Peck's Sunshine: Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun,; Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
General
Peck's Sunshine: Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun,; Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882
Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
American wit and humor
It is not necessary to inquire what the boy would have been doing all
the time Jeff was pulling him off the horse. We all know how easy it is
for an unarmed old man to spill a healthy soldier off a horse. We can
readily see that the soldier could not have whacked the old fellow over
the head with the empty carbine, or drawn his sabre and run him through,
or given him a few shots out of a revolver.
Jeff had, no doubt, arranged in his own mind to chloroform the bold
Michigan cavalryman, but his wife broke it all up by throwing her arms
around him at an inopportune moment, thus pinioning the President of the
Confederacy so he could not whip the Union army. And so, like Adam, Jeff
lays the whole business to the woman. What would we do without women to
lay everything to?
And while Jeff must ever doubt the judgment of his wife in breaking up
his plans at that trying moment, when so much was at stake, how that
soldier, whose life was saved by her act, must revere her, memory!
Had the woman not held Jeff the soldier must have been pitched off his
horse, and striking on his head, he must have been killed.
Mr. Davis does not say so, but we have no doubt his plan was to have the
soldier strike on his head on a projecting root or stone, so he would be
killed. If there should be another war, we should never join the cavalry
branch of the service unless there was an understanding that no old men,
armed with petticoats and tin water pails, should be allowed to charge
on cavalrymen and throw them off their horses.
It is said that during the late war no man ever saw a dead cavalryman,
but if the tactics of Mr. Davis had been adopted early in the war, the
mortality must have been fearful, and perhaps the result of the war
would have been different. We cannot be too thankful that Jeff didn't
think of that way of demoralizing cavalry before.
THOSE BOLD, BAD DRUMMERS.
About seventy-five traveling men were snowed in at Green Bay during a
late blockade, and they were pretty lively around the hotels, having
quiet fun Friday and Saturday, and passing away the time the best they
could, some playing seven up, others playing billiards, and others
looking on. Some of the truly good people in town thought the boys were
pretty tough, and they wore long faces and prayed for the blockade to
raise so the spruce looking chaps could go away.
The boys noticed that occasionally a lantern-jawed fellow would look
pious at them, as though afraid he would be contaminated, so Sunday
morning they decided to go to church in a body. Seventy-five of them
slicked up and marched to the Rev. Dr. Morgan's church, where the
reverend gentleman was going to deliver a sermon on temperance. No
minister ever had a more attentive audience, or a more intelligent one,
and when the collection plate was passed every last one of the travelers
chipped in a silver dollar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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