Peck's Sunshine Part 12

MALE AND FEMALE MAs.h.i.+NG.

There has been a great deal of talk in the papers about arresting "mashers," that is, young men who stand on the corners and pulverize women, and a great many good people got the idea that it was unsafe to travel the streets. This is not the case. A woman might travel all day and half the night and not be insulted. Of course, once in a great while, a woman will be insulted by a man, the same as a man will be by a woman.

No woman, unless she throws out one eye, kind of cunning, is in danger of having a male man throw out his other eye the same way. There has got to be two parties to a mas.h.i.+ng match, and one must be a woman. Too many women act sort of queer just for fun, and the poor male man gets to acting improper before he realizes the enormity of the crime, and then it is everlastingly too late.

But a female masher, one who is thoroughly bad, like the male loafers that have been driven from the corners, is a terror. She will insult a respectable man and laugh at his blushes. One of them was arrested the other day for playing her act on a policeman who was disguised as a respectable granger from Stevens Point. These female mashers are a tornado.

Why, one of them met a respectable church member the other night, and asked him how his liver complaint was. He was a man who had been troubled with the liver complaint, and supposing she was some acquaintance, he stopped on the corner and talked with the pullet for about ten minutes, explaining to her the course of treatment he had used to cure him, and dozens of people pa.s.sing by that knew him, and knew that she was clear off.

Finally she asked him if he wouldn't take her to a restaurant and buy her a spring chicken and a small bottle. He told her if she would come up to his house she should have a hen, and there were lots of bottles, both large and small, that she was welcome to. She told him to go to Hades, and he went in a drug store and asked a clerk who that lady was he had been talking with, and when the clerk, who knew her, told him she was a road agent, a street walker, a female masher, the old man had to sit down on a box of drugs and fan himself with his hat.

We mention this to show that ladies are not the only portion of the population that is liable to be accosted and insulted. The other night a respectable merchant was going to the opera with a friend from the country, when a couple of sirens met them and one said to the other, "Look at his nibs," and she locked arms with him and asked him if he was not her own darling. He said his name was not "Nibs," and he would have to look at his memorandum book before he could tell whether he was her darling or not, but from the smell of gin about her person he would blush to extemporize.

We do not give his exact language, but in the heat of debate he shook her and told her if she ever clawed on him again he would everlastingly go and tell her parents. And while he was talking with her the other one had seated herself beside his country friend on a salt barrel in front of a grocery and was feeling in his vest pocket to see if he had any cloves.

A female masher is much worse than a male masher as you can imagine.

Who ever heard of a male masher feeling in an unprotected female's vest pocket for cloves? O, the men are simply unprotected, and at the mercy of wicked, designing women, and the police ought to protect them.

THE USES OF THE PAPER BAG.

A First Ward man was told by his wife to bring home a quart of oysters on New Year's night, to fry for supper. He drank a few prescriptions of egg nog, and then took a paper bag full of selects and started for home.

He stopped at two or three saloons, and the bag began to melt, and when he left the last saloon the bottom fell out of the bag and the oysters were on the sidewalk.

We will leave the man there, gazing upon the wreck, and take the reader to the residence where he is expected.

A red-faced woman is putting the finis.h.i.+ng touches to the supper table, and wondering why her husband does not come with the oysters. Presently a noise as of a lead pencil in the key-hole salutes her ear, and she goes to the door and opens it, and finds him taking the pencil out of the key-hole. Not seeing any oysters, she asks him if he has forgotten the oysters.

"Forgot noth(hic)ing," says he.

He walks up to the table and asks for a plate, which is given him by the unsuspicious wife.

"Damsaccident you ever(hic)see," said the truly good man, as he brought his hand out of his overcoat pocket, with four oysters, a little smoking tobacco, and a piece of cigar-stub.

"Slipperysoystersev (hic)er was," said he, as he run his hands down in the other pocket, bringing up five oysters, a piece of envelope, and a piece of wire that was used as a bail to the pail.

"Got all my pock(hic)ets full," said he, as he took a large oyster out of his vest pocket. Then he began to go down in his pants pocket, and finding a hole in it, he said:

"Six big oys(hic)ters gone down my trousers leg. S'posi'll find them in my boot," and he sat down to pull off his boot, when the lady took the plate of oysters and other stuff into the kitchen and threw them in the swill, and then she put him to bed, and all the time he was trying to tell her how the bag busted just as he was in front of All Saints Ca(hic)thedral.

Three distinct charges of heresy will be made against Rev. Dr. Thomas, of Chicago, at the trial next month. The amount of heresy that is going on in this country, and particularly among ministers, is truly alarming.

The names of his partners in guilt are not mentioned, probably out of respect for their families. A minister that goes around practicing heresy ought to be watched, and when caught at it he should be bounced.

There is no excuse for _heresy_, though a minister will occasionally meet a mighty attractive _her_, but he should say: "Git thee foreninst me, Susan, and when I have a convenient season I will send the police after thee."

