a gentle spirit o’er the still and pulseless world.” Not a sound was heard, except Robert’s dog baying at a sorrel haired young man and a muchmussed girl, who were returning home from a suburban picnic. As they passed out of hearing, and the dog was peacefully cannibalizing on a link of sausage that had been condemned by the board of health, owing to a piece of brass padlock that showed through the silky nickel plating made of fiddling string material, a soft cry of a child was heard in an upper room of a mansion owned by a prosperous business man. The head of the house heard it and sat up in bed to still the small voice, but couldn’t, when the mother of the child said that she had forgotten to bring up anything for the child to eat in the night, and she must go down cellar and get a doughnut. The man said he could never stay there and enjoy himself in bed and think of his wife, groping around in the dark below stairs after it. After telling him that he would probably come up with a pickle, ehe let him go. Carefully he got out of bed, in an angelic frame of mind and a night shirt, and barefooted he prepared to make the descent. As he stopped to hold one foot in his hand, the instep of which had struck the rocker of the baby crib, she told him the doughnuts were in the third crock in the pantry on the floor. He said it was one evidence of a clear headed man, that he could walk all over his own house in the dark. At the head of the first pair of stairs he tripped on a baby cart and the tongue flew up and struck him on the knee, but by hanging to the bannisters he saved himself. At the foot of the stairs he tumbled over a block house and broke off a toe nail. He said it was a mean man that wouldn’t sacrifice a few toe nails for his little baby, and he laughed. He fell over a dining room chair, and sat down in another, and when he got up he felt that though he was not proud, he was stuck up, for on his night shirt was a sticky fly paper that had been placed in readiness to catch the unwary early fly. After peeling off the sticky paper, and subterraneously swearing a neat, delicate little female swear, he groped to the cellar door, and began to go down.

THE STARTLED CAT.

Now, if there is anything a boy ought to be punished for, it is for surreptitiously eating a large slice of musk melon and leaving the rind on the top stair. It tends to make a boy disliked. The head of the family stepped with his bare feet on the piece of melon, and sat down so quick that it made his head swim. It made him swim all over, and under, and everywhere. But if he sat down soon, he got up sooner. If there is one thing that a house cat should be taught, it is to sleep elsewhere than on the top stair. When he fell and struck the sleeping cat there was a crisis. He took in the situation at once. An occasional disengaged feline toe nail, and a squall, told him in burning words that, while his title to the seat was contested, it would be impolitic to wait for a commission of unbiased judges to decide which was entitled to it. His opponent was armed, and had possession, and he felt that it would tend to prevent riot and bloodshed if he quietly gave up. But he felt that while in his present position the cat was comparatively harmless, if he attempted to rise she would bring the whole army and navy into action, and perhaps cripple his resources. So he decided to jump up in a hurry before the cat had time to think of her toe nails much. His position was not pleasant, to say the least, but he jumped up in a hurry, hoping the cat would remain and continue her nap. She was not a remaining cat and as soon as his weight was removed from her person, she gave a yell as though frightened, and began to walk up and down his legs, inside of his night shirt. The question as to how many toe nails a cat has got, has never been decided, but he says they have a million, and he can show the documents to prove it. She went up him as though he was a fence post, and a dog after her, and he flew around as though his linen was on fire, and yelled until his wife came down to see what was the matter. By unbuttoning the top button the cat was coaxed out, under protest however, and after a light was lit there was seen about the maddest man in the world. He took a candle and went down after the doughnuts, and after running his hand into a jar of preserved peaches, and another of pickled pig’s feet, he struck the right one, and after hot grease from the candle had run down his fingers he came up with a doughnut, and then the baby wouldn’t eat it, then he sat down side-ways in a cushioned chair, applied arnica and swore till daylight. A single shot was heard in the cellar that morning, and the young life of that cat went out. As he rode down on the street car the next morning, people marvelled that he should stand up on the back platform, when there were so many vacant seats, and when a neighbor asked him to be seated he said, with a yawn, “No thank you, I have been sitting down a good deal during the night,” and he looked mad. It is such things that drive men to commit crimes.

TAKE YOUR LATIN STRAIGHT.

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The school board, at its last session adopted the following rule: “The continental system of pronounciation shall be taught in the high schools of La Crosse, and no other allowed except by direction of board of education.” We are glad the rule has been adopted, as there is no doubt that the continental system is the best. We have been pained beyond measure, as no doubt all of the school board have, at hearing the scholars pronounce Latin by ’tother system. No longer ago than last Saturday, when we were in Mons. Anderson’s, a girl came in and asked for a pair of Latin corsets, by the Onalaska system of pronounciation. The clerk, not understanding, went and got a pair of those undershirts and drawers, complete in one number, with no tale to be continued. The girl blushed, the clerk did not understand, and we had to explain by the continental system, and the girl got her corsets, but suppose there had not been a Latin scholar standing around there waiting for his wife to buy a package of safty pins, what a predicament the girl would have been in. On behalf of the people, THE SUN thanks the board of education for adopting the continental system of pronounciation, only they ought to go further, and make it a crime punishable with suicide for anybody to pronounce it in any other way. There has been suffering enough by pronouncing it the old way.

PECK’S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.

HE IS TOO HEALTHY.

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“There, I knew you would get into trouble,” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as a policeman came along leading him by the ear, the boy having an empty champagne bottle in one hand, and a black eye. “What has he been doing Mr. Policeman?” asked the grocery man, as the policeman halted with the boy in front of the store.

“Well, I was going by a house up here when this kid opened the door with a quart bottle of champagne, and he cut the wire and fired the cork at another boy, and the champagne went all over the sidewalk, and some of it went on me, and I knew there was something wrong, cause champagne is too expensive to waste that way, and he said he was running the shebang and if I would bring him here you would say he was all right. If you say so I will let him go.”

