Peck's Compendium of Fun. George W. Peck

Power of Eloquence

        The Thirsty Gopher

        The Universalist Bath

        The Universal Object

        The Wicked Mon Kee

        The Wrong Corpse

        Three Inches of Leg

        To What Vile Uses May We Come

        Too Particular by Half

        What the Country Needs

        What the Democrats Will Do

        We Will Celebrate

        Why not Raise Wolves?

ILLUSTRATIONS.

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        A Scene in Paradise

        “Ah, my Friends, Look Down Into That Burning Lake!”

        An Intrusive Nigger

        At the Telephone

        Behind the Scenes

        Bossing the Pillow

        “Do not Pass me by!”

        Drummers Trying to Pray

        “Get Thee to a Nunnery!”

        “Happy New Year, Mum!”

        Hiawasamantha, the Dusky Daughter of the Golden West

        “I Want to be an Angel”

        It Looked Like an old Dripping Pan

        “It is F-f-four Sizes too Big!”

        John McCullough Killing a Texas Steer

        “Just as I am”

        “Keno!”

        Martindale Climbs a Pole

        “Me Long Lost Duke!”

        Mystery of a Woman’s Clothes

        New Way of Taking Seidlitz Powders

        No More Apples for the Minister

        “Oh, That Will be all Right”

        “Pa Grabbed Her by the Polonaise”

        “Sard,” and the Greek Slave

        Sacred Memories

        Slippery Oysters

        Swallow-Tails on the Climb

        The Lady of the Seventh Ward

        The Old Back Number Girl

        The Old Man Tries His Hand

        The Resorter

        The Rotund Urso

        The Sexton in all His Glory

        The Startled Cat

        The Tenor Arrayed in all His Glory

        The Wandering Oyster

        “Thereby Hangs a Tail.”

        “This is too Allfired Much!”

        “Too Late, Pa, I Die at the Hand of an Assassin!”

        Turning the Proper Dingus

        “Yell, or go Down!”

PECK’S COMPENDIUM OF FUN.

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THE NEW COAL STOVE.

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      We never had a coal stove around the house until last Saturday. 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.

      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 shiveringly 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