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 pound delegate with a cigar between his fingers, blew
the smoke out of the mouth which but a few hours before was uttering 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.