The grocery man said he had better let the boy go, as his parents would not like to have their little pet locked up. So the policeman let go his ear, and he throwed the empty bottle at a coal wagon, and after the policeman had brushed the champagne off his coat, and smelled of his fingers, and started off, the grocery man turned to the boy, who was peeling a cucumber, and said:

“Now, what kind of a circus have you been having, and what do you mean by destroying wine that way! and, where are your folks?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. Ma she has got the hay fever and has gone to Lake Superior to see if she can’t stop sneezing, and Saturday Pa said he and me would go out to Oconomowoc and stay over Sunday, and try and recuperate our health. Pa said it would be a good joke for me not to call him Pa, but to act as though I was his younger brother, and we would have a real nice time. I knowed what he wanted. He is an old masher, that’s what’s the matter with him, and he was going to play himself for a batchelor. O, thunder, I got on to his racket in a minute. He was introduced to some of the girls and Saturday evening he danced till the cows came home. At home he is awful fraid of rheumatiz, and he never sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured off’n him, and he stood in the door and let a girl fan him till I was afraid he would freeze, and just as he was telling a girl from Tennessee, who was joking him about being ‘a nold batch,’ that he was not sure as he could always hold out a woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with the charming ladies of the Sunny South. I pulled his coat and said, ‘Pa how do you spose Ma’s hay fever is to-night, I’ll bet she is just sneezing the top of her head off.’ Wall, sir, you just oughten seen that girl and Pa. Pa looked at me as if I was a total stranger, and told the porter if that freckled faced boot-black belonged around the house he had better be fired out of the ball room, and the girl said ‘the disgustin’ thing!’ and just before they fired me I told Pa he had better look out or he would sweat through his liver pad.

“I went to bed and Pa staid up till the lights were put out. He was mad when he came to bed, but he didn’t kick me, cause the people in the next room would hear him, but the next morning he talked to me. He said I might go back home Sunday night, and he would stay a day or two. He sat around on the veranda all the afternoon, talking with the girls, and when he would see me coming along he would look cross. He took a girl out boat riding, and when I asked him if I couldn’t go along, he said he was afraid I would get drowned, and he said if I went home there was nothing there too good for me, and so my chum and me got to firing bottles of champagne, and he hit me in the eye with a cork, and I drove him out doors and was just going to shell his earth works, when the policeman collared me. Say, what’s good for a black eye?”

The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home. “What do you think your Pa’s object was in passing himself off for a single man at Oconomowoc?” asked the grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the boy’s father.

“That’s what beats me. Aside from Ma’s hay fever she is one of the healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose he does it for his health, the way they all do when they go to a summer resort, but it leaves a boy an orphan, don’t it, to have such kitteny parents?”

SURE OF HEAVEN.

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The only persons that are real sure that their calling and election is sure, and that they are going to heaven across lots, are the men who are hung for murder. They always announce that they have got a dead thing on it, just before the drop falls. How encouraging it must be to children to listen to the prayers of our ministers in churches, who admit that they are miserable sinners, living on God’s charity, and doubtful if they would be allowed to sit at His right hand, and as they tell the story of their own unworthiness the tears trickle down their cheeks. Then let the children read an account of a hanging bee, and see how happy the condemned man is, how he shouts glory hallelujah, and confesses that, though he killed his man, he is going to heaven. A child will naturally ask, why don’t the ministers murder somebody, and make a dead sure thing of it?

THE NAUGHTY BUT NICE CHURCH CHOIR.

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You may organize a church choir and think you have got it down fine, and that every member of it is pious and full of true goodness, and in such a moment as you think not you will find that one or more of them are full of the old Harry, and it will break out when you least expect it. There is no more beautiful sight to the student of nature than a church choir. To see the members sitting together, demure, devoted and pious looking, you think that there is never a thought enters their mind that is not connected with singing anthems, but sometimes you get left.

There is one church choir in Milwaukee that is about as near perfect as a choir can be. It has been organized for a long time, and has never quarreled, and the congregation swears by it. When the choir strikes a devotional attitude it is enough to make an ordinary Christian think of the angel band above, only the male singers wear whiskers, and the females wear fashionable clothes.

You would not think that this choir played tricks on each other during the sermon, but sometimes they do. The choir is furnished with the numbers of the hymns that are to be sung, by the minister, and they put a bookmark in the book at the proper place. One morning they all got up to sing, when the soprano turned pale, as an ace of spades dropped out of her hymn book, the alto nearly fainted when the queen of hearts dropped at her feet, and the rest of the pack was distributed around in the other books. They laid it onto the tenor, but he swore, while the minister was preaching, that he didn’t know one card from another.

One morning last summer, after the tenor had been playing tricks all spring on the rest of the choir, the soprano brought a chunk of shoemaker’s wax to church. The tenor was arrayed like Solomon in all his glory, with white pants, and a Seymour coat. The tenor got up to see who the girl was that came in with the old lady, and while he was up the soprano put the shoemaker’s wax on the chair, and the tenor sat down on it. They all saw it, and they waited for the result. It was an awful long prayer, and the church was hot, the tenor was no iceberg himself, and shoemaker’s wax melts at ninety eight degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TENOR ARRAYED IN ALL HIS GLORY.

The minister finally got to the amen, and read a hymn, the choir then coughed and all rose up. The chair that the tenor sat in stuck to him like a brother, and came right along and nearly broke his suspenders.

It was the tenor to bat, and as the great organ struck up he pushed the chair, looked around to see if he had saved his pants, and began to sing, and the rest of the choir came near bursting. The tenor was called out on three strikes by the umpire, and the alto had to sail in, and while she was singing the tenor began to feel of first base to see what was the matter. When he got his hand on the shoemaker’s warm wax his heart smote him, and he looked daggers at the soprano, but she put on a pious look and got her mouth ready to sing “Hold the Fort.”

Well, the tenor sat down on a white handkerchief before he went home, and he got home without anybody seeing him, and he has been, as the old saying is, “laying” for the soprano ever since to get even.

It is customary in all first-class choirs for the male singers to furnish candy for the lady singers, and the other day the tenor went to a candy factory and had a peppermint lozenger made with about half a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper in the centre of it. On Christmas he took his lozenger to church and concluded to get even with the soprano if he died for it.

Candy had been passed around, and just before the hymn was given out in which the soprano was to sing a solo, “Nearer My God to Thee,” the wicked wretch gave her the loaded lozenger. She put it in her mouth and nibbed off the edges, and was rolling it as a sweet morsel under her tongue, when the organ struck up and they all arose. While the choir was skirmishing on the first part of the verse and getting scored up for the solo, she chewed what was left of the candy and swallowed it.

