Peck's Sunshine: Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun,; Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
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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
A man--as we understand religion from those who have had it--does not
have to howl to the accompaniment of an asthmatic organ, pumped by a
female with a cinder in her eye and smut on her nose, in order to enjoy
religion, and he does not have to be in the exclusive company of other
pious people to get the worth of his money. There is a great deal of
religion in sitting in a smoking car, smoking dog-leg tobacco in
a briar-wood pipe, and seeing happy faces in the smoke that curls
up--faces of those you have made happy by kind words, good deeds, or
half a dollar put where it will drive away hunger, instead of paying it
out for a reserved seat in a gospel car. Take the half dollar you would
pay for a seat in a gospel car and go into the smoker, and find some
poor emigrant that is going west to grow up with the country, after
having been beaten out of his money at Castle Garden, and give it to
him, and see if the look of thankfulness and joy does not make you feel
better than to listen to a discussion in the gospel car, as to whether
the children of Israel went through the Red Sea with life-preservers, or
wore rubber hunting boots.
Take your gospel-car half dollar and buy a vegetable ivory rattle of the
train boy, and give it to the sick emigrant mother's pale baby, and
you make four persons happy--the baby, the mother, the train boy and
yourself.
We know a man who gave a dollar to a prisoner on the way to State
prison, to buy tobacco with, who has enjoyed more good square religion
over it than he could get out of all the chin music and saw-filing
singing he could hear in a gospel car in ten years. The prisoner was a
bad man from Oshkosh, who was in a caboose in charge of the sheriff,
on the way to Waupun. The attention of the citizen was called to
the prisoner by his repulsive appearance, and his general
don't-care-a-damative appearance. The citizen asked the prisoner how he
was fixed for money to buy tobacco in prison. He said he hadn't a cent,
and he knew it would be the worst punishment he could have to go without
tobacco. The citizen gave him the dollar and said:
“Now, every time you take a chew of tobacco in prison, just make up your
mind to be square when you get out.”
The prisoner reached out his hand-cuffed hands to take the dollar, the
hands trembling so that the chains rattled, and a great tear as big as
a shirt-button appeared in one eye--the other eye had been gouged out
while “having some fun with the boys” at Oshkosh--and his lips trembled
as he said:
“So help me God, I will!”
That man has been boss of a gang of hands in the pinery for two winters,
and has a farm paid for on the Central Railroad, and is “squar.”
That is the kind of practical religion a worldly man can occasionally
practice without having a gospel car.
INCIDENTS AT THE NEWHALL HOUSE FIRE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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