Peck's Compendium of Fun: Comprising the Choicest Gems of Wit, Humor, Sarcasm and Pathos of America's Favorite HumoristPeck, George W. (George Wilbur)
General
Peck's Compendium of Fun: Comprising the Choicest Gems of Wit, Humor, Sarcasm and Pathos of America's Favorite Humorist
Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
American wit and humor
"Say, I don't know as you would believe it, but at one place I sent some
shirts and things to be washed, and they sent to my room a lot of female
underclothes, and when I kicked about it to the landlord he said I would
have to wear them, as they had no time to rectify mistakes. He said the
season was short and they had to get in their work, and he charged me
Fifth Avenue Hotel prices with a face that was child-like and bland, when
he knew I had been wiping on diapers for two days in place of towels.
"But I must get off here and see if I can find water enough to bathe all
over. I will see you down town after I bury these clothes."
And the sticky, cross man got off swearing at summer hotels and pirates.
We don't see where he could have been traveling.
PECK'S BAD BOY AND HIS PA.
HIS PA JOKES HIM.
"What on earth is that you have got on your upper lip?" said the grocery
man to the bad boy, as he came in and began to peel a rutabaga, and his
upper lip hung down over his teeth, and was covered with something that
looked like shoemaker's wax, "You look as though you had been digging
potatoes with your nose."
"O, that is some of Pa's darn smartness. I asked him if he knew anything
that would make a boy's moustache grow, and he told me the best thing he
ever tried was tar, and for me to rub it on thick when I went to bed, and
wash it off in the morning. I put it on last night, and by gosh I can't
wash it off. Pa told me all I had to do was to use a scouring brick, and
it would come off, and I used the brick, and it took the skin off, and the
tar is there yet, and say, does my lip look very bad?"
The grocery man told him it was the worst looking lip he ever saw, but he
could cure it by rubbing a little cayenne pepper in the tar. He said the
tar would neutralize the pepper, and the pepper would loosen the tar, and
act as a cooling lotion to the lacerated lip. The boy went to a can of
pepper behind the counter, and stuck his finger in and rubbed a lot of it
on his lip, and then his hair began to raise, and he began to cry, and
rushed to the water-pail and ran his face into the water to wash off the
pepper. The grocery man laughed, and when the boy had got the pepper
washed off, and had resumed his rutabaga, he said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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