Well, if a democratic torch-light procession had marched unbidden down her throat she couldn’t have been any more astonished. She leaned over to pick up her handkerchief and spit the candy out, but there was enough pepper left around the selvage of her mouth to have pickled a peck of chow-chow. It was her turn to sing, and as she rose and took the book, her eyes filled with tears, her voice trembled, her face was as red as a spanked lobster, and the way she sung that old hymn was a caution. With a sweet tremulo she sung, “A Charge to Keep I Have,” and the congregation was almost melted to tears.

As she stopped, while the organist got in a little work, she turned her head, opened her mouth and blew out her breath with a “whoosh,” to cool her mouth. The audience saw her wipe a tear away, but did not hear the sound of her voice as she “whooshed.” She wiped out some of the pepper with her handkerchief and sang the other verses with a good deal of fervor, and the choir sat down, all of the members looking at the soprano.

She called for water, the noble tenor went and got it for her, and after she had drank a couple of quarts, she whispered to him: “Young man, I will get even with you for that peppermint candy if I have to live a thousand years, and don’t you forget it,” and then they all sat down and looked pious, while the minister preached a most beautiful sermon on “Faith.” We expect that tenor will be blowed through the roof some Sunday morning, and the congregation will wonder what he is in such a hurry for.

SUPREME COURT JUDGES AND U.S. SENATORS.

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I would call your attention to a change that it seems to me should be made in the method of selecting U.S. Senators and Supreme Judges. Heretofore it has been noticeable that the men who carried the longest pole knocked down the senatorial persimmons. In the matter of the election of Judges of the Supreme Court, it has been the practice to secure men for those places at an enormous salary, when other men would be willing to do the work and board themselves. The suggestion I would make is that you pass a law letting the offices of United States Senator and Judges of the Supreme Court to the lowest bidder. This method will be economical and will secure to the state men who can legislate and judge things well enough for all practical purposes. The way times are now we must get things at panic prices or go without.

OUR CHRISTIAN NEIGHBORS HAVE GONE.

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It pains us to announce that the Young Men’s Christian Association, which has had rooms on two sides of our office for more than a year, has moved away. We do not know why they moved, as we have tried to do everything it was possible to do for their comfort, and to cheer them in their lonely life. That their proximity to the Sun office has been beneficial to them we are assured, and the closeness has not done us any hurt as we know of.

Many times when something has happened that, had it happened in La Crosse, might have caused us to be semi-profane, instead of giving way to the fiery spirit within us, and whooping it up, we have thought of our neighbors who were truly good, and have turned the matter over to our business manager, who would do the subject justice or burst a flue.

When the young Christians have given a sociable, we have always put on a resigned and pious expression and gone amongst them about the time the good bald-headed brother brought up the pail full of coffee, and the cheerful sister cut the cake.

No one has been more punctual at these free feeds than we have, though we often noticed that we never got a fair divide of the cake that was left, when they were dividing it up to carry home for the poor. We have been as little annoyed by our neighbors as we could have been by anybody that might have occupied the rooms.

It is true that at times the singing of a church tune in there when we were writing a worldly editorial has caused us to get tangled, but the piety that we have smuggled into our readers through the church music will more than atone for the wrath we have felt at the discordant music, and we have hopes the good brothers will not be averse to saying a good word for us when they feel like it.

When we lent the young Christians our sanctum as a reception room for the ladies when they gave the winter picnic to the dry goods clerks, we did feel a little hurt at finding so many different kinds of hair pins on the carpet the next morning, and the different colors of long hair on our plush chairs and raw silk ottoman would have been a dead give away on any other occasion, but for this, even, we have forgiven the young Christians, though if we ever do so again, they have got to agree to comb the lounge and the chairs before we shall ever occupy the rooms again.

There is nothing that is so hard to explain as a long hair of another color, or hair pins and blue bows and pieces of switch. They are gone and we miss them. No more shall we hear the young Christian slip on the golden stairs and roll down with his boot heel pointing heavenward, while the wail of a soul in anguish comes over the banisters, and the brother puts his hand on his pistol pocket and goes out the front door muttering a silent prayer, with blood in his eyes.

No more will the young Christian faint by the wayside as he brings back our borrowed chairs and finds a bottle and six glasses on our centre table, when he has been importuning us to deliver a temperance speech in his lecture room. Never again shall we witness the look of agony on the face of the good brother when we refuse to give five dollars toward helping discharged criminals to get a soft thing, while poor people who never committed a crime and have never been supported by the State are amongst us feeling the pangs of hunger. No more shall we be compelled to watch the hard looking citizens who frequent the reading room of the association for fear they will enter our office in the still watches of the night and sleep on the carpet with their boots on.

They are all gone. They have crossed the beautiful river, and have camped near the Christian Statesman office, where all is pure and good except the houses over on Second street, beyond the livery stable, where they never will be molested if they do not go there.

Will they be treated any better in their new home than they have been with us? Will they have that confidence in their new neighbors that they have always seemed to have in us? Well, we hope they may be always happy, and continue to do good, and when they come to die and go to St. Peter’s gate, if there is any backtalk, and they have any trouble about getting in, the good old doorkeeper is hereby assured that we will vouch for the true goodness and self-sacrificing devotion of the Milwaukee Young Men’s Christian Association, and he is asked to pass them in and charge it up to the Sun.

BUTTERMILK BIBBERS.

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The immense consumption of buttermilk as a drink, retailed over the bars of saloons, has caused temperance people to rejoice. It is said that over two thousand gallons a day are sold in Milwaukee. There is one thing about buttermilk, in its favor, and that is, it does not intoxicate, and it takes the place of liquor as a beverage. A man may drink a quart of buttermilk, and while he may feel like a calf that has been sucking, and want to stand in a fence corner and bleat, or kick up his heels and run around a pasture, he does not become intoxicated and throw a beer keg through a saloon window.

Another thing, buttermilk does not cause the nose to become red, and the consumer’s breath does not smell like the next day after a sangerfest. The complexion of the nose of a buttermilk drinker assumes a pale hue which is enchanting, and while his breath may smell like a baby that has nursed too much and got sour, the smell does not debar his entrance to a temperance society.

