The other day a business man who has one of the nicest houses in the
nicest ward in the city, and who has horses and carriages in plenty, and
who usually looks as clean as though just out of a band box and as happy
as a schoolma'am at a vacation picnic, got on a street car near the
depot, a picture of a total wreck. He had on a long linen duster, the
collar tucked down under the neck band of his shirt, which had no collar
on, his cuffs were sticking out of his coat pocket, his eyes looked
heavy, and where the dirt had come off with the perspiration he looked
pale, and he was cross as a bear.
A friend who was on the car, on the way up town, after a day's work,
with a clean shirt on, a white vest and a general look of coolness,
accosted the traveler as follows:
“Been summer resorting, I hear?”
The dirty-looking man crossed his legs with a painful effort, as though
his drawers stuck to his legs and almost peeled the bark off, and
answered:
“Yes, I have been out two weeks. I have struck ten different hotels, and
if you ever hear of my leaving town again during the hot weather, you
can take my head for a soft thing,” and he wiped a cinder out of his eye
with what was once a clean handkerchief.
“Had a good, cool time, I suppose, and enjoyed yourself,” said the man
who had not been out of town.
“Cool time, hell,” said the man, who has a pew in two churches, as he
kicked his limp satchel of dirty clothes under the car seat. “I had
rather been sentenced to the house of correction for a month.”
“Why, what's the trouble?”
“Well, there is no trouble, for people who like that kind of fun, but
this lets me out. I do not blame people who live in Southern States for
coming North, because they enjoy things as a luxury that we who live in
Wisconsin have as a regular diet, but for a Chicago or Milwaukee man to
go into the country to swelter and be kept awake nights is bald lunacy.
Why, since I have been out I have slept in a room a size smaller than
the closet my wife keeps her linen in, with one window that brought in
air from a laundry, and I slept on a cot that shut up like a jack-knife
and always caught me in the hinge where it hurt.
“At another hotel I had a broken-handled pitcher of water that had been
used to rinse clothes in, and I can show you the indigo on my neck. I
had a piece of soap that smelled like a tannery, and if the towel was
not a recent damp diaper then I have never raised six children.
“At one hotel I was the first man at the table, and two families came in
and were waited on before the Senegambian would look at me, and after
an hour and thirty minutes I got a chance to order some roast beef and
baked potatoes, but the perspiring, thick-headed pirate brought me some
boiled mutton and potatoes that looked as though they had been put in a
wash-tub and mashed by treading on them barefooted. I paid twenty-five
cents for a lemonade made of water and vinegar, with a piece of
something on top that might be lemon peel, and it might be pumpkin rind.
“The only night's rest I got was one night when I slept in a car seat.
At the hotel the regular guests were kept awake till 12 o'clock by
number six headed boys and girls dancing until midnight to the music of
a professional piano boxer, and then for two hours the young folks sat
on the stair? and yelled and laughed, and after that the girls went to
bed and talked two hours more, while the boys went and got drunk and
sang 'Allegezan and Kalamazoo.'
“Why, at one place I was woke up at 3 o'clock in the morning by what I
thought was a chariot race in the hall outside, but it was only a lot
of young bloods rolling ten pins down by the rooms, using empty wine
bottles for pins and China cuspidores for balls. I would have gone
out and shot enough drunken galoots for a mess, only I was afraid a
cuspidore would carom on my jaw. Talk about rest, I would rather go to a
boiler factory.
“Say, I don't know as you would believe it, but at one place I sent some
shirts and things to be washed, and they sent to my room a lot of female
underclothes, and when I kicked about it to the landlord he said I would
have to wear them, as they had no time to rectify mistakes. He said the
season was short and they had to get in their work, and he charged me
Fifth Avenue Hotel prices with a face that was child-like and bland,
when he knew I had been wiping on diapers for two days in place of
towels.
“But I must get off here and see if I can find water enough to bathe all
over. I will see you down town after I bury these clothes.”
And the sticky, cross man got off swearing at summer hotels and pirates.
We don't see where he could have been traveling.