Peck's bad boy abroad : $b Being a humorous description of the bad boy and his dad in their journeys through foreign lands: 1904 — John Shaqi
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
Gee, but dad found her, and she ain't any more of a duchess than I am.
Her husband is a younger son of a titled person, but there isn't money
enough in the whole family to wad a gun, and our poor girl is working in
a shop, or store, selling corsets to support a lazy, drunken husband and
a whole mess of children, and while she is seven removes from a duchess,
she does not rank with the woman who washes her mother's clothes at
home. Gosh, but dad was hot when he found her, and after she told him
about her situation in life he gave her a yellow-backed fifty-dollar
bill, and came back to the hotel mad, and wanted to pack up and go
somewhere else, where he didn't know any titled-persons.
That night a couple of dukes came around to the hotel to sell dad some
stock in a diamond mine in South Africa, and they got to talking about
how English society held over our crude American society, until dad got
an addition to the mad he had when he called on our girl, and when one
of the dukes said America was being helped socially by the marriage
of American women to titled persons, dad got a hot box, like a stalled
freight train.
Says dad, says he: “You Johnnies are a lot of confidence men, who live
only to rope in rich American girls, so you can marry them and have
their dads lift the mortgages on your ancestral estates, and put on tin
roofs in place of the mortgages, 'cause a mortgage will not shed rain,
and you get their money and spend it on other women.” One of the dukes
turned red like a lobster, and I think he is a lobster, anyway, and he
was going to make dad stop talking, but the duke didn't know dad, and he
continued. Says dad, says he: “I know a rich old man in the States, who
made ten million dollars on pickles, or breakfast food, and he had a
daughter that was so homely they couldn't keep a clock going in the
house.
“She came over here and got exposed to a duke, and she had never been
vaccinated, and the first her father knew she caught the duke, and came;
home, and he followed her. Say, he didn't know enough to pound sand, and
the old man got several doctors for her, but they couldn't break up the
duke fever, and finally the old pickle citizen asked him how much the
mortgage was, and how much they could live on, and he bought her the
duke, and sent them off, and the duke covered his castle with building
paper, so it would hold water, and they set up housekeeping with a
hundred servants. Then the duke wanted a racing stable, after the baby
came, and the old pickle man went over to see the baby, and it looked
so much like the old man that he invested in a racing stable, and the
servants bowed low to the old man and called him 'Your 'ighness,'
and that settled the old pickle person, and he fell into the trap of
building a townhouse in London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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