FISHING FOR PIECES OF WOMEN.

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There are lots of ludicrous scenes to be observed on the railroads and conductors are loaded with stories that would cause a marble monument to keep its sides a laughing. Some day we are going to borrow a conductor, and take him out in the woods, and place a revolver to his head and make him deliver a lot of stories. The other day as conductor Fred Underwood’s train from Chicago, arrived on the trestle work on the south side, the whistle blew, the air break was touched off, and the train came up standing so quick that a woman lost her false teeth in the sleeper, and everybody’s hair stood up like a mule’s ears. Every window had a head out, and when the conductor got out on the platform he saw the engineer and fireman on the ends of the ties looking down into the mud and water, shading their eyes as though looking for the eclipse.

There, sticking out of the mud were two human legs, and as one leg had a piece of listing around it, just above the veal, the conductor knew, instinctively, that the surface indications showed that there was a woman in there. Then he thought that the engine had probably struck a female, and tore her all to pieces, and of course he knew that the company would expect him to bring home enough for a mess, or a funeral. Spitting on his hands he called a brakeman with a transom hook out of the sleeper, to fish with, they rolled up their trousers and waded in, after telling a porter to bring a blanket to put the pieces in. The brakeman got there first and took hold of one foot, when the conductor got hold of the brakeman’s coat tail and pulled. The passengers turned away sick, expecting to see the mangled remains brought to the surface. They pulled, and directly the balance of the deceased came up. It was an Irish lady, with a tin pail, who had been on the way to take her husband’s dinner to him, and she stood on one side to let the train pass, and had lost her balance and fallen into the mud. As her head came out of the mud, she squirted water out of her mouth, kicked the brakeman in the ear and said,

“Lave go of me, I am a dacent woman!”

The conductor asked her if she was hurt.

“Hurted is it,” said she, “Ivery bone in my body is kilt intirely, and I have lost me tay cup,” and she looked in her tin pail in distress.

After vainly trying to get the conductor to wade in and search for her “tay cup,” she permitted them to assist her into the car, where an old doctor from Racine volunteered to examine her to see if she was mortally injured. He put his hand on her shoulder and asked her if she was in any pain.

“Divil the pain, except the loss of me tay cup,” said she, “and kape yer owld hands off me, for I am a dacent woman.”

She shook herself in the car and got mud all over everybody, and finally took her pail and jumped off at a crossing before arriving at the depot. As the train came into the depot ten minutes late, and the conductor jumped off, all mud from head to foot, as though he had been playing spaniel and retrieving a wounded duck, Supt. Atkins looked at his clothes and said, “Where in —— have you been all the time?” The conductor took a wisp of straw to wipe himself off, and as he threw it under a car he said he had been in the artificial propagation of the human race. In fact he had been engaged in the noble work of raising woman to a higher sphere. He was allowed to go on probation and wash himself. The brakeman went down there the next day and was fishing in the same hole. He said he didn’t know but there might be more woman in there, but they say he was after the “tay cup.”

NEARLY BROKE UP THE BALL.

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A party of well meaning young people from Ripon nearly broke up a dance at Hazen’s cheese factory, out in the country a spell ago. The people around there are quiet, sober country people, who confine themselves in dancing, to plain quadrilles and country dances, with an occasional monnie musk, or a plain waltz. These young Ripon people are on the dance bigger than a wolf, and they have learned all the Boston dips, and Saratoga bends, and Newport colic dances, and everything new. There is one dance they have learned which is peculiar to say the least. It is a species of waltz, but the couple get together so odd that a person who sees it for the first time just leans against something and fans himself. When the music strikes up a waltz the young man opens his arms and doubles himself up like a boy with the cholera infantum, his hind leg cramps and his head lops over on one side, and he looks sick, his back humps up like a case of chronic inflammatory rheumatism, and he is ready. The girl who is with him, when he begins to have spasms, at once seems to go into a trance. Her back gets up like a cat, she bends over towards him, her forward leg gets out of joint at the knee, her neck takes a cramp, her mouth opens and she lolls, her eyes roll like a steer that has turned the yoke, and just before she dies she falls into the arms of the deceased and they are ready. For a moment they stand and squirm like angle-worms on a hook, and froth at the mouth, and look, as they stand there, like a pile driver that has been run into by an engine. They teeter up and down a little, and then fly off on a tangent, and they flop around in unexpected places among the other dancers, jump like a box car, bump against other couples, and at every bump they are driven closer together, until they are so near that it does seem as though they will have to be pried apart with a handspike; they look into each other’s eyes as though they would bite, and they keep going around till their backs are broke. Well, a party of these kind of dancers went to the cheese factory where the country people were gathered, and after dancing a few quadrilles, the fiddlers struck up an old fashioned waltz. While the visiting dancers were going into spasms to get ready to wade in, the floor filled with the country couples, who were waltzing around old fashioned, when all of a sudden those Ripon people began to work. They flopped across the cheese factory, knocked down a couple from Pickett’s Corners, caromed on a fellow and his girl from Brandon and sent them against a barrel of lemonade, glanced across the hall and struck an old lady amidships that had just started to call her girl off the floor because she was afraid the girl would catch those Ripon cramps, knocked her under a bench, where she lay and called for her husband Isaiah, to come and pick her up in a basket. In less than two minutes all the other dancers hauled off, and stood on benches and looked at them. Some of the country girls hid their heads and said they wanted to go home. The visitors slid around the hall, caught each other on the fly, run the bases, and come under the wire neck and neck, just as the man who played second fiddle fell over the base viol in a dead faint, and the man that played the piccalo rolled under the music stand, striken with apoplexy. The manager of the dance called a constable who was present, and told him to arrest the party, and handcuff them and take them to the Oshkosh insane asylum, where they had escaped. The young men explained that they were not crazy, and that it was only a new kind of dance, and they were reluctantly allowed to remain, on condition that they “wouldn’t cut up any more of them city monkey shines, not afore folks.”

SUMMER RESORTING.

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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.

THE RESORTER.

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 back 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 lunancy. 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 than 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 stairs 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.

PECK’S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.

HIS PA JOKES HIM.

