Peck's Sunshine. George W. Peck

this point Mr. Aldrich, who had just come in, was asked to examine it and tell what it was. Mr. Aldrich took it up like a thing of life, and gazed upon it as though trying to recall something to his mind. Placing his finger, the one with the diamond ring on, to his corrugated forehead, he paused for a moment and finally gave his opinion that they were life preservers. He said that in Boston all women wore them, especially when they were out on excursions, or picnics. “See,” says he, as he hefted it, and made an indentation in it, which resumed its natural position as soon as he took his finger off, “it is filled with wind. Now, in case of accident, that would float a woman on top of water until she could be rescued. Let us demonstrate this matter by putting it on Mr. Boyington, of the Sentinel, and taking him to the morgue and placing him in the bath tub and he proceeded to fasten the life preserver around the calf of Mr. Boyington's leg.

      “Say, where are you putting it?” says Mr. B., as he struggled to keep from laughing right out. “You fellows don't know as much as Thompson's colt. If I know my own heart, and I think I do, a life preserver goes on under the vest.”

      Mr. Aldrich said he didn't pretend to know any more than anybody else. All he knew about these things personally was that he had seen them hanging up in stores, for sale, and one day when he was shopping he asked one of the lady clerks what it was hanging up there, and she said it was a life preserver, and asked him if he wanted one, and he told her no, he was only inquiring for a friend of his, who rode a bicycle. He didn't know but it might be something that went with a bicycle.

      All the time this discussion was going on we sat by the safe in the police office. We never were so sorry for a lot of innocent young men, never. The girl looked at us and winked, as much as to say, “Old man, why do you not come to the rescue of these young hoodlums, who don't know what they are talking about, and take the conceit out of them,” and so we explained to them, in the best language we could command, the uses and abuses of the garment they were examining, and showed them how it went on, and how the invention of it filled a want long felt by our American people. They all admitted that we were right, and that it was a counterfeit well calculated to deceive, and we believe now that the woman was convicted of counterfeiting mainly on the testimony of the reporters. However that may be, we desire to impress upon the authorities the importance of employing ladies at the police office to examine women who are arrested for crime. The police cannot always depend on having a newspaper man around.

ABOUT HELL.

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      An item is going the rounds of the papers, to illustrate how large the sun is, and how hot it is, which asserts that if an icicle a million miles long, and a hundred thousand miles through, should be thrust into one of the burning cavities of the sun, it would be melted in a hundredth part of a second, and that it would not cause as much “sissing” as a drop of water on a hot griddle.

      By this comparison we can realize that the sun is a big thing, and we can form some idea of what kind of a place it would be to pass the summer months. In contemplating the terrible heat of the sun, we are led to wonder why those whose duty it is to preach a hell hereafter, have not argued that the sun is the place where sinners will go to when they die.

      It is not our desire to inaugurate any reform in religious matters, but we realize what a discouraging thing it must be for preachers to preach hell and have nothing to show for it. As the business is now done, they are compelled to draw upon their imagination for a place of endless punishment, and a great many people, who would be frightened out of their boots if the minister could show them hell as he sees it, look upon his talk as a sort of dime novel romance.

      They want something tangible on which they can base their belief, and while the ministers do everything in their power to encourage sinners by picturing to them the lake of fire and brimstone, where boat-riding is out of the question unless you paddle around in a cauldron kettle, it seems as though their labors would be lightened if they could point to the sun, on a hot day in August, and say to the wicked man that unless he gets down on his knees and says his now I lay me, and repents, and is sprinkled, and chips in pretty flush towards the running expenses of the church, and stands his assessments like a thoroughbred, that he will wake up some morning, and find himself in the sun, blistered from Genesis to Revelations, thirsty as a harvest hand and not a brewery within a million miles, begging for a zinc ulster to cool his parched hind legs.

      Such an argument, with an illustration right on the blackboard of the sky, in plain sight, would strike terror to the sinner, and he would want to come into the fold too quick. What the religion of this country wants, to make it take the cake, is a hell that the wayfaring man, though a democrat or a greenbacker, can see with the naked eye. The way it is now, the sinner, if he wants to find out anything about the hereafter, has to take it second handed, from some minister or deacon who has not seen it himself, but has got his idea of it from some other fellow who maybe dreamed it out.

      Some deacon tells a sinner all about the orthodox hell, and the sinner does not know whether to believe him or not. The deacon may have lied to the sinner some time in a horse trade, or in selling him goods, and beat him, and how does he know but the same deacon is playing a brace game on him on the hereafter, or playing him for a sardine.

      Now, if the people who advance these ideas of heaven or hell, had a license to point to the moon, the nice, cool moon, as heaven, which would be plausible, to say the least, and say that it was heaven, and prove it, and could prove that the sun was the other place, which looks reasonable, according to all we have heard about 'tother place, the moon would be so full there would not be standing room, and they would have to turn republicans away, while the sun would be playing to empty benches, and there would only be a few editors there who got in on passes.

      Of course, during a cold winter, when the thermometer was forty or fifty degrees below zero, and everybody was blocked in, and coal was up to seventeen dollars a ton, the cause of religion would not prosper as much as it would in summer, because when you talked to a sinner about leading a different life or he would go to the sun, he would look at his coal pile and say that he didn't care a continental how soon he got there, but these discouragements would not be any greater than some that the truly good people have to contend with now, and the average the year round would be largely in favor of going to the moon.

      The moon is very popular now, even, and if it is properly advertised as a celestial paradise, where only good people could get their work in, and where the wicked could not enter on any terms, there would be a great desire to take the straight and narrow way to the moon, and the path to the wicked sun would be grown over with sand burs, and scorched with lava, and few would care to take passage by that route. Anyway, this thing is worth looking into.

UNSCREWING THE TOP OF A FRUIT JAR.

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      There is one thing that there should be a law passed about, and that is, these glass fruit jars, with a top that screws on. It should be made a criminal offense, punishable with death or banishment to Chicago, for a person to manufacture a fruit jar, for preserving fruit, with a top that screws on. Those jars look nice when the fruit is put up in them, and the house-wife feels as though she was repaid for all her perspiration over a hot stove, as she looks at the glass jars of different berries, on the shelf in the cellar.

      The trouble does not begin until she has company, and decides to tap a little of her choice fruit. After the supper is well under way, she sends for a jar, and tells the servant to unscrew the top, and pour the fruit into a dish. The girl brings it into the kitchen, and proceeds to unscrew the top. She works gently at first, then gets mad, wrenches at it, sprains her wrist, and begins to cry, with her nose on the underside of her apron, and skins her nose on the dried pancake batter that is hidden in the folds of the apron.

      Then the little house-wife takes hold of the fruit