Ptomaine Street: The Tale of Warble PetticoatWells, Carolyn
General
Ptomaine Street: The Tale of Warble Petticoat
Wells, Carolyn
Fiction; Lewis, Sinclair, 1885-1951 -- Parodies, imitations, etc.
“Mount of Atalanta highly prominent,” said Goodsport, “that means
you are a runner, either for office or for pleasure. Here is a line
meeting--that indicates a railroad man. H'm. A well-developed football
shows you have been to college. You seem to be inclined to solemates--”
But Leathersham had taken to his heels.
“Please,” said Iva Payne, gracefully offering her long psychic foot for
perusal.
“Ah, the poetic foot!” the soloist exclaimed. “There are two kinds
of poetic feet--the Iambic and the Trochaic. You have one of each. In
poetic feet the heels are often found in French forms. But poets are
a footloose class and are often found with lame and halting feet. You
don't seem to be a poet.”
“Never said I was,” retorted Iva, shortly, and Warble said, “Stop this
nonsense, it makes too much kicking. Now we're going to play the game I
learned in Buda Pesth.”
She led them to the picture gallery which had been prepared for the game
by having many sheets of fly-paper placed on the floor, sticky side up.
“It's Fly-paper Tag,” she said.
It _was_ Fly-paper Tag--she was quite right.
“You're it!” screamed Mrs. Givens as she pushed the minister over onto a
sheet of fly-paper.
“It yourself,” shrieked Leathersham adroitly shoving a sheet where he
saw Mrs. Givens would light next.
* * * * *
Warble was certain she was a great reformer.
Yet would these reformed people stay reformed?
True, they were now in the spirit of her party, Mack Sennett himself
couldn't have asked a better interpretation of his own vital principles.
But had they come to realize that this after all was the real thing, the
true ideal?
Warble feared.
* * * * *
They were a stuck-up lot. The fly-paper had intrigued them all. Not only
were they all half-soled with it but the merry wags had decorated the
ladies' bare backs and the men's coated backs, until all looked like
sandwich men or peripatetic ragpickers.
Trymie Icanspoon crowned Mrs. Charity Givens with a fresh sheet of
tanglefoot and Warble hilariously made a foolscap of another for the
Rector's bald head. Judge Drinkwater folded Daisy Snow's two little
hands together, then wrapped them tightly in fly-paper, and shook with
laughter to see her futile attempts to get free.
“Naughty man!” she cried, “to make poor little me so helpless!” With
a spring she flung her entangled hands over the Judge's head, and hung
round his neck like a pretty little millstone.
Warble relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired and very hungry.
But she was the stuff of which true reformers are made and Martin Luther
had nothing on her.
Then Beer came tripping in with a pile of varicolored garments which she
held up to view.
“These,” Warble announced, “are the real Mack Sennett costumes. They
are one-piece bathing suits, I got them from an importer of contraband
goods. You are to put them on in place of your clothes. And please
forget that you are Butterflies and turn into bathing beauties and
champion swimmers.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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