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“What on earth is that you have got on your upper lip?” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came in and began to peel a rutabaga, and his upper lip hung down over his teeth, and was covered with something that looked like shoemaker’s wax, “You look as though you had been digging potatoes with your nose.”

“O, that is some of Pa’s darn smartness. I asked him if he knew anything that would make a boy’s moustache grow, and he told me the best thing he ever tried was tar, and for me to rub it on thick when I went to bed, and wash it off in the morning. I put it on last night, and by gosh I can’t wash it off. Pa told me all I had to do was to use a scouring brick, and it would come off, and I used the brick, and it took the skin off, and the tar is there yet, and say, does my lip look very bad?”

The grocery man told him it was the worst looking lip he ever saw, but he could cure it by rubbing a little cayenne pepper in the tar. He said the tar would neutralize the pepper, and the pepper would loosen the tar, and act as a cooling lotion to the lacerated lip. The boy went to a can of pepper behind the counter, and stuck his finger in and rubbed a lot of it on his lip, and then his hair began to raise, and he began to cry, and rushed to the water-pail and ran his face into the water to wash off the pepper. The grocery man laughed, and when the boy had got the pepper washed off, and had resumed his rutabaga, he said:

“That seals your fate. No man ever trifles with the feelings of the bold buccanner of the Spanish main, without living to rue it. I will lay for you, old man, and don’t you forget it. Pa thought he was smart when he got me to put tar on my lip, to bring my moustache out, and to-day he lays on a bed of pain, and to-morrow your turn will come. You will regret that you did not get down on your knees and beg my pardon. You will be sorry that you did not prescribe cold cream for my bruised lip, instead of cayenne pepper. Beware, you base twelve ounces to the pound huckster, you gimlet-eyed seller of dog sausage, you sanded sugar idiot, you small potato three card monte sleight of hand rotten egg fiend, you villain that sells smoked sturgeon and dogfish for smoked halibut. The avenger is on your track.”

“Look here, young man, don’t you threaten me, or I will take you by the ear and walk you through green fields, and beside still waters to the front door and kick your pistol pocket clear around so you can wear it for a watch pocket in your vest. No boy can frighten me by crimus. But tell me, how did you get even with your Pa?”

“Well, give me a glass of cider and we will be friends and I will tell you. Thanks! Gosh, but that cider is made out of mouldy dried apples and sewer water,” and he took a handful of layer raisins off the top of a box to take the taste out of his mouth, and while the grocer charged a peck of rutabagas, a gallon of cider and two pounds of raisins to the boy’s Pa, the boy proceeded:

“You see, Pa likes a joke the best of anybody you ever saw, if it is on somebody else, but he kicks like a steer when it is on him. I asked him this morning if it wouldn’t be a good joke to put some soft soap on the front step, so the letter-carrier would slip up and spill hisself, and Pa said it would be elegant. Pa is a Democrat, and he thinks that anything that will make it unpleasant for Republican office holders, is legitimate, and he encouraged me to paralyze the letter-carrier. The letter-carrier is as old a man as Pa, and I didn’t want to humiliate him, but I just wanted Pa to give his consent, so he couldn’t kick if he got caught in his own trap. You see? Well, this morning the minister and two of the deacons called on Pa, to have a talk with him about his actions in church, on two or three occasions, when he pulled out the pack of cards with his handkerchief, and played the music box, and they had a pretty hot time in the back parlor, and finally they settled it, and were going to sing a hymn, when Pa handed them a little hymn book, and the minister opened it and turned pale and said, ‘what’s this?’ and they looked at it, and it was a book of Hoyle’s games instead of a hymn book. Gosh, wasn’t the minister mad! He had started to read a hymn and he quit after he had read two lines where it said, ‘In a game of four-handed euchre, never trump your partner’s ace, but rely on the ace to take the trick on suit.’ Pa was trying to explain how the book came to be there, when the minister and the deacons started out, and then I poured the two quart tin pail full of soft soap on the front step. It was this white soap, just the color of the step, and when I got it spread I went down in the basement. The visitors came out and Pa was trying to explain to them, about Hoyle, when one of the deacons stepped on the soap and his feet flew up and he struck on his pants and slid down the steps. The minister said ‘great heavens, deacon, are you hurt? let me assist you,’ and he took two quick steps, and you have seen these fellows in a nigger show that kick each other head over heels and fall on their ears, and stand on their heads and turn around like a top. The minister’s feet slipped and the next I saw he was standing on his head in his hat, and his legs were sort of wilted and fell limp by his side, and he fell over on his stomach. You talk about spreading the gospel in heathen lands. It is nothing to the way you can spread it with two quarts of soft soap. The minister didn’t look pious a bit, when he was trying to catch the railing he looked as though he wanted to murder every man on earth, but it may be he was tired.

“Well, Pa he was paralyzed, and he and the other deacon rushed out to pick up the minister and the first old man, and when they struck the steps they went kiting. Pa’s feet somehow slipped backwards, and he turned a summersault and struck full length on his back, and one heel was across the minister’s neck, and he slid down the steps, and the other deacon fell all over the other three, and Pa swore at them, and it was the worst looking lot of pious people I ever saw. I think if the minister had been in the woods somewhere, where nobody could have heard him, he would have used language. They all seemed mad at each other. The hired girl told Ma there was three tramps out on the sidewalk fighting Pa, and Ma she took the broom and started to help Pa, and I tried to stop Ma, ’cause her constitution is not very strong and I didn’t want her to do any flying trapeze business, but I couldn’t stop her, and she went out with the broom and a towel tied around her head. Well, I don’t know where Ma did strike, but when she came in she said she had palpitation of the heart, but that was not the place where she put the arnica. O, but she did go through the air like a bullet through cheese, and when she went down the steps a-bumpity-bump, I felt sorry for Ma. The minister had got so he could set up on the sidewalk, with his back against the lower step, when Ma came sliding down, and one of the heels of her gaiters hit the minister in the hair, and the other foot went right through between his arm and his side, and the broom liked to pushed his teeth down his throat. But he was not mad at Ma. As soon as he see it was Ma he said, ‘Why, sister, the wicked stand in slippery places, don’t they?’ and Ma she was mad and said for him to let go her stocking, and then Pa was mad and he said, ‘look-a-here you sky-pilot, this thing has gone far enough,’ and then a policeman came along and first he thought they were all drunk, but he found they were respectable, and he got a chip and scraped the soap off of them, and they went home, and Pa and Ma they got in the house some way, and just then the letter-carrier came along, but he didn’t have any letters for us, and he didn’t come onto the steps, and then I went up stairs and I said, ‘Pa, don’t you think it is real mean, after you and I fixed the soap on the steps for the letter-carrier, he didn’t come on the step at all,’ and Pa was scraping the soap off his pants with a piece of shingle, and the hired girl was putting liniment on Ma, and heating it in for palpitation of the heart, and Pa said, ‘You dam idjut, no more of this, or I’ll maul the liver out of you,’ and I asked him if he didn’t think soft soap would help a moustache to grow, and he picked up Ma’s work-basket and threw it at my head, as I went down stairs, and I came over here. Don’t you think my Pa is unreasonable to get mad at a little joke that he planned himself?”

