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
“It is said that the average traveling man will keep a whole seat in a
car, and never offer to give half of it to a man, when, if a handsome
woman comes in, he will fly around and divide with her. Well, who the
deuce wouldn't? That shows that his heart is in the right place. A man
can go into the smoking car and sit on the wood box, but a woman has got
to sit down, at least that is the way I should explain it.
“Boys, may the trips become shorter each year, and the visits to the dear
ones at home be extended, so that in time you may be detailed to stay at
home always, with an increase of salary or an interest in the business;
and, I am sure, when the time comes you will be the happiest fellows
that ever had thousand mile tickets punched, and when your time comes to
attend the grand banquet above, and you appear before St. Peter at the
gate, and begin to open up your samples, he will simply look at your
business card and turn to the clerk and say, 'Give these boys all front
rooms, and see that there is a fire escape and plenty of towels, and
that the rooms are aired, and then step down to the box office and
reserve them some seats for the sacred concert this evening. Pass right
in now and get a check for your overshoes.'”
ACCIDENTS AND INCIDENTS AT THEATRES.
Sometimes our heart bleeds for actors and actresses, when we think what
they have to go through with. The other night at Watertown, N. Y.,
Miss Ada Gray was playing “Camille,” and in the dying scene, where she
breathes her last, to slow music, an accident occurred which broke her
all up. She was surrounded by sorrowing friends, who were trying to do
everything to make it pleasant for her, when the bed on which she
was dying,--an impromptu sort of a bed got up by the stage
carpenter,--tipped partly over, and the dying woman rolled over on the
stage, tipped over a wash-stand filled with tumblers and bottles of
medicine, and raised a deuce of a row. It would have been all right, and
she could have propped the bed up and proceeded with her dying, had not
the actress got rattled.
Most actresses get lost entirely when anything occurs that is not in
the play, and Miss Gray was the scaredest female that ever lived. She
thought it was a judgment on her for playing a dying character, and
thought the whole theatre had been struck by lightning, and was going
to fall down. To save herself was her first thought, so she grabbed her
night-dress,--which was embroidered up and down the front, and had point
lace on the yoke of the sleeves,--in both hands and started for the
orchestra, the wildest corpse that ever lived.
The leader of the orchestra caught her, but not being an undertaker he
did not undertake to hold her, and she fell over the bass viol and
run one foot through the snare drum, and grasping the fiddle for a
life-preserver she jumped into the raging scenery-back of the stage
which represented a sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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