Peck's Sunshine Part 28

One day it got away and strayed into the theatre, where it ran around until the audience got seated for the evening performance, when the pig began to fool around under the seats, probably looking for the lady that owned it. On the front row in the dress circle was a young man and woman from Waukesha. Whether the Guinea pig mistook the girl for its owner or not is not positively known, but the animal was seen to go under the seat occupied by the young woman.

Her attendant was leaning over her shoulder whispering in her ear, when suddenly she jumped about two feet high, and grabbed her dress with both hands. Her feller had his chin scratched by a pin that held a bow on her shoulder, and as he wiped it off he asked her, as she came down into the seat again, if she had them often.

A bald-headed citizen who sat next to her looked around at the woman in astonishment, and took up his overcoat and moved to another seat. She looked sa.s.sy at the bald-headed man, and told her escort the man had insulted her. He said he would attend to the man after the show was out.

About three seats further down toward the stage there was a girl from the West Side, with a young fellow, and they were very sociable.

Suddenly he leaned over to pick up a programme he had dropped, just as the Guinea pig nibbled her instep. She drew herself away from her escort, blushing, and indignation depicted on every feature, looked the other way, and would not speak to him again during the whole evening.

He thought she was flirting with somebody else, and he was mad, and they sat there all the evening looking as though they were married.

The Guinea pig went on down the row, and presently another woman hopped up clear out of the seat, said, "For heaven's sake what was that?" and looked around at a man who sat in the seat behind her as though she could eat him raw.

Just before the curtain rose the pig got into a lady's rubber and went to sleep, and when the performance was over and she went to put on the shoe, she screamed a little and jumped up on the seat, and said something about rats, which brought an usher to her a.s.sistance, and he took the Guinea pig and sent it to its owner. For a few minutes there was almost as much commotion as there would be at a picnic if a boy should break up a nest of hornets.

FAILURE OF A SOLID INSt.i.tUTION.

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 c.o.o.n 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 think 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 new how baked beans ought to be cooked from years'

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.

The Decoration Day exercises at Appleton were somewhat marred by a discussion as to whether the graves of Confederate soldiers should be decorated, and one man--Prof. Sawyer--a soldier who lost a leg in the army, said that if anybody should attempt to decorate a rebel soldier's grave in his vicinity, it would have to be done over his--Sawyer's--dead body.

Notwithstanding this heartrending recital, the graves of rebel soldiers in many places in this state and throughout the north, were decorated by Union soldiers. What hurt does it do to throw a few flowers on the clay that covers one who was once your enemy? n.o.body thinks less of the Union soldier for it, and it would make the southern mother or sister of the dead boy feel so much better to know that kind hands at the north had done a n.o.ble act.

Suppose this Professor Sawyer had been killed and buried down south, and the Confederate people should be decorating the graves of their own dead, and they should throw a few flowers on his grave, and some hot-headed vindictive rebel should get on his ear and say that the man who laid that bouquet on the Yankee's grave would have to take it off or fight. The professor, if he laid there and heard it, would feel like getting out of the grave, and taking a crutch and mauling the liver out of the bigoted rebel.

It is not the rebel's cause that we decorate, but we put a few flowers above his remains to show the people who loved him at home, that there is nothing so confounded mean about us after all, and that we do as we would be done by, and that while we were mad, and sa.s.sy, and full of fight, eighteen years ago, we want to be friends, and shake hands over the respective graves of our loved ones, and quit making fools of ourselves.

A Ridiculous scene occurred a Palmyra, the other day. The furnace in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the church is reached by a trap door, which is right beside the pulpit. There was a new preacher there from abroad, and he did not know anything about the trap door, and the s.e.xton went down there to fix the fire, before the new minister arrived. The minister had just got warmed up in his sermon, and was picturing to his hearers h.e.l.l in all its heat. He had got excited and told of the lake of burning brimstone below, where the devil was the stoker, and where the heat was ten thousand times hotter than a political campaign, and where the souls of the wicked would roast, and fry, and stew until the place froze over.

Wiping the perspiration from his face, he said, pointing to the floor, "Ah, my friends, look down into that seething, burning lake, and--" Just at this point the trap door raised a little, and the s.e.xton's face, with coal s.m.u.t all over it, appeared. He wanted to come up and hear the sermon.

If h.e.l.l had broke loose, the new minister could not have been more astonished. He stepped back, grasped his ma.n.u.script, and was just about to jump from the pulpit, when a deacon on the front seat said, "It's all right, brother, he has only _been down below to see about the fire._"

The s.e.xton came up and shut down the trap door, the color came back to the face of the minister, and he went on, though the incident seemed to take the tuck all out of him.

A traveling man who happened to be at the church tells us that he knows the minister was scared, for he sweat so that the perspiration run right down on the carpet and made a puddle as though a dipper of water had been tipped over there. The minister says he was not scared, but we don't see how he could help it.