Peck's Sunshine Part 19

PRIZE FIGHTING AND MORMONISM.

The trouble that is usually experienced by prize fighters in finding a place where they can fight unmolested must have been apparent to all, and _The Sun_ would suggest a way out of the difficulty.

Let the government set apart a portion of the public domain, near some military post, and enact a law that prize fighting shall be no more unlawful than polygamy, or stealing from the government. If prize fighters can have the same immunity from arrest and punishment that polygamists and defaulters have, it is all they ask, and it seems not unreasonable to ask it.

Certainly a prize fighter in whipping a friend to raise money to support one wife and one set of children, when the other fellow is willing to take the chances of being whipped, is not as bad as a praying old cuss who marries from twenty to forty feeble minded females and raises a flock of narrow headed children to turn loose after a while, with not much more brain than goslings.

If two men want to go out and enjoy "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," by mauling each others faces, why should they be pulled, and let an official who steals half a million dollars from the government, give a New Year's reception? The thing does not look right to a man who believes that this is a free country, and that every man is endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which is the right to pay his debts.

Another thing, the government, if it decided to set apart certain ground for prize fights, might create the office of "referee," and appoint some honest, square man, who applied for a consulship and there was no vacancy, to the position, with a good salary. What prize fighters need is a referee that can be depended on, and it would be no worse to appoint a government referee than it would to give breech loading arms and ammunition to Indians to go on the war-path with.

Prize fighting does not do any harm. If one of the princ.i.p.als is killed, which does not often occur, the government is so much ahead. The government would furnish the poison if Mormons would kill themselves.

Why not furnish prize fighters an opportunity to climb the golden stairs? The fact of it is, as a people we oppose prize fighting because it is "brutal," and we go to a wrestling match where men hurt themselves twice as much as they would if they stood up and knocked each other down. We cry out against prize fights, and yet a majority of the male population would walk ten miles to see a prize fight when they wouldn't ride a mile to attend church.

We wish men would not fight, but if they want to they should either be allowed to, or else all other kinds of foolishness should be suppressed.

If every respectable business man in this country could box as well as Sullivan there would not be as much crime as there is to-day. Suppose all the men that have been robbed in the past year by cowardly sand baggers, could have "put up their hands," and knocked the robbers into the middle of next week, wouldn't there be fewer headaches and heartaches, fewer widows mourning their murdered husbands, and fewer orphans?

It is against the law to carry weapons, and yet if a man opens a boxing-school to teach men to defend themselves, and fit them so they can knock the hind sights off a robber, he is frowned upon. We want to see the time when every young man has got muscle, and knows how to use it, and then there will be fewer outrages. If a respectable citizen has a daughter that is the pride of his heart, he had rather she would go to a theatre or a party with a man who can protect her with his strong arm than with an effeminate curiosity that has his brain parted in the middle, and who would be afraid to meet a dwarf in the dark.

We advise every boy who reads _The Sun_ to throw away the revolver he has bought to carry in his pistol pocket, or sell it to some coward, and use the money to hire somebody to teach him to box, and to strike a blow that will make any person sick to his stomach who insults the boy's sister. Just depend your muscle to get through the world. If the boy's people are truly good and want him to go to Sunday-school he should do it, and learn all that is good, but he should want a little exercise with his hands between meals, and learn the efficacy of two fists, for sometimes they come handy.

We have heard of cases in prayer meetings where deacons got to fighting, even in this State, and a fellow that could use his fists best stood up the longest, though a chair was used by the opponent. We know ministers in Wisconsin who are good boxers, and while they would not teach boxing from the pulpit, they would not object to see every boy know how. Since the tramps have been knocking people down in Indianapolis, we have been anxious to hear that one of them has tackled our old friend, Rev. Myron Reed; as we know that tramp would go to the hospital dead sure. Boys, learn to box.

MISDEAL IN A SLEEPING CAR.

There is one thing about sleeping cars that should be changed, and that is the number of the berth should be on the curtain, so when a man gets up in the night to go out to the back end of the car and look out into the night to see if the stars are shining, and he gets through seeing if the stars are shining, and goes back, he will not get into the wrong berth.

Since the other night we have not wondered that on a similar occasion, at the dead hour of night, as it is reported, the truly good Mr.

Beecher, who left his berth to see the porter, and ask him about how long it would be before they got there, returned to what he supposed was his own berth, and sat down on the side of it to remove his trouserloons, and by a scream was notified that he was in the wrong pew. We attach no blame to Mr. Beecher, and would defend him to the last breath, because to a man whose mind is occupied with great thoughts, the berths all look alike. Neither do we blame Miss Anthony for screaming.