There should be an amendment to the const.i.tution of the United States making it lawful for an ex-President to walk on gra.s.s. We have no great admiration for Hayes, but when we read that at Cleveland he was ordered off the gra.s.s by a thirteen dollar a month soldier, and had to s.h.i.+n it-over a fence real spry to save the shoulder of his pants from a.s.sault by a cheap bayonet, it makes us feel ashamed, and we blush for America.

The spectacle of a man who has occupied the White House, and been the chief attraction of county fairs, being compelled to put his stomach on a fence, and flop over, heels over appet.i.te, like a boy playing tag, to keep from being jabbed in a vital part, makes us sick.

THE NEW COAL STOVE.

We never had a coal stove around the house until last Sat.u.r.day. Have always used pine slabs and pieces of our neighbor's fence. They burn well, too, but the fence got all burned up, and the neighbor said he wouldn't build a new one, so we went down to Jones' and got a coal stove.

You see, we didn't know anything about coal stoves. We filled the stove about half full of pine fence, and, when the stuff got well to going, we filled the artesian well on the top with coal. It simmered and sputtered about five or ten minutes, and all went out, and we put on an overcoat and a pair of buckskin mittens and "went out too"--to supper. We remarked, in the course of the frugal meal, that Jones was a "froad" for recommending such a confounded refrigerator to a man to get warm by.

After supper we took a piece of ice and rubbed our hands warm, and went in where that stove was, resolved to make her draw and burn if it took all the pine fence in the First Ward. Our better-half threw a quilt over her, and s.h.i.+veringly remarked that she never knew what real solid comfort was until she got a coal stove.

Stung by the sarcasm in her remark, we turned every dingus on the stove that was movable, or looked like it had anything to do with the draft, and pretty soon the stove began to heave up heat. It was not long before she stuttered like the new Silsby steamer. Talk about your heat! In ten minutes that room was as much worse than a Turkish bath as Hades is hotter than Liverman's ice-house. The perspiration fairly fried out of a tin water cooler in the next room. We opened the doors, and snow began to melt as far up Vine street as Hans...o...b..'s house, and people all round the neighborhood put on linen clothes. And we couldn't stop the confounded thing.

We forgot what Jones told us about the dampers, and she kept a biling.

The only thing we could do was to go to bed, and leave the thing to burn the house up if it wanted to. We stood off with a pole and turned the damper every way, and at every turn she just sent out heat enough to roast an ox. We went to bed, supposing that the coal would eventually burn out, but about 12 o'clock the whole family had to get up and sit on the fence.

Finally a man came along who had been brought up among coal stoves, and he put a wet blanket over him and crept up to the stove and turned the proper dingus, and she cooled off, and since that time has been just as comfortable as possible. If you buy a coal stove you want to learn how to engineer it, or you may get roasted.

A COLD, CHEERLESS RIDE.

Probably the most cold-blooded affair that ever occurred took place at a certain summer resort a couple of weeks ago. There was going to be a picnic, and a young man and the girl he was engaged to be married to started in a row-boat to cross the lake, taking an ice cream freezer full of frozen ice cream for the picnic. Just before arriving at the picnic the boat capsized. The boat was bottom side up, and the young man helped the girl on to the ice cream freezer, and he got on the boat, and after floating for half an hour they were rescued.

The girl did not complain at the time she was put on the freezer, as she was glad enough to get on anything that would float, but after they got ash.o.r.e, and she had a chance to reflect on the matter, and talk with the other girls, she concluded that his getting on the boat, which was nice and warm, and putting her aboard the ice cream freezer, which was so cold and cheerless, was a breach of etiquette that would stamp any man as being a selfish, heartless villain, and she refuses to speak to him, and has declared the engagement off.

He is very much mortified over the affair, and tries to explain that he was more accustomed to a boat than she was, while he reasoned that she would naturally be more familiar with an ice cream freezer. It certainly looks to us to have been a cold-blooded transaction, and while the young man might have been rattled, and powerless to grasp the situation as he would if he had it to do over again, the girl is certainly justified in being indignant.

An ice cream freezer is a cold and cheerless companion even when empty, but filled with congealed cream and pounded ice, and in water, it cannot but have been an Arctic exploration on a small scale. Besides the ice, it is a notorious fact that ice cream freezers are made of zinc, the coldest metal in the world, if we bar women's feet.

"Sheridan's Ride" has been spoken of in poetry and in song, but it pales into insignificance by the side of this girl's ride on the ice cream freezer. If the young man had exhibited foresight, and had a side saddle buckled on to the ice cream freezer, the experience would have been robbed of much of its frigidity, or if there had been a thick blanket under the saddle, but he failed to take even that precaution.

As it is we do not blame the girl for breaking off the engagement. In addition, we think any court would decide that he should pay for the ginger tea and cough lozenges that she had to take to cure her cold.