Probably the meanest trick that was ever played on a white man was
played in Milwaukee, and the fact that there is no vigilance committee
there is the only reason the perpetrators of the trick are alive. A
business man had just purchased a new stiff hat, and he went into a
saloon with half a dozen of his friends to fit the hat on his head. They
all took beer, and passed the hat around so all could see it. One of the
meanest men that ever held a county office went to the bar tender and
had a thin slice of Limburger cheese cut off, and when the party were
looking at the frescoed ceiling through beer glasses this wicked person
slipped the cheese under the sweat leather of the hat, and the man put
it on and walked out.
The man who owned the hat is one of your nervous people, who is always
complaining of being sick, and who feels as though some dreadful disease
is going to take possession of him and carry him off. He went back to
his place of business, took off his hat and laid it on the table, and
proceeded to answer some letters. He thought he detected a smell, and,
when his partner asked him if he didn't feel sick, he said he believed
he did. The man turned pale and said he guessed he would go home. He met
a man on the sidewalk who said the air was full of miasma, and in the
street car a man who sat next to him moved away to the end of the car,
and asked him if he had just come from Chicago. The man with the hat
said he had not, when the stranger said they were having a great deal of
smallpox there, and he guessed he would get out and walk, and he pulled
the bell and jumped off. The cold perspiration broke out on the forehead
of the man with the new hat, and he took it off to wipe his forehead,
when the whole piece of cheese seemed to roll 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.