The grocery man said he didn’t know, and the boy went out with a pair of skates over his shoulder, and the grocery man is wondering what joke the boy will play on him to get even for the cayenne pepper.

GATHERED WAISTS!

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Andrews’ Bazar says: “Gathered waists are very much worn.” If the men would gather the waists carefully they would not be worn so much. Some men go to work gathering a waist just as they would go to work washing sheep, or raking and binding. They ought to gather as though it was eggs done up in a funnel-shaped brown paper at a grocery.

CHURCH KENO.

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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 nineteen 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!”

“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 taking advice from pious looking traveling men. They call her “Little Keno” now.

THE OLD SWEET SONGS.

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A Boston girl sings: “What is home without a mother,” while the old lady is mending her daughter’s stockings. There is something sweet about those old songs.

FAILURE OF A SOLID INSTITUTION.

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We are astonished to see that a Boston dealer in canned goods has failed. If there is one branch of business that ought to be solid it is that of canning fruits and things, for there must be the almightiest profit on it that there is on anything. It must be remembered that the stuff is canned when it is not salable in its natural state.

If the canners took tomatoes, for instance, when they first came around, at half a dollar for six, and canned them, there would be some excuse for charging twenty-five cents for a tin thing full, but they wait until the vines are so full of tomatoes that the producer will pay the cartage if you will haul them away, and then the tomatoes are dipped into hot water so the skin will drop off and they are chucked into cans that cost two cents each, and you pay two shillings for them, when you get hungry for tomatoes. The same way with peas, and peaches, and everything.

Did you ever try to eat canned peas? They are always old back numbers that are as hard and tasteless as chips, and are canned after they have been dried for seed. We bought a can of peas once for two shillings and couldn’t crack them with a nut cracker. But they were not a dead loss, as we used them the next fall for buck shot. Actually, we shot a coon with a charge of those peas, and he came down and struck the water, and died of the cholera morbus the next day.

Talk of canned peaches; in the course of a brilliant career of forty years we have never seen only six cans of peaches that were worth the powder to blast them open. A man that will invent a can opener that will split open one of these pale, sickly, hard hearted canned peaches, that swim around in a pint of slippery elm juice in a tin can, has got a fortune. And they have got to canning pumpkin, and charging money for it.

Why, for a dollar, a canning firm can buy pumpkins enough to fill all the tin cans that they can make in a year, and yet they charge a fellow twenty cents for a can of pumpkin, and then the canning establishment fails. It must be that some raw pumpkin has soured on the hands of the Boston firm, or may be, and now we thing we are on the right track to ferret out the failure, it may be that the canning of Boston baked beans is what caused the stoppage.

We had read of Boston baked beans since school days, and had never seen any till four years ago, when we went to a picnic and bought a can to take along. We knew how baked beans ought to be cooked from years of experience, but supposed the Boston bean must hold over every other bean, so when the can was opened and we found that every bean was separate from every other bean, and seemed to be out on its own recognizance, and that they were as hard as a flint, we gave them to the children to play marbles with, and soured on Boston baked beans. Probably it was canning Boston beans that broke up the canning establishment.

REGISTRY OF ELECTORS.

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The registry law has proved a conspicuous failure, inasmuch as it has taken ten years of persistent efforts by its use to make a change in the admistration. I would suggest that you amend the registry law by providing that all qualified voters have their ears punched, immediately after voting, by the inspectors of elections, the same as conductors punch tickets. This method will obviate the difficulties heretofore experienced, and check illegal voting and prevent repeating.

ABOUT HELL.

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An item is going the rounds of the papers, to illustrate how large the sun is, and how hot it is, which asserts that if an icicle a million miles long, and a hundred thousand miles through, should be thrust into one of the burning cavities of the sun, it would be melted in the hundredth part of a second, and that it would not cause as much “sissing” as a drop of water on a hot griddle.

By this comparison we can realize that the sun is a big thing, and we can form some idea of what kind of a place it would be to pass the summer months. In contemplating the terrible heat of the sun, we are led to wonder why those whose duty it is to preach a hell, hereafter, have not argued that the sun is the place where sinners will go to when they die.

It is not our desire to inaugurate any reform in religious matters, but we realize what a discouraging thing it must be for preachers to preach hell and have nothing to show for it. As the business is now done, they are compelled to draw upon their imagination for a place of endless punishment, and a great many people, who would be frightened out of their boots if the minister could show them hell as he sees it, look upon his talk as a sort of dime novel romance.

They want something tangible on which they can base their belief, and while the ministers do everything in their power to encourage sinners by picturing to them the lake of fire and brimstone, where boat-riding is out of the question unless you paddle around in a cauldron kettle, it seems as though their labors would be lightened if they could point to the sun, on a hot day in August, and say to the wicked man that unless he gets down on his knees and says his “Now I lay me,” and repents and is sprinkled, and chips in pretty flush towards the running expenses of the church, and stands his assessments like a thoroughbred, that he will wake up some morning, and find himself in the sun, blistered from Genesis to Revelations, thirsty as a harvest hand and not a brewery within a million miles, begging for a zinc ulster to cool his parched hind legs.

