Peck's Sunshine. George W. Peck

a supplication to the Most High to make us all good, punched a thin elder in the ribs with his thumb and said: “Jim, do you remember the time we carried the cow and calf up into the recitation room?” For a moment “Jim” was inclined to stand on his dignity, and he looked pained, until they all began to laugh, when he looked around to see if any worldly person was present, and satisfying himself that we were all truly good, he said: “You bet your life I remember it. I have got a scar on my shin now where that d—blessed cow hooked me,” and he began to roll up his trousers leg to show the scar. They told him they would take his word, and he pulled down his pants and said:

      “Well, you see I was detailed to attend to the calf, and I carried the calf up stairs, assisted by Bill Smith—who is now preaching in Chicago; got a soft thing, five thousand a year, and a parsonage furnished, and keeps a team, and if one of those horses is not a trotter then I am no judge of horse flesh or of Bill, and if he don't put on an old driving coat and go out on the road occasionally and catch on for a race with some worldly-minded man, then I am another. You hear me—well, I never knew a calf was so heavy, and had so many hind legs. Kick! Why, bless your old alabaster heart, that calf walked all over me, from Genesis to Revelations. And say, we didn't get much of a breeze the next morning, did we, when we had to clean out the recitation room?”

      A solemn-looking minister, with red hair, who was present, and whose eyes twinkled some through the smoke, said to another:

      “Charlie, you remember you were completely gone on the professor's niece who was visiting there from Poughkeepsie? What become of her?”

      Charlie put his feet on the table, struck a match on his trousers, and said:

      “Well, I wasn't gone on her, as you say, but just liked her. Not too well, you know, but just well enough. She had a color of hair that I could never stand—just the color of yours, Hank—and when she got to going with a printer I kind of let up, and they were married. I understand he is editing a paper somewhere in Illinois, and getting rich. It was better for her, as now she has a place to live, and does not have to board around like a country school ma'am, as she would if she had married me.” A dark-haired man, with a coat buttoned clear to the neck, and a countenance like a funeral sermon, with no more expression than a wooden decoy duck, who was smoking a briar-wood pipe that he had picked up on a what-not that belonged to the host, knocked the ashes out in a spittoon, and said:

      “Boys, do you remember the time we stole that three-seated wagon and went out across the marsh to Kingsley's farm, after watermelons?”

      Four of them said they remembered it well enough, and Jim said all he asked was to live long enough to get even with Bill Smith, the Chicago preacher, for suggesting to him to steal a bee-hive on the trip. “Why,” said he, “before I had got twenty feet with that hive, every bee in it had stung me a dozen times. And do you remember how we played it on the professor, and made him believe that I had the chicken-pox? O, gentlemen, a glorious immortality awaits you beyond the grave for lying me out of that scrape.”

      The fat man hitched around uneasy in his chair and said they all seemed to have forgotten the principal event of that excursion, and that was how he tried to lift a bull dog over the fence by the teeth, which had become entangled in a certain portion of his wardrobe that should not be mentioned, and how he left a sample of his trousers in the possession of the dog, and how the farmer came to the college the next day with his eyes blacked, and a piece of trousers cloth done up in a paper, and wanted the professor to try and match it with the pants of some of the divinity students, and how he had to put on a pair of nankeen pants and hide his cassimeres in the boat house until the watermelon scrape blew over and he could get them mended.

      Then the small brunette minister asked if he was not entitled to some credit for blacking the farmer's eyes. Says he: “When he got over the fence and grabbed the near horse by the bits, and said he would have the whole gang in jail, I felt as though something had got to be done, and I jumped out on the other side of the wagon and walked around to him and put up my hands and gave him 'one, two, three' about the nose, with my blessing, and he let go that horse and took his dog back to the house.”

      “Well,” says the red haired minister, “those melons were green, anyway, but it was the fun of stealing them that we were after.”

      At this point the door opened and the host entered, and, pushing the smoke away with his hands, he said: “Well, gentlemen, are you enjoying yourselves?”

      They threw their cigar stubs in the spittoon, the solemn man laid the brier wood pipe where he got it, and the fat man said:

      “Brother Drake, we have been discussing the evil effects of indulging in the weed, and we have come to the conclusion that while tobacco is always bound to be used to a certain extent by the thoughtless, it is a duty the clergy owe to the community to discountenance its use on all possible occasions. Perhaps we had better adjourn to the parlor, and after asking divine guidance take our departure.”

      After they had gone the host looked at his cigar box, and came to the conclusion that somebody must have carried off some cigars in his pocket.

AN ARM THAT IS NOT RELIABLE.

       Table of Contents

      A young fellow about nineteen, who is going with his first girl, and who lives on the West Side, has got the symptoms awfully. He just thinks of nothing else but his girl, and when he can be with her—which is seldom, on account of the old folks—he is there, and when he cannot be there, he is there or thereabouts, in his mind. He had been trying for three months to think of something to give his girl for a Christmas present, but he couldn't make up his mind what article would cause her to think of him the most, so the day before Christmas he unbosomed himself to his employer, and asked his advice as to the proper article to give. The old man is baldheaded and mean. “You want to give her something that will be a constant reminder of you?” “Yes,” he said, “that was what was the matter.” “Does she have any corns?” asked the old wretch. The boy said he had never inquired into the condition of her feet, and wanted to know what corns had to do with it. The old man said that if she had corns, a pair of shoes about two sizes too small would cause her mind to dwell on him a good deal. The boy said shoes wouldn't do. The old man hesitated a moment, scratched his head, and finally said:

      “I have it! I suppose, sir, when you are alone with her, in the parlor, you put your arm around her waist; do you not, sir?”

      The young man blushed, and said that was about the size of it.

      “I presume she enjoys that part of the discourse, eh?”

      The boy said that, as near as he could tell, by the way she acted, she was not opposed to being held up.

      “Then, sir, I can tell you of an article that will make her think of you in that position all the time, from the moment she gets up in the morning till she retires.”

      “Is there any attachment to it that will make her dream of me all night?” asked the boy.

      “No, sir! Don't be a hog,” said the bad man.

      “Then what is it?”

      The old man said one word, “Corset!”

      The young man was delighted, and he went to a store to buy a nice corset.

      “What size do you want?” asked the girl who waited on him.

      That was a puzzler. He didn't know they came in sizes. He was about to tell her to pick out the smallest size, when he happened to think of something.

      “Take a tape measure and measure my arm; that will just fit.”

      The girl looked wise, as though she had been there herself, found that it was a twenty-two inch corset the boy wanted, and he went home and wrote a note and sent it with the corset to the girl. He didn't hear anything about it till the following Sunday, when he called on her. She received