She could not know in the imperfect light that was vouchsafed her in a sleeping car, that it was a mistake. She had no time to argue; it was a case where immediate decision was necessary, and she did right to scream--she could not do otherwise. But when vile men tell us, as they draw down their eyelids and wink, that it was "a mistake the way the woman kept tavern in Michigan," they do an injustice to a n.o.ble preacher who has been lied about, and who has better judgment than to do so knowingly.

So we say that anybody is liable to err; but if anybody had told us, when that woman from Pere Marquette, with a hare lip, and a foot like a fiddle box, got into the berth next to ours, that in the dead hour of night we should be sitting down on the selvage of her berth, we should have killed him.

We are more than ever struck by the old adage that the ways of Providence are inscrutable, and past finding the right berth. We had gone out to the back part of the car, and stood in our stocking feet on the cold zinc floor for a couple or three minutes, looking out upon the beautiful Michigan landscape and waterscape, as the train pa.s.sed Michigan City, and had asked the porter if there was any bar on the train, and had returned up the aisle to find our berth.

Pulling aside the curtains we sat down, and were about to throw our hind leg up into the sheets, when a cold, hard hand, calloused like a horn spoon, grabbed hold of the small of our back, and two piercing eyes shot sharp glances at our human frame.

One look was enough to show that we had opened the wrong curtains. Every second we expected that a female scream would split the air wide open, that the pa.s.sengers would tumble out of the berths, and that the conductor would have us arrested for coalition with intent to deceive.

It seemed years that we sat there with that cold hand grasping the situation, and we would have given half our fortune to have been in the bunk just one remove towards Canada.

All things have an end, and just as we were imagining that the woman with the hare lip was feeling around with her disengaged hand to draw from its concealment in her corset, a carving knife, with which to cut a couple of slices off our liver, a voice said, "Well, what in Kalamazoo are you doing in this berth, anyway?"

The porter came along with a lantern, and we looked at the woman with a hare lip and a ba.s.s voice, and it was not a woman at all, but a Detroit drummer for a stove house. Finding that we were not a midnight a.s.sa.s.sin, nor a woman, the drummer let go of the small of our back, and we got into our own berth; but it was a narrow escape; the woman with the hare lip was in the upper berth. We found that out in the morning when she talked through her nose at the porter about fetching a step ladder for her to climb down on.

PARALYSIS IN A THEATRE

Inasmuch as there seems to be no other business before the house, we desire, Mr. Speaker, to arise to a personal explanation. There was something occurred at the Opera House, the last night that the Rice Surprise Party played "Revels," that placed us in a wrong position before the public.

Mr. Gunning, the scene painter, had prided himself that the transformation scene that he had fixed up for the play was about as nice as could be, and as we confessed that we had only got an imperfect view of it, the night before, from one side of the house, he insisted that we take a seat right in front of the stage, in the parquette, and get a good view of it.

There were a good many legs in the show, and we didn't want to sit right down in front all the evening, so we compromised the matter by agreeing to sit in the dress circle until it was about time for the transformation scene, and then, after the giddy girls had all been behind the scenes, we would go down and take a front seat, right back of the orchestra, and take in the transformation scene.

Well, they had got through with the high kicking, and all gone off, except one girl, a gipsy, who was going to sing a song, and then a bell would ring and the whole stage effects would change as if by magic. When she had got to the end of her song and had waltzed off to the left, we got up and walked down in front, and took one of a whole row of vacant seats, put on our spectacles, and were ready. Do you know, every cuss in that audience saw us go down there? They all thought we had gone there to be nearer the dizzy tights, and they began to clap their hands and cheer. We think Chapin, the lawyer, who doesn't like us very well, started it, and every kid in the gallery took it up, and the house fairly rung with applause at the sight of our bald head well down in front. We never felt so mean since we quit stealing sheep.

The crowd laughed and hi-hi'd, and the stage manager took the applause for an _encore_, and ordered the girl to go out and sing some more. She knew better, knew they were guying the bald-headed man in front, and all the troupe knew it, and the girls put their heads out from the wings and laughed; but the girl came out and sung again. If she didn't wink at us when she came out, then we don't know what a wink is, and we have been around some, too.

She sang some confounded love song, such as "Darling, Kiss My Eye Winkers Down," or "Hold the Fort," or something, and kept looking at us every moment, and smiling like a church sociable. The crowd took it all in, too. Her dress was cut decolette, or low necked at the bottom, and we were nearer to the angelic choir than a bald headed man of family ever ought to be, but there was no help for it. She was the only girl in the troupe that wore black tights, and we thanked our stars for that, but even with all those mitigating circ.u.mstances in our favor the affair had a bad look, and we admit it. Of course any one would know that we wouldn't go out of our way to see any black stockings, but it looked as though we had, to the crowd.

