A favorite style of Kankanna revenge is to drink a quart of this water,
and then, on meeting an enemy, to breathe on him and wither him. One
breath produces syncope and blind staggers. Two breaths induce coma and
metallic casket for one.
Minnehaha is not mineral water. It is just plain water, giving itself away
day after day like a fresh young man in society. If you want pure water
you get it at the spring near the foot of the fall, and if you want it
flavored, with something that will leave a blazed road the whole length of
your alimentary canal, you go to the “blind pig,” a few rods away from the
falls.
The blind pig draws many people toward the falls through sympathy. To be
blind must indeed be a sad plight. Let us pause and reflect on this
proposition.
By good fortune I have had a chance to watch the rum problem in all its
phases this summer. Beginning in Maine, where the most ingenious methods
of whipping the devil around the stump are adopted, then going through
northern Iowa and tasting her exhilarating pop, and at last paying ten
cents to see the blind pig at Minnehaha, I feel like one who has wrestled
with the temperance problem in a practical way, and I have about decided
that a high license is about the only way to make the sale of whisky
odious. Prohibition is too abrupt in its methods, and one generation can
hardly wipe out the appetite for liquor that has been planted and fostered
by fifty preceding generations.
For fear that a few of my lady readers do not know what the Minnehaha
blind pig looks like, and that they may be curious about it, I will just
say that it is a method of evading the law, and consists of a dumb waiter,
wherein, if you pay ten cents, you get a glass of stimulants without the
annoyance of conversation. Many ladies who visit the falls, and who have
heard incidentally about the blind pig, express a desire to see the poor
little thing, but their husbands generally persuade them to refrain.
Minnehaha is a beautiful waterfall. It is not so frightfully large and
grand as Niagara, but it is very fine, and if the State of Minnesota would
catch the man who nails his signs on the trees around there, and choke him
to death near the falls on a pleasant day, a large audience wold attend
with much pleasure, I believe that the fence-board advertiser is not only,
as a rule, wicked, but he also lacks common sense. Who ever bought a liver
pad or a corset because he read about it on a high board fence? No one.
Who ever purchased a certain kind of pill or poultice because the name of
that pill or poultice was nailed on a tree to disfigure a beautiful
landscape? I do not believe that any sane human being ever did so. If
everyone feels as I do about it, people would rather starve to death for
pills and freeze to death in a perfect wilderness of liver pads than buy
of the man who daubs the fair face of nature with names of his alleged
goods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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