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
Say, a boat on the English channel does not roll, or pitch, at
intervals, like a boat on ordinary water, but it does stunts like a
broncho that has been poisoned by eating loco-weeds, and goes into the
air and dives down under, and shakes itself like a black bass with a
hook in its mouth, and rolls over like a trained dog, and sits up on its
hind legs and begs, and then walks on its fore paws, and seems to jump
through hoops, and dig for woodchucks, and all the time the water boils
like 'pollinarius, full of bubbles, and it gives you the hiccups to look
at it, and it flows every way at the same time, and the wind comes from
the fourteen quarters at once, and blows hot if you are too hot and want
a cool breeze, and if you are too cold, and want a warm breeze to keep
you alive, it comes right from the north pole, and you just perish in
your tracks.
Gee, but it is awful. When you get seasick on an ordinary ocean, you
know where to locate the disease, and you know where to go for relief,
and when you have got relieved you know that you are alive, but an
English channel seasickness is as different from any other as an
alcohol jag is different from a champagne drunk. This English channel
seasickness begins on your toes, and you feel as though the toenails
were being pulled out with pincers, and the veins in your legs seem to
explode, your arms wilt like lettuce in front of a cheap grocery, your
head seems to be struck with a pile-driver and telescoped down into your
spine, and your stomach feels as though you had swallowed a telephone
pole with all of the cross arms and wires and glass insulators, and you
wish lightning would strike you. Gosh, but dad was hot when he found
that he was sick that way, and when we got ashore he wanted to kill the
first man he met.
He thinks that it is a crime for a man not to understand the English
language, and when he tells what he wants, and the man he is talking to
shrugs his shoulders and laughs, and brings him something else, he wants
to pull his gun and begin to shoot up the town, and only for me he would
have killed people before this, but now he takes it out in scowling at
people who do not understand him. Dad seems to think that if he cannot
make a man understand what he says, all he has to do is to swear at the
man, but there is no universal language of profanity, so the more dad
swears the more the nervous Frenchman smiles, and acts polite.
I think the French people are the politest folks I ever knew. If a
Frenchman had to kick a person out of doors, he would wear a felt
slipper, and after he had kicked you he would place his hand on his
heart, and bow, and look so sorry, and hurt, that you would want to give
him a tip.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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