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
Though endowed with more than ordinary eloquence, no remarks that he had
ever made before brought the applause that this did. Everybody yelled,
and the woman smiled as pleasantly as though she had not crushed the
young life out of her victim, and left him a bleeding sacrifice on the
altar of his country, but when she had realized what she had done her
heart smote her, and she felt bad.
Chapin will never be himself again. From that moment his proud spirit
was broken, and all during the picnic he seemed to have lost his cud. He
leaned listlessly against a tree, pale as death, and fanned himself
with a skimmer. When the party had spread the lunch on the ground
and gathered around, sitting on the ant-hills, he sat down with them
mechanically, but his appetite was gone, and when that is gone there is
not enough of him left for a quorum.
Friends rallied around him, passed the pickles, and drove the antmires
out of a sandwich, and handed it to him on a piece of shingle, but he
either passed or turned it down. He said he couldn't take a trick. Later
on, when the lemonade was brought on, the flies were skimmed off of some
of it, and a little colored water was put in to make it look inviting,
but his eyes were sot. He said they couldn't fool him. After what had
occurred, he didn't feel as though any Democrat was safe. He expected to
be poisoned on account of his politics, and all he asked was to live to
get home.
Nothing was left undone to rally him, and cause him to forget the
fearful scene through which he had passed. Only once did he partially
come to himself, and show an interest in worldly affairs, and that was
when it was found that he had sat down on some raspberry jam with his
white pants on. When told of it, he smiled a ghastly smile, and said
they were all welcome to his share of the jam.
They tried to interest him in conversation by drawing war maps with
three-tined forks on the jam, but he never showed that he knew what
they were about until Mr. Moak, of Watertown, took a brush, made of
cauliflower preserved in mustard, and shaded the lines of the war map on
Mr. Cha-pin's trousers, which Mr. Butterfield had drawn in the jam. Then
his artistic eye took in the incongruity of the colors, and he gasped
for breath, and said:
“Moak, that is played out. People will notice it.”
But he relapsed again into semi-unconsciousness, and never spoke again,
not a great deal, till he got home.
He has ordered that there be no more borrowing of sugar and drawings of
tea back and forth between his house and that of the lady who broke his
heart, and he has announced that he will go without saurkraut all winter
rather than borrow a machine for cutting cabbage of a woman that would
destroy the political prospects of a man who had never done a wrong in
his life.
He has written to the chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee
to suspend judgment on his case, until he can explain how it happened
that a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat hurrahed for Garfield.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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