Peck's bad boy abroad : $b Being a humorous description of the bad boy and his dad in their journeys through foreign lands: 1904Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
General
Peck's bad boy abroad : $b Being a humorous description of the bad boy and his dad in their journeys through foreign lands: 1904
Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
American wit and humor; Boys -- Fiction; Practical jokes -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
This is the place where “There was a sound of revelry at night, and
Belgium's capitol had gathered there.” You remember, the night before
the Battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon Bonaparte got his. You must
remember about it, old man, just when they were right in the midst of
the dance, and “soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,” and
they were taking a champagne bath, inside and out, when suddenly the
opening guns of Waterloo, twelve miles away, began to boom, and the
poet, who was present, said, “But hush, hark, a deep sound like a rising
knell,” and everybody turned pale and began to stampede, when the floor
manager said, “'Tis but the wind, or the car on the stony street, on
with the dance, let joy be unconfined, no sleep till morn, when youth and
pleasure meet, to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.”
Well, sir, this is the place where that ball took place, which is
described in the piece I used to speak in school, but I never thought
I would be here, right where the dancers got it in the neck. When dad
found that the battlefield of Waterloo was only a few miles away, he
hired a wagon and we went out there. Well, sir, of all the frauds we
have run across on this trip the battlefield of Waterloo is the
worst. When the farmers who are raising barley and baled hay on the
battlefield, saw us coming, they dropped their work and made a rush for
us, and one fellow yelled something in the Belgian language that sounded
like, “I saw them first,” and he got hold of dad and me, and the rest
stood off like a lot of hack drivers that have seen a customer fall into
the hands of another driver, and made up faces at us, and called the
farmer who had caught us the vilest names. They said we would be skinned
to a finish by the faker who got us, and they were right.
[Illustration: 368 began to sell things to dad]
He showed us from a high hill, where the different portions of the
battle were fought, and where they caught Napoleon Bonaparte, and where
Blucher came up and made things hum in the German language, and then
he took us off to his farm where the most of the relics were found, and
began to sell things to dad, until he had filled the hind end of the
wagon with bullets and grape-shot, sabres and bayonets, old rusty
rifles, and everything dad wanted, and we had enough to fill a museum,
and when the farmer had got dad's money we went back to Brussels, and
got our stuff unloaded at the hotel. Say, when we came to look it over
we found two rusty Colt's revolvers, and guns of modern construction,
which have been bought on battlefields in all countries, and properly
rusted to sell to tourists. I showed dad that the revolver was unknown
at the time of the battle of Waterloo, and that every article he had
bought was a fraud, the sabers having been made in America, before the
war of the rebellion, and dad was mad, and gave the stuff to the porter
of the hotel, who charged dad seven dollars for taking it away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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