RURAL FELICITY.

MR. PHILETUS R. THROOP is a well-known insurance agent of Burlington. He is a perfect steam engine to work, and every Summer, when he feels about worn out by his labors, he goes out to the farm of his Uncle George and rests a couple of weeks. He went out last Summer, as usual, but he only remained a couple of days, and on his return he was heard to say that he would never, never, never, go into the country again if he died for a breath of fresh air. The causes which led to this determination were as follows:

You see, he got a late start on his last trip out into the country, so that when he reached his Uncle George’s farm it was about nine o’clock in the evening, and the family, after the good old-fashioned custom, had gone to bed; not a light was visible about the house. Mr. Throop got out of the wagon in which a neighboring farmer had brought him, before they reached the house, so that the noisy wheels would not apprise any waking member of the fact that a visitor had come. Then he climbed over the fence and skipped briskly across lots to reach the house, and give Uncle George and the family a good surprise. Mr. Throop was not so familiar with the farm as he ought to have been to attempt such a nocturnal expedition. He had not gone twenty steps before he stepped into a great ditch, and had time to say all he could remember of the child’s prayer, “Now I lay me,” before he reached the bottom, and then had plenty of time to compose and repeat a much more appropriate and longer one before he crawled out again. After that he went more slowly, picking his steps with the greatest care, and straining his eyes as he peered into the darkness to distinguish noxious objects. But it was very dark, and of course appearances were unusually deceitful. He would walk around a patch of young clover or luxuriant turf, his heart standing still the while with the terror of having so narrowly escaped walking into a great well, and the next minute he would, after peering ahead of him until his eyes ached and sparks of fire danced before them, walk with the greatest confidence and composure into a pile of last year’s peabrush seven feet high, knocking off his hat, scratching his face and tearing his clothes. And then such a time as he would have hunting for his hat, and all the imaginable and unimaginable things that he would pick up in mistake for that useful article of apparel, can be far better imagined than described. And once he ran into a fence and nearly put his eye out on the end of a great stake that was standing out like the point of a chevaux de frise. And just before he got to the barn-yard he was amazed to discern a creek flowing between him and the fence, and after vainly hunting in the dark for a bridge, he pulled off his boots and trousers, and, holding the bundle of clothes high in his arms, waded across a stubblefield! so dry, every foot of it, that he might have lighted a match on it anywhere. He thought every tooth he had would chatter out of his head before he could get into his clothes again. Then he got into the barn-yard. He knew it was the barn-yard after he got into it, because in less than a minute after he had climbed the fence, he fell over a slumbering cow, and before he could get up, the frightened animal rose to her feet and bucked Mr. Throop over her head. Then he heard a cow get up just before him, and another just behind him, and two or three to the right and left, and when a cow with a bell that could be heard two miles got up and began galloping around the yard stirring up the rest of the cows, Mr. Throop would have willingly given up the best risk he had ever taken for a lantern. It wasn’t safe to stand still, so he took his hat in his hand and went along, swooping it around him in great circles, shouting “Swoosh! Hi! Hooey! Scat! Whish! Whoosh! Ste-boy!” as he went along. He only hit one cow with his hat, however, and the animal thus rudely assailed reached out and kicked him in the groin and doubled him up, and with a farewell flourish hit him on the side of the face with the end of a tail so full of cockle burs that it weighed twenty-seven pounds and knocked him so flat he thought he never would want to get up again. Then he saw what he supposed was the house, looming up black and quiet before him, and he thought his troubles were over. They had just begun.

The next minute he stepped under an open shed where the agricultural implements had been stored during the Winter. The first intimation he had of this was by falling over a plow. He scraped both shins, from the instep to the knee, across the edge of the share, and one of the handles caught him under the chin and jabbed his head up and back so suddenly that he heard his neck crack, and the other hunched him in the floating ribs and knocked enough breath out of him to start a tornado, in a small way but on a safe basis. He thought he never would get away from that plow, for he no sooner got one leg out of one entanglement of draught-irons, coulter, share and handles, than he got the other one snarled up in a still more hopeless maze of mould-board, clevis, sole-plate and beam, besides several other parts that he didn’t know the names of. And when at last he vanquished the plow he lost himself in a cultivator, and wore himself out trying to crawl through the gang of coulters. When he got clear of that he fell in with a reaper and mower, and after prodding his instep into indescribable agony by thrusting it against the sickle guards as he fell, he caught hold of the reel, which, of course, immediately whirled with his weight. But it chanced that quite a large colony of barn-yard fowls had used the reel as their roosting place during the Winter, and as it whirled round the amazed and bewildered Mr. Throop rained down upon himself a terrific tempest of hens and roosters, Brahmas, light Cochins, ungainly Shanghais, and a variety of other breeds in such a tumult of squawkings and cacklings, and flappings of wings, and vague but vigorous clawings of feet, that he didn’t care whether he got out alive or not, and, indeed, before he got through with the reel he knocked himself down with its vindictive slats seven times. Then he got away from that and impaled himself on a horse rake, and fell over the handle of a fanning mill, and nearly killed himself in the horse-power of a thrashing machine, and finally got into the house yard, felt his way to the house, and fell exhausted and speechless against the front door with a diamond-shaped harrow hanging around his neck. And Uncle George, awakened by the thump at the door, opened an up-stairs window and demanded who was there, and receiving no answer shot twice at the recumbent form of Mr. Throop with his revolver. And when they came down with lights and opened the door, they were as greatly surprised as Mr. Throop could have wished.