Peck's Sunshine. George W. Peck

over and breathe, and the man got the full benefit of it, and came near fainting away.

      He got home and his wife met him and asked him what was the matter? He said he believed mortification had set in, and she took one whiff as he took off his hat, and said she should think it had. “Where did you get into it?” said she. “Get into it?” said the man, “I have not got into anything, but some deadly disease has got hold of me, and I shall not live.” She told him if any disease that smelled like that had got hold of him and was going to be chronic, she felt as though he would be a burden to himself if he lived very long. She got his clothes off, soaked his feet in mustard water, and he slept. The man slept and dreamed that a smallpox flag was hung in front of his house and that he was riding in a butcher wagon to the pest house.

      The wife sent for a doctor, and when the man of pills arrived she told him all about the case. The doctor picked up the patient's new hat, tried it on and got a sniff. He said the hat was picked before it was ripe. The doctor and the wife held a postmortem examination of the hat, and found the slice of Limberger. “Few and short were the prayers they said.” They woke the patient, and, to prepare his mind for the revelation that was about to be made, the doctor asked him if his worldly affairs were in a satisfactory condition. He gasped and said they were. The doctor asked him if he had made his will. He said he had not, but that he wanted a lawyer sent for at once. The doctor asked him if he felt as though he was prepared to shuffle off. The man said he had always tried to lead a different life, and had tried to be done by the same as he would do it himself, but that he might have made a misdeal some way, and he would like to have a minister sent for to take an account of stock. Then the doctor brought to the bedside the hat, opened up the sweat-leather, and showed the dying man what it was that smelled so, and told him he was as well as any man in the city.

      The patient pinched himself to see if he was alive, and jumped out of bed and called for his revolver, and the doctor couldn't keep up with him on the way down town. The last we saw of the odoriferous citizen he was trying to bribe the bar-tender to tell him which one of those pelicans it was that put that slice of cheese in his hat-lining.

A FEMALE KNIGHT OF PYTHIAS.

       Table of Contents

      A woman of Bay City, Michigan, disguised herself as a man and clerked in a store for a year, and then applied for membership in the Knights of Pythias and was initiated. During the work of the third degree her sex was discovered. It seems that in the third degree they have an India rubber rat and a celluloid snake, which run by clockwork inside, and which were very natural indeed. The idea is to let them run at the candidate for initiation to see if he will flinch. When the snake ran at the girl she kept her nerve all right, but when the rat tried to run up her trousers leg she grabbed her imaginary skirts in both hands and jumped onto a refrigerator that was standing near, (which is used in the work of the fourth degree) and screamed bloody murder. The girl is a member of the order, however, and there is no help for it. This affair may open the eyes of members of secret societies and cause them to investigate. One lodge here, we understand, takes precaution against the admission of women by examining carefully the feet of applicants. If the feet are cold enough to freeze ice cream the candidate is black-balled.

THE TELESCOPE FISH-POLE CANE.

       Table of Contents

      There is one thing we want to set our face against and try and break up, and that is the habit of young and middle aged persons going fishing on Sunday, when going on the Summer excursions to the country. The devil, or some other inventor, has originated a walking-stick that looks as innocent as a Sunday school teacher, but within it is a roaring lion, in the shape of a fish-pole. We have watched young fellows, and know their tricks. Sunday morning they say to their parents that they have agreed to go over on the West Side and attend early mass with a companion, just to hear the exquisite music, and, by the way, they may not be home to dinner. And they go from that home, with their new cane, looking as pious as though they were passing the collection plate. When they get around the corner they whoop it up for the depot, and shortly they are steaming out into the country. They have a lot of angleworms in an envelope in their vest pockets, and a restaurant colored man, who has been seen the night before, meets them at the depot and hands them a basket of sandwiches with a bottle sticking out.

      Arriving at the summer resort, they go to the bank of the lake and take a boat ride, and when well out in the lake they begin to unbosom the cane. Taking a plug out of the end of it, they pull out a dingus and three joints of fish-pole come out, and they tie a line on the end, put an angle worm on the hook, and catch fish. That is the kind of “mass” they are attending.

      At night the train comes back to town, and the sunburnt young men, with their noses peeled, hand a basket to the waiting colored man, which smells of fish, and they go home and tell their parents they went out to Forest Home Cemetery in the afternoon, and the sun was awful hot. The good mother knows she smells fish on her son's clothes, but she thinks it is some new kind of perfumery, and she is silent.

      An honest up-and-up fish-pole is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, if the fishing is good, but one of these deceptive, three carde monte, political fish-poles, that shoves in and appears to be a cane, is incendiary, and ought to be suppressed. There ought to be a law passed to suppress a fish-pole that passes in polite society for a cane, and in such a moment as ye think not is pulled out to catch fish. There is nothing square about it, and the invention of that blasted stem winding fish-pole is doing more to ruin this country than all the political parties can overcome. If there was a law to compel the owners of those wailking-sticks to put a sign on their canes, “This is a fish-pole,” there would be less canes taken on these Sunday excursions in summer.

      Look not upon the walking-stick when it is hollow, and pulls out, for at last it giveth thee away, young fellow.

      The Sun is in receipt of an invitation to attend the opening of a new hotel in an Iowa city, but it will be impossible to attend. We remember one Iowa hotel which we visited in 1869, when the Wisconsin editors stopped there on the way back from Omaha—the time when a couple of bed bugs took Uncle David Atwood up on the roof and were going to throw him off, and they would have done it, only a party of cockroaches took his part and killed the bed bugs.

      Sam Ryan will remember how there was a crop of new potatoes growing on the billiard room floor in the dirt, that were all blossomed out; and Charley Seymour can tell how he had to argue for an hour to convince the colored cook that the peculiar smell of the scrambled eggs was owing to some of them being rotten. There were four waiters to a hundred guests, and it was a sight long to be remembered to see Mrs. Seymour and Mrs. Atwood carry their broiled chicken back to the kitchen and pick the feathers off, while good Uncle McBride, of Sparta, got into an altercation over his fried fish because the fish had not been scaled; where it was said the only thing that was not sour was the vinegar, and where the only thing that was not too small was the bill, and where every room smelled like a morgue, and the towels in the rooms had not taken a bath since 1827.

      At this hotel the proprietor would take a guest's napkin to wipe his nose, and the barefooted, waiter girl would slip up on the rare-done fried egg spilled on the dining-room floor, and wipe the yolk off her dress on a guest's linen coat tail. That is all we want of a hotel in that place.

      Not many months ago there was a meeting of ministers in Wisconsin, and after the holy work in which they were engaged had been done up to the satisfaction of all, a citizen of the place where the conference was held invited a large number of them to a collation at his house. After supper a dozen of them adjourned to a room up stairs to have a quiet smoke, as ministers sometimes do, when they got to talking about old times, when they attended school and were boys together, and The Sun man, who was present, disguised as a preacher, came to the conclusion that ministers were rather human than otherwise when they are young.

      One two-hundred