We have faced death on many a field of carnage, but we never knew what it was to want to be away from a place quite so much as then. If you know how a man feels when he is stricken with paralysis, or a piece of a brick house, you can imagine something about it. We tried to put on a pious look, a deaconish sort of expression, like a man who is pa.s.sing a collection plate in church, but the blushes on our face did not look deaconish at all. We tried to look far away, and think of the hereafter, or the heretofore, but that Gipsy warbling "Darling Eyes of Marine Blue," and forty girls in the wings making up faces, and five hundred people back of us having fun at our expense was too much, and we just wanted to die. If there had been a trap door to let us down into the beer saloon below, we would have taken pa.s.sage on it in a minute.

But she finally got through singing, the transformation scene came on, and we went back to our seat in the dress circle, a changed man, and we never looked at a person in the audience after that, but when the performance was over and we came out, and Chapin said, "h.e.l.lo, old man, guess we got even with you that time," we felt like murdering somebody in cold blood and feathers. Hereafter if anybody ever catches us taking a front seat at a leg drama, they can take it out of our wages. Mr.

Speaker, we have spoken.

THE QUEEREST NAME.

There is a case in Chicago where a young man is going to apply to have his name changed. The man's name is Easus, and he is now about eighteen years old, and just beginning to go into society. It is alleged that he was engaged to be married to an heiress, but she has broken off the engagement until he can get his name changed. She was not very much mashed on the name, anyway, and Monday night, as she was with him coming out of Haverly's Theatre, something happened that broke her all up.

The young man's father was a pious man, and he named his son Abijah.

His companion nicknamed him "Bige." Coming out of the theatre with his intended on his arm, an old friend, a drummer for a Chicago grocery house, happened to see him, and he went up to him and said, "Why, Bije Easus, how are you?" Young Mr. Easus shook hands with his friend, and introduced him to his girl, and she looked at the profane drummer out of one corner of her eye and trembled for his soul as she thought how he would be sure to go to h.e.l.l when he died.

Mr. Easus explained to his friend as they walked out of the building, that he was engaged to the girl, and when they parted at the platform of the street car the drummer grabbed her by the hand and shook it as a terrier would a rat and said, "Well, Mrs. Bije Easus, that is to be, let me wish you many happy returns."

Mr. Easus colored up, the girl was as mad as a wet hen when she pried her fingers apart, and they rode home in silence. At the gate she said to him, "Bije Easus, I never till to-night knew what a horrid name I was going to take upon myself, and I have made up my mind that I cannot go through the remainder of my natural life in Chicago, being alluded to as a 'little female Bije Easus.' Mr. Easus, I trust we part friends. If you can come to me by any other name, you would be sweet, but Bije Easus I will never have on my calling cards." The young man has employed a lawyer and will have his name changed. The girl had a narrow escape, and she may thank the drummer for calling her attention to it.

CHURCH KENO.

While the most of our traveling men, our commercial tourists, are nice Christian gentlemen, there is occasionally one that is as full of the old Nick as an egg at this time of year is full of malaria. There was one of them stopped at a country town a few nights ago where there was a church fair. He is a blonde, good-natured looking, serious talking chap, and having stopped at that town every month for a dozen years, everybody knows him. He always chips in towards a collection, a wake or a rooster fight, and the town swears by him.

He attended the fair, and a jolly little sister of the church, a married lady, took him by the hand and led him through green fields, where the girls sold him ten cent chances in saw dust dolls, and beside still waters, where a girl sold him sweetened water with a sour stomach, for lemonade, from Rebecca's well. The sister finally stood beside him while the deacon was reading off numbers. They were drawing a quilt, and as the numbers were drawn all were anxious to know who drew it. Finally, after several numbers were drawn it was announced by the deacon that number fifteen drew the quilt, and the little sister turned to the traveling man and said, "My! that is my number. I have drawn it. What shall I do?" "Hold up your ticket and shout keno," said he.

The little deaconess did not stop to think that there might be guile lurking in the traveling man, but being full of joy at drawing the quilt, and ice cream because the traveling man bought it, she rushed into the crowd towards the deacon, holding her number, and shouted so they could hear it all over the house, "_Keno!_"

If a bank had burst in the building there couldn't have been so much astonishment. The deacon turned pale and looked at the poor little sister as though she had fallen from grace, and all the church people looked sadly at her, while the worldly minded people snickered. The little woman saw that she had got her foot into something, and she blushed and backed out, and asked the traveling man what keno meant. He said he didn't know exactly, but he had always seen people, when they won anything at that game, yell "keno." She isn't exactly clear yet what keno is, but she says she has sworn off on taking advice from pious looking traveling men. They call her "Little Keno" now.