Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy: 1899 — John Shaqi
Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy: 1899Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
General
Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy: 1899
Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
American wit and humor; Boys -- Fiction; Uncles -- Fiction
“Well, boy,” said Uncle Ike, as the two wandered around the garden,
looking at the things grow, “there is a sign that tomato cans are ripe,
and you go and get one and I will hold this big, fat angleworm,” and
he put his cane in front of a four-inch worm, which shortened up and
swelled out as big as a lead pencil. “I want just a quart of those worms
in cold storage, and tomorrow we will go fishing. Don't you like to go
out in the woods, by a stream, and hook an angleworm on to a hook, in
scallops, so he will look just as though he was defying the fish, and
throw it in, and wait till you get a nibble, and feel the electric
current run up your arm, and then the fish yanks a little, and you can't
refrain, hardly, from jerking, but you know he hasn't got hold enough
yet, and you make a supreme effort to control your nerves, and by and
by he takes it way down his neck, and you know he is your meat, and you
pull, and the electricity just gives you a shock, and----”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy, interrupting the old man, “it feels just like
going home with a girl from a party, and she accidentally touches you,
and it goes all up and down you, and he swallows the bait, and you pull
him out and have to take a jackknife and cut the hook out of his gills,
and the angleworm is all chewed up, and when she looks at you as you bid
her goodnight and says it was kind of you to see her home, and puts out
her hand to shake you, you feel as though there was only one girl in the
whole world, and when you start to go home you have to blow your fingers
to keep them warm, and pry your fingers apart, but I don't like to scale
'em and clean 'em, but when they are fried in butter with bread crumbs,
and you have baked potatoes, gosh, say, but you can't sleep all night
from thinking maybe the next party you go to some other boy will ask
her if he can't see her home, but I like bullheads better than sunfish,
don't you, Uncle Ike?” and the boy went on filling his tomato can with
worms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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