Such an argument, with an illustration right on the blackboard of the sky, in plain sight, would strike terror to the sinner, and he would want to come into the fold too quick. What the religion of this country wants, to make it take the cake, is a hell that the wayfaring man, though a Democrat or a Greenbacker, can see with the naked eye. The way it is now, the sinner, if he wants to find out anything about the hereafter, has to take it second handed, from some minister or deacon who has not seen it himself, but has got his idea of it from some other fellow who maybe dreamed it out.

Some deacon tells a sinner all about the orthodox hell, and the sinner does not know whether to believe him or not. The deacon may have lied to the sinner some time in a horse trade, or in selling him goods, and beat him, and how does he know but the same deacon is playing a brace game on him on the hereafter, or playing him for a sardine.

Now, if the people who advance these ideas of heaven or hell, had a license to point to the moon, the nice, cool moon, as heaven, which would be plausible, to say the least, and say that it was heaven, and prove it, and could prove that the sun was the other place, which looks reasonable, according to all we have heard about ’tother place, the moon would be so full there would not be standing room, and they would have to turn Republicans away, while the sun would be playing to empty benches, and there would only be a few editors there who got in on passes.

Of course, during a cold winter, when the thermometer was forty or fifty degrees below zero, and everybody was blocked in, and coal was up to seventeen dollars a ton, the cause of religion would not prosper as much as it would in summer, because when you talked to a sinner about leading a different life or he would go to the sun, he would look at his coal pile and say that he didn’t care a continental how soon he got there, but these discouragements would not be any greater than some that the truly good people have to contend with now, and the average the year round would be largely in favor of going to the moon.

The moon is very popular now, even, and if it is properly advertised as a celestial paradise, where only good people could get their work in, and where the wicked could not enter on any terms, there would be a great desire to take the straight and narrow way to the moon, and the path to the wicked sun would be grown over with sand burs, and scorched with lava, and few would care to take passage by that route. Anyway, this thing is worth looking into.

PREPARING FOR WAR.

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The Sun is no alarmist, but it can see in recent events what it believes to be a preparation for war. All of the manufactories of fire arms and cartridges are working night and day, and the Oneida community have just received an order to immediately can 24,000 cans of baked beans. When the war will break out we do not know, but all this fixed amunition is not being fixed for no 4th of July. It is trouble.

A TONY SLAUGHTER HOUSE.

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A Milwaukee paper copies what THE SUN said about killing hogs while under the influence of chloroform, at Keine & Wilson’s packing house, and intimates that it is all a lie. Have we lived to this age to have our word doubted by a Milwaukee editor? This is too much. Why, bless the dear man, the half has not been told. The firm we speak of is desirous of building up a trade for gilt edged pork and hams, so every improvement known to the trade is inaugurated. We did not think it necessary to describe the whole process, but now that our word is doubted, it is necessary to do so. When the late lamented hog is transferred from the parlor where he was chloroformed, his body is gently, yet firmly placed in a gold lined tank, filled with boiling Florida water and cologne, where the body remains until the bristles become loose, when it is transferred to a table covered with purple velvet, and the bristles are removed by the gentlemanly ushers, dressed in the fashions of the time of George III, armed with gold candle sticks, studded with diamonds. Then the body is taken by easy stages, into the presence of the intestine transporter, who reclines upon a downy couch. He raises up, brushes a particle of dust from his sleeve, and with a silver knife cuts the hog from Dan to Beersheba, and the patent insides are received on a silver salver, and divided among attendant maidens. The inside of the hog is washed with bay rum, and sweet majorum is put in. Then the hog is removed and cut up. The portions salted are salted for keeps, and the hams and bacon are smoked in a room filled with incense, and when the smoked meat comes out it is good enough for a king, or a queen, or a Milwaukee editor. Lie, indeed! We should like to see ourselves lying for one hog.

AN ARM THAT IS NOT RELIABLE.

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A young fellow about nineteen, who is going with his first girl, and who lives on the West Side, has got the symptoms awfully. He just thinks of nothing else but his girl, and when he can be with her,—which is seldom, on account of the old folks.—he is there, and when he cannot be there, he is there or thereabouts, in his mind. He had been trying for three months to think of something to give his girl for a Christmas present, but he couldn’t make up his mind what article would cause her to think of him the most, so the day before Christmas he unbosomed himself to his employer, and asked his advice as to the proper article to give. The old man is bald-headed and mean. “You want to give her something that will be a constant reminder of you?” “Yes,” he said, “that was what was the matter.” “Does she have any corns?” asked the old wretch. The boy said he had never inquired into the condition of her feet, and wanted to know what corns had to do with it. The old man said that if she had corns, a pair of shoes about two sizes too small would cause her mind to dwell on him a good deal. The boy said shoes wouldn’t do. The old man hesitated a moment, scratched his head, and finally said:

“I have it! I suppose, sir, when you are alone with her, in the parlor, you put your arm around her waist; do you not, sir?”

The young man blushed, and said that was about the size of it.

“I presume she enjoys that part of the discourse, eh?”

The boy said that, as near as he could tell, by the way she acted, she was not opposed to being held up.

“Then, sir, I can tell you of an article that will make her think of you in that position all the time, from the moment she gets up in the morning till she retires.”

“Is there any attachment to it that will make her dream of me all night?” asked the boy.

“No, sir! Don’t be a hog,” said the bad man.

“Then what is it?”

The old man said one word, “Corset!”

The young man was delighted, and he went to a store to buy a nice corset.

“What size do you want?” asked the girl who waited on him.

That was a puzzler. He didn’t know they came in sizes. He was about to tell her to pick out the smallest size, when he happened to think of something.

“Take a tape measure and measure my arm; that will just fit.”

“IT IS F-F-FOUR SIZES TOO B-B-BIG.”

The girl looked wise as though she had been there herself, found that it was a twenty-two inch corset the boy wanted, and he went home and wrote a note and sent it with the corset to the girl. He didn’t hear anything about it till the following Sunday, when he called on her. She received him coldly, and handed him the corset, saying, with a tear in her eye, that she had never expected to be insulted by him. He told her he had no intention of insulting her; that he could think of nothing that would cause her to think of the gentle pressure of his arm around her waist but a corset, but if she felt insulted he would take his leave, give the corset to some poor family, and go drown himself.

