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
One day we put our face up to a deaf young lady to speak to her, and the
cockroach looked straight the other way, and seemed to be looking over
an old copy of the _Christian Statesman_; but when he found we only
yelled at the lady, he winked as much as to say:
“Well, how did I know?”
O, that cockroach is a thoroughbred!
SUMMER RESORTING.
The other day a business man who has one of the nicest houses in the
nicest ward in the city, and who has horses and carriages in plenty, and
who usually looks as clean as though just out of a band box and as happy
as a schoolma'am at a vacation picnic, got on a street car near the
depot, a picture of a total wreck. He had on a long linen duster, the
collar tucked down under the neck band of his shirt, which had no collar
on, his cuffs were sticking out of his coat pocket, his eyes looked
heavy, and where the dirt had come off with the perspiration he looked
pale, and he was cross as a bear.
A friend who was on the car, on the way up town, after a day's work,
with a clean shirt on, a white vest and a general look of coolness,
accosted the traveler as follows:
“Been summer resorting, I hear?”
The dirty-looking man crossed his legs with a painful effort, as though
his drawers stuck to his legs and almost peeled the bark off, and
answered:
“Yes, I have been out two weeks. I have struck ten different hotels, and
if you ever hear of my leaving town again during the hot weather, you
can take my head for a soft thing,” and he wiped a cinder out of his eye
with what was once a clean handkerchief.
“Had a good, cool time, I suppose, and enjoyed yourself,” said the man
who had not been out of town.
“Cool time, hell,” said the man, who has a pew in two churches, as he
kicked his limp satchel of dirty clothes under the car seat. “I had
rather been sentenced to the house of correction for a month.”
“Why, what's the trouble?”
“Well, there is no trouble, for people who like that kind of fun, but
this lets me out. I do not blame people who live in Southern States for
coming North, because they enjoy things as a luxury that we who live in
Wisconsin have as a regular diet, but for a Chicago or Milwaukee man to
go into the country to swelter and be kept awake nights is bald lunacy.
Why, since I have been out I have slept in a room a size smaller than
the closet my wife keeps her linen in, with one window that brought in
air from a laundry, and I slept on a cot that shut up like a jack-knife
and always caught me in the hinge where it hurt.
“At another hotel I had a broken-handled pitcher of water that had been
used to rinse clothes in, and I can show you the indigo on my neck. I
had a piece of soap that smelled like a tannery, and if the towel was
not a recent damp diaper then I have never raised six children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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