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
You feel in going through the tower like you was in an American
slaughter house, for it was here that kings and queens were beheaded
by the dozen. They showed us axes that were used to behead people, and
blocks that the heads of the victims were laid on, and the places where
the heads fell on the floor. It seemed that in olden times when a king
or a queen got too gay, the anti-kings or queens would go to the palace
and catch the king or queen in the act, and take them by the neck and
hustle them to the tower, and when a king or queen got in the tower they
went out on the installment plan, and after being thrown in the gutter
for the mob to recognize, and walk on the bodies, they would bring
them back in the tower, and seal them up in a pigeon hole for future
generations to cry over.
All my life I have had in our house to look at a picture of beautiful
Anne Boleyn, and here I stood right where her head was cut off, and I
couldn't help thinking of how we in America got our civilization from
the descendants of the English people who cut her head off.
By ginger, old chum, it made me hot. I didn't care to look at the old
armor, or the crown jewels, which make you think of a cut glass factory,
but I reveled in the scenes of the beheading. I never was stuck much
on kings and queens, but it seems to me if they had to murder them they
ought to have given 'em a show, and let them fight for their lives,
instead of getting into a trap, like you would entice a rat with cheese,
and then cut their heads off.
I suppose it is right here that we inherited the desire to lynch and
burn at the stake the negroes that commit crime and won't confess at
home. When anything is born in the blood you can't get rid of it without
taking a dose of patriotism and purifying the blood, and I advise you
never to visit the Tower of London, unless you want to feel like going
out and killing some one that is tied up with a rope.
Hearing of these murders and seeing the place where they were committed
does not give you an idea of fair play and you don't feel like taking
some one of your size when you fight, but you get to thinking that if
you could catch a cripple who couldn't defend himself you would like to
take a baseball club and maul the stuffing out of him. You become imbued
with the idea that if you went to war you would not want to stand up
and fight fair, but that you would like to get your enemy in a bunch
and drop dynamite down on him from a balloon, and kill all in sight, and
sail away with an insane laugh.
Gee, but another day in this tower, and I would want to go home and
murder ma, or the neighbors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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