He was about to go away, when she burst out crying, and sobbed out the following words, wet with salt brine.

“It was v-v-v-very thoughtful of y-y-you, but I couldn’t feel it! It is f-f-four sizes too b-b-big! Why didn’t you get number eight? You are silent, you cannot answer, enough?”

They instinctively found their way to the sofa; mutual explanation followed; he measured her waist again; saw where he had made a mistake by his fingers lapping over on the first turn, and he vowed, by the beard of the prophet, he would change it for another, if she had not worn it and got it soiled. They are better now.

THE BOY AND THE GOAT.

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A man on King Street gave a boy a goat the other day, and he tied a rope around its neck to lead it home. The boy wanted to go through the gate, but as the goat concluded to jump over the fence and pull the boy through between the pickets, he let the goat have its own way. The boy got through the fence in instalments, leaving his shirt collar and one pants leg on the pickets, the goat dragged him out into the middle of the street, and then there occurred a sanguinary encounter to see whether the boy or the goat should boss the moving. At one time the spectators thought the goat would take the boy home. The animal used the boy for a cultivator, and they tore up the street like hands working on the road, till the goat slipped the rope over his head, and then the boy gathered himself up by the armful, and went and told his mother that he got his rope back anyway. She combed him with a piece of barrel.

PECK’S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.

HIS PA GETS MAD!

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“I was down to the drug store this morning and saw your Ma buying a lot of court-plaster, enough to make a shirt I should think. What’s she doing with so much court-plaster?” asked the grocery man of the bad boy, as he came in and pulled off his boots by the stove and emptied out a lot of snow that had collected as he walked through a drift, which melted and made a bad smell.

“O, I guess she was going to patch Pa up so he will hold water. Pa’s temper got him into the worst muss you ever see, last night. If that museum was here now they would hire Pa and exhibit him as the tattooed man. I tell you, I have got too old to be mauled as though I was a kid, and any man who attacks me from this out, wants to have his peace made with the insurance companies, and know that his calling and election is sure, because I am a bad man and don’t you forget it.” And the boy pulled on his boots and looked so cross and desperate that the grocer-man asked him if he wouldn’t try a little new cider.

“Good heavens!” said the grocery man, as the boy swallowed the cider, and his face resumed its natural look, and the piratical frown disappeared with the cider. “You have not stabbed your father have you? I have feared that one thing would bring on another, with you, and that you would yet be hung.”

“Naw, I haven’t stabbed him. It was another cat that stabbed him. You see, Pa wants me to do all the work around the house. The other day he bought a load of kindling wood, and told me to carry it into the basement. I had not been educated up to kindling wood, and I didn’t do it. When supper time came, and Pa found that I had not carried in the kindling wood, he had a hot box, and told me if that wood was not in when he came back from the lodge, that he would warm my jacket. Well, I tried to hire some one to carry it in, and got a man to promise to come in the morning and carry it in and take his pay in groceries, and I was going to buy the groceries here and have them charged to Pa. But that wouldn’t help me out that night. I knew when Pa came home he would search for me. So I slept in the back hall on a cot. But I didn’t want Pa to have all his trouble for nothing, so I borrowed an old torn cat that my chum’s old maid aunt owns, and put the cat in my bed. I thought if Pa came into my room after me, and found that by his unkindness I had changed to a torn cat, he would be sorry. That is the biggest cat you ever see, and the worst fighter in our ward. It isn’t afraid of anything, and can whip a New Foundland dog quicker than you could put sand in a barrel of sugar. Well, about eleven o’clock I heard Pa tumbing over the kindling wood, and I knew by the remark he made as the wood slid around under him, that there was going to be a cat fight real quick. He came up to Ma’s room, and sounded Ma as to whether Hennery had retired to his virtuous couch. Pa is awful sarcastic when he tries to be. I could hear him take off his clothes, and hear him say, as he picked up a trunk strap, ‘I guess I will go up to his room and watch the smile on his face, as he dreams of angels. I yearn to press him to my aching bosom.’ I thought to myself, mebbe you won’t yearn so much directly. He come up stairs, and I could hear him breathing hard. I looked around the corner and could see he just had on his shirt and pants, and his suspenders were hanging down, and his bald head shown like a calcium light just before it explodes. Pa went into my room, and up to the bed, and I could hear him say, ‘Come out here and bring in that kindling wood or I will start a fire on your base burner with this strap.’ And then there was a yowling such as I never heard before, and Pa said, ‘Helen Blazes,’ and the furniture in my room began to fall around and break. O, my! I think Pa took the torn cat right by the neck, the way he does me, and that left the cat’s feet free to get in their work. By the way the cat squawled as though it was being choked I know Pa had him by the neck. I suppose the cat thought Pa was a whole flock of New Foundland dogs, and the cat had a record on dogs, and it kicked awful. Pa’s shirt was no protection at all in a cat fight, and the cat just walked all around Pa’s stomach, and Pa yelled ‘police,’ and ‘fire,’ and ‘turn on the hose,’ and he called Ma, and the cat yowled. If Pa had had presence of mind enough to have dropped the cat, or rolled it up in the mattrass, it would have been all right, but a man always gets rattled in time of danger, and he held on to the cat and started down stairs yelling murder, and he met Ma coming up.

“I guess Ma’s night cap or something frightened the cat more, cause he stabbed Ma on the night-shirt with one hind foot, and Ma said ‘mercy on us,’ and she went back, and Pa stumbled on a hand-sled that was on the stairs, and they all fell down, and the cat got away and went down in the coal bin and yowled all night. Pa and Ma went into their room, and I guess they annointed themselves with vasaline, and Pond’s extract, and I went and got into my bed, cause it was cold out in the hall, and the cat had warmed my bed as well as it had warmed Pa. It was all I could do to go to sleep, with Pa and Ma talking all night, and this morning I came down the back stairs, and haven’t been to breakfast, cause I don’t want to see Pa when he is vexed. You let the man that carries in the kindling wood have six shillings worth of groceries, and charge them to Pa. I have passed the kindling wood period in a boy’s life, and have arrived at the coal period. I will carry in coal, but I draw the